Wordcatcher (5 page)

A long
metaphor;
a story with an inner and outer meaning; a narrative with symbolic significance.
An
allegory
is a description in which a place, object, or action is personified or holds moral, social, religious, or political importance. To
fully appreciate the magnitude of this word, think of an average day in classical Athens. An indignant citizen walks down to the agora, the marketplace under the Acropolis, and delivers a heated
allegoria
, a veiled but critical speech designed to expose the actions of a politician he vehemently disagrees with. We’ve been speaking and writing that way ever since.
Allegories
abound in novels, songs, movies. Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
is an audacious adventure story, but its deeper power is as an
allegorical
satire on 17th-century English mores. Francis Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now
and Katherine Bigelow’s
The Hurt Locker
aren’t only movies about the Vietnam and Iraq wars, but
allegories
about the insanity of all wars in all times. What I find stirring is that the word picture still shines through. Our English word derives from 14th century French
allégorie
, via the Greek
allegoria
, from
allos,
another, different, plus
agoreuein
, to speak openly in the agora. Thus, to be
allegorical
means to express yourself openly but differently, figuratively, metaphorically, symbolically, sometimes furtively. Plato’s “
Allegory
of the Cave” was to the ancient world what Maya Lin’s
Confluence
is to ours. John Keats wrote of one who employed it most ingeniously, “Shakespeare led a life of allegory; his works are the comments on it.” “The Allegory of Painting” (1665-67) by Vermeer features a drawn-back curtain that reveals the artist himself painting a model dressed as Clio, the muse of history; it was considered his own favorite painting. More recently, in
Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the
Comic Book
, Gerard Jones vividly describes
Superman
as “an
allegory
that echoed for immigrants and Jews: the strange visitor who hides his alien identity.”

A legendary river in South America; a mythic race of female warriors from Scythia
. Today whenever we hear the word we think of the forests of South America, Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Killer, Billie Jean King. But the word was originally used by the ancient Greeks to describe a tribe of warring women who lived at the remote reaches of the then known world, the shores of the Black Sea and the Caucasus mountains, in Asia Minor. The first historian, Herodotus of Ephesus, described them as fierce warriors who fought against the Greeks,
a-masos
, without one breast, allegedly to more easily let fly their arrows. According to travelers’ tales of the time, theirs was a society without men; any son born to an Amazon was either slain or exiled. Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
takes place the night before the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, the
Amazon
queen. In 1541, the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana, who was the first European to navigate the length of the river, named it after the infamous warriors after being surprised in an attack by the Tapuya Indians, whose women, he reported, were as fierce as his own soldiers. Out of such unsettling events, a legend grew of a ferocious tribe of women warriors living in a world
without men. Curious companion words include
Amazonian chin
, beardless, like a female warrior, as evoked in Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus
: “When with his
Amazonian chin
he drove / the bristled lips before him.”

To divert, entertain, occupy, please, or pleasantly
bewilder
.
Its 500-year-old origins are rather…
amusing
, a revelation, rooted as they are in the Middle French
amuser
. Captain Francis Grose, in his scintillating 1811 dictionary of
slang
, deftly defines its earliest use: an attempt to deceive or cheat. But Grose adds a colorful use as a noun, and his definition is worth quoting in full. “
Amusers
,” he writes, “are rogues who carried snuff or dust in their pockets, which they threw into the eyes of any person they intended to rob; and running away, their accomplices (pretending to assist and pity the half-blinded person) took that opportunity of plundering them.” Some lexicographers insist on important degrees of
amusement
:
amusing
is a light and pleasant distraction, an activity that kills time;
entertaining
is an agreeable experience, as in a performance of some brio that heightens awareness;
diverting
suggests amusing ourselves to death, turning off the intellectual faculties, by a sporting contest or comedy. “Ha, ha! You
amuse
me, Mr. Bond,” snarls the slitherly villain Max Zorin in
A View to a Kill
. Companion words include
amusia
, the inability to hear or appreciate music. And, dare we add, the
amusing
term
from the English countryside
Ha-ha’s
, which is humorlessly defined by the OED as “sunken fences bounding a park or garden.” This is an ungainly description for a clever invention that prevents animals from escaping because the fences or walls are hidden from view—until the last possible second to unsuspecting country hikers, who are so surprised and delighted they’ve been known to shout, “Ha-ha!” Now,
that’s
amusing!

A teacher who infuses life into a subject.
An obscure word from the French worthy of widespread use to vividly describe all those mentors, coaches, and therapists who teach with “a little bit o’ soul,” as they say in Motown, thereby
animating
their subjects and their students. The wordsmith Howard Rheingold suggests that
animateur
might even be able to bring to life the writing that deadens technical and scientific books. Similarly, the art of
animation
is the ability to create cartoons that appear to hum with life, such as the work of the Warner Brothers legend Chuck Jones, who brought Bugs Bunny, the Roadrunner, and Pepe Le Pew to life. Jones said in a 1999 interview, “Indeed, we wanted our characters to be alive. I take the term ‘
animation’
very seriously. … The expression is what gives life, the movement of the eye.” Speaking of sketches that seem to move, the Swiss painter Paul Klee said that drawing to him was “taking a line out for a walk.” Thomas Pynchon writes
in
V.
, “All he believed at this point, on the bench behind the Library, was that anybody who worked for
inanimate
money so he could buy more
inanimate
objects was out of his head.” Companion words include
animal
, a creature that breathes, and the miniscule
animalcule
, a tiny creature observed under a microscope, a discovery by Dutch lens-maker Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek that sparked a worldwide interest in microbiology, thereby
animating
science. Look again, you’ll see
anima
and
animus
, the feminine and masculine aspects of the soul, respectively, according to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. And, as Bill Bryson points out, in
The Mother Tongue
, it is wonderful to know that among the many early names for movie theaters are
phantascope
,
thaumatrope
, and
animatoscope
.

The haunting feeling, however fleeting, that one is unloved.
Not to be dismissed as just another “inkhorn term,” but a case of an “invisible ink term,” a word to be borrowed because nothing close to it exists in English. Entire phrases, proverbs, or song lyrics are required to express what these six brief syllables say. Its roots are Greek
a-philo
, not loved, and
phrenia
, mental disorder. To name it may take some of the sting out of it, knowing we aren’t alone in this fear. If you listen hard to this word, you can hear an echo of B. B. King singing at the Cook County Jail, in Chicago, “Nobody loves me but my mama—and she could be jivin’
too!” The most moving expression of this universal fear I’ve ever heard came one night in 1989, at the Village Voice Bookstore in Paris, when Raymond Carver read his poem “Late Fragment”: “And did you get what / you wanted from this life even so? / I did. / And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on this earth.” Mother Theresa concluded, near the end of her days, “I have come to realize more and more that the greatest disease and the greatest suffering is to be unwanted, unloved, uncared for, to be shunned by everybody, to be just nobody [to no one].” Companion words include the soft-sounding but hard-meaning
amourette
, French for an unloved lover. There is also the hard-to-translate Russian
razbliuto
, which refers to the amorous feelings you once had for somebody but just cannot conjure up again, which sounds far more like what it means than the clunky
anagapesis
, lost feelings for an old lover. And encompassing all of the above is
erotomania
, the
melancholy
that sweeps over lovers, as diagnosed in John Coxe’s London medical dictionary in 1817.