Wordcatcher (8 page)

A tip; a favor, gratuity, charity; a reward.
A benevolent bribe offered to smooth out service in the bazaar or market; a subtle gift to grease the wheels of a business deal; alms for the poor to fulfill a religious obligation. As an integral social custom in Islamic cultures,
baksheesh
is a familiar, almost incantatory word, heard on the streets from Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem to Baghdad, Beirut, and Calcutta. It is an echo of the American cry of “Brother, can you spare a dime?” but carries the spiritual overtones
of the medieval practice of giving alms, whereby spiritual merit is earned. Its roots are in the Persian
bakhshish
, a gift, which stems from the verb
bakhshidan
, to give or forgive. The first written appearance in English dates back to 1625. A passage in the classic travelers’ tale
The Great Railway Bazaar
, by Paul Theroux, illuminates the custom as practiced in Iran in the 1970s: “It is an old country; everywhere in the gleaming modernity are reminders of the orthodox past—the praying steward, the portraits, the encampments of nomads, and on what is otherwise one of the best run railways in the world, the
yearning
for the
baksheesh
.”

To fool, guile, trick,
or
hoodwink
. Those long
o
’s and that hard
z
lends the word a “grifterly” feeling, to coin a phrase, evocative of an Elmore Leonard detective novel riddled with deceitful women and swindling men.
Bamboozle
is first recorded in 1703, a
slang
or
cant
word, derided by Johnson as “not used in pure or grave writings.” However, Brewer traces it back to the Chinese and Gypsy
bamboozle
, meaning to “dress a man in
bamboos
to teach him swimming,” which gives rise to an image of a kind of human raft. Even though it’s nearly impossible to rhyme in a poem—
bamboozle
and
ouzel?
—it is still a raffish word that lifts a smile on the face of anybody who uses it. The Scots can take credit, tracing it back to
bombaze
, to perplex, though it may also be connected to the French
bombast
.
If you can feel a wild animal
writhing
around in the word when you say it out loud, you’re not far wrong. There was a popular epithet in Old French, “To make a baboon out of somebody,” an uncanny reference to
embabuiner
, to make a fool out of. Not all have been charmed by the word. Jonathan Swift included it in his dubious
index expurgatorius
, his list of words to be expunged from the language. Nonetheless, it could not be repressed, and Benjamin Disraeli used it deftly in a letter: “It is well known what a middle man is: he is a man who
bamboozles
one party and plunders the other.” Carl Sagan warned, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been
bamboozled
long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The
bamboozle
has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Finally, if you just happen to be using
bamboozle
in a poem or song lyrics and you’re stuck for a rhyme, you might try
gongoozle
, a rare but useful word meaning “to stare at, idly watch,” as those whose leisure activity centers around watching boats drift by in the canals of England.

A monster so horrible, so terrifying, nobody has ever stayed around long enough to get a description of it
. Beware, for it is outside your door, licking its chops. If you look up the hideous verb
transmogrify
, you’ll find the bodacious
bandersnatch
nipping at its heels. Try to picture the horripilating (“hairraising”) incident in the
Voyages of Sinbad
in which the
sailors are driven to mutiny by the strange cries of unseen monsters and the terror of the churning sea. If asked about the origins of the dreaded beast, a researcher into such things might say it is born of the scritching at the door of our imagination, and our
eldritch
fear of the unknown. However, the doughty Lewis Carroll dared name the dreaded beast in his diabolic poem “Jabberwocky.” “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! / The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! / Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun / The frumious
Bandersnatch
!” Companion words include
catathleba
, “a noxious monster,” which Pliny mentions in his
Histories
, and according to Coleridge, the
deutyraun
, which was “some monstrous animal.” Finally, there is the odious beast in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” cartoon strip, which he introduced “offstage” as the unseen but memorably named Lena the Hyena.

An uncivilized, uncouth, uneducated foreigner.
The Greeks and Romans disagreed on many issues, but they held fast to this suspicion of the outsider. Those who couldn’t speak their language were
barbaros
, stammerers or babblers. To both cultures, the speech of strangers was incomprehensible, reeking of roughhewn sounds like “bar bar bar to bar.” No inconsequential prejudice, this. If you couldn’t speak Greek you couldn’t compete in the Olympics, own land, or vote. If you couldn’t speak Latin, you were forever
regarded as pagan. Dr. Johnson holds forth on the evolution—or devolution—of the word, tracking down its origins in the fear and loathing of strangers: “[
Barbarian
] seems to have signified at first only foreign, or a foreigner; but, in time, implied some degree of wildness or cruelty.” Since then
barbarians
have arrived at the gate in virtually every land, as immigration and exile is now a constant in modern life, reviving the ancient disdain for strangers in the now universal phrase “It’s all Greek to me.” All is not lost. After being criticized by August Strindberg for the paintings he made in Tahiti, Paul Gauguin wrote, “You suffer from your civilization. My
barbarism
is to me a renewal of youth.” Companion words include
gringo
, a regional Mexican-Spanish expression for the dreaded
Yanqui
, often used, with almost shocking similarity, to describe gibberish spoken by strangers. Word maven John Ciardi traces its derivation back to
griengar
, “to speak like a Greek,” suggesting that American English was
barbaric
to Mexican ears, which brings us full circle, like Odysseus, back to Greece.

False depth, sentimentality, triteness, mawkishness. Bathos
is the sinking feeling of being pulled down by sentimentality, dragged down by false emotion.
Bathos
is exaggerated pathos, which, as readers of James Joyce, Thomas Aquinas, or Greek tragedy know, is the “quality that arouses pity or
sorrow.” The original sense of
pathos
is “what befalls one,” related to
paskhein,
to suffer, and
penthos
, grief, sorrow. So powerful were the old associations with
pathos
that when
bathos
, the old Greek word for “depth,” was floated by Alexander Pope, in 1727, its echo was clear to most educated people. Current usage suggests that
bathos
sinks to the depths of what used to be called “low writing,” in contrast to “high writing,” which is reputedly loftier.
Bathos
is also a synonym for
anticlimax
, the sudden descent to the depths, in the pejorative sense, in speech or writing or at the end of a work of art. Otherwise known as third-act problems. Or as Napoleon famously remarked to De Pradt, the Polish ambassador to France, a drop “from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.” Charlotte Brontë evoked its true profundity (
profundus
, depth) in
Jane Eyre
, when she wrote: “I like you more than I can say, but I’ll not sink into a
bathos
of sentiment.” Companion words include
bathykopian
, deep-bosomed, from
bathos
, deep, and
kolpos
, cleft;
bathyscape
, a small submarine designed to explore the depths of the ocean; and
bathetic
, which is a
pathetic
drop in the gravitas of the word
pathos
.