Words of the Year, Pt. II
Nicholas Clairmont
Last Word of the Week, I wrote about the first half of the new words I learned in 2022, a salmagundi (random assortment) of rare terms I had come across. Since then, I haven’t encountered any new ones, but I did learn two new etymological facts on the wintry theme of the recent holiday.
First, the terms “arctic” and “antarctic” come from the Greek word for bear, “arktos,” and many online sources say this is because polar bears reside at the North Pole, but not the South, so the words mean “has bears” and “doesn’t have bears.” This is a false folk etymology, as credible sources can relate. The names probably come from before any Western scientific explorers had spent time in either icy biome. The tipoff is this: The prefix “ant-” does not mean “no” — rather, it means “opposite.” In reality, the term refers to the skies, not to megafauna: At the North Pole, the constellations Ursa Minor and Ursa Major are visible. Ursa Minor (Latin for “little bear”) contains the North Star, and Ursa Major contains the Big Dipper, so even someone with little celestial navigational knowledge can locate it pretty quickly. (In the Southern Hemisphere, the easy-to-spot thing in the night sky is the Southern Cross, so we might have instead called the South Pole the Stauric and the north the Antistauric, after the Greek word “stauros” for stake or cross.)
Second, the word “yule,” as in “yuletide” or “yule log,” referring to the Christmas period from Dec. 25 to the feast days of early January, comes from a Norse word, “jol.” In Sweden, they drink a soda available only around Advent called “Julmust,” which translates to “Christmas juice.” Originally, it was the term for a 12-day pagan feast, co-opted for Christmas. Though just as there is folk etymology, there is folk cultural and religious history, and each year, one hears that Christmas developed from Saturnalia and northern pagan rituals, which is half-true at most.
Anyway, this is about looking back at the past year, not just the current season, so back to the words of 2022:
Plosive: This means, basically, “beat-boxy” noises. That makes it sort of onomatopoeic (referring to words that sound like they mean, such as “whisper” and “thud”). Because of the P, “plosive” is a plosive word since plosive means a sound that is produced by stopping the airflow, as with the consonants P, T, K, D, G, and B. There’s a pleasing paradox or “antinomy” about words like this called the Grelling-Nelson paradox, which goes as follows: An adjective is “autological” if it does describe itself and “heterological” if it does not describe itself. For example, the word “pentasyllabic” is autological, because it has five syllables. “Plosive” is autological. “Green” is heterological, as is angry. (“Fussy” is an edge case.) You get it. So, ask yourself, is “heterological” a heterological word? If no, then heterological is autological, which is a contradiction. If yes, then heterological is heterological, which makes it autological, doesn’t it? Think about it for a while.
Cremains: This is a portmanteau of “cremated” and “remains,” and it means the ashes of a body.
Threnody: This is a word for a lamenting song for the dead, such as a dirge, an elegy, or a requiem.
Grimoire: This is a word for a book of witchcraft or magic, a spellbook. Intriguingly, it shares a French root common ancestor with our word “grammar.”
Thaumaturgy: OK, I admit I looked a lot of these up around Halloween. This is a word for the craft of doing miracles or magic, best synonymized into a single word as “wonder-working.”
Pleonexia: This is like gluttony, but for money. It’s extreme greed and compulsive hoarding of wealth, in particular, to the point of pathology.
Pellucid: This word, related to lucid, means clear and easy to understand. Lucid people see things clearly, and pellucid prose is easy to understand clearly. I am not sure my explanation of the Grelling-Nelson paradox was pellucid.
Those are my words from auld lang syne (meaning “times gone by” in Robert Burns’s great Scots-language poem). Look out for great words in the new year, and don’t forget how rewarding it can be to treat language with curiosity and care.