Wordcatcher (10 page)

A library, a paradise for book lovers.
The earliest written record dates back 4,500 years to ancient Sumeria’s
eduba
, translated by its Akkadian conquerors as the “tablet house,” for its thousands of cuneiform books. Originally,
bibliothèque
meant “a box or warehouse of papyrus scrolls.” The word
derives
, drifts downriver to us like a reed along the Nile, from the Greek colony of Alexandria, whose famous library consisted of 700,000
biblion
, papyrus scrolls, from
biblios
, the heart of the papyrus stalk, and
byblos
, rolled scroll or rolled book, the word used to describe what came from the Phoenician port that shipped papyrus rolls to Egypt. [Green]
bibliophile
Alberto Manquel describes the Library of Alexandria as “a very long high hall lined with
bibliothekai,
niches for the scrolls.” This was the Museion, The House of the Muses, The Place for the Cure of the Soul. Companion words:
bibliography
, a book list;
bibliomancy
, divination through books;
biblioclast
, destroyer of books; and
biblioburro
, “a rural book mobile system,” via donkeys, in Colombia.
Bibliocaveat
: beyond the uplifting aspects of libraries, a gentle warning about the addiction to books. H. L. Mencken tells us there are
bibliobibuli
, those who are
book-drunk
because they have read too much. “I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing, and hearing nothing.”
Bibliophobia
is the fear of running out of things to read, a familiar dread for those
on long plane flights or train rides. Eudora Welty visited her local Carnegie library every day as a young girl for her “sweet devouring” of the two books a day doled out by the librarian.

In good faith, authentic, honest; without bad intentions, fraud, deceit, or deception.
Today, we say, “He’s got the
bona fides
, he’s a five-tool ballplayer.” Or: “She’s got
bona fide
talent as a singer; she’s the real deal.” Figuratively, it points out authentic credentials. One of my favorites is the following example, from a pub custom in late-19th-century Dublin, Ireland. In those days the pubs closed at the traditional hour of 11:00 P.M., but it was also an hour when the back roads of Ireland still saw plenty of wanderers afoot, such as the gypsies, the traveling people. Often, they would knock on the doors of pubs they knew stayed open late for travelers, those who wanted a late meal or drink. But there was a law in Dublin that pubs could only sell alcohol to those who were true, authentic out-of-towners, so as to keep the locals from drinking after hours. Since those were days when many people still knew Latin, the phrase
bona fide
was used as a kind of password at the threshold of the pubs: “Aye, lad, are ye
bona fide
?” Meaning, “Are you telling me in
good faith
that you are truly from outside Dublin?” If so, the lad could enjoy a late-night whiskey. In the Coen brothers’ rumpus of a movie
O Brother, Where
Art Thou?
Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) asks his ex-wife, Penny Wharvey McGill (Holly Hunter) why she’s told everyone that he was hit by a train. Exasperated, she says, “Lots of respectable people have been hit by trains… What was I gonna tell them, that you got sent to the penal farm and I divorced you from shame?” Ulysses responds, “Uh, I take your point. But it does put me in a damn awkward position, vis-a-vis my progeny.” Rolling her eyes, Penny says: “Vernon here’s got a job. Vernon’s got prospects. He’s
bona fide
. What are you?” Companion words include the anguished antonym
malafide
, bad faith, a word well worth reviving.

A woman bound to the land or the lord, as a bondman was bound
. One of the notorious “lost words” from the first edition of the OED. It’s editor, the venerable James Murray, who was the very personification of “philosophical calm,” was mortified to learn that shortly after the “B” volume had been mailed to the publisher the white slip with the inscription of
bondmaid
was found under an unturned pile of fellow words. In 1901, fourteen years after the famed first edition appeared, Murray wrote to a caviling correspondent: “I am afraid it is quite true that the word
bondmaid
has been omitted from the Dictionary, a most regrettable fact.” Upon review of that project the omission becomes understandable, if you consider that Murray had to comb through 5-6
million slips or citations, from which he and his assistants in the “Scriptorium” chose 1.25 million headwords. Later lexicographers have rued the seemingly random process by which some words were included and others went missing, for lack of time or lack of space, such as the incandescent
lamprocarpous
, defined as “having shining fruit,” and the clangorous
collide
, to crash into.

A distant place, the remote mountains, the farthest reaches of civilization
. A favorite word of mine, popularized in books and movies, as well as by baseball announcers such as the legendary Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell, who used the word to describe long home runs:
“Kaline swings—and it’s a long belt to left field—it’s long gone—way back into the boondocks!”
Its origins are as surprising as they are fascinating: not the docks of longshoremen like Terry Malloy in
On the Waterfront
, but the rice terraces and head-hunting villages of the far, faraway Philippines. The root word is
bundok
, a Kapampangan word for “mountains” learned the hard way by American GIs who were captured by the Japanese army during World War II while fighting in central Luzon. The few who escaped the Bataan Death March disappeared into the remote villages of northern Luzon, where Filipino rebels and the last of the headhunters still controlled the rice-terraced
bundoks
. Those who survived described where they’d waited out the war as “in the
bundoks
,” which
later became our
boondocks
. Companion words include the short version, the
boonies
, and its distant cousin
boondoggle
, a
sonicky
word, as Roy Blount, Jr. calls the ones that sound as great as they appear on the page, for a useless task, a futile project that wastes time and money, coined in 1929 by American Scoutmaster Robert Link.

Stomach growls; the rumble in the jungle of your tummy.
Our word descends from the Greek
borborugmos
, from
borboryzein
, to rumble (no kidding) which meant the same then as it does now, the burbling sounds issuing forth from your intestinal passing of gas. This is a great word to pull out around the Thanksgiving table when the snarls and growls coming from within the bowels of your guests threatens to drown out the cheers and jeers coming from the football game on television. Kids tend to be especially delighted with this word because it sounds as goofy as the Looney Tunes sounds coming from their own stomachs. For those who are uncertain how the word can possibly be used, see Vladimir Nabokov’s novel
Ada
: “All the toilets and water pipes in the house had been suddenly seized with
borborygmic
convulsions.” Companion words include
eructation
, commonly called
burping
, the expulsion of air from the stomach, and
flatus
, the explosion from the other end, an exercise school kids and “bromance” screenwriters call
farting
. And a severe case of
borborygmi
results in what my
elegantly Victorian English Grandpa Sydney used to call
collywobbles
, severe cramping and diarrhea. Incidentally, the art of listening to the symphony of stomach sounds and discerning what they mean is called
auscultation
.

A private room where a woman goes to be alone to brood to her heart’s content
. When dinner parties would break up during the glory days of France, the custom was for the men to withdraw to the smoking room for cigars, brandy, and manly talk. Women, in contrast, were expected to retreat to the
boudoir
, to brood, after the French
bouder
, to pout, sulk. If the reader is brooding over the origins of the selfsame word
brood
, it derives from the Anglo-Saxon
brod
, for “heat.” Centuries of careful farmyard observation taught farmers that when hens sit on or
brood
their eggs, their heat will help hatch the baby chicks. Eventually, that long, slow process stood for the prolonged meditations of those
brooding
over problems and “hatching” plots. “As she sallied forth from her
boudoir
,” wrote William Manchester, “you would never have guessed how quickly she could strip for action.” Novelist Kathleen Winsor writes, “It was a woman’s bedroom, actually a boudoir, and no man belonged in it except by invitation.” A curious companion word is
parlor
, which was the room reserved in an otherwise silent monastery for speaking, from the French
parlez
. Companion words include
gueuloir
, a “shouting room,” which is what
Gustave Flaubert called his study. More often than he liked, he spent hours searching for
le mot juste
, just the one right word to use in his stories or novels. So he tended to alternate the usual writer’s brooding with yelling at himself.