Wordcatcher (14 page)

An 800-year-old word used to describe a game that’s been played for at least thousands of years. Recent excavations along the Nile reveal Egyptian tomb paintings forty-five centuries old of a pharaoh playing catch with his priests and swinging a black stick at a palm-leaf-wrapped ball. Compared with that veteran status, our English word
catch
is a rookie, first brought up from the minor leagues of language in 1205 AD. The sequence is familiar to all hunters and ballplayers.
Catch
ricochets to us from Old French
cachier
, to hunt, chase, from the Latin
captare
, to seize, and
capere
, to take hold. Thus, to
catch
is to take hold of what has been chased down, whether a long belt to left field or a long-tailed rabbit. The expression “a good
catch
” took on romantic connotations at the end of the 16th century as a way to describe a nubile young woman or a winsome lad as someone “worth
catching
.” Jane Austen adapted the phrase for one of her characters who was vying “to
catch
the eye” of someone who had caught hers. Companion words include
capable
, meaning “with ability,” and
catchy
, memorable.
Catchword
is a dictionary term for a word printed in the lower right-hand corner of each page of a book that signals what the first word will be on the following page.
Catchy
phrases include
catch as catch can,
recorded in 1393, and the foot-tapping song “Catch Me If You Can,” recorded by the Dave Clark Five in 1965.
Catch-22
, Joseph Heller’s famous novel title, refers to a notorious “
catch
” (or gotcha) in military law that relates to a bomber
pilot’s decision to fly or not to fly combat missions. If the pilot never asks to be relieved, he can be officially regarded as insane—and thus eligible to be grounded. But if he does ask, it is interpreted as him having the wherewithal to recognize the danger involved, a sign that he isn’t
crazy
. So he has to keep flying more missions. And there is the lesser-known, but to some of us just as stirring, “Catch 25.” Legend has it that during a break on the set of
Citizen Kane
the 25-year-old Orson Wells shouted: “Who’s got a baseball? Let’s play
catch
!” Finally, there is
wordcatcher
, an alert reader who is always ready for the coruscating
catch
of a particularly beautiful, unusual, precise, or eye-opening word in a book or
conversation
—and then equally ready to throw it over to the next reader, a playful act that keeps the game of
wordcatching
going on, infinitely.

Catch
(Catch 22)

To sing and cry at the same time.
A word to fill a void in our language, one that we’ve all felt and rarely been able to describe. Recall the time you attended your child’s school Christmas concert and when the sing-along time came at the end, with
O Holy Night,
you could barely lift your voice for all the emotion swelling in your heart. No English word fills the need to describe that beveled-edge moment on the verge of both elation and sorrow. But there is the lovely
chantepleure
in French, which defies precise derivation, other than from
chanter
, to sing, and
pleurer
, to weep. Perhaps it is the result of centuries of concerts in the bejeweled Saint-Chapelle, in Paris, or in that stone poem, Chartres Cathedral, or the triumphant tears inspired by the singing of “La Marseillaise” in the French classic
Les Enfants du Paradise
. Whatever its source,
chantepleure
is to language what sweet-and-sour sauce is to Chinese food. Companion words include
chanticleer
, clear-singing, as well as
Chauntecleer
, the proud rooster in the French fable
Reynard the Fox
. During the French invasion of Russia in 1812, those Russian prisoners who did not sing for their French captors were insulted as
chanterapa
. Then there’s
merry-go-sorry
, a merry-go-round of emotion, spinning you around from laughter to weeping. Synchronicity lives: as I type this word story, my son Jack brushes by me, casually chanting “Singin’ in the Rain,” the American equivalent of singing through your tears.

An impressive life; the life that is incised on the soul
. A sharp word with an incisive story. I’m reminded of the description of the face of a lovely old woman in Ballyconneelly, Connemara, where I lived in the 1980s. My neighbor, Mr. Keaney, called it a “lived-in face.” Originally, a
kharacter
was an engraving or stamping tool in ancient Greece, deriving from the verb
kharassein
, to sharpen, cut, incise, furrow, scratch, engrave. In Skeat’s dictionary of 13th-century
slang
,
character
has the meaning of “an engraved or stamped mark.” Not used in its modern sense of “distinctive qualities” until the 17th century, by the historian Clarendon (
History of Great Rebellions
), and later in the 18th century, when Noah Webster defines
character
as qualities that are “impressed by nature or habit” onto someone, distinguishing them from someone else. Thus, the early sense of
kharacter
, “to impress or stamp in a way that marked one thing differently from another,” has been likewise stamped deep into the language.
Character
is the etching of life’s trials and tribulations into our faces and souls, which distinguishes us from everyone else. Eventually, this sense led to
character drawings
and
character portraits
in literature and memoirs, and to
character acting
. The French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “To compose our
character
is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.” UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “Sports
don’t build
character
; they reveal it.” Annie Lamott, in
Bird by Bird
, writes, “Find out what your
character
cares about the most in the world, because then you will have discovered what’s at stake.” An obscure but compelling meaning for
character
, in Skeats, is as a synonym for “handwriting,” a belief that lives on in the work of handwriting experts. Companion words include
characteristics
and
character flaw
.

Tricky talk, clever deceptions, unfair artifice
. The deliberate practice of obscuring the truth that this tough-sounding word evokes is similar to the speculation about the word itself. The root word here is the unfortunately lost verb
chicane
, from French
chicaner
, to deceive, to wrangle. But the stratagem within chicanery reaches back to
chicane
, a dispute in the French bridge game described as “a whist hand without trumps.” The modern French verb retains the smoky atmosphere of an argument in a tense card game, “to quibble.” Skeat tracks it back even further to the Persian
chuan
, a crooked mallet, from
mall
, a club or bat. Still others insist it is an echo of a precursor to golf played long ago in Languedoc. In his day John Adams captured the pettifoggery of politics: “Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.” The 19th-century Romantic novelist Ouida (a favorite of Oscar Wilde’s) wrote, “To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.”

Melancholic birdsong
. A word you never thought possible for a moment you thought could never be expressed with mere language. Have you ever been outdoors in those air-crackling moments just before a rainstorm when a branch full of birds in a nearby tree begins to chirp or sing? Well, this is the word, in the lovely phrasing of the 18th-century Scottish wordhunter Joseph Jamieson, “the mournful sound emitted by them, especially when collected together.” The OED’s definition is dolefully prosaic, chiming in with “noise, din, chatter, vocal noise, especially birds, with a secondary meaning of the noise of children on a playground, especially the mingled noise of many birds.” Murray’s anonymous contributor for this word must not have been fond of birdsong. Curious companion words include
jargon
, from Old French
jargoun
, twittering of birds. The Scottish
chavish
is second cousin to
chyrme
, defined by Rev. W. D. Parish as “a chattering or prattling noise of many persons speaking together. A noise made by a flock of birds.” We may collect these marvelous bird words in a “birdcage,” which in French is
cajole
, which gave us
cajoler
, to persuade by flattery or promises or to chatter like a blue jay. These words are birds-of-a-feather, what I like to think of as “observation words” that emerged from a lifetime of closely watching nature’s own theater, including bird behavior. It’s sweet to think that our own mating calls may have been inspired by untold generations listening to the cajoling, the flattery, the sweet-nothings
of our fair-feathered friends, the birds, which adds a grace note to the romantically alluring power of Frank Sinatra’s crooning or Ella Fitzgerald’s scatting.