Wordcatcher (19 page)

One
who is
easily fooled
,
a
chump,
patsy
,
sap
, sucker, or
pushover
. An old hunting term from the French
duppe
(first recorded in 1426), and
le huppe
, the
hoopoe
, an extravagantly feathered but easily caught bird. The hunters knew a
metaphor
when they saw one, and the name naturally evolved into
dupe
, the personification of one who is equally easy to catch, or, in the argot of thieves, “a deceived person.” Thus a
dupe
is one who is easily
gulled
, an imitative word for an unfledged bird, and
gullible
, easily fooled, possibly from
gullet
, the esophagus, which tightens up whenever we try to swallow a lie, while its verb form, to
dupe
, is “to fool, to deceive, to take advantage of.”
Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary
offers
gobemouche
, French for “swallowing flies,” a person who swallows anything, as in
gullible
. An illuminating antonym is
morosoph
, a wise fool. Speaking of which,
the On the Road
journalist Charles Kuralt once defined a
dupe
as someone “trying to learn how to fool a trout with a little bit of floating fur and feather.”

To leave out, fail, overwhelm, pass by, suffer
. In Skeat’s phrasing, “a failure, especially of the light of the sun.” The word’s origins are overshadowed only by its euphony. Our current word dates back to Middle English
eclips
, and the Greek
ekleipsis,
a leaving out, and
ekleipein
, to omit, forsake a usual place, fail to appear, from
ek
, out, and
leipein
, to leave. Eventually,
eclipse
came to refer to the complete or partial obscuring of one celestial body by another, as well as the passing into the shadow of a celestial body; figuratively, it came to mean “falling into obscurity, decline, the shadows,” as to one’s reputation. Companion words include the celestial
ecliptic
(c. 1391), “the circular path in the sky followed by the Sun, whose light is
eclipsed
when the moon approaches the line.” In a letter to Galileo, in 1611, Kepler wrote: “The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar
eclipse
.” Almost four
centuries later, Stephenie Meyer presents the dilemma of the vampire hero of her novel
Eclipse
: “The clouds I can handle, but I can’t fight an
eclipse
.”

Eerie, uncanny, terrifying
. A 14th-century word that stretches over the moors of language like a supernatural mist.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary
has only “
weird
, hideous,” as if it’s the scary uncle in the attic. We do know that by the late 18th century it had come to mean “frightful, repulsive, inexplicable.” and that
eldritch
is possibly a compound of
elf
and
rich,
kingdom. Thus, James A. C. Stevenson tracks down
eldritch
to the scratching sounds at the door, at midnight, in a cabin deep in the woods, which is a nastifying echo of the shenanigans of elves. Not the Keebler Cookie kind, but the ferocious spirits of the forest who guard a loathsome treasure that we may or may not wish to dig up. The Scottish national poet Robert Burns wrote, in “Address to the Deil”: “I’ve heard my reverend grannie say, / In lonely glens ye like to stray / Or where old ruined castles gray / Nod to the moon, / You fright the nightly wandering way / With
eldritch
croon.” Writer and essayist Cecil Day-Lewis wrote, in
From Feathers to Iron
, “Do not expect again a phoenix hour, / The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining, / Sudden the rain of gold and heart’s first ease / Traced under trees by the
eldritch
light of sundown.”

A comprehensive book or collection of books.
In every sense of the word, an
encyclopedia
attempts to provide a well-rounded education. If you look it up, you’ll find it derives from the Greek
enkulclios,
which originally meant “cyclical, periodic, ordinary,” plus
paideia
, learning. This led to the Latin
cyclo
, circle, and
pedia
, learning. As Skeat defines it, “circular or complete instruction,” from
encyclo
, to circle, and
paeda
, instruction. Such was the influence of Johnson’s prodigious English dictionary that when the French attempted to translate it they appointed the essayist Denis Diderot, who promptly gave up and forged ahead with a completely original work, the
Encyclopédie,
which became a hallmark of the French Enlightenment. Diderot’s goal was, he wrote, “to assemble the knowledge gathered over the face of the globe and to expose its general system to the men who come after us, so that the labors of centuries past do not prove useless to the centuries to come.” The most surprising interpretation of the word I know of comes from baseball star Yogi Berra, whose young boys once asked him to buy them an
encyclopedia
. His response deserves an old Bob Seger once-over-twice: “I had to walk to school, and so do you.”

Encyclopedia (Diderot)

A secret, a riddle, a shadowy saying, a puzzling person.
An arcane mystery, obscure or hidden meaning, or even more precisely, “a dark secret.” If you peer behind the curtain, you find the Greek
enigmae
, to speak darkly;
enigmarein
, dark sayings (“I speak in riddles”);
aivos
, tale, story; and finally
enigmatic
, meaning “from the stem.” Altogether, we find “a dark riddle told as a story from the stem.” Jane Austen wrote often about dark, mysterious strangers: “One cannot love a reserved person. … He’s my
enigma
.” One of the century’s most memorable lines was delivered by Winston Churchill in a description of Russia in a 1939 radio
broadcast
, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an
enigma
.” Later,
he evoked the “dark saying” for the name of his “
Enigma
” project, which helped keep secret the Allies’ battle plans during World War II. Italian essayist Umberto Eco updates Churchill when he writes, “I have come to believe that the whole world is an
enigma
, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” And the Riddler’s name in the
Batman
comics was Edward Nigma—
E. Nigma.

Commonly reckoned as the luster of inspiration.
More precisely, to the ancient Greeks
enthusiasm
signified the glow of “the god within,” or “to be full of the gods,” from the Greek
enthousiasmos
, possessed by a god. To my lights,
enthusiasm
is a form of inspiration but with the addition of passion and joy. By the early 17th century, the French evolution of the word,
enthousiasme,
took on the connotation of “religious fervor,” such as the ability to speak in tongues, but possibly also referring to persons who were mentally unbalanced, full of violent passions, suspicious because they claimed God spoke to them. Dr. Johnson wrote that an
enthusiast
was “one who vainly imagines a private revelation; one who has a vain confidence of his intercourse with God.” Personifying this posture for Johnson was poet John Milton, whom he denigrated as being “no better than a wild enthusiast.” But the shift to the modern sense was already under way, as evidenced by Boswell’s prescription
for the well-lived life: “He who wishes to be successful, or
happy
, ought to be
enthusiastical
, that is to say very keen in all the occupations or diversions of life.” The eminent microbiologist René Dubos writes, “The phrase ‘a god within’ symbolizes for me the forces that create private worlds out of the universal stuff of the cosmos and thus enable life to express itself in countless individualities.” For Marlene Dietrich, “Latins are tenderly
enthusiastic
. In Brazil they throw flowers at you. In Argentina they throw themselves.” Companion words include the verb
enthusing
, as in “the critics were
enthusing
among themselves about Pavarotti’s performance,” and
giddy
, from the German
gudiga
, also possessed by a god. Thus, the modern figurative sense of
enthusiasm
evokes the God or gods or the divine in all of us.