Wordcatcher (34 page)

To strangify.
An invaluable word for a process most artists know well, the trick of making something ordinary seem extraordinary; something recognizable, unrecognizable; something dull, sharp. Have you ever stood before a painting and stared and stared at an object that seemed familiar—a horse, a curve in the road, a starry night—and felt a frisson, a shiver of unfamiliarity? As if you’ve never seen it before? This is one of the least understood but most compelling aspects of the creative process: the
strangifying
of the world so we can see it as if for the first time. The origins of
ostranenie
attest to as much, being from the Old French
estrange
, strange, and Latin
extraneum
, on the outside, foreign. Howard Rheingold refers to it as a “perceptual cleansing tool.” Companion words include
defamiliarize
and the Old English
estrange
, “the making strange,” which brings us full circle. Consider the peculiar last moments of Robert Louis Stevenson as he lay dying in Samoa, his words echoing the pathos of his novel
The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde
: “What’s the matter with me? What is this
strangeness
? Has my face changed?”

Effortless style, easy swagger.
If you can picture José Ferrer in the classic black-and-white movie version of
Cyrano de Bergerac
, leaping across the battlements of the castle, flashing his sword, and flourishing the white plume in his hat, you can begin to appreciate the connection between poetry and
panache
. The play’s author, Edmond Rostand, explained his use of the word to the French Academy: “A little frivolous perhaps; a little melodramatic certainly, the
panache
is no more than a charming gesture. But this charming gesture is so difficult to make in the face of death and supposes so much strength that it is a charming gesture I would wish for all.” The first historical reference is 1553, when it is mentioned as “a tuft or plume of feathers,” from the Middle French
pennache
. Figuratively, it means a style infused with flair, élan, dash—pleasingly flamboyant, like Myrna Loy and William Powell in the
Thin Man
movies.
Curious companion words include
aplomb
, cool, classy self-confidence, from “true to the plumb line,” and
sprezzatura
, the art of performing a task effortlessly. In a review of the 1937 movie
Toast of the Town
, Donna Moore describes an actor who embodies all of the qualities above: “Cary [Grant] plays the charmer,” she writes, “with his usual
panache
and is a sight for sore eyes in his top hat and tails.”

Walking and talking, in the interest of philosophy as much as exercise
. After the
Peripatetic
School of the Lyceum, founded by Aristotle, whose custom was to teach and dispute while meandering around Athens. His students became known as
peripatetics
, from Greek
peripatetikos
, given to walking about while teaching, from
peri
, around and
patein
, to walk, plus
patos
, a path, and the expression
peripatikou
, “I walk about.” Likewise,
peripatos
means “covered walk.” Since the 17th century,
peripatetic
has described a person who wanders all over, the Western equivalent of the Native American elder as one who “walks his talk.” Not so obscure a word that it couldn’t be tapped by lyricist Edward Kleban for “One,” the hit song from
A Chorus Line
: “She’s uncommonly rare, very unique, /
peripatetic
, poetic and chic.” Curious companion words include
gyrovagus
, an Irish pilgrim, from
gyro
, circle, circuit, and
vagus
, wandering, roving. Walking our talk here, as our Native American elders say, we come to the marvelous speculation that our word
vague
, meaning
“unclear, vacillating, rambling,” from the Middle French
vague
, might just be a kind of folk memory of wanderers, rovers, ramblers, and vagrants. Other familiar forms of
peripatetic
souls include
pellegrino
, Italian for “pilgrim, wanderer”;
gallivanter
; and
rolling stone
, which inspired the naming of the band and the Dylan song.

The smell of rain rising from the earth.
A niche-filling word to describe the seemingly ineffable smell of rain as it wafts off the ground, particularly after a long spell without rain. Coined in 1964 by I. J. Bear and R. G. Thomas, two Australian anthropologists, in an article titled “Nature of argillaceous odour” published in the journal
Nature
. Wisely wanting to avoid the clunky technical word for smells coming out of the
argillaceous
, clay, they borrowed the Greek words
petros
, stone, and
ichor
, blood of the gods, and provided us with a rainy-day word for all seasons. Since there isn’t a common word for the head-reeling, swoon-inducing smell of rain wafting off a paved road, I hereby nominate
pluviaroma
, from the Latin
pluvia
, rain,
via
, road, and
aroma
. Hence,
road-rain-smell
. Fellow words include
Jupiter Pluvius
, the god of rain;
pluviograph
, a rainfall gauge; and
interpluvial
, the period between rains, a vitally important calculation in drought-ridden areas of the world. For fans of new words, consider the estimates of the number conjured up by Shakespeare, which range from 1,700 to
21,000 words. What follows is a partial list:
accommodation, advertising, besmirch, castigate, champion, dextrous, dialogue, dishearten, ladybird, love-letter, lustrous, moonbeam, radiance, undress, whirligig,
and
zany
.

A flickering series of phantoms, apparitions, visions, or illusory images
. From an ancient Greek word,
phantasma
, to show, to display, to shine, that later illuminated such words as
Pharos
, the famous lighthouse at Alexandria, Egypt, and
epiphany
, the shining forth of divine light. Soon after the French Revolution, the showman and entrepreneur Etienne Gaspard Robertson opened a
son-et-lumière
show in Paris he called
Fantasmagorie
, from the Greek
phantasmagoria
, and introduced a new kind of “magic lantern” show with a new projector, the
Fantascope
. In 1801 the word reappeared in the French
phantasmagorie
, courtesy of the French dramatist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who combined
phantasma
, image, with
agora
, assembly, marketplace. Thus,
phantasmagoria
truly means “a showing of fantastic images in public.” The next year, it was borrowed as the name for a magic lantern in a Paris exhibition. In 1822, five years after Brewster’s invention of the
kaleidoscopic
, the meaning of
phantasmagoria
becomes more dynamic, more modern; now it means “a shifting scene of many elements.” Companion words include the indispensable
fantasy
, a shining vision. The English critic Marina Warner
writes, in
Phantasmagoria
, a collection of essays about spirit visions, horror films, and dreams, “Whereas the dioramas and panoramas concentrated on battles, modern cityscapes, or exotic scenery, customs, and people—they are the forerunners of the wide-screen epic films—the
phantasmagoria
shadows forth the great silent movies like F. W. Murnau’s
Nosferatu
[1922] and Robert Wiene’s
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
[1920].”

Calculatingly false, unctuously insincere.
A robust example, as Cassidy claims, of how an honorable word from classical Irish,
fainne
, devolved into street slang of the English-speaking empire.
Fainne
, ring, was corrupted to
fawney
, a fake gold ring, which inevitably became
phony
, street slang for “fake or sham” anything, from gold rings to politicians. As the story goes, the use of the word by Irish immigrants in Britain filtered down to “thieves and swindlers” in need of “secret code words.” These no-goodniks sold the spurious gold rings as if they were 24 karat, but they were really imitative. When I started teaching screenwriting at the American Film Institute, in the early 1980s, I was warned by one of my fellow instructors not to take the movie business too seriously. “Behind the
phony
tinsel of Hollywood,” he said, forgetting to tell me that he was quoting Oscar Levant, “lies the real tinsel.”