Wordcatcher (4 page)

Praise, laurel, award
. A laudatory word worthy of honors. Imagine, if you will, as Rod Serling would intone, a ritual for conferring knighthood, featuring an all-night vigil for the candidate, a ceremonial embrace, and a light tap on the shoulders with the flat side of a sword, capped off, if we can trust the movies, with the immortal phrase “I dub thee Sir Lancelot, or “Sir Loin,” as the case may be. That’s your
accolata
, the name of the ceremony, whether it takes place in a cathedral, a castle, or on the battlefield. The ennobled word derives from
ad,
to, and
collum
, the neck or collar, from Latin
accolare
, to embrace, and French
accoler
, which the
Random House Dictionary
warmly defines as “to hug round the neck.” Webster’s adds a concise secondary meaning of “a mark of acknowledgement,” and a third, the vivid musical usage “a brace or line used in music to join two or more staffs carrying simultaneous parts.” Notes joined at the neck, you might say. In his poem “Memorial Day,” Joyce Kilmer wrote, “May we, their grateful children, learn / Their strength, who lie beneath this sod, / Who went through fire and death to earn / At last the
accolade
of God.” More recently, actor Morgan Freeman said
upon receiving his
Academy
Award
,
“Getting a standing ovation was kind of humbling. … So many people are so happy that I have been named for this award. A lot of people say you’re due—maybe you are, maybe you aren’t—it’s an
accolade
.” Thus, an
accolade
is an honor or praise that feels like a warm embrace, or a tap of approval on the shoulder from a favorite uncle or coach or book critic.

To prefigure, render a sketchy outline, disclose a bit of what you know, give warning.
Not just another “inkhorn word” but a useful verb, since so much of our life is in and out of the dark. Like many light-and-dark words, it comes from the Latin
ad
, to or fore, and
umbra
, shadow, thus
adumbratus
, meaning “to lightly foreshadow.” If you look it up, you’ll discover a shadow theater of silhouetted words:
umbrage
,
shadowbox
, and
skiamachy
, or “shadow-fighting,” a favorite practice of boxers, familiar to anyone battling imaginary enemies. My own earliest recollection of the word was in my first college film class, at the University of Detroit, in 1974, where we studied the use of foreshadowing. One morning the professor wrote in white chalk caps on the blackboard: THE ART OF ADUMBRATING IN HITCHCOCK. That lecture changed the way I viewed movies, teaching me how to look for signs and symbols. Writing of Hitchcock’s
Odd Man Out
, Thomas M. Letich says, “[He] has made it fun to watch the revelation of Alicia’s character
by involving her in a promisingly dangerous situation while
adumbrating
the danger with such authority and wit that following the continuity provides the same perverse pleasures as identifying Hannay’s char and the body she discovers in
The 39 Steps
.” Companion words that
shadow forth
include
skiascope
, an optometrist’s tool for determining the “refractive condition of the eye” by following the movement of “retinal lights and shadows,” and
chiaroscuro
, an art born of light and shadow, like moonlight on castle ruins, or the gold-haunted portraits of Rembrandt, the feverdream movies of Terrence Malick, the shadow-strewn architecture of Tadao Ando.

Adumbrate (Shadow Boxing)

Aftermath

Consequences
. Today we speak of the
aftermath
of something as its long-lasting results. But this has nothing to do with your old math classes, which still haunt some of us who suffer the odd nightmare about receiving high school transcripts that say we failed our tenth grade math class and have to take it over. No, thankfully,
aftermath
has been harvested from
after
, following, and
math
, from
mæð
, Old English dialect meaning “to mow, cut hay,” and originally referred to the second crop of hay grown in the same season after the first had been scythed. By the 18th century, the agricultural term took on its modern figurative meaning of reaping what we sowed. Now the only question is: What’s the word for that head-spinning smell released from all
that cut grass that I mowed for $5 a lawn when I was kid? Companion words include
polymath
, from
poly
, much, and
mathein
, learner, and so someone who simply loves to learn. And speaking of math,
algebra
derives from the
al-jabr
, a book by its inventor, Muhammad al-Khwarizmi.
An after-word
for
aftermath
reveals a distant cousin,
afterclap
, which refers to the … sudden silence … after the applause dies away—a word well worthy of revival because it names the currently nameless trauma suffered by ex-
athletes
, actors, and politicians who desperately miss the applause after they retire.

Pain, conflict, struggle
. Ancient Greece teemed with competition. There were upward of 300
gymnasiums
, stadiums, and hippodromes, which regularly held a thrilling range of contests, from wrestling and chariot racing to sculpture and drama. Collectively, these were called the
agonia
, the struggle for victory in the games, from the earlier verb
agein
, to drive, to lead, to celebrate, and
agon
, or contest. So fierce were all contests in ancient Greece that the winners were celebrated, even apotheosized, while the losers slunk away ignominiously. The visceral memory of those fierce competitions comes down to us in our word
agony
, which by the 14th century stretched out to mean wrestling against the fierce opponents of mental anguish, physical torment, even the suffering before death. In the
International Journal of Lexicography
, John Considine writes that the earliest recorded use in English, in Wycliffe’s Bible, is the description of Christ “in
agonye
” in the Garden of Gethsemane. Companion words include
protagonist
and
antagonist
, the two
characters
pitted against each other in any drama, whether essentially an arena or theater; and
antagonize
, which means to put someone else in
agony
. Figuratively,
agony
is the heart of all drama; encountering, confronting, then triumphing over it. “There is no greater
agony
than bearing an untold story inside you,” writes Maya Angelou. Seamus Heaney expanded on this aspect after translating a certain 9th-century Anglo-Saxon epic: “One way of reading
Beowulf
is to think of it as three
agons
in the hero’s life.” Curiously, an
agonist
is a drug that activates cell molecules in a way that replicates their natural processes. In China, the
writhing
of tea leaves in the bottom of a teacup when hot water is poured in is called “the
agony
of the leaf.” On
Star Trek
“
agonizers
” were red-glowing weapons used on those who had committed minor offenses, while those who were guilty of major ones were sent to the “
agony
booth.”