Wordcatcher (46 page)

Sagacity, prudence, the quality of being wise.
From Old English
wis
, to see, and
dom
, quality or condition, hence, the quality of seeing; related to
witan
, to know, to wit. To “get
wise
” to Socrates meant to lead the well-lived life; to Dillinger it meant to “understand, learn something.” “Wise up” suggests that someone has been on the dullard side and needs to “get smart.” Companion words include
wiseacre
, a smart aleck, from the Middle Dutch
wijsseggheri
, soothsayer.
Wisdom tradition
has come to replace the loaded word
religion
for some scholars, such as Huston Smith. Figuratively,
wisdom
describes the capacity to act wisely, as in the famous couplet from the
Tao te Ching
: “A wise man has no extensive knowledge; He who has extensive knowledge is not a wise man.” Companion words include the marvelous
waywiser
, an indicator of the way, an adaptation of the Dutch
wegwijzer
, one who shows the way.
Wisdom
, then, can be “way out,” as hipsters chanted unwittingly over their bongos, or “way in,” as that Taoist hippie, Lao-Tzu, might’ve said.

Wisdom

Inborn knowledge, natural or common sense, good humor, entertaining, lively intelligence.
It is not being too
facetious
to say that there are myriad expressions pertaining to wit, especially since
facetious
itself originally meant “mirthfully witty,” from Latin
facetiae
, and later meant “insincere.” Among the witty companion words are
inwit
, knowledge from within, conscience,
remorse
; and outwit, which first meant “knowledge from without, information,” and only later “to outmaneuver.” To be
fat-witted
is to be dull or stupid. A
flasher
is “one whose appearance of wit is an illusion.”
The Five Wits
are “the five sensibilities, namely common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory.”
Unwit
means “ignorance”;
motherwit
, “natural talent”;
forewit
, “anticipation”;
gainbite/ayerbite
, the agenbite of inwit, “the backbiting of guilt.” A
witworm
is someone who feeds on others’
wit
. According to Herbert Coleridge, in
A Dictionary of the First, or Oldest Words in the English Language
(1859), an
afterwit
is an afterthought. Coleridge registers
biwit
as someone “out of one’s
wits
.” To Johnson, a
witling
was “a pretender; a man of petty smartness. One with little understanding or grace but desire to be funny.” In
Our Southern Highlanders,
Horace Kephart describes a
half-wit
as a silly or imbecilic person, writing, “Mountaineers never send their ‘
fitified
folks’ or
half-wits
, or other unfortunates, to any institution in the lowlands.” The witty Bill Bryson tracks
nitwit
down to the Americanization of the Dutch expression
Ik niet wiet,
“I don’t know.” The last (
witty
) word goes to John Florio, who translated Montaigne into English: “For he that hath not heard of Mountaigne yet / Is but a novice in the school of
wit
.”

True to one’s word
. What would a word book be without a few “word” words? Fellow words include
wordridden
, to be a slave to words you don’t understand, and
wordwanton
, having a dirty mouth. A
wordmonger
is a show-off with
words, rather than using them to express meaning, emotion, facts. A
witherword
is hostile language. One blessed with word dexterity is a
logodaedalus
, after the Greek
logo
, word, and
Daedalus
, the inventor of the
labyrinth
, armor, and toys. Someone stricken with
logophilia
has caught the love of words; whereas
logomachy
is a fight or dispute over words. A
wordroom
is a place to indulge our passions for words, closely related to
lectory
, a place for reading. A
scriptorium
was a
translation
hall in medieval Ireland. A “lexicographical laboratory” was a backyard shed in London where James Murray and friends created
The Oxford English Dictionary
over the course of 49 years, comprising twelve volumes and 414,825 words, plus 1,827,306 citations to illuminate their meanings. “Words, words, words,” cries Eliza Doolittle in
My Fair Lady,
“I’m so sick of words!” On the other hand, the Divine Sarah Bernhardt longed for them, as she wrote to her lover, Victorien Sardou, “Your
words
are my food, your breath my wine. You are everything to me.”

To make a mark; to record, communicate.
“To trace symbols representing word(s),” says
The Concise Oxford Dictionary
, “especially with pen or pencil on paper or parchment.” For as long as we have known, human beings have felt a compunction to record their thoughts, to reach out to one another using the magical letters of their respective alphabets. This effort began with a simple scratch on bark,
or papyrus, which, incidentally, later gave us the word
paper
. It makes poetic sense, then, that the root of our word
write
is
writan
, Old English for “scratch.” Ogden Nash’s quip comes to mind: “Happiness is having a scratch for every itch.” Look that up and you’ll soon find “scratch” as a synonym for “money,” though
writing
for “scratch” has eluded many a writer trying to “scratch out a living.” Incidentally, “starting from scratch” refers to making a mark in the dirt for the start of a race, which is often then
written
about. And what do we
write
with? A
ballpoint pen
, which was originally called a “non-leaking, high-altitude
writing
stick.” When I first read that, I had to scratch my head before
writing
it down. As for the
secret
of
writing
, I was taught that
writing
is rewriting is rewriting. When an interviewer asked S. J. Perelman how many drafts of a story he was used to
writing
, the gag man for the Marx Brothers and others replied: “Thirty-seven. I once tried doing thirty-three, but something was lacking, a certain—how shall I say?—
Je ne sais quoi
.”

To twist and turn in acute pain
. One of J. R. R. Tolkien’s favorite words, a 12th-century one from Middle English, from Old English
wruthan
; akin to Old Norse
rutha
, to twist into coils or folds or twist into distortion. Tolkien’s avid studies in Anglo-Saxon (he was the world expert on
Beowulf
) provided the inspiration for his famously evil
wraiths
in
The Lord of the Rings
, which are the very embodiment—or enspiritment—of
wrenching, wrangling, and writhing.
Companion words include
wraith
, vividly defined by Mackay as “the supposed apparition of the soul about to quit the body of a dying person.” Curiously related is
twistification
, cited in
Southern Appalachian Slang
as a “pejorative term for dancing used by churchmen. Wherever the church has not put its ban on twistifications the country dance is the chief amusement of young and old.”