Wordcatcher (24 page)

Sheer beatific happiness
. Originally, simply, music. The magic lies in those two gloriously long
e
’s, the joyful vowels of a child with her toys and the music fan
shrieking
in the front row at a concert. A
happy
word, by chance, borrowed directly from the Scandinavian
glee
. Mackay writes at first haltingly, then cheerfully, “by which by the progress of change and corruption, has come to signify that state of mind which music is so calculated to produce, joyfulness and pleasure.” In
Songs of Innocence
William Blake writes: “Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant
glee
, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me,
‘Pipe a song about a lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again!’ So I piped. He wept to hear.” The Rolling Stones sang, in “Sympathy for the Devil”: “I watched with glee / While your kings and queens / Fought for ten decades / For the Gods they made.” From the
melancholic
genius behind “Peanuts,” Charles Schultz: “All the loves in the strip are unrequited. All the baseball games are lost, all the test scores are D-minuses, the Great Pumpkin never comes, and the football is always pulled away. … For me the operative response is
glee
. And its
glee
that I never get tired of.” Companion words include a
glee
, a part-song scored for three or more usually male and unaccompanied voices that was popular in the 18th century;
gleeman
, a singer, teller of tales;
gleeful
,
happy
; and
glee-music
, which Hunter defines as “merriment caused by minstrels.”

To
grab, grasp, grope, snatch, steal.
This is a stealth word. It snuck in under the radar, quietly evolving from the Scottish
glaum
, the tool used to geld horses. The careful groping around under the horse and then the quick emasculating cut made a stark impression, coming to mean over the centuries any quick, dangerous, thieving move. A later influence was
glam
, Irish-American gangland slang, to handle awkwardly, grab voraciously, devour, thieve, snitch, nobble, nab. Over time, the two words merged
into the popular street word
glom
, to understand, to get it. Curiously, Dashiell Hammett used the former spelling but took the latter meaning in
The Dain Curse
: “Looks like him and another guy
glaumed
the ice.” Cassidy offers an alternate reading, the Irish
glam
, to grab, snatch, and cites O’Leary’s
Dictionary of the American Underworld
: from
glom,
to grab, as in stealing. Either way, to
glom on
to something is to suddenly snatch it away. At the risk of being indelicate, it takes some balls to suggest the following companion words:
glomerate
, from Latin
glamus
, to collect into a ball of yarn, and
conglomerate
, to wind into a ball, heap together, as in having the balls to gather together a group of businesses. Our word
globe
rolls to us from
globus
, as if the gods rolled all of creation into a ball when they created the round world we live on. Uncannily, the original sense of
glom
lives on faintly, a faint echo—or is it odor—of the furtive behavior in Scotland’s horse stables, whenever we try to grasp the meaning of anything difficult to reach.

An ageless sprite
. Old reliable Skeat attributes the word to the alchemist Paracelsus, who suggested “the notion that gnomes could reveal secret treasures.” Now there’s a new light on the old
gnome
in the neighbor’s garden, rooted as he is in two old Greek words,
gnosis
, intelligence, and
noetics
, to know, especially hidden knowledge.
Gnosis
in turn gave rise to
gnostic
, a sect devoted to the teaching of immediate
knowledge, from
gnositiko
, wise, good at knowing. To call somebody
gnomic
isn’t to say they’re annoying little garden spirits, but that they’re prone to “wise sayings or aphorisms,” like Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein—or John Belushi, who both looked and sounded
gnomic
. The astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s mysterious observation “Something out there is doing we don’t know what” is numinously
gnomic
. Marvelously related words include
gnomon
, the index of a sundial; and also from the Greek,
gnosis
, interpreter, one who knows. While researching my book
Riddle Me This
in the early 1990s, I caught sight of a book of gnomic verse in the San Francisco Library special collection of humor,
Early English Poems,
by Pancrost and Spaeth, published in 1911. Here is “The Book-Worm”: “A moth ate a word! To me that seemed / A Strange thing to happen, when I / heard that wonder,—A worm that / would swallow the speech of a man, / Sayings of strength steal in the dark, / Thoughts of the mighty; yet the / thieving sprite / Was none the wiser for / the words he had eaten!” Thus, it’s safe to say that a
gnome
is an elemental reminder that there are those who
know
the secret knowledge, maybe of time itself, one that eats and spits it out again.

A blessing, a gift from back of beyond
. Originally, a term in Orkney and the Shetland Islands for the flotsam washed ashore from shipwrecks in the outrageously rough North Seas. The god behind the word riddles much of the language.
Godhopping
is the act of pretending religious interest to get help from missionaries. Not as unusual a construction as one might believe. A
goditorium
is
slang
for a church, the place where one listens to a
godbox
, a rare but colorful term for a church organ. Our English word
god
has the oldest of roots, the Proto-Indo-European
ghut
, that which is invoked, which grew into the Icelandic
guth
, which sired such European words as the German
Gott
, Dutch
god
, and Danish
gud
. There are many euphemisms for the divine, such as
Zounds!
from “God’s wounds,”
good-bye
from “God be with you.”
Gadzooks
comes from “God’s looks.”
Gee whiz
is a contraction of “Holy Gee (“G”),” possibly from old Irish
dia
, God, a god.
Gossip
was overheard from an old expression for “a sponsor in baptism.” Skeats derives it from
godsibb
, a reference to relatives, which gave us godfather and godmother, a person related in God, someone regarded as spiritual enough “to have God’s ear.” All that intimate talk invariably involved some betrayal of secrets, which evolved into the “idle talk” known as gossip. “Oh, Deuce!” comes from “Deus!” A comic expression for God in the South is
Old Wind-maker
: “Old Wind-maker’s blowin’ liars right out of North Car’lina.” And ordinary stones are called “God’s biscuits” in the old saloons of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Showily, splendidly beautiful.
The hidden meaning lurks in its French origins,
gorgias
, elegant, from
gorge
; and
gorget
, throat, throat-covering. A fully embodied word. In 1611, Randle Cotgrave pointed out in his French-English
dictionary
a tantalizing connection with the earlier French
reggorger
, which he cleverly traced to the habit of proud people to “hold down the head, or thrust the chin into the neck, as some do in pride, to make their faces look fuller.” Figuratively, this action evolved into
gorgias
and
gorget
, to reflect the proud behavior, “from the swelling of the throat in pride.” Thus, a painted word comes into
focus
: an attractive woman who coquettishly tucks her head down, exposing more of her beautiful neck, and thus appearing simultaneously more modest and more alluring. In a word,
gorgeous
, which when uttered is usually stressed—
italicized,
if you will—far more than the soft-spoken
beautiful
, as in “She’s
gorgeous
!” When I was teaching screenwriting at the American Film Institute, I searched through their library for a perfect quote for a talk I was to give on the history of humor in the movies. Finally, in
Hollywood Quotes
, I caught this sumptuous use of the word from flame-haired Lucille Ball: “Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a
gorgeous
redhead.” Companion words include
gorge
, to overeat, an act which tends to enlarge the throat;
gorge
, as in the throatlike passage in a canyon; and
gorget
, throat-armor.

To turn to stone, demonize
. The verb form of the infamous noun, as vivid as you’ll ever hope to encounter, deriving, of course, from the three daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, called the Gorgons, from
gorgos
, the very embodiment of “fear, fierce.” Originally, the three sisters, Medusa, Sthenno, and Euryale, were considered
gorgeous
, famous for their beautiful hair. But after Poseidon “obtained their favors” in Athena’s temple, the sisters were cursed, their fate repellent, their hair transformed into slithering snakes, their hypnotic eyes petrifying all who stared at them to stone. Together, the sisters personified different aspects of fear and trembling experienced by those entering into deadly realms. Medusa’s epithet was “lightning,” Sthenno’s was “thunder,” and Euryale’s “wanderer.” If a
hero
or hunter was foolhardy enough to gaze upon one of them, he or she was turned to stone. So lethal was their power that even after death their heads were placed on shields, as when Perseus slew Medusa and presented her still swithering head to Athena, as a talisman. For some mythically murky reason, Medusa was beloved by Poseidon, and when she died, their offspring, the flying horse Pegasus (later a symbol of the Mobil Oil Company), sprang up from the pool of her still burbling blood. Curious companion words include
gorgonia
, a sea-fan-shaped polyp that appears to turn to stone the second it is exposed to the air. Today,
gorgonize
is an obscure but still stone-cold word meaning, as it ever did, to “paralyze, petrify, or hypnotize.”