A wordy column

So my use of the term, as you see, is extremely precise. "Antediluvian," by the by, means "ridiculously old-fashioned." But it also means "of or belonging to the time before the Biblical flood"; and you’d be amazed how many common English words originally came from the Bible. John Wycliffe, a 14th century scholar and theologian, did the first major translation of the Bible from Latin to English. It is in the Wycliffe Bible that we first read words like birthday, child-bearing, communication, crime, envy, godly, graven, humanity, lecher, madness, middleman, pollute, puberty, and unfaithful.

Of course, the Roman Catholic Church was adamantly opposed to the Bible being translated into a common tongue, and in 1382 the Church banned all English-language Bibles and tortured and killed many of the itinerant preachers who used them.

Such acts show up the irony of the word "pagan," which is derived from the Latin word paganus, which means "countryman" — that is, someone who is superstition and uneducated. So "pagan," it turns out, pretty much describes the majority of fundamentalist Christians today. Indeed, I am sure that the Bethel Women’s Group, which has enough money to take out proselytising newspaper ads regularly, does not know that their title derives from the word "baetylia," which are heathenish, rude stones once used to worship the fertility gods of Canaan, Assyria, and Mesopotamia.

Although it is an unjustified leap, I sometimes view such people as suffering from a mild form of anosognosia. This word means "unaware of illness," and was coined by French neurologist Joseph Fran?ois Babinski, who first observed it clinically in 1908. It is a condition where otherwise mentally lucid persons are unaware that a whole side of their body is paralysed, and will make excuses or give rationalisations to explain why they don’t move their limbs. ("My arthritis is acting up.") A related condition is called "somatoparaphrenia," and means denial of ownership of one’s own body parts. Maybe it is this that affects those fat women who squeeze themselves into unwisely tiny bikinis at Carnival time.

But anosognosia is just an extreme version of the self-deception we are all subject to — everyone uses mechanisms like denial, repression, and confabulation when confronted with disturbing or unpalatable facts about themselves. Interestingly, though, it is only patients with damage to the right hemisphere of the brain who suffer from anosognosia. The brain’s left hemisphere deals with the production of speech sounds, syntax, and semantics. The right hemisphere is concerned with the subtleties of language such as metaphor, allegory, and ambiguity. "The left hemisphere’s job is to create a belief system or model or to fold new experiences into that belief system...

The right hemisphere’s strategy, on the other hand, is to play Devil’s Advocate, to question the status quo and to look for global inconsistencies," notes neurologist VS Ramachandran in his book Phantoms in the Brain.

No wonder, then, that religious fundamentalists tend not to be readers. In fact, the total number of books translated by Middle East nations into Arabic in the past 1,100 years equals the number of books Spain translates into Spanish every year. This is a far fall from the days when the word "alcohol" was entirely Arabic. In the 16th century, when the word had entered the English language, alcohol derived from sugar was first called kill-devil, them rumbullion, then rumbustion, before becoming plain "rum". Rum became the drink of the British Navy, and there was one Admiral Vernon, known for wearing a cloak made of a coarse fabric named grogram, who ordered it be mixed with water before being given to the crew. Because of his cloak, his nickname was "Old Grog." That led to rum and water being called "grog," then to the word "groggy".

The West Indies has contributed its fair share of words to English — hurricane, savannah, potato, filibuster, and cutlass were first used in this region, often by the Amerindians. And, although its etymology is probably untraceable, the original Spanish word for sugar plantation was "ingenio," which means engine. Could there be a connection between that and the "engine room" of the panyard? And how did "marasmus" — Greek for "wasting away," originally used to describe infants dying in orphanages for no apparent reason but lack of love — how did this word enter the common parlance of Trinidadian speech as "marasm?"?

Indeed, it is a mystery why some words fail to survive while others thrive. In the 16th and 17th centuries, words like fatigate (to make tired), abstergify (to cleanse) and illecebrous (enticing) didn’t make the grade. "Expede" also vanished, yet its antonym "impede" remained. And seemingly unlikely words like exaggerate, affability, dexterity, disabuse, and extol also lasted.

What was culled and what was called was no doubt partly due to writers, and most influential amongst them was surely William Shakespeare. There are more than 2,000 words first recorded in his plays, though it is not certain which he invented or which he just wrote down. However, words like obscene, barefaced, lacklustre, emulate, demonstrate, dislocate, and meditate appear first in his works. (Mind you, so too do unplausive, vastidity, and honorificabilitudinatibus.)

Shakespeare’s works have about 15,000 distinct words. To give perspective, the King James Version Bible has 10,000, while educated people know between 45,000 to 120,000 words.

However, most people use just 5,000 words in everyday speech. And that is why writers have to avoid the temptation to use obscure words just for the sake of seeming erudite. Otherwise, readers may perform floccinaucinihilipilification on their work — that is, the act or habit of estimating something as worthless.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com

Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh