Continuing with Expositions of the OED Words

Ammon Shea gave an online interview after writing his book on how he spent a year reading the OED. In this interview he lists a small list of his favorite words. I list them in this essay, and will repeat them here: apricity, bouffage, father-waur, ignotism, introuvable, obmutescence, onomatomania, peracme, postivde, psithurism, sialoquent, velleity. I have already written on velleity, various words beginning with sialo-, and psithurism; in the first OED essay I introduced obmutescence. This leaves me with eight words to explain. The only problem is that peracme is spelled incorrectly: it really is paracme. And, the definition given ("The point at which one's prime has passed") certainly has a possibly amusing connotation but misses the historical understanding of the word.

Beginning with Paracme

So, let's begin with paracme and then backfill to the other words. Somewhat surprisingly, the word paracmastical, a Hellenistic Greek term meaning "to be past the prime," entered our language a half century before paracme. Paracmastical, and paracme, originally had a medical connotation--sugesting a time past the crisis of a fever. As Thomas Blount says in his 1656 Glossographia, the first use of paracmastical, it is "pertaining to a..feaver, wherein the heat, when it is at the greatest, by little and little diminisheth till it ceaseth." So, it would have been proper to say in the late 17th century: "The child's fever was, fortunately, paracmastical, and the whole family breathed a collective sigh of relief" (the word was shortened to paracmastic in 1892).

Moving then to paracme, we have its 1706 definition: "the declining of a Distemper, when its Rage is abated, and the Patient judg'd beyond Danger." But then, it became quickly associated with a time or period of human life when we had gone "beyond our prime." Listen to this howler from Nathan Bailey's mid- 1730s dictionary: "Paracme, that part of life, in which a person is said to grow old, and which, according to Galen, is from 35 to 49." Well, maybe it isn't so funny. We are so glib in assuming that we should enjoy near perfect health into our 70s. Indeed, I have run into people who are maddened in their last illness, when they are in their 70s, because they still have so much work to do and they feel that life is being unfairly taken from them at their age. Putting our longevity into historical context is perhaps the best thing to do...

Thus, by the middle of the 18th century, paracme had these two connotations--when fever had passed and when we had gone beyond our "prime." [Footnote--it makes me wonder when the notion of "middle age" originated. We ought to give the Nobel Prize for something to the inventer of that phrase, since it characterizes what everyone thinks of himself/herself these days. People from 30-80 are in various stages of "middle age."] But then, in the mid-nineteenth century, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel wrote his Generelle Morphologie (1866), and decided to reach into the grab bag of language and come up with paracme, among others. In brief, Haeckel identified three phases of evolution of a phylum or type of organism: the epacme, which included the rise of the type from its origin; the acme, or the period of greatest expansion in members and form, and its paracme, or decline towards extinction. We see behind this term the German desire to systematize and expound. Once various subjects are divided into threes, then the specific features of each part of life can be described.

This, then, has taken us a little deeper into the discussion of peracme (sic) possibly than desired. But this richer historical context may actually embolden us to use it in various circumstances. Rather than saying that a person is "in his dotage" or "beyond his prime," why not just say, "Peracme achieved" or something like that. People will think you are congratulating someone on an accomplishment!

Postvide

The word postvide, though a "nonce-word" in the view of the OED, should receive more attention today. By the way, here is an article on what a "nonce-word" is. It is, a word "for the nonce"--i.e., for now. It is not yet a neologism, which would be a new coinage, but is a word introduced in a particular situation which probably will not last. But, you never know; words originally introduced as "nonce-words" can sometimes become part of our language and enter front and center into our speech and writing. Well, postvide has not yet become that, but when we realize that it means "providing for things after the event" [opposite of "provide"], we see immediately how it can be resurrected. The OED tells us that Thomas Fuller used it in 1661: "When men instead of preventing, postvide against dangers..."

By the way, I ran into Thomas Fuller today and yesterday through another study I am doing: on Milton's Paradise Lost. In Book I of that classic, Milton introduces the demons in hell, based on the Homeric model of the catalogue of ships in Book II of the Iliad. We have, as it were, a catalogue of demons. As Milton reviews various of them, such as Moloch of the Ammonites or Chemosh of Moab, he goes into quite some detail about the cities and geographical features of these "pagan" lands. I was amazed at this, since Milton was supposed to be blind at the time. But what he was doing was making use of Thomas Fuller's 1650 (later editions in the early 1660s) A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine, which has, in its more than 400 pages, long descriptions of the lands occupied by each of the 12 tribes of Israel, as well as maps for each tribe. The tribe of Reuben, for example, lived in the trans-Jordanian area, and on that map we see various specific features of the land of Moab or Ammon. Thus, Fuller gives us a window not only into postvide but also into Milton's authorial method in Book I of PL.

Back now to postvide. It reflects the common human experience of making plans for something after you really needed them. We have the phrase in English, "locking the barn after the horse gets out," and postvide carries that notion. I think the most obvious example of it today are the myriad "security" rules we have in the US today to postvide against terrorist attacks. Ok, I suppose airport screening and making people bring in birth certificates as well as genuine social security cards just to get a driver's license might reflect a concern for forestalling future terrorist attacks or control the flow of future illegal immigration, but really, these are measures to postvide against perceived dangers. The "damage," as it were, has already been done. Our shores have been "flooded" by immigrants, whom we really shouldn't blame for coming here, since we basically invited them to do so (because we had so much extra work for them); our towers in NYC have already been attacked by the 9/11 "terrorists." Thus, we are now in the process of postviding against dangers. Another example of this would be to purchase a security system after your house has been ransacked. You are postviding against burglars.

Conclusion

The OED lists dozens of other words on its "post- prefix" page which begin with post. Maybe someone, someday will take it upon him/herself to exposit some of these. In the meantime, I still have six words to go!

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