Returning to the "F's" Really

I thought the previous essay would get me back on the "f's," and I began in good faith toward this task with farreation. But, as you saw, confarreation took over and became my cicerone, and I barely escaped. But now I return to the f's, though I need to honor the last sentence of my previous essay by telling you about one more near-neighbor of confarreation: confabulate. I pause on confabulate not because I don't know what it means, but because I didn't know that the great 19th-20th century Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler first used it in a psychological context in the way we use it today.

Actually, the first appearance of confabulate was in the 17th century. It meant, simply, "to talk familiarly together, chat." From 1732: "Moses and Elias were at the Transfiguration, and did confabulate with Jesus." Yet, in AA Brill's 1924 translation of Bleuler's Textbook on Psychiatry, we have this: "Many paretics..spontaneously confabulate in a very profuse manner" [By the way, a paretic suffers from paresis, and paresis is "partial or incomplete paralysis]. In a psychological context, confabulate means "to fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory." Thus one confabulates in place of real memories. "One of the joys, and burdens, of being a lawyer for elderly people, is that the clients so freely 'remembered' the past. To differentiate fact from confabulation required patience and enormous skill."

Returning to the "F's"--Beginning with Farouche

Let's return to the "f's" now with words like farrow, farctate, feria, flump, farouche, feroher, fautor, fantod, fad, farrago, farraginous and fastigiate.

1. We start simply, with farouche. It is a French word and it means "sullen, shy and repellent in manner." Horace Walpole first used the word in English (1765), "The King..has great sweetness in his countenance instead of that farouche look which they give." We need a vocabulary of glances, don't we? One can have a glower, for example, a frown or scowl. A gloomy, ill-humored, moody or sullen look is also a lour. It is almost as if all these words have a "down-ward" feel to them to capture the downward glance of the eyes of the one in this conditin. Farouche is an adjective, not a noun, so one can have a farouche or sullen glance, frown, scowl, glower or lour. We invent the world when we slowly pay attention to the words we use to describe things. From 1855: "She has been very farouche with me for a long time."

2. With that good start, let's continue with flump. It is a mimetic or imitative word and means (as a verb) "to throw down with violence" or "to throw oneself down heavily." An example of the latter would be: "She flumped down in a chair." Or, "The St. Bernard whines, runs, jumps, and flumps down on me." So, flump is like dump, bump... Thackeray used the word in 1840: "Chairs were flumped down on the floor."

By the way, while looking for "flump" I 'mistyped' the "f" as a "g" and came up, at first, with "glump." It invites a word. It is both a noun and a verb, and means "to sulk, be glum or sullen." "He glumped and gloomed and turned his head away." "Pray tell what you are glumping at?"

3. Let's do farrago, a word that should be familiar, but one that was suggested to me by farreus (Latin for "made of spelt or corn") of the previous essay. A farrago is "hodgepodge; a medley; a mass composed of various materials confusedly mixed." Sheridan's Rivals has "Yet I do carry everywhere with me such a confounded farrago of doubts, fears, hopes, wishes...." But our word farrago owes its origin to the Latin word meaning "mixed fodder for cattle, mash.." Thus, we get a pretty neat picture in our mind when using the word farrago. It is as if our brain, our life, the tasks before us, are like mashed up cattle fodder. Sounds about right...

4. Then nearby is farraginous, defined as "mixed, jumbled." Now all this jumble is making sense, isn't it? One might have a farraginous discourse or a farraginous concatenation of factors. "But the great farraginous body of Popish rites and ceremonies, the subject of my learned friend's letter from Rome, had surely a different original..." We speak today of jumbled or confused tangles of things. Let's bring back farraginous, and see if anyone notices!

5. and 6. We have to be a little more careful with words like feria and ferie and some of its near-neighbors, since each successive word, though looking similar to its predecessor, comes from a different linguistic, historical and social location than its predecessor. Sometimes the study of words is like walking through an intensive care unit at the hospital; you really have to go through with great care and patience, or else you will hurtfully disturb those who are there. In fact we will see contradictions here that aren't easily resolved. Let me lay this out.

Actually, let's back into feria by ferie. A ferie is a holiday or a stated feast-day. Wyclif used the term in his translation of Lev. 23:2: "These been the feries of the Lord, whiche ye schulen clepe [i.e., call] hooli." Thus, it is a "day off."

Well, ferie is the really old word, and its more "modern" equivalent is feria. But, and here is where I am at a bit of a loss, because the OED gives the first definition of feria as "a day of the week; a weekday, esp. an ordinary weekday as opposed to a festival." Thus, a feria seems "ordinary" while a ferie, supposedly the same word, is a "festival." Perhaps we can bridge the definitional problem a bit by realizing that the phrase "greater feria" means "a particular day of a certain week, that has an office or commemoration proper to it, such as Ash Wednesday, Monday in Rogation Week, etc." So, I would say that a feria is an ordinary day, the greater feria makes it extraordinary and the rare and old term ferie was only used sparingly, to describe a special or holy day.

This isn't completely satisfactory, and I have to spend some time in the next essay to say a few more things about this before getting on with my life.

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