On to 2009

One of my New Year's Resolutions for 2009 was not to write as many (or any) essays on words. It isn't that I don't love them; indeed, I do. But I find that words often take me in so many potentially new and exciting directions that I can't focus on anything in particular. They are distracting more than they allure. So, armed with that insight, I decided to "take a break" from words. But then two things happened. Someone asked me if I knew what "funambulism" was, and I said, "Sure, tightrope-walking." But I was struck by the word ambulism/ambulance and wanted to do a little more work on it. Then, I was over at my girlfriend's house this morning, and I found myself without books. Most people would just have a little conversation, but I decided I would begin to leaf through her dictionary, and I randomly opened it to "dev..." As I did, the wonder of words began to open to me again, and I realized I was "re-hooked." So, these are some words I want to explore: ambulance, ambo, ambavalia, deverbative, developpe, Devanagari. For some reason I also wandered over to the "te's," and so I found tenaculum, tenaille, and telotaxis there. Let's see where all this takes us.

Amb-related Words

1. Funambulism got me started. The Latin word funis means "rope." Ambulare means to "walk." Hence the word "ambulatory" refers to someone who can walk. An ambulatory will is one that still can be changed because the testator isn't yet dead (i.e., it has "legs"). But what is the relationship of the word ambulance to all this, since you only call an ambulance when the person affected can't walk very well? The OED tells us that the word originated with hospital ambulant, or "walking hospital." The term was first used at the beginning of the 19th century to describe a hospital which followed an army in its movements so as to afford the speediest possible help to the wounded. Thus, the word refers to a hospital that can "walk" rather than the patient who can do the same. From the Edinburgh Review, "These ambulances in their most perfect form consist of a mounted corp of surgeons and inferior assistants...to remove them [the wounded] to other ambulances or temporary hospitals." So, if someone asked, "where is the ambulance?" in a French combat situation in the 19th century, they would be wondering where the temporary or "moving" hospital was. But by the time of the Crimean War (mid-1850s), the term was also used to describe the wagon or cart to convey the wounded off the field of battle. It was the cart sent from the ambulance, and so it became known as the ambulance cart or, eventually, the ambulance. Neat.

2. An ambo relates not at all to ambulances but is derived from the Greek word ambon (rising, raised edge or rim of a dish, a raised stage or pulpit) and is a "special name of the pulpit or reading-desk in early Christian churches." So the OED. The word is probably ultimately derived from the Greek verb anabo, which means "I go up." Thus, one "went up" to the pulpit or reading desk, by climbing stairs, so that the congregation could see the person. Yet, if you do a "Google Images" search under the term, you discover that lots of modern-day pulpits in various churches are called ambos. The Century, which often has interesting articles on things, has a picture of this kind old pulpit (which still can be seen in many New England and European Churches) with the further description: "It was often an oblong enclosure with steps at both ends, and was generally richly decorated. It was very common to place two ambos in a church, one from which was read the gospel, and from the other the epistle."

3. But then, I ran across ambarvalia in the Century, and I knew I had to pause and look at it for a while. This is what words do to me; they draw my attention away from other things I have planned and require me to pay them some attention. The word is derived from Roman antiquity and is composed of the words ambi (around; ambu suggests "walking") and arvum, a cultivated field. Ambarvalia is a festival celebrated in the Spring of the year whose object was to invoke the favor of the gods toward the fertility of the fields. Now, we could go into all kinds of complexities here--whether it was the same feast as celebrated by the Arval Brothers, what exactly the festival consisted of, when it arose, how it died and how it was brought back to life in the Roman Empire, etc., but I will leave it here. This word encourages us to discover its life--and maybe you will be the one to do so..

To the Dev's

4. Developpe (pronounced dev lah PAY) is a term from ballet pointing (pun intended) to a movement in which one leg is raised and then fully extended. You can do so twards the front, side or rear. In fact, this YouTube video demonstrates the elementary movement, which it calls passe developpe. The passe part is the uplifted leg, with sole of foot touching the knee. Of course the realization that this is an elementary ballet movement means that girls of five years old in America are running around saying it, while I had to wait a lot of years to learn the word. Well, they don't probably know what a pile driver or even a suplex is....

If developpe opens the ballet world to us, both enticing us to join in the fun as well as judging us subtly for not being more curious about the world, the word Devanagari does the same thing. It is the word describing the script used in several Indian languages, such as Hindi, Marathi, Pali, Sanskrit and Sindhi. Derived from the two Sanskrit words deva, which means "god, brahmin or celestial," and nagari, which means "city," this script is derived from the Brahmi script (used to write classical Hindu texts) in the 11th century. Here is a page explaining it. And I thought, "wouldn't it be great to expend some effort to try to learn this one, too?" After all, if I take enough time and effort to learn some of the chief European languages, then I really have no excuse, other than indolence and other priorities, to ignore languages such as Sanskrit. The great Brown University historian of mathematics David Pingree brought to that program a knowledge of Sanskrit, as well as bundles of other languages, and thus raised the program to world prominence.

6. Well, Devanagari will have to wait a bit, because other words allure. Actually we can dispose of deverbative rather quickly. It is either a noun or adjective. As the former it is the form of a word derived from a verb, while as the latter it just means "derived from a verb." Thus, driver is a deverbative. But we can also talk about the deverbative tendency prevalent in modern English. In fact, however, I have noticed that there is also a movement from nouns to verbs, wuch as the fairly recent move, at least in law, to make the word task play a big role as a verb.

The next essay reviews three more words, beginning with "t."

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