What the "H" and Other Terms

Some of the words on the list today begin with "h," but not all do. We have: hericide, heriot, habendum, herisse, herisson, hercynian, Hepialid, hephthemimer. But then there is a cluster of words to describe "outsiders," from the perspective of various cultures. These words are palagi (Samoa); haole (Hawaii); pakeha (Maori) and gaijin (Japanese). These we have a lot of miscellaneous words, such as klepht, knisteneaux, klendusity and klewang (kleywang), beginning with "k," and cochleiform, cochleariform, cochliocarpous, beginning with "c," and then the stray words thrawart, madeleine, vafrous. If we work through this list today, we may have enough words to satisfy us for many a day...

Outsiders

I don't need to say much about the "outsider" terms; I just realized that I had run into a lot of them, and that these were the most prominent. Each one of these four cultures is an island one (Japan, Samoa, Hawaii, New Zealand). You wonder if there is a generic word for "outsider" from a land-locked country. In any case, just as the Sahara wind is called different things based on the country you are in when you feel it, so the stranger or outsider is called different things in these various islands. Just think, if you went island-hopping in the Pacific, within a few days you could be a haole, pakeha, palagi and gaijin. Where else could you learn four such words so quickly?

To the "H's"

1. I ran across the legal term habendum, and I decided I needed to spend some time on "h's." The word habendum is a Latin word describing a clause of a real estate deed at common law. The deed consisted of two parts: a description of the real estate (the "premises") and a statement beginning "to have, hold, receive, and take," which is the common form of habendum. The habendum clause is also called the habendum and tenendum, if you are keeping score. Maybe when I try to sell my house I should interview prospective real estate agents and, if they can't tell me what a habendum clause is, I should go on to the next. Hm. Maybe I would never sell my house..

2. The word hercynian is rare and looks poetic at first blush, but is "applied by and after the ancient writers to the wooded mountain-system of Middle Germany." As JG Frazer said in the Golden Bough: "Down to the first century before our era the Hercynian forest stretched eastward from the Rhine for a distance at once vast and unknown." Caesar described it as so large that it took a fast runner 9 days to cross it. The term was taken over by geologists in the late 19th century to describe the mountain-building movement that occurred in Europe in late Carboniferous or early Permian times. Thus, geologists wax eloquent on the "Hercynian movement" or the "Hercynian System."

3. Hericide can be handled quickly--it is the killing of one's master. The Latin word for master is "herus." I have never heard it used or seen it in print, but now you have it.

4. Let's color outside of the lines a little bit by leaving the "h's" temporarily because of another Latin-derived word that is rarely, if ever seen. Vafrous is derived from the adjective vafer, vafra, vafrum, which means "sly" or "crafty." Thus, a vafrous person is these things. From 1650: "These are subtle, and vafrous Men, who are never solidly, nor honestly, Wise." Or, in a theological sense, from 1664: "This vafrous and bloudy Treason against the holy Majesty of Christ." I have argued elsewhere that the English language exploded in the 17th century, perhaps as an expression of confidence in the newly powerful place of England in the world. Thus, all kinds of Latin-derived words were invented, many of which never seemed to make it out of the century. This is one of them. Just as America wanted to explode in economic ways in the end of the 20th century, so England wanted to explode verbally about 350 years ago. But, you wonder if linguistic or verbal bubbles burst, just as economic bubbles do...

4. Hepialid is an adjective meaning "of or pertaining to a moth of the family Hepialidae, the ghost-moths or swifts." Wow. This gets us into the study of moths, a study ignored by most people because even the idea of moths grosses them out. Here is an online list of all the known genera and species of ghost moths--but I think it is overkill. You don't generally go from complete ignorance of something to devoting your life to mastering every expression of it. I didn't know there were so many familes of moths that inhabited our planet. Where have I been? Well, the word hepialid comes from the Greek word epiolos, so there has been a bit of an evolution from Greek to English to get our word. Indeed, some of the older English sources talk about the epialid moth, which would be truer to the Greek. Interestingly, the Greek word epialos means "nightmare." We transliterate it into English as "ephialtes. Thus, an ephialtes is either a demon supposed to cause nightmare or the nightmare itself.

5. Let's close this essay with herisse and herisson. The latter term originally meant "hedgehog" or "urchin" but has come to focus on an aspect of such a creature--the spiky hair. Thus, the more prominent meaning of herisson today, if we can say that there is a prominent meaning of the word, is "a barrier, consisting of a revolving beam, armed with iron spikes." But the Century has another definition of it which I haven't seen--"a wooden horse set with spikes or points, formerly used as military punishment, the culprit being mounted on it." Just the thought tends to make you rub your butt.

Herisse, with an acute accent on the ultima, is a term from heraldry and means "set with long sharp points like the prickles of a hedgehog." The stately OED doesn't have the term, but all dictionaries of heraldry do. I wonder if this actually means that a picture of a hedgehog with the sharp bristles is emblazoned on the shield or just the bristles are. I think it is the former, which is one question I will store up either for the curator of a heraldry museum I will visit in the future --or for God.

I still have about a dozen words, which I can get to in the next essay.

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