acerose and pine needle acervate

How frequently do you have the feeling that you don't know what you are doing? Some of us manage to live with that feeling a good deal of the time, while others, blessedly, seem to go through life seemingly immune to confusion. Today, I was going to write on English synonyms for "sharp," focusing especially on those words which describe something "sharp" in nature (such as a branch, needle, etc.). I keep finding more of these words whenever I read the dictionary or look at descriptions of nature. But the profusion of terms so confused me that I decided I needed to stop, catch my breath and see if I could get my bearings in this roiling linguistic ocean. Let me bring you into the problem, first, and then tell you how I am going to try to deal with it.

Words for Sharp

I once had a friend who told me that until he was shopping for a mattress he never became aware of how prevalent ads were for mattresses. So I, until I focused on the problem of a proliferation of words for "sharp," never knew how many words there were. Let me list several. Something can be acerose, acerous, acerate, acuminate, aciculate, calcareate, ensiform, fusiform, hastate, lanceolate, mucronate, sagittate, spicate, spicifiorm (and related terms), spinous (and related terms), styliform or subulate. I will probably discover other words to describe something sharp in nature, but let this suffice for a start. Several different Latin and Greek words lie behind these words, but I don't want to get to them now. Suffice it to say that I entered into quite a linguistic jungle even before I felt I could understand and enjoy what was being described. Enjoyment, for some people, seems to come irrespective of being able to "name" the experience. I am more Adamic in this regard, believing that much of the joy of being human is to name things (and, by the way, also eat forbidden fruit given to me by life's various Eve's).

Beginning at the Beginning--Acer

If all of life's English words consisted in those listed in the Collegiate, one really would not have a problem. In a sense the Collegiate is the "infant" or "toddler" of dictionaries, leaving the reader blissfully unaware that huge linguistic thickets exist beyond its pages. The only entries in the Collegiate beginning with "acer" relate to something irritating or bitter (acerb, acerbate, acerbic, acerbity). These derive from the Latin root acerb and not acer, though the two are obviously related. So, there is no problem of "sharpness" in the Collegiate, as it relates to the prefix acer. But when you look at other dictionaries, you see the scope of the issue.

I suppose I should first mention the meaning of acer in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. It has 14 separate meanings, but the emphasis is on an object that is sharp or pointed, a color or sound which is bright or strident, or a person who is alert, vigilant, shrewd or energetic. Thus, acer was a very useful term in Classical Latin.

As we turn to Webster's Third International dictionary, the sort of "Bible" of one-volume unabridgeds, we find 21 English words beginning with "acer." Five of them are the "bitter" words, which leaves us 16. Several are "Linnean" terms, such as "aceraceae," a family of certain trees or shrubs, which don't interest me now. I found myself being drawn to about four words: acerate, acerous, acerous (with a different meaning), acervate. Finally, I decided I had found Kunta Kinte--the basic and earliest-appearing (at least in the alphabet) dictionary words for sharp.

Focusing on One Concept

But even as I looked at those four words more closely, I realized that there were three distinct concepts contained in those four words. The words acerate and acerous are synonymous, meaning "having needlelike leaves." Acerous also means "without horns" and acervate means "growing in heaps or closely compacted clusters." I will pursue a digression on these words in the next essay. But then the OED and the Century list another word for "having needlelike leaves": acerose. Indeed acerose is the preferred word for "having needlike leaves" in English. The Century even provides us a cut of pine needles, as if anyone didn't know what they were. Pine needles are "acerose leaves," as the Century tells us. Thus, let's fix this definition in our minds. Something acerose is "straight, slender, rigid and sharp-pointed." The use of the term in this sense goes back to Linneaus in 1785: "The leaves of all these are linear and permanent; Linnaeus calls this sort of leaf acerose." Then, from an 1870 botany textbook we have, "When a linear leaf terminates in a sharp rigid point like a needle, it is acerose or needle-shaped." A linear leaf is narrow and flat, with parallel sides, such as a blade of grass or, of course, a pine needle.

Before we conclude this essay with a whoop of joy, however, we should realize that an earlier (than 1785) usage of acerose was "chaffy; like, or mixed with chaff." Where does this come from? Well, the Latin word for chaff is acus, aceris (an irregular genitive). Because Anglicized Latin words are sometimes derived from the genitive singular, the first meaning of acerose was, therefore, chaffy. Behind the Latin acus, aceris is the Greek word for chaff (achuron). Herodotus used the word in his Histories, and many combination words using achuros/achuron appear in Attic Greek, such as achurogogos (for the conveyance of chaff). But, thankfully, this definition has dropped out of English usage, and the botanical usage is the only one that you can find today--if, that is, you have a big enough dictionary.

So now we have one word that we can confidently use which relates to "sharp" or "sharpness." Let's celebrate the acerose leaf of the pine tree.

After this, however, I think I need a digression.

1905