Inturbidate and turbid and tumid and turgid and turgescence and turbitity current and tumidity

People often confuse these words, but when you sort them out they can become very useful in your speech and writing. The most familiar English term derived from any of these, tumor, is something that justifiedly frightens us, though if you understand the root meaning of tumor as a swelling or growth, you have understood one of the words. I used to make the mistake of thinking that tumid, because it nearly rhymed with humid, was a swelling caused by heat. Indeed the word tumescence, which signfies the swelling up of a volcano as a result of increasing pressure of magma within, seems to have that meaning, but basically tumid means swollen. Two Latin verbs meaning the same thing, tumeo and tumesco, stand behind the range of English words ranging from tumesce to tumor. There are also four words using the "in" prefix, attached to the Latin verb tumesco, but they mean about the same thing as the word without the "in" prefix. Thus, an intumescence of the arm at the point of a ball's impact of is pretty much the same as a tumescence of the arm.

But tumid also has a much more colorful figurative meaning, relating to the "swollenness" of a person's prose or speech. In this sense tumid language is "inflated" or "bombastic" or "grandiloquent." I don't see it meaning verbosity per se, but a kind of affected verbosity that may be found in students who are just learning the language as well as some speakers/writers who ought to know better. Tumid speech is known in classical rhetoric as bomphiologia, bombastic or braggart speech. Lord Byron uses a helpful transition to the next word in his memorable phrase, turgid ode and tumid stanza.

On to Turgid

Tumidus is much more frequently attested in Latin than turgidus, though they seem to mean almost the same thing. Tumidus and related words usually suggest a swelling such as that of a sail when caught by the wind or the sea when storm-tossed, while turgidus refers primarily to the kind of swelling of plants or other living thing when they are growing. Both of them also refer to "swollen speech." But, when turgid comes into English, its meaning is nearly indistinguishable from tumid, though I would say that turgid is more prevalent in English than tumid. Thus, I recall a comment by my New Testament professor in seminary when I turned in an exegesis paper: "well-done but style is too turgid." He was right in that my style at age 23 was a bit "swollen" or affected, though it didn't have the bombast (at least I don't think so!) usually associated with turgid. Because we have words such as turgescence, turgescent and turgidity (there are also two Latin words standing behind these--turgeo and turgesco) in English, as well as inturgescence and inturgescency, we have a variety of sturdy words to use to describe a swelling, either of a bodily part, the sea, a plant or, figuratively speaking, one's "head." I think there is probably an occasion each day to use turgid or turgidity, though sometimes the use of it to describe something as simple as a swollen finger might itself be an example of turgid speech. There is a word turgor which means the same thing as tumor, though the latter has taken over the field from the former. And, we probably only need one word to describe the frighenting reality of an unpredictable swelling in a vital bodily part.

Finishing with Turbid

Most visual for me and suggestive in meaning of this triad is turbid. With respect to liquid, which is its most frequent meaning, it signififes "thick or opaque with suspended matter; not clear; cloudy, muddy." With respect to language, it does not signify bombast or braggadocio, as do tumid and turgid, but it refers to obscure or unclear (i.e., "muddied") speech. Thus a turbidimeter is an instrument for determining the turbidity of a liquid, and a turbidity current is "an underwater current flowing swiftly downslope owing to the weight of sediment it carries." Something turbid is unclear, smoky, muddy, confused. When the Negro spiritual talks about "The Lord's gonna' trouble the waters," it speaks of a divine turbescency of the water. Interestingly enough, there is no attestation for turbation or turbescence, words that would more properly be used in the previous sentence. Possibly because we have another all purpose English word ("disturb") we don't need a turbation. Unless, that is, we just want to make it up.

Behind turbid, however, stands the Latin turba, a very visual word describing an unruly mass of people, a civil disorder or riot or, contemptuously, the "masses" as distinguished from the patricians. The unruly masses stir things up; they "muddy" the "clarity" of the heavens and earth and waters. Thus, whenever I use the word turbid and its cousins (such as turbidity or turbidness or turbidly), I always use it in ways that relate to the obscurity or darkness or "stirred up" nature of the situation. Turbid prose need not be turgid language; the opposite of the former is limpid, and the latter unaffected.

A Concluding Thought

There is only one word attested where an "in" prefix is combined with turbid but the one attestation is so memorable that it ought not be lost. The word is inturbidate and it means, not unexpectedly, "to disturb, confuse." Samuel Coleridge used it in 1834: "The confusion of ideas and conceptions under the same term painfully inturbidates his theology." May we be saved from the dual sins of inturbidation and turgidity, and may our words flow as smoothly and as clearly as a crystalline spring flow.