airt and aiblins and aglet and aiguille and aiguillette

As I have said previously, the most interesting words (or explanations of their origins) don't really appear in the Collegiate. For example, I already knew the word accolade and was going to breeze over it until I looked it up in the OED. According to the OED it has spent most of its life superseding earlier forms of the word, such as acolee, but its root goes back to French and Italian (and why not Latin?), and literally means something around the neck. Thus the first definition of it is an "embrace or clasping about the neck," although at different points in its history it could be applied to an embrace, a kiss or a slap on the shoulders with the flat blade of the sword symbolizing the bestowal of knighthood. The term then morphed in the 19th century to mean a "supreme honor; a mark of approval or admiration, a bestowal of praise; a plaudit." This is the more usual form of the word we know, but knowing the history of how things were thrown around the neck as a sign of honor is a vivid way to make study of the language interesting.

While I was looking up the acolee in the OED on the way to learning about accolade, I couldn't resist checking out acolaust and acolastic, both of which occur only in the OED. Derived from the Greek, the word acolastic(ke) means "a prodigall person" or "one that liveth under no correction, riotous." An acolastic is "incorrigible, not better by chastisement." These are all 17th century usages. The definition given by the OED of acolaust is "One the revels in sensual pleasures (like the prodigal of the parable)," as indicated by the 17th century quotation: "The acolaust loathes the service of that churl, that allowed him no better diet than husks." So the prodigal son is an acolaust. I think I like that term better than prodigal. Maybe I will even try to bring back the word. Who knows? Just because the OED says that something is obsolete doesn't make it so. The OED is simply the first draft of a dictionary of the English language.

Back to the Collegiate

I see, however, that I have gotten pretty far afield. I am supposed to be reviewing pages 21-30. I will never get through this dictionary. Ok. I will be good. These pages took me from the "af's" to the "al's." I can imagine that those organizing the National Bee might want to use affenpinscher, that wiry black-haired dog. After all, the Oregon Bee used weimaraner this year. Should the beloved affenpinscher be spared? Words like affectioned and afferent, even if I don't use them at all, are pretty easy to sound out, but let's pause for a second on affricate. It is interesting that the Collegiate has the term, as does the OED, but the Century does not. That is because the field of modern linguistics was only in its birth at the turn of the century, and the word affricate had not "hardened" into meaning by that time.

The earliest use of affricate (here affricative) as a noun was in 1880 where Sayce said, "Where a spirant or fricative is immediately preceded by an explosive, a double sound or affricative is the result." Ok. An affricate, then, is a "close combination of an explosive consonant or 'stop' with an immediately following fricative or spirant." It really helps a lot that one of the examples Sayce gives of this term is from the Armenian; at least the other is the German "pf." The English example provided in the Collegiate is the "ch" in "choose" being a combination of the "explosive" "t" and the spirant "sh." Hence, the affricate "ch."

The "Ag's"

I don't have many words listed under "ag," but the agapanthus, a South African plant, will probably be used because it is obscure, and agar will only take me a second to learn, even if it is a "gelatinous colloidal extractive of a red alga...." I don't have to do agate, because I am from Oregon and every third beach, it seems, has agate in it. Nor do I need to focus on agave, because I am getting to know my Arizona plants. But I need to learn agita, a word coined only in 1982, to describe a feeling of agitation or anxiety (pronounce a-jeh-tah). The word isn't in the OED, but that probably can be explained by the fact that the OED folk try to avoid excitement at all costs.

An aglet is an ornamental stud, which I felt like one holiday season when a woman I was dating took me to the company Christmas party, but I think the definition really means a kind of pin you wear on clothing. Agley (ah-GLAY) must be distinquished. It is another one of those obscure Scottish words (thank Bobbie Burns for this) meaning "awry." "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang oft agley." Sure, I talk like that. My friends do, too. Finally, an agouti is a rabbit or rodent found in the West Indies or parts of South America, and is derived from an Indian term.

The Rest

Aiblins, meaning perhaps, is another Scottish word, while aiguille and aiguillette are, respectively, a slender, sharply-pointed peak (of rock) and another word for aglet, though I don't want to revisit that word. Aioli is garlic mayonnaise, originally a specialty of Provence, where everything tastes like you had just died and gone to heaven. Another Scottish word is airt, meaning "direction." Hey, what is up with all these "Scottishisms?" No one uses them anymore, and who knows if they ever really used them in Edinburgh? I know I slipped up on one of them in the Oregon Bee. Know what it was? Yoicks, meaning "a cry of encouragement to foxhounds." Talk about obscure. I think that for every Scottish term in the Collegiate they ought to have a Zulu word or an Ashante word. After all, we live in the age of diversity. Let's not just define diversity as English AND Scottish.

That is more than enough for one day, despite the fact that I am just getting started.

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