coarct and coarctation and cleromancy and cleronomy

Let's begin by listing a series of terms on which I will not comment. Clinquant means some thing glittering with gold or silver, even though it seems like it should mean "something clanking." A clochard, derived from the French clocher (to limp) is a vagrant or tramp. The word is only first attested in 1937, during the height of the Great Depression in America. A clonus is a contraction or relaxation of muscles while a clupeid is a herring. A coble is a flat-bottomed boat, while a cocotte is a prostitute or a baking dish. I wonder how the meaning of this word stretched from one to the other concept. A coelacanth, pronounced SEL a kanth, is a fish. Cogon denotes tall SE Asian grasses, whereas cohomology is a part of topology (pure math) theory. I was going to write a few sentences or even a paragraph on cohomology because I was a math major for a few years in college, but I understand so little of the math now that it would take me quite a bit of time to work myself back up to speed to know really what it is. A coir is the fiber from a coconut, while coleoptera are insects that are beetles. A collembolan is one of numerous wingless primitive insects while a collimator is a device for producing a beam of parallel rays as of a light.

To collogue is not a colleague nor is it a colloquy; it means to talk or confer secretly. Collotype are prints from film; well, you should examine some of the work of Todd Walker to get a good sense of what it is. A colubird is a snake while a colugo is a flying lemur and a columella is a cental column or axis of a spiral univalve cell. Be sure to differentiate between complected and complexioned even though they mean about the same thing. I love the word compurgation, which is derived from ancient legal practice. It was one way to vindicate someone--by calling in the "oath helpers," or compurgators, would would swear to a person's innocence. As trial by jury became more prominent after the 13th century, this model of examination of defendants declined in importance. Some authorities say that the common law never knew compurgation, as it arose well before the Norman Conquest, but that it did know the wager of law, by which the accused was said to purge himself from guilt.

Stopping to Look at a Word or Two

We never really have much space to investigate many words in detail. Let's look at colophon for a minute. Derived from the Greek word kolophon, it meant "summit" or "peak," but was used in combination with the verb "epitithenai," to mean "give the finishing stroke or touch to a speech." The ancient geographer Strabo tried to explain the connection with the city of Colophon in Asia Minor by saying the the calvary from that city was so excellent that it "gave the finishing stroke" to the opposition, but this is a fanciful explanation. A colophon is "an emblematic device, or note, especially one relating to the circumstances of production (of a book), as the printer's or scribe's name, place, and date, put at the conclusion of a book or manuscript." The OED informs us that the colophon for a book functioned as the title page does today.

I always like it when I can discover different ways of doing things in scholarly publications or book-publishing than the way we do it today. For example, scholarly people today act as if the footnote and the "peer-reviewed" article was the acme of scholarly work, the culmination of centuries of stumbling efforts to get to the truth. There may be the need in some areas for peer-review before allowing publication, but why do it in areas of law or the humanities or even the social sciences? Let stuff be published, and let it stand on its own. It is always striking to me as I read the "classics" or "standards" in a field of investigation, which come usually from the 19th or early 20th centuries, that footnotes either are non-existent or sparse in those works. However, many articles and even books today are nearly unreadable because of the profusion of footnotes and the use of the footnote as a dumping ground as well as debate forum for issues that either should be placed in the body of the work or ignored altogether. I think there ought to be federal legislation imitating the great CERCLA statute of 1980 in environmental law (the "clean up" law), but applied now to the book. Maybe we should have "footnote cleanup legislation," so that authors can get federal funds, from a sort of literary Superfund, to clean up their manuscripts. It would do us all a great service.

Conclusion

Well, after that screed, I think I ought to introduce a few terms that I like but do not want to pass over with a three-word definition. A coistrel, spelled coistril in the Century, even though the Collegiate only knows coistrel, is "an inferior groom; a mean paltry fellow." The OED tells us that the term originally referred to a groom or servant in charge of the horses, but by the 16th century it was used as a term of reproach. Shakespeare can say, in Twelfth Night, "He's a Coward and a Coystrill that will not drinke to my Neece."

Then there is cleromancy and cleronomy. A kleyron, in Greek, is a lot or inheritance, and so cleronomy is an inheritance or distribution or lot. Cleromancy is divining by lots, which was practiced by the early Church when they replaced Judas Iscariot in the apostleship. Later on, as one authority has it, "Cleromancy was practised by throwing black and white beans, little bones or dice, and, perhaps, stones." But, as I was studying these words it seemed to me that the word clergy, though related to clerk, was also formed off the root kleyron. What might that mean? Don't know.

Finally, let's conclude with a reference to coarctation. Derived from the Latin and meaning "drawing or pressing together," coarctation has found its home most readily in medical usage, where there is said to be compression or coarctation of the veins. However, Bacon, in the 17th century, could use it to refer to any restriction or limitation, such as a restriction on action or knowledge. Since I have spent so much time trying to explain the mental world of Job, I think I might want to use coarctation as a term to capture his feeling of confinement, of mental restriction, of exhaustion and oppression by God. He perceives he is coarcted by God. A useful term to know.

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