Some "Superior Person" Words--but Useful to Know

The idea for this page came from some words I ran into in Peter Bowler's Superior Person's Book of Words, a book I received as a present several years ago. I will use his book to begin a journey of words, and then I will stray off into other paths, picking up interesting words and concepts as I go.

Let me begin with a personal observation. I picked up Bowler's book a few days ago because I was feeling under siege. I recall on one occasion when practicing law I felt the same way. My client, a person applying for Social Security disability benefits, was greeted with skepticism and even hostility by the judge. I, his lawyer, was completely unprepared for the judge's attack on my client. I remember going back to the office, feeling beaten up, and I decided to dive deeply into the Code of Federal Regulations--a multi-volume list of all the "rules" that various professional and governmental bodies must follow to be in compliance with law. I was "burying myself" in the federal regulations when I could fight no further in the courtroom. I was feeling under siege this week for a different reason (don't worry; the problem has just about "passed"); hence I decided to dig myself deeply into the dictionary of obscure words. What you find, as I have realized over the years, however, is that by digging deeply into obscure words you somehow build very practical kinds of knowledge and insight--insight that leads to a richer life. Well, enough on that. Here is the journey.

New Words

I began reading Bowler's book at random. I came across a term which is so obscure that no dictionary I consulted had it. It is ephetic, a transliteration of a Greek word used by the ancient Sceptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus. In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus talked about various kinds of human rationality--zetetic (I think this is in a few dictionaries), which means "seeking," and then aporetic, which means "doubting," and Pyrrhonean, which means "skeptical" (named after one of the founders of the sect). Finally, he talked about ephetic, which means "suspending judgment." Well, no one uses the term. Absolutely no one. I think it isn't very useful.

But, with almost all things in life for me, something not useful manages to morph into something very valuable. I decided to work backwards through the book, and came across yemeless (negligent) and zoanthropy (the illusion that one has become an animal). We have the words lycanthropy (becoming like a wolf) and cynanthropy (like a dog), and zoanthropy comes from that world. But then I came across a word that actually enlarged my mental horizons. Words can sometimes do that, giving you in a few syllables a concept that had only been hazily swimming through your mind previously. It was the word xenogenesis. Derived from two Greek words meaning "stranger" and "birth" it means "the production of offspring permanently unlike the parent." As I was researching the term, I ran into a science-fiction trilogy from the late 1980 entitled Xenogenesis, by Octavia Butler. Well, I am not an avid reader of that genre, but I see that the notion of having offspring completely different from parents stimulated her creativity. Indeed, after spending many a day in court over the years and representing some pretty difficult people (one on death row), I think I longed for the word and concept of xenogenesis. If people like this reproduce, you hope their children are unlike them in many respects.

There was one other "x-word" that proved remarkably illuminating--xenopus. Bowler's book just has this to say about xenopus-- "an African toad with teeth in its upper jaw, tentacles on the side of its head, webbed hind feet, and claws on its toes." Pictures abound online. But what I learned as I studied this rather ugly frog for a bit is that it is now used (Xenopus tropicalis, that is) as an amphibian model for vertebrate development genetics. Or, as an update from July 17, 2007 says:

"The pipid frog Xenopus tropicalis presents the opportunity to combine sophisticated embryological methods with developmental genetics in a vertebrate system. The recently sequenced genome of X. tropicalis affords unique opportunities for genomic studies as well because its evolutionary distance from mammals is such that it is possible to identify long regions of synteny (a new word--meaning "The condition of two or more genes being located on the same chromosome whether or not there is demonstrable linkage between them") and conserved gene regulatory elements."

Thus, the study of Xenopus tropicalis is, indeed, a "hot topic" now among evolutionary biologists. I have concluded about scholarship in general that it really isn't too difficult to be fully "up-to-speed" on almost any area of human thought. You just have to learn the vocabulary, a little history of the field and then you can join in the debate to see what people are trying to say. That doesn't mean that you are automatically "there," but you can get "there" if you want to. Like so much in life, it depends on you...

Some W's and Others

Since I am already running out of space here, let me list about ten more words that I learned or reinforced in my mind yesterday. We have moliminous (from molimen, which is a 19th century medical term meaning a physiological change that produces symptoms, especially associated with the menstrual cycle), which means "massive, cumbrous, weighty, momentous." Then, equally as useless, we have wedbedrip, a legal term from common law England (usually known simply as bedrip), which is a service some tenants had to perform for their Lord, such as to reap his corn at harvest time. Interestingly enough, the word "bed" in its root comes from "bid" (i.e., the Lord "asked" the tenant to do work), which is related to "ben," a prayer or request. Thus the days so employed were called "ben" or "boon days." "Boon" passed, in a process that no one has fully documented, to my knowledge, from being a favor asked to a favor conferred or a gift. Thus, when we use the word "boon" to mean a "gift" or unexpected benefit, we are using the term in this "modern" sense.

I looked up the relatively useless word quisquose, meaning "difficult to deal with," and decided to do some work on nearby words. The words surrounding the notion of quiritian or quiritary caught my attention. The words come from the ancient Roman legal system. A quiritian was a citizen of Rome, and the law so-called was the law governing his/her conduct. But as the law develped there were two branches, quiritary and bonitary, corresponding roughly to what we would call law and equity in the common law tradition. Thus, something bonitary is something beneficial or something possessing benefits without, however, legal "title" to something.

Conclusion

Just take some time learning all the words--and the realities to which they point, spend some time making sure you understand those realities to which they point, and you can be a budding polymath. People will think you are a genius and, in fact, you will begin to understand things as never before. But it all begins with mastery of a few words, such as those with which we began today. Good luck to you on your mastery!

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