Words and Achrom and achromatism and achromatic and achromaticity and achromatism and achromatic prose

My foray into terms beginning with achro/acro actually began as an exercise to make up a more useful word than "manic- depressive" to describe a person whose psychological state bounces from extreme elation to utter despair. I was writing my essays on "The Depths" and felt that a word such as "benthic" or "bathic" or "bathetic" would capture the "lows" of a person, but was looking for the appropriate prefix to describe a person's "highs." That is what led me to acro. But, as is usually the case, on the way to acro I was waylaid by achrom..., achron... and acroam. The first suggests something without color, the second something about timelessness and the third something about hearing. I felt I needed to clear out the decks on those three terms/prefixes before diving into the heights of acro. This essay concerns achrom and the next covers achron and acroam. Only then do I turn to acro.

But I can't resist a proleptic glance toward acro. Acro is a prefix meaning highest, topmost or utmost. Two close neighbors, acroteleutic and acrotelion have fully different but very precise meanings. The former, literally meaning the "utmost end," appears almost exclusively in Ecclesiastical writers to mean something that is sung or added after the conclusion of a Psalm or verse. One could say, "The Gloria Patri ("Glory be to the Father") is sung by the congregation as an acroteleutic to the reading of the Psalm."

I can even think of a way that acroteleutic can be secularized. Think of the common situation in life where you go to certain people to get a kind of predictable reaction. For example, when I worked in a large law firm, I would sometimes come up with a solution to a problem or approach to a case that would make me proud. I always had a particular lawyer whom I would visit at that moment, who would predictably tell me, "Bill, you are great." On other occasions, however, when I felt I had been beaten up pretty badly, I would go to a friend who would intone regularly, "Well, those people are just jerks." I looked to my colleagues to provide me with these comforting lines as an acroteleutic---something at the "utmost end" of my complaint that consoled me.

An acroterion (the OED has it as acroter) is a pedestal placed on the center and sides of a pediment (a triangular piece on top of columns) of a Greek temple or building. It can also refer to the figures (usually Greek divinities) that are placed on the pedestal(s). The plural is acroteria--hence, "there were three acroteria atop the temple."

Moving to Achrom...

Whereas acro is the prefix for the preceding two words, achromatic and its cousins (achromatism, achromatize, and my favorite, achromaticity) are composed of an initial "a," called an "alpha privative" (because it deprives the following word of its essence) and "chromatos," which means color. Thus, something that is achromatic is something without color or something that does not permit the decomposition of light as it passes through it, such as an achromatic lens. A person suffering from color-blindness is said to have achromatopsia, derived from the two indicated words and combined with "opsis," meaning "sight. Literally, the color-blind person is one who is "without color with respect to sight." Be sure, however, not to misspell "opsis" as "ophis," which means "snake," and thus you would have a colorless snake. The concept is interesting to think about for a while, but it really doesn't get you too far.

Even though the terms coming from achrom are almost all technical terms in the field of ophthalmology, I think i would like to reclaim achromatic for humanities use. The scientists and ophthalmologists can have the term from 9-5 on M-F, but the rest of us get to use it on the evenings and weekends. If its root meaning is "colorless," it is not much of a stretch at all to say that it can be used adjectivally and put before a noun like "person" to become an achromatic person. Such a person would be insipid or colorless in the extreme. You could even use the word directly in addressing the person, "Hi, I find you an achromatic man," you might say. Because of our propensity not to ask each other what they mean by words that we think we ought to know, the person would probably think that you had commended them for being an acrobatic person, a person who could perform great gymnastic feats (maybe of the mind, he thinks).

The word then could be put to use in other catchy ways. You could refer to someone's writing as achromatic prose. A gathering of a particularly dull character would be an achromatic gathering. "In all my years, I have not encountered such an achromatic collection of people as in....." (you fill in the blank). Or, "by the time the report had gone through seven drafts, its recommendations had become so achromatized that no one was inspired to action." Or, "whose interests are served by so achromatizing the story?" The mind explodes with possibilities.

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