Accismus, mundivagant, apposite: Do you know what these words mean?
22/June/2023
I have always prided myself on using the right word for the thought or idea I wish to convey, but sometimes the word that strikes me as perfectly appropriate in a specific context might turn out to be the wrong choice simply because no one understands it. After all, if the purpose of communication is to get your point across, using words that are incomprehensible to most people rather defeats the purpose. The word I wish to use might well the most apposite one, but if it’s too difficult for the listener or reader, then it’s actually inappropriate to use it. Still, there are many words I actually think should be in greater use and would, therefore, be more widely understood. “Apposite” is one of them — how many of you thought it was a typing mistake in the last paragraph? It actually is a synonym for “apt” — or specifically, apt in the circumstances, or apt in relation to something. This column italicises a few useful words that I tend to use sparingly, or type and then discard with a sigh, knowing they would not be understood. In the course of a mundivagant life (one spent “wandering all over the world”), I have come across many cultural differences. The most glaring involves people from countries where it is considered polite to refuse the offer of a drink, a meal or a second helping until the host insists (and then you politely give in). As an Indian in the US for the first time half a century ago, I practised this accismus (or “the pretended refusal of something one keenly desires”), only to be taken literally by my hosts, with the result that I would constantly go hungry! This kind of self-defeating behaviour has deep cultural roots, but it also occurs in political conduct as akratic action — voting behaviour, for instance, that is manifestly not in the voters’ self-interest. Akrasia comes from the Greek for ‘lacking control of oneself’, and it means ‘to act against one’s better judgement’. So akratic conduct is something you shouldn’t do, and wouldn’t if you thought a little more about its consequences: for instance, most public health specialists will tell you that smoking is an akratic action. Yet, despite the widespread prevalence of the behaviour it describes, akrasia and akratic are hardly used in everyday conversation or reportage. There’s a word I can understand us not using much, even though it describes a common emotion: antipelargy, defined by the lexicographer Thomas Blount in 1656 as “the reciprocal love of children to their parents, or (more generally) any requital or mutual kindness”. Antipelargy just doesn’t sound pleasant enough for such a beautiful feeling. But there are other feelings that also get shortchanged. Take a pair of words we really ought to use more often — uxoriousness, “the state of being excessively fond of or submissive to a wife”, and its counterpart, maritality, “excessive fondness of a wife for her husband”. How many uxorious husbands have we all encountered, and how many wives totally immersed in maritality? And yet not many use those words to describe them. People around us are constantly searching for that elusive target, happiness. And yet life is full of infelicific things (those that are “productive of unhappiness”). For many, of course, a good pint of ice-cream or a stiff drink might be the only things they find felicific (productive of happiness), since they haven’t found anything else to averruncate — to take away hurtful things. None of those words, though, is in common use. I should stop, for fear of being ultracrepidarian, “giving opinions on matters beyond one’s knowledge”. As I grow older and hit my peracme (“the point at which the prime or highest vigour is past”), I am increasingly afraid of indulging in anecdotage. The word is a portmanteau of anecdote (defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident”) and dotage (“a state or period of senile decay marked by the decline of mental poise and alertness”). As venerable seniors enter our dotage, we tend to tell too many anecdotes – and that could lull the reader into consopition, or in other words, put you to sleep!
Source:
I have always prided myself on using the right word for the thought or idea I wish to convey, but sometimes the word that strikes me as perfectly appropriate in a specific context might turn out to be the wrong choice simply because no one understands it. After all, if the purpose of communication is to get your point across, using words that are incomprehensible to most people rather defeats the purpose. The word I wish to use might well the most apposite one, but if it’s too difficult for the listener or reader, then it’s actually inappropriate to use it. Still, there are many words I actually think should be in greater use and would, therefore, be more widely understood. “Apposite” is one of them — how many of you thought it was a typing mistake in the last paragraph? It actually is a synonym for “apt” — or specifically, apt in the circumstances, or apt in relation to something. This column italicises a few useful words that I tend to use sparingly, or type and then discard with a sigh, knowing they would not be understood. In the course of a mundivagant life (one spent “wandering all over the world”), I have come across many cultural differences. The most glaring involves people from countries where it is considered polite to refuse the offer of a drink, a meal or a second helping until the host insists (and then you politely give in). As an Indian in the US for the first time half a century ago, I practised this accismus (or “the pretended refusal of something one keenly desires”), only to be taken literally by my hosts, with the result that I would constantly go hungry! This kind of self-defeating behaviour has deep cultural roots, but it also occurs in political conduct as akratic action — voting behaviour, for instance, that is manifestly not in the voters’ self-interest. Akrasia comes from the Greek for ‘lacking control of oneself’, and it means ‘to act against one’s better judgement’. So akratic conduct is something you shouldn’t do, and wouldn’t if you thought a little more about its consequences: for instance, most public health specialists will tell you that smoking is an akratic action. Yet, despite the widespread prevalence of the behaviour it describes, akrasia and akratic are hardly used in everyday conversation or reportage. There’s a word I can understand us not using much, even though it describes a common emotion: antipelargy, defined by the lexicographer Thomas Blount in 1656 as “the reciprocal love of children to their parents, or (more generally) any requital or mutual kindness”. Antipelargy just doesn’t sound pleasant enough for such a beautiful feeling. But there are other feelings that also get shortchanged. Take a pair of words we really ought to use more often — uxoriousness, “the state of being excessively fond of or submissive to a wife”, and its counterpart, maritality, “excessive fondness of a wife for her husband”. How many uxorious husbands have we all encountered, and how many wives totally immersed in maritality? And yet not many use those words to describe them. People around us are constantly searching for that elusive target, happiness. And yet life is full of infelicific things (those that are “productive of unhappiness”). For many, of course, a good pint of ice-cream or a stiff drink might be the only things they find felicific (productive of happiness), since they haven’t found anything else to averruncate — to take away hurtful things. None of those words, though, is in common use. I should stop, for fear of being ultracrepidarian, “giving opinions on matters beyond one’s knowledge”. As I grow older and hit my peracme (“the point at which the prime or highest vigour is past”), I am increasingly afraid of indulging in anecdotage. The word is a portmanteau of anecdote (defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident”) and dotage (“a state or period of senile decay marked by the decline of mental poise and alertness”). As venerable seniors enter our dotage, we tend to tell too many anecdotes – and that could lull the reader into consopition, or in other words, put you to sleep!
Source: