If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth,
there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. There is a word to describe the state of
being a woman: muliebrity. And there's a word for describing a sudden breaking
off of thought: aposiopesis. If you harbor an urge to look through the windows of
the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition: crytoscopophilia. When
you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of
falling, there is a word for it: it's a myoclonic jerk. If you want to say that a word
has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that is has a
circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon. There is even a word
for a figure of speech in which two connotative words linked by a conjunction
express a complex notion that would normally be conveyed by an adjective and
a substantive working together. It is a hendiadys. (But of course.) In English, in
short, there are words for almost everything.
Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes
a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a
useful term? Or how about slub-berdegullion, a seventeenth-century word
signifying a worthless or slovenly fellow? Or ugsome, a late medieval word
meaning loathsome or disgusting? It has lasted half a millennium in English, was
a common synonym for horrid until well into the last century, and can still be
found tucked away forgotten at the back of most unabridged dictionaries. Isn't it
a shame to let it slip away? Our dictionaries are full of such words—words
describing the most specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies,
the most arcane of distinctions.
And yet there are odd gaps. We have no word for coolness corresponding to
warmth. We are strangely lacking in middling terms—words to describe with
some precision the middle ground between hard and soft, near and far, big and
little. We have a possessive impersonal pronoun its to place alongside his, her,
and their, but no equivalent impersonal pronoun to contrast with the personal
whose. Thus we have to rely on inelegant constructions such as "The house
whose roof" or resort to periphrasis. We have a word to describe all the work
you find waiting for you when you return from vacation, backlog, but none to
describe all the work you have to do before you go.Why not forelog? And we have a large number of negative words—inept,
disheveled, incorrigible, ruthless, unkempt—for which the positive form is
missing. English would be richer if we could say admiringly of a tidy person,
"She's so sheveled," or praise a capable person for being full of ept or an
energetic one for having heaps of ert. Many of these words did once have
positive forms. Ruthless was companioned by ruth, meaning compassion. One of
Milton's poems contains the well-known line "Look homeward, Angel, now, and
melt with ruth." But, as with many such words, one form died and another lived.
Why this should be is beyond explanation. Why should we have lost demit (send
away) but saved commit? Why should impede have survived while the once
equally common and seemingly just as useful expede expired? No one can say.
Despite these gaps and casualties, English retains probably the richest
vocabulary, and most diverse shading of meanings, of any language. We can
distinguish between house and home (as, for instance, the French cannot),
between continual and continuous, sensual and sensuous, forceful and forcible,
childish and childlike, masterful and masterly, assignment and assignation,
informant and informer. For almost every word we have a multiplicity of
synonyms. Something is not just big, it is large, immense, vast, capacious, bulky,
massive, whopping, humongous. No other language has so many words all
saying the same thing. It has been said that English is unique in possessing a
synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly—so that
we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or
ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or
cogitate upon a problem. This abundance of terms is often cited as a virtue. And
yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive
language, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really
need fictile as a synonym for moldable, glabrous for hairless, sternutation for
sneezing? Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel
character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then
underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still
didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. There is something in
that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity, as
evidenced by our peculiar affection for redundant phrases, expressions that say
the same thing twice: beck and call, law and order, assault and battery, null and
void, safe and sound, first and foremost, trials and tribulations, hem and haw,
spick-and-span, kith and kin, dig and delve, hale and hearty, peace and quiet,vim and vigor, pots and pans, cease and desist, rack and ruin, without let or
hindrance, to all intents and purposes, various different.
Despite this bounty of terms, we have a strange—and to foreigners it must seem
maddening—tendency to load a single word with a whole galaxy of meanings.
Fine; for instance, has fourteen definitions as an adjective, six as a noun, and two
as an adverb. In the Oxford English Dictionary it fills two full pages and takes
5,000 words of description. We can talk about fine art, fine gold, a fine edge,
feeling fine, fine hair, and a court fine and mean quite separate things. The
condition of having many meanings is known as polysemy, and it is very
common. Sound is another polysemic word. Its vast repertory of meanings can
suggest an audible noise, a state of healthiness (sound mind), an outburst (sound
off), an inquiry (sound out), a body of water (Puget Sound), or financial stability
(sound economy), among many others. And then there's round. In the OED,
round alone (that is without variants like rounded and roundup) takes 725 pages
to define or about 15,000 words of text—about as much as is contained in the
first hundred pages of this book. Even when you strip out its obsolete senses,
round still has twelve uses as an adjective, nineteen as a noun, seven as a
transitive verb, five as an intransitive verb, one as an adverb, and two as a
preposition. But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks a
wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled
organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial
adjective