Dr. Metablog

What Not to Say

Let us suppose that an old friend has just told you that his or her spouse is suffering from Alzheimer's or some other horrible form of dementia. It's very difficult to know what to say to your friend. You want be sympathetic and consoling, and polite, but you just can't find the right words. Perhaps the best you can do is to say nothing, just put your hand to your heart to indicate compassion, or give the guy or gal a sincere hug.

And here are some sentences that you should definitely avoid  --  all of them transcribed directly from real life.

1.  "Think of it as a growth opportunity."

2.  "My grandmother had Alzheimer's."

3.   "My spouse has celiac disease."

4.   "Everything happens for a reason."

5.   "You should have tried ginkgo."

6.   "Do you want to have a going away party when [s]he goes into the institution?"

Juliet 1595-2015

Juliet 1595:  "My bounty is as boundless as the sea/ My love as deep. The more I give to thee,/ The more I have, for both are infinite."

Juliet 2015:  "My bounty is as epic as the sea,/  My love as cool.  The more I give to you,/ The more I have, for both are awesome."

Little Old Ladies

I know that I'm not the only person in the world who's prone to snap judgments and easy stereotyping.  I say this in apology, because yesterday I was guilty of a spectacular misjudgement, a wildly incorrect speculation.  It's time to kneel on ground glass, to scourge myself (metaphorically speaking).

One of the attendees of a support group that I attend is a "little old lady." Elderly, gray in complexion and attire. Wizened, juiceless. She looks as though nothing of any moment happened to her in all her eighty or eighty-five years.

Her husband, Steve, died last week. Here's the piece of her story that she revealed. 

"I was Steve's third and fifth wife. He was an airline pilot, so we traveled together all over the world.  Steve had two children by his first wife; I had five children by my first husband. I had so many babies because they started to come in pairs. At his funeral I played some of the Bach preludes."

You, gentle imaginative readers, can fill in the blanks. There are many, several novelsworth, in fact, starting with the obvious question, "who was wife number four; tell me about her?"

My Favorite Suffix

Not just my own, but surely every thinking person's favorite word-forming element is "--some," perhaps because It appears in so many cheerful formulations. If you experience a sudden, overpowering urge to transform a noun to an adjective then  "--some's" the way to go. 

Imagine yourself, for instance, writing a novel and searching for the words to describe your ingénue heroine. She's not just "handsome" and "wholesome" but also "blithesome," "lissome," "winsome" "toothsome," "cuddlesome" and perhaps even "frolicsome."  Could you find a better word? Well, maybe. Perhaps "buxom?" 

Most of these words are of obvious origin but a few are on the obscure side. "Winsome," one of the language's most delightful (or delightsome) adjectives, derives from the now defunct "wynn," meaning "joy". It's a word that apparently hid out in illiterate northern English dialect for a couple of centuries before it was resuscitated, to everyone's advantage, by Burns and Scott. "Lissome," which now means supple or graceful, comes from the old English "lithe" meaning mild, gentle, or meek. "Buxom" is drawn from a stem meaning "bow" and for most of the existence of the English language signified "compliant" or "obliging." "Buxom" began to connote zaftigity only during the middle of the last century. Here's the very best use of "buxom" in its long history.  It's by John Milton -- the young Milton, not yet the epic Milton.

The frolic wind that breathes the spring,

Zephyr, with Aurora playing,

As he met her once a-Maying,

There on beds of violets blue,

And fresh-blown roses wash'd in dew,

Fill'd her with thee, a daughter fair,

So buxom, blithe, and debonair.

 

Candor compels us to admit that not all "-some" words are quite so bonny. There's also a "--some" underside: "irksome," "loathsome," "gruesome," "meddlesome," "fearsome," "noisome" (which now means" foul-smelling and is related to "annoy"), bothersome. Good mouth-filling words to describe the villain of the piece.

And then there's "fulsome" which for the longest time meant what it seems to mean, then latterly acquired the learned connotation "odious," which it is now in the process of shedding. And "awesome" which has deteriorated from "filled with awe" to meaning "cool" -- and has become a favorite adjective of praise to an entire cohort or generation of the vocabularially deprived.

No one can say, "unbuxom" or "unblithesome."  Yet we regularly say "unwholesome."

For the record, the "--some" in "threesome" is an entire different "--some,"  as is the "--some" in "chromosome."