Friday Vocabulary

1. Comstockery — “censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality” (George Bernard Shaw)

Though named after an anti-smut crusader of the 1870s, Comstockery has a long reach through American culture, as the example of Tipper Gore can attest.

 

2. poetaster — writer of inferior, insignificant verse

The popular anthologies circulating in the United States in the late 19th Century are filled with the tawdry outpourings of maudlin poetasters.

 

3. titrate — to determine quantity of a substance in a solution by adding reagent of known quantity until measurable reaction completes

No matter how much his friends attempted to titrate Bob’s soul by teasing him viciously, his patience seemed immeasurable.

 

4. pruriginous — causing or pertaining to prurigo; hence, by extension, causing itchiness

The scholar’s pruriginous didacticism made him persona non grata at the faculty parties.

 

5. katagelasticism — joy at laughing at others without compunction

No, your humor goes far beyond mere schadenfreude; it verges on a psychopathic and vicious katagelasticism.

 

6. hortatory — tending to encourage; exhorting

His hortatory remarks out of the way, the speaker admitted that any contributions were not tax-deductable.

 

7. ithyphallic — of the phallus carried in ancient Bacchus festivals; hence, of or pertaining to an erect penis

Though an ithyphallic display was once a striking homage to fertility and life, now it is more likely to be a sign that you should consult a physician immediately.

 

8. synechia — eye disease wherein the iris adheres to either the cornea or the lens

His refusal to treat the synechia he suffered as a result of the beating led to glaucoma.

 

9. zetetic — proceding by investigation (often used in contradistinction to pejorative view of the term “skeptic”)

The debunking battles of the late 20th Century led to a reactionary debunking of the debunkers, as in the case of the zetetic view that UFOs deserved more open-minded investigation than they were receiving.

 

10. quean — a disreputable woman, especially a prostitute (Archaic)

The many references to queans in Stuart literature may confuse the modern reader, who may presume another sex is meant.

Friday Vocabulary

1. a fortiori — all the more, for an even stronger reason

Since she hired a private detective to shadow her husband, then a fortiori she would have no compunction in reading his personal email.

 

2. dido — bauble, trifle

She wore a necklace she had made from a little dido she had found among costume jewelry at the church rummage sale.

 

3. tinnitus — a ringing in the ears

His enjoyment of piano concertos was sullied by his constant tinnitus, an unfortunate consequence of a mispent youth and too many Scorpions concerts.

 

4. interstice — a small space between things

Our son found almost twelve dollars worth of change in the interstices of the couch.

 

5. panchreston — an explanation which attempts to cover all possibilities in a situation, but which is too generalized to be of practical use

Joel always managed to strike out with women by following explicitly the panchrestron of his older brother’s dating advice.

 

6. fervid — passionate or zealous

Despite my fervid attempts to make her see reason, the meter maid gave me a parking ticket anyway.

 

7. clinamen — the unpredictable swerve of atoms, in the philosophy of Lucretius

Free will was posited to derive from the clinamen by Lucretius, and this unexpected and unpredictable behavior has become the cornerstone of many other critical theories ranging from literature to psychology.

 

8. puce — dark or brownish purple

He still bore the signs of the beating, though his puce bruises had faded to a sickly green.

 

9. antiphrasis — use of a word in the opposite sense of its usual meaning

“How wonderful to see you,” Marcia greeted her ex-husband’s girlfriend, the ironic antiphrasis unnoticed as usual by the blonde high school dropout.

 

10. defray — pay costs or expenses

Herbert looked upon his theft of test answers as simply a means to defray his tuition.

Friday Vocabulary

1. prosopopeia — personification (Rhetoric)

The walls spoke silently of years of decaying neglect, the persistent prosopopeia of drywall and dust sounding its forlorn dirge for love’s opportunities lost.

2. apodictic — incontestable because demonstrable

In spite of her constant allusions to the spiritual basis of life, she seemed always to search for apodictic rules by which to live.

3. malversation — corrupt or improper conduct in office

The speaker bewailed the current political climate in his jeremiad, preaching that even blatant malversation was neither punished nor even illegal anymore.

4. tauromachia — a bullfight, bullfighting

Her taste for tauromachia showed a feral side that gave Pete pause.

5. catamite — a boy or youth in a sexual relationship with a man

Julius Caesar’s enemies often whispered that he had played the catamite on his path to political power.

6. epigraph — an inscription, on a building, statue, or the like

The epigraph at CIA headquarters — “The Truth Will Set You Free” — seems ironic unless one questions who is the subject of that sentence.

7. hypostatize — to treat as a distinct object or reality

The capitalization of all nouns in written German seems indicative of a tendency to hypostatize even the most abstract ideas.

8. maieutic — of or related to the Socratic method of education

Barzun compares the maieutic process to midwifery.

9. ambient — of the surrounding environment

It was impossible to hold an actual conversation, due to the ambient noise in the bar.

10. palliate — mitigate

The front-row seats proffered by the driver mitigated somewhat the damage done to my bike.

Sonnet


(for Anne, on the seventeenth anniversary of our first date)

This southern sun cannot eclipse the pale
And dark eternal moment under moon
When heaven’s vault baptized our dusty trail
And future wand’rings, holy and picayune.
Though breaking tides have crashed with fearsome power
Against the tender union born of love,
The lunar pull sustains each potent hour
That gravity our souls were dreaming of.
So waning fashions cannot stay the sun,
Nor waxing passions shake the timeless sphere.
In moondark rays our breathless breaths are one
As when we once orbited the silent deer.
A silent glance still strikes its resonant chime
In bodies moving still through celestial time.

Friday Vocabulary

1. sotadic — of erotic or pornographic material (after Sotades, the first known Greek erotic poet)

The Victorian Age saw an avid interest in sotadic literature, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the supposedly repressed nature of the period.

 

2. tribadism — lesbianism

The tropes of pornography have little changed since the erotic poetry of the Greeks, in which sodomy and tribadism played their eternally subversive parts.

 

3. pleonasm — redundancy

Speaking of his absolutely unique style, the artist’s agent slipped into pleonasm.

 

4. gueridon — a small stand or table

Our caesar salad was prepared tableside upon a gueridon.

 

5. anniversary — the celebration of the yearly recurrence of a past event

Perhaps I take too much umbrage at their solicitude for the relationship, but celebrating the anniversary of their first latte together seems a trifle precious.

 

6. hedonic — of pleasure

The hedonic instinct is so strong in some that it brings in its wake most unpleasurable consequences.

 

7. noxious — unhealthy

From beneath the floorboards came the most noxious odor, evidence of the buried but unforgotten past.

 

8. picayune — trivial

The wedding planner’s customers made her life difficult with their picayune objections.

 

9. ambit — area of influence

Never have my thoughts left her since once I fell within the ambit of her lovely spirit.

 

10. estrus — a female’s period of sexual receptivity

Many Dionysian aspects of sex may be seen in the fact that estrus derives from the Greek word for gadfly or madness.

Friday Vocabulary

1. bailiwick — area of expertise or skill

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you with your cuticular problem,” said the podiatrist. “Not my bailiwick, I’m afraid.”

 

2. cadge — to obtain through imposition upon one’s generosity or friendship

He tried to cadge another drink from his hostess in spite of his wife’s imprecations.

 

3. discalced — shoeless

In spite of his nickname, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson was not discalced when he trod the basepaths.

 

4. modest — without ostentation

She arrived at the ball wearing a modest gown.

 

5. prolicide — the murder of one’s child

Kafka asked a friend to burn his works after his death, as even his tortured ego would not allow him to commit prolicide.

 

6. tare — noxious weed (biblical)

Separating the wheat from the tares instructs us to discard the bad so that we can embrace and hold the good.

 

7. ironicon — a backwards question mark, intended as a punctuation mark to denote irony; also called a percontation point

The invention of the ironicon in the late 16th Century for ending rhetorical questions shows a great deal of doubt in the ability of authors to convey their message using words.

 

8. felicitation — congratulation

He sent his deep felicitations in a heartfelt letter to the new bride.

 

9. cavil — to quibble, to find petty objections

Do not cavil at the color of the his hair when he brings news of your lost son.

 

10. benignant — kind, particularly to inferiors

She turned her benignant gaze upon the gardener as she bade him relax and explain everything from the beginning.

Little Science, Less Life

The Science of Life, by Alfred Adler (1929: Garden City, NY)

I approached The Science of Life with admittedly high expectations. I have read with pleasure the writings of the other two-thirds of the psychoanalytic triumvirate of Freud, Jung, and Adler, and this was my first exposure to the works of Adler. Thus I was disappointed to find this book a muddied, rambling work: sometimes verging upon a coherent presentation of Adler’s core beliefs, but always then veering away towards unsubstantiated platitudes and — my least favorite trait of psychological literature — a telling overdependence upon anecdote and fictional “case studies”. Naturally these case studies always tend to underscore and ‘prove’ the author’s theories, expressed or implied, but in this case the underlying theory was either too obscure or banal, making it difficult to even find in the constant appeal to those cases an assortment of interesting stories.

When reading eighty-year-old books of any stripe, the reader wages constant struggle against the impulse to patronizingly look down upon the earlier views, as if modernity has reached a great height in the intervening years from which it can look down upon the so-called ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages with benignant and purer knowledge. This is especially the case with works of psychology — not because our received wisdom in this area is so much the greater, but because the topic itself is so effectively colored by the cultural milieu in which the reader finds him- or herself. We can look askance, therefore, at Phillipe Mairet’s introduction wherein he states that “homosexuality is always the consequence of incapability for love” [p. 19] — but do we really have any generally agreed-upon belief about homosexuality with which to oppose this categorical statement? Even making such allowance for the vast distance between Adler’s time and ours (he wrote this book in the interstice between the two World Wars), I found little in Adler’s chapters to either commend or condemn. Indeed, the most maddening aspect of the book for me was its dreary repetition of its key terms without any linkage to the broader stream of Adler’s thought.

The key points of Adler’s theory are here: the emphasis on the unity of each individual’s psyche, the insistence that the life direction is settled by the time a person has reached five years of age, the tripartite division of human life into the fields of social, occupational, and love relations. But these ideas are more cogently, more forcefully, and ultimately more persuasively presented in the Wikipedia article on Adler than in this 264 page book. Thirty of those pages are given over to the introduction by the aforementioned Phillipe Mairet — for me the most interesting part of the book and the reason I purchased it in the first place. The actual words (translated, one assumes, perhaps by Mairet himself) of Adler however are mushy and boring: pedantic without being instructive, illustrative without painting a clear picture. The most energetic passages are those where he declaims against narrowing human drives to solely sex or other reductionist views (this work was written a decade and a half after the break with, and purge by, Sigmund Freud).

To be sure, there are interesting, even intriguing ideas here. Adler is rightfully famous for his idea of inferiority complexes as the foundation of much maladjustment and neurosis. But The Science of Life takes a glib approach instead of accumulating evidence. I can believe that Adler saw this or that mechanism operating in the patients he treated, but I don’t see why I should believe it from the arguments presented here. Perhaps the problem lies with the translation. I found myself almost wishing this were the case, and shall report if I read a different version of the book in the future. But I find that my main resistance to the hardback’s contentions was the flow of argument rather than the exact words used. Though the chapters seem to paint a case for The Science of Life in the usual manner of presenting a thesis and then approaching its components — thus “The Inferiority Complex” is followed by its successor “The Superiority Complex” — in reality each chapter meanders over much of the same material covered before. Adler hearkens back, for example, to his idea of the “prototype” developed in early childhood to which a person’s energies are ever after devoted. Or he returns time and again to the idea that teachers must be trained in his method of Individual Psychology in order to identify and if possible correct early tendencies away from the “useful” directions in life. But the work as a whole is but a set of wandering streams of mumbling thoughts rather than a deep channel flowing inexorably to the conclusions Adler wishes us to draw.

According to one Web reference, this book was originally a set of lectures. If this be true, I only hope that those lectures were presented to the general public and not to men and women (Adler was an early proponent of the equality of sexes) of a more scientific bent, for I doubt the latter would get much out of the successive chapters that was not already covered in the first — with just as little evidence beyond “for example” stories. This characteristic method of presenting anecdote to explicate psychology has a long and storied career. In the hands of an author who can meld such tales to the needed background of science and experiment, evidence pro and con, it can be compelling and persuasive. Oliver Sacks is a good example of such a writer. It can degenerate, however, into mere story-telling with no more evidentiary merit than so-called “old wives’ tales”. Less, in fact, for those tales at least have the merit of supposed experience of hundreds or thousands of “old wives” whose communal wisdom is encapsulated therein, whereas the stories of shrinks are meaningless isolated without confirmation from other doctors, studies, or repeatable experiments. Marcello Truzzi wrote that “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.” Now, Dr. Adler’s contentions are not as incredible as a belief that the sun stood still in the sky, but they are uncommonplace enough to require more proof than “I know” or “I can tell”. So, for example, when Adler claims that a person who habitually leans upon a chair for support “does not trust his own power, but wants to be supported” [p. 137], I can only think: perhaps true, perhaps not. Adler himself cautions against “judging solely by one consideration” [p. 136] but gives no evidence upon which to judge his theses.

A perfect example of this mess and mélange is his description of the characteristic psychologies of siblings. First-borns, he says, are more likely to develop neuroses and other issues; this because they have all the mother’s attention until the second child is born, after which they feel betrayed and abandoned. Second-born children are primed for success, however, for reasons I won’t go into here. It is an interesting concept. It may even be true. No actual evidence is given in support, however, beyond an appeal to the story of Esau and Jacob (who were twins, by the way, but let that pass). I myself would give the idea more credence if Alfred Adler had not himself been the second of six siblings. Had he been firstborn, or third, etc., I might have concluded that he came to his conclusion about sibling order based on some studies he was only neglecting to proffer at this time. As it is, the argument has an obvious bias towards self-interest.

In conclusion, I must affirm an abiding respect for the pioneers of psychology. Though Freud today gets quite a bad rap, his seminal insight into the interconnections between conscious and unconscious thought — and the frequent tension between the two — remains a breathtaking leap forward in theories of human behavior, perhaps the first quantum leap in this area since Aristotle and Plato duked it out in ancient Athens. That Psychology is a fraud with as little scientific basis as Economics or Astrology does not lessen its power or potential. To be sure, there was much to be said against these early theories from the cusp of the Twentieth Century — as is to be expected. I only wish that The Science of Life was a more impressive edifice against which to lean (showing my distrust of my own power, I suppose) and strike out for or against, rather than the muddied mess which I found it.

Friday Vocabulary

1. impervious — not capable of being affected or influenced

Like all comic book heroes of the Golden Age, Jack Hardaway was impervious to doubt.

2. impermeable — not allowing fluids to pass through

His impermeable cape also protected him from prying eyes and suspicious minds.

3. gangly — awkwardly tall or thin

The gangly platform, towering high over the heads of the assembled crowd, looked as if it could not possibly support the weight of the hanged once they swung from the gallows.

4. al fresco — outside, in dining

As we sat enjoying our al fresco brunch, itinerant booksellers and free-marketeers of every stripe approached our table to hawk their wares and perhaps cadge a bite of bacon.

5. omnibus — archaic term for bus

The term ‘omnibus‘, from which the modern coinage ‘bus’ derives, stems from a hatter’s sign in Nantes, before which one of the first bus stops stood in 1823.

6. emblematic — symbolizing, representative

Pete found the seagull shit upon the totem’s peak emblematic of the oppression of Native American populations by the incursion of white settlers; his friends just found it guano.

7. vertiginous — likely to cause vertigo

The AMC Pacer skidded on the curves of the long gravel driveway during its vertiginous descent from the hermit writer’s cottage.

8. haberdashery — a retail establishment selling men’s accoutrements such as shirts, ties, gloves, and hats

To their dismay, the haberdashery had just sold out of top hats.

9. boggart — a malevolent household fairy in English folklore, frequently stealing small items and souring milk

Hanging a horseshoe above the door was supposed to prevent the boggart from entering a home.

10. fishmonger — a seller of seafood

Pike’s Market is one of the few places hiring female photogenic fishmongers.

Friday Vocabulary

1. apotropaic — intended to ward off evil

Before retiring in our quaint hotel room deep within vampire country, we placed crosses and apotropaic garlic before each window and upon the door.

 

2. gob — mouth

As the wrench slammed into his left elbow his right fist was lashing out, catching the attacker smack dab in his gob.

 

3. protreptic — intended to convince or instruct

Listening to the president’s protreptic oratory, Billy wondered if his Pizza Pockets were ready yet.

 

4. irrefragable — indisputable, undeniable

The collapse of the Twentieth Century into the first tenth of the Twenty-First took with it any lingering belief in irrefragable truths or standards of conduct.

 

5. jake leg — paralysis caused by drinking bootleg liquor made from denatured alcohol

Though the crippling effects of jake leg left a terrible scar upon communities during Prohibition, the condition became the inspiration for many wonderful blues songs.

 

6. decimate — to reduce by a tenth

The terrible battles and consequent famine of the Thirty Years’ War decimated the male population of Germany’s towns and villages, with some burgs losing well over 30% of their men in the carnage.

 

7. abstruse — hard to understand; recondite

The abstruse subject matter was made more difficult to understand by the professor’s discursive and tangential lectures.

 

8. ascend — to move upward

As the portly man began to ascend the stairs into the attic, a steamer trunk tossed from above knocked him back to the hallway floor.

 

9. burgee — a triangular flag or one having a triangular indentation leaving two tails

The yachts were resplendant on the water, flying flags, pennants, and burgees in the particolor code of the sea.

 

10. hyperopia — farsightedness

The coke-bottle lenses in photographs of James Joyce give testimony to the author’s severe hyperopia.

Friday Vocabulary

1. interest — a cause or business in which a person has a share

The conflicting interests between the king and the nobles initiated the events which culminated in the French Revolution.

 

2. purview — area of expertise

Standard & Poor’s insistence that the United States must immediately reduce its debt seems beyond its purview of judging whether the nation will pay off that debt in future years.

 

3. criterion — standard of judgment

One wonders if S&P applied the same criterion when it rated as triple-A the worthless home loan instruments that led to the financial catastrophe of 2008.

 

4. wayward — driven by willful deviation from norms to gratify one’s own desires

The wayward idiocies of politicians are often seen as conspiratorial, but more often are cases of naked self-interest winning out over any other values — if such still exist.

 

5. staggering — overwhelming, unbelievable

The number of staggering events in recent U.S. history seems to increase at an exponential rate, as constitutional crises dehisce from Watergate to Iran-Contra to the Lewinsky Affair to a very strange compulsion to war with Iraq, and we grow accustomed to the idea that people begging for money at every intersection is no concern of ours, that school teachers’ pensions cause our states’ financial problems, that CEOs making 130 times their employees’ wages just makes good business sense, that patents and copyrights are commodities to be traded like baseball cards rather than measures to protect actual creativity, as politicians lose office for sexual dalliances while spending (and receiving) hundreds of millions with each campaign, but I date the collapse of our civilization to the moment in time when we as a society somehow decided that it would be a good idea to have doctors and lawyers advertise as does any old cracker company.

 

6. inadvertent — unintentional; heedless

Forcing the king’s hand by encouraging the call for the Estates General, the French nobility had no inkling of the inadvertent consequences of their power play against Louis XVI.

 

7. maelstrom — a turbulent or tumultuous situation; a violent whirlpool

The Sun King’s son famously said, “After me, the deluge”, and the flood that washed away l’Ancien Régime plunged France and especially Paris into a seething maelstrom from which not all escaped.

 

8. chirography — handwriting

What visionary or prophet, what evaluator of questioned documents can read the chirography on our culture’s wall?

 

9. laggard — sluggish; dilatory

We may question our own laggard response to the rats gnawing into our finger bones, until we pick our teeth and see the foreign sinew between our own canines.

 

10. refractory — stubbornly disobedient

Ovid highlighted our refractory human nature, when he said “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor“.