A British detour. These people get me every time.

A “mouse mat” … how cute it that?

This post is the second in what I have hoped to be a weekly celebration of words (but has soon devolved into a desultory deliberation on diction). As always—super good.

The words below also come from a Paul Farmer book; today, it’s The Uses of Haiti. See a few quotes in the previous post.

(Note: definitions are paraphrased from the indispensable American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. [A vade mecum, perhaps?])

1. charnel house

   “In times of strife, when hospitals become charnel houses, the university has seemed bucolic; tygers are rare in the groves of acadame.”

   charnel house: a place where bones or bodies of the dead are deposited

2. withering

   “Thompson concludes his withering attack on the French philosopher Louis Althusser and other scholar-demagogues by accusing them of taking young men and women of good will on a ride: ‘The terminus of that ride is outside the city of human endeavor and outside the domain of knowledge. So we can expect them to be absent from both.’”

   withering: overwhelming, devastating

   (My note: apparently, wuthering, as in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, is a location not a word. Moving on.)

3. invective

   “Review of the historical record is nothing more than ’sound-bites and invectives about Washington’s historically evil foreign policy.’”

   invective: characterized by abusive language

4. plebiscite

   “Wilson’s Marines organized a plebiscite in which the Constitution was ratified by a 99.9% vote, with 5% of the population participating, using ‘rather high handed methods to get the Constitution adopted by the people of Haiti,’ the State Department conceded a decade later.”

   plebiscite: a direct vote in which the entire electorate is invited to accept or refuse a proposal

   (My note: the word plebe, which refers to a first-year student (or a cadet) at the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Naval Academy, immediately comes to mind. Plebe is probably short for plebeian, referring to the common people of Rome.)

5. Pyrrhic

   “But, as we shall see in the following chapters, this victory has been a Pyrrhic one.”

   Pyrrhic: a victory that is so costly it may not have been worth the effort

   (From Wikipedia: “The phrase is an allusion to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties when he defeated the Romans during the Pyrrhic War at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC.”)

6. indemnity

   “As late as 1824, the French monarch Charles X pressed Haiti’s President, Jean-Pierre Boyer for 150 million francs and the halving of customs charges for the French trade—all as indemnity for the losses of the plantation owners [in Haiti's revolutionary war].”

   indemnity: compensation, reparation

   (By the way, I’m reminded of the words immunity and impunity, lexical choices which always have seemed to confuse me. Let’s go to the dictionary. Immunity is a legal term that means “exemption from legal prosecution.” Impunity means “exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm.” I guess the words are closely related, but immunity has move of a judicial connotation to it. [Now, I'm just as confused as ever.])

7. interregnum

   “Again, a troubled interregnum followed; again, the British, French, Spanish and North Americans vied for influence and control”

   interregnum: the interval of time between the end of a sovereign’s reign and the accession of a successor.

8. au courant

   “Such ‘reclamations’ were au courant in the German, French, British, and United States communities.”

   au courant: informed on political affairs

   (My note: apologies for the French. I won’t let it happen again. Also, foreign-language words, such as au courant, are generally italicized when used in English.)

9. intransigent

   “The widespread hope that Haiti could change radically had been dealt a telling blow by the intransigent CNG.”

   intransigent: uncompromising

   (Transigent, apparently, isn’t a word—although it should be. Intransient isn’t a word either, but transient means “passing with time.” I think.)

10. genteel

    “The bishops were unable to call for their genteel removal by the police . . .”

    genteel: polite, characteristic of the gentry (upper class)

    (My note: Unsurprisingly, the word has the same etymology as gentleman.)

This post is the first in what I hope to be a weekly celebration of words (but will more likely devolve into a desultory deliberation on diction). As always—super good.

The words here come from Paul Farmer’s dissertation-turned-book, AIDS and Accusation. I quote from it in the post below. For more information on the book—and a terrific review by Amazon.com customer sebastiand—click here.

(Note: definitions are paraphrased from the indispensable American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. [A vade mecum, perhaps?])

1. nascent

   “I certainly take no pleasure in pointing out that a geographically broad and historically deep examination of the nascent pandemic in the 1980s showed that this disaster would occur unless vigorous and fundamentally structural interventions took place.”

   nascent: coming to existence; emergent

2. provenance

   “My rebuttal to this frequently encountered view about the provenance of HIV, which is informed by clinical and historical evidence, may come as unwelcome news to some.”

   provenance: place of origin

   (My note: compare with providence [a deity] and province [a division of a country].)

3. quietus

   “At the conference, several Haitian clinicians presented case material that put the quietus on any doubts whether or not the syndrome seen in Haiti was the same as that encountered in the urban United States.”

   quietus: something that serves to suppress, check, or eliminate

4. idyllic

   “Harvests were, by all reports, bountiful; life there is now recalled as idyllic.”

   idyllic: simple and carefree

   (My note: an idyll is a short poem “written . . . in the style of Theocritus’s short pastoral poems, the Idylls [source: Wiktionary].)

5. efflorescence

   “The efflorescence of new services drew many families to the area, which had previously been considered an exceedingly inhospitable place.”

   efflorescence: flowering, anthesis

6. maleficence

   “Of the dozen or so villagers interviewed about Marie’s illness, only one spoke as if there was (past subjunctive sic) even a chance that she had been the victim of maleficience.”

   maleficence: the doing of evil

   (My note: compare with the law terms against the holders of public office—malfeasance [illegal conduct by a public official], misfeasance [the performance of a lawful action in an illegal or improper manner], and nonfeasance [failure to do what ought to be done].)

7. jacqueries

   “The record is replete with accounts of jacqueries and peasant movements, local revolts, and organized resistance.”

   jacquerie: a peasant revolt

   (From Wikipedia: “The Jacquerie was a popular revolt in late medieval Europe that took place in northern France in 1358, during the Hundred Years’ War. The revolt centered in the Oise valley north of Paris. This rebellion was known as the Jacquerie after its peasant revolutionary leader Guillaume Cale, popularly known as Jacques Bonhomme (“Jack Goodfellow”) or Callet. The word “Jacquerie” later became a synonym for French peasant uprisings.”)

8. consanguinity

   “Of the 123 families then living in Do Kay, 56 had kin in the urban area, and 14 families could claim consanguinity with Haitians living in the United States.”

   consanguinity: from the same lineage of another person

   (My note: think of sanguine, the color of blood.)

9. putative

   “Was the putative sorcery related to the beating?”

   putative: purported; supposed, reputed

   (The word appears to have a vageuly negative connotation—as in a claim believed to be true on inconclusive grounds. Also, compare with punitive [relating to punishment].)

10. insolent

    “Everyone was, however, shaken and revolted that, to quote Pére Alexis, “the goverment would insolently parade its victims before us.”

    insolent: arrogant; disrespectful

    (For some reason, I thought it meant stubborn. Also, compare the word insolent to insolvent [being unable to meet debts] and indolent [lazy]. For interesting [at least to me] information on my previous use of different from as opposed to different than, see the AHD’s pedantic Usage Note here.)