Idle Questions

If you don't know these starred words, make sure to look them up in the old fashioned dictionary at the end!

Alas*, alack!*

A lark* attack!

Ever aggravated* an antiquarian*?

Or barbered* a barbarian*?

Coddled* a curmudgeon*?

Or dreideled* with a Dravidian*?

Ever enjoined* an encyclopedist*?

Or fraternized* with 

Federalist*?

Guffawed* with a gravedigger*?

Or hibernated* with a hedonist*?

Have you ever been illuminated* by an illustrator*?

Or jam-packed* into a jamboree*?

Been kibitzing* in a kimono*?

Or levitating* with Louis 14*?

Half way done.  Having any fun?

Ever been marooned* with a martinet*?

Or met a nettled* narcissist*?

Been ostracized* by Osiris*?

Or treated by a poetic podiatrist*?

Ever seen Quasimodo* quilting?

Or a Rasputin* written recommendation?

Salinger* in a saloon*?

Or Theseus* trying transliteration*?

Ever come across an unassailable* unicyclist*?

Or a vervet* working as a valet*?

Whistler's* mom in a water closet?

Or a xenophobe* zapped with an x-ray?

Ever yearn to yodel* with a ukulele*?

Or skate with Zeus* on the Zuider Zee*?

Practice yoga* with WB Yeats*?

Or play zydeco* with a zoot-suited* Zuni*?

A

 aggravated mule

• aggravated – past tense of the verb to aggravate.  This originally meant to make heavier, to lay a burden on.  Like, you would aggravate a mule by loading him up with mining tools.   Over the years to aggravate became burdensome, and people and mules started to resent getting loaded down, and they would react by yelling (or braying*), biting, or refusing to move.   So now to aggravate somebody is to get him or her mad.  So spray painting, not matter how artfully, on an ancient Grecian artifact would aggravate an  antiquarian*.
• alack – see alas
• alas – close to the meaning of alack*, i.e. [i.e. = id est = that is] both alack and alas are old-fashioned expressions for “that’s too bad” or “what a shame.”   Alack isn’t as strong as alas.  For example, you might say alack if you misplaced your suit of armor, but you’d say alas if you lost the War of the Roses.  The most famous alas ever uttered is Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick!  I knew him Horatio.  A fellow of infinite jest.” (Note to parents:  Isn’t it about time you read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest?  After all, it’s the hippest novel since Gravity’s Rainbow.  Come on, how in good conscience can you cajole your kids into reading if you’re not setting a good example yourself? So what if it’s 900-plus pages? The Man from Glad is the grandfather of the protagonist).
• antiquarian – a person who studies or deals with old objects, like antiques or rare books or relics.

B  

Attila the Hun

• barbarian – originally this was the Greek word for foreigner.  Not only do foreigners have different manners than we do, but oftentimes in the ancient world they weren’t visiting as tourists but as invaders (i.e. wielding battle axes and sporting biker* hair-dos).  So barbarian, like most words, can mean more than one thing.  One denotation describes a primitive person.  Another a fierce outsider.  Yet another describes a person who doesn’t obey the social rules of the dominant culture.  For example, if the woman who taught me cotillion* ran into Shakespeare* in a restaurant, she might very well call him a barbarian for not using a salad fork.  (Note: forks aren’t mentioned in English until 1674, fifty-eight years after Shakespeare’s death).
• barbered – past tense of the verb to barber, i.e. to cut hair.  Of course, the noun barber means someone who cuts hair.  The world’s most famous barber is Figaro, the Barber of Seville.  The world’s second most famous barber is John Peters.
• biker – in this context, a motorcycle enthusiast*.
• braying– hee-haw, hee-hawing.

C

  Scrooge

• coddled – past tense of the verb to coddle.  This originally meant to heat up to the brink of boiling.  Now it means to baby somebody, to treat somebody very sweetly, to cater to him or her bigtime.  You might cuddle with someone you coddle or coddle someone you cuddle.  How it went from boiling someone to spoiling someone is a mystery.
• cotillion – a historical recreation of what your great grandmother’s social life was like.
• curmudgeon – an ill-tempered old fellow (that’s the noun the Oxford English Dictionary uses).  The old definitions describe curmudgeons as avaricious or greedy, both meaning stingy.  Nowadays, curmudgeon more or less means a grouchy old person.  But curmudgeons don’t have to be as unpleasant as Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s The Christmas Carol.  Curmudgeons can be funny if they’re witty.  Mark Twain, for example, is curmudgeonly.  I’ve not looked up the official etymology*, but it appears to come from cur (dog) and mud (wet dirt) and geon (the tailend of a dungeon), so maybe originally it meant muddy dog in a pen.

D

dreidel 

• Dravidian – a family of languages spoken in India and Sri Lanki.  Or in this case an ancient pre-Indo-European speaker of Dravidian.  Thinking question #1: Would the woman who taught me cotillion consider a Dravidian to be a barbarian?   (See page   for answers to thinking questions).

• dreideled – until now, dreideled couldn’t be used as a verb.  A drieidel is a   spinning top you play with in during Hanukkah.  The reason I can change a noun into a verb is because I have a poetic license.  All you need to get a poetic license is to think that you’re so special you can break all those stupid grammatical rules that curmudgeons* dreamed up.  Then you get one automatically.

E

etymologists

• encyclopedist  - someone who writes or puts together an encyclopedia, a collection of alphabetized articles on a wide range of subjects, usually starting with aardvark  (an anteaterlike creature) and ending with Zwingli. (a Martinlutherlike Protestant).  Thinking Question #2: Did I use my poetic license in the adjectives I used in the parentheses?
• enjoined -   past tense of the verb to enjoin.  This verb doesn’t mean what it sounds like it should mean. It sounds like it should mean to put together, but actually it means to impose your will on somebody or to tell somebody they can’t do something.  So enjoined smacks of getting smacked if you don’t do what you’re being told to do. To be the subject of the verb to enjoin you need authority.  You can’t enjoin the principal to let everybody out early.  But the principal can enjoin you with all kinds of restrictions.  So unless your last name is Webster, chances are you’ve never enjoined an encyclopedist*.
• enthusiast – This is a word that’s really lost its punch.  Originally it meant one possessed by a deity or a spirit or a demon.  Now it might describe a person who spends his weekends assembling model airplanes. Somewhere in the middle of its evolution, (i.e. 1647) the English poet Crasaha wrote these immortal words: “Enthusiastic flames such as can give Marrow to my plump genius.”  (If you don’t believe me, enjoin* your parents to take you to the library and see for yourself by looking up enthusiasm in the O.E.D*.).
• etymology – the family tree of a word, the breaking down of a word into its parts, then tracing its different meanings through the ages.  For example, enthusiast* can be taken back to the Greek enqeos, which transliterated* into Latin becomes en theos (i.e. god-in).  If you were enthusiastic, you had a god in you, which might make you act funny.  Next thing you know there’s an industrial revolution and acting funny no longer means you’re chanting prophecies but you’re spending inordinate* amounts of time assembling miniature aircraft.

F

   James Madison

  Federalist – in this case a member of the Federalist Party founded in 1787 to urge adoption of the Constitution of the United States of America.  Famous Federalists include Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.  Although James Madison was a president, you’re probably more familiar with Alexander Hamilton, since he’s that fellow on the ten-dollar bill.   He ended up getting killed in a duel smack dab in the Age of Reason.  In the Age of Reason duels (i.e. the mutual formal cotillion*-like agreement in which two men to try to shoot each other) weren’t considered barbaric*.

A federalist nowadays means someone who believes in a strong central federal government.  Not surprisingly, virtually all modern day federalists are in favor of hand gun laws.

• fraternized – past tense of the verb to fraternize.  The root word here is the Latin frater, which means brother.  So if you know the etymology* of words, you can sort of guess their meaning, which can come in handy when you forget to study for a quiz or taking an SAT test.

If you’re male, when you go to college you can join a fraternity, i.e. a club in which you pretend you’re Greek but dress in togas* and call your fellow members brothers.  If you take that same root frat and add the suffix cide (meaning to kill, as in insecticide) you get fratricide, which means, of course, killing a brother, like in the Bible story of Cain and Abel.  Fraternized literally means changing someone into a brother, but what it actually means in everyday usage is hanging out with.  So in reality, you can fraternize with an enemy.  A federalist could fraternize with, say,  Charlton Heston, but alas*, he’s dead.

G

• Gravedigger – someone who might dig a hole for an unsuccessful duelist .  The most famous gravedigger in the world is the clown in Hamlet.  Although he’s the one who disinters poor Yorick’s skull, the gravedigger offers some much-needed comic relief.   Try looking comic relief  (or disinter) yourself in a real dictionary.

• guffawed- past tense for the verb to guffaw, which means a big ol’ bellylaugh.  Sneakily hiding in the word is the suggestion that whoever is doing the guffawing isn’t very bright.  The word is echoic, as the linguists* say, i.e. the sound of the word guffaw supposedly echoes what coarse laughter sounds like.  Here’s how Richard Doddridge Blackmore, the author of Lorna Doone, used a form of guffaw in 1895:”You guffawing jackanapes*!” 

H 

     Alfred Hitchcock

• hibernated – past tense of the verb to hibernate.  To take a very long winter’s nap. 
• hedonist -  the root word here is the Greek hdonh (see transliteration*), which means pleasure.  A hedonist is someone who thinks pleasure is good, which puritans* consider bad, so oddly enough in some places thinking pleasure is good is sinful  [(e.g. = exempli  gratia = for example) Bob Jones University].   Instead of performing godly acts like trimming hedges, hedonists engage in wild, abandoned merrymaking, e.g. soaking in hot tubs while eating inordinate* numbers of grapes.
• Heston, Charleton – a heat packing one time portrayer of Moses.
• Hitchcockian – like something you’d see in a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock, e.g.. a flock of normally timid songbirds attacking Tippi Hefferen.

I

The Enlightened One

• illuminated – past tense of the verb to illuminate.  This word has lots of definitions.  It can mean to light up, like in this sentence: Flashing on a flashlight, I illuminated Buster Crabbe as he swam in my outdoor swimming pool.  Or illuminated can mean to decorate a page of a book by making flashy designs out of the first letters.  Or it can mean to provide someone with spiritual enlightenment.  A cool form of the word that is rarely used is illuminati.  To be a member of the illuminati is to be so ultimately hip you glow.  You are enlightened.  You can only get there by reading. 
• illustrator – someone who is paid to draw pictures in books (as opposed to someone like you who is punished for drawing pictures in a book).
• Indo-European – the big ol’ granddaddy/grandmamma of lots of latterday languages that stretch all the way from India to Indiana.  Both the Buddha and Jesus spoke Indo-European languages. But so did Billy the Kid and Benito Mussolini.  Thinking Question #3:  Is American English an Indo-European language?
• inordinate – way too many, an excessive amount.

J

• jackanapes – a word like stupid you shouldn’t call someone to his face, except in this case no one will know what you’re calling him.  It means a stuck-up or sassy person.  It used to mean monkey, but now that’s archaic, meaning no one uses it that way anymore. The word was named after William de la Pole, 4^th Earl and 1^st Duke of Suffolk whose nickname was Jack Napis.  Ever heard your parents talk about how important your reputation is?
• jampacked – to cram too many things into too small of a space.
• jamboree – a noisy celebration, usually of boy scouts.  The word sounds fun.  Like yippee, like whoopee.  Though come to think of it, the Boy Scouts of America don’t want you making whoopee at a jamboree.

K

        

         kimono

• kibitzing – poking your nose in somebody else’s business, giving unwelcome advice.  This is a Yiddish word that sounds a lot like kibbutz, which is a collective farm in modern Israel.  A collective farm means that several families own it together and work it together.  You call a member of a kibbutz a kibbutznik.   You call someone kibitzing a kibitzer. Synonyms for kibitzer include busybody, buttinsky, mom, dad.
•  kimono – those beautiful, highly decorative, wide-sleeved Japanese dresses that you have to take teeny tiny steps in.

L

     Louis XIV

• lark – a small songbird or a fun act.  Oddly enough, the melodious songbird lark appears in the ugliest sounding lines of all of English poetry:  “It is the lark that sings so out of tune/Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps” (Romeo and Juliet 3.5).  Here’s how a Mrs. Carlyle used the second sense of the word in 1857: “My mother . . . once by the way of a lark, invited her to dinner.”  We can tell by the context of the word lark (a fun act) that the pronoun “her” doesn’t refer to the woman who taught me cotillion*.  Anyway, a “lark attack” could be a Hitchcockian* literal attack by an Old World songbird, or it could be a sudden impulse to write a silly poem and then drive to Mexico.
• levitating -  present perfect of the verb to levitate.  To float in the air.  If you’re levitating, it means that you’re breaking the Newtonian Law represented by the formula F= G times M₁ times M₂   divided by R²  (with F representing the force of attraction between two material bodies with masses M₁ and M₂ respectively, and R representing the distance between those bodies).  And I certainly hope I don’t need to tell you that ignorance of the law is no excuse!
• linguist  - someone who studies human speech (as opposed to inhuman speech).
• Louis the Fourteenth (XIV) – king of France 1643-1715 who was known as the Sun King (le Roi Soliel) even though when he died he had left France as bankrupt as a black hole because of his wars, his conquests, and his larks*.  Despite his insistence that he was a divine right king, there is no evidence that he was powerful enough to defy gravity (see levitating*).

M

        Daniel Defoe

• marooned – this means to be stranded somewhere, most often on a deserted island, like Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist in the famous book by Daniel Defoe.  The word originally meant an escaped African slave who lived in the forests of the West Indies.  The French word for runaway slave is marran, which the French Colonists got from the American Spanish word cimarron, which also means runaway slave.  The color maroon, which is reddish brown with a touch of purplish red (got that?), comes from the French word for chestnut.
• martinet – a very strict disciplinarian.  This word has a weird past.  Most directly it comes from the name of a French army officer in the reign of Louis the Fourteenth*, one Jean Martinet.  The schoolteacher Mr. McChokemchild is an aptly named martinet in Dickens’s Hard Times.  But before Jean Martinet came on the scene, a martinet was a military engine for throwing stones, and before that it was a demon whose job it was to assemble witches for meetings.  So what we have here is a cluster of coincidental negative associations, unless, of course, you consider a machine that hurls stones a good thing, and then you’d probably call it by a different name, like “the Peacekeeper” or “Strategic Defense Initiator.”

N

·      nettled – past tense of the verb to nettle, which means to aggravate* somebody.  This verb comes from the noun nettle, the porcupine of plants, one of those plants with sticky spines or irritating hairs that hurt you when you touch them

• narcissist – a person whose self-esteem is so high he’s fallen in love with himself.  The word comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, who one day saw his reflection in a pond and to kiss himself, then fell in and drowned.  So, it’s really easy to nettle a narcissist.  Just ask, for example, “Bad hair day?”

O

     Osiris

·      O.E.D. – the abbreviation for the Oxford English Dictionary, the illuminati’s* favorite reference tool.

·      Osiris – the ancient Egyptian god whose death and resurrection represent the waxing and waning of the seasonal cycle.  He was murdered by his nemesis*, his twin brother and son Seth (go figure that one out) who cut his body into pieces.  But his wife Isis planted his body parts, and he rose from the dead to reign forever in heaven.  If they’re not puritanical*, go see if your parents can find you a book on Egyptian mythology.

·      ostracized – to banish, i.e. to kick out.  It now means more or less to exclude someone or to be excluded.  The original Greek word meant shell.  The ancient Greeks used shells as ballots when voting to ostracize someone, literally to kick him out of their city state. The 4^th Earl and 1^st Duke of Suffolk whose nickname was Jack Napis is probably lucky he didn’t live in ancient Greece (see jackanapes*), but then again, if he had, he wouldn’t have been murdered crossing the English Channel.

P

John Milton, Puritan

·      podiatrist – a doctor specializing in diseases of the foot. Can you name a disease of the foot?  I can’t.  Interestingly enough, some poets also deal with feet, i.e., metrical feet: iambs, trochees, anapaests, dactyls, spondees, etc, which are units of sound that give metrical poetry its beat.  Here’s a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “Metrical Feet” that demonstrates what the various feet: sound like:

Trochee trips from long to short;

From long to short in solemn sort

Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able

Ever to come up with dactyl trisyllable.

Iambs march from short to long –

With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng . . .

• poetic – like poetry, having the quality of a poem, mystical, emotional.
• puritan – in the immortal words of H.L. Mencken: “someone who is afraid that, somewhere, someone else is having a good time” i.e., having a lark*.

Q

     gargoyle

• Quasimodo – the famous Hunchback of Notre Dame from the novel of the same name by Victor Hugo.  Quasimodo is the bell ringer of Notre Dame Cathedral where he gives the gargoyles a grotesque run for their money in who is the ugliest contest.  But Quasimodo proves to have a heart of gold as he attempts to save the gypsy dancer Esmerada from the villain Frollo whom he hurls from the roof of Notre Dame. Interestingly enough, gargoyles were originally waterspouts cast in the form of monsters to shoot rainwater from the gutters of gothic cathedrals.
• quilting – present perfect form of the verb to quilt, which means to make a quilt, i.e. a sort of sandwich of a blanket consisting of two pieces of fabric with a layer of soft stuff like feathers or cotton or foam in between.  The word comes from Latin culcita, which means mattress.  Quilting bees were an important social occasion for colonial and frontier women in those days before central heat and television.  The women would gather together and collectively make a quilt while their husbands and boyfriends were out having some fun of their own by collectively raising a barn.  Thinking Question # 4:  Would a hedonist* send back a regret when invited to a barn raising or a quilting bee?

R

• Rasputin – a weird religious figure of Czarist Russia, he preached salvation through repentance, first inviting people to sin and then inviting them to repent.  This proved to be very popular then and is still very popular today, especially among politicians.  Rasputin became the religious advisor to Tsar Nicholas II and to his wife Alexandra.  Later he started influencing them in affairs of state.  Eventually, he was assassinated by a group of conspirators who poisoned him and then shot him and then stuck him under the ice of the River Neva.  Legend has it he was harder to kill than RoboCop.
• recommendation –a favorable letter giving a thumbs-up to someone’s character and qualifications.

S

• Salinger, J.D. – the reclusive (i.e. avoiding contact with people) author of the novel A Catcher in the Rye, a book that puritans* absolutely love – to burn.
• saloon – in the United States an establishment where alcohol is served but in England a large hall for gatherings or a large cabin on a passenger ship.  Of course, saloon comes from the French word salon, either a place where fashionable people go to discuss art or unfashionable people go to get beehive hair-dos.  Given the propensity of drunks to slur their words, the transformation of the o sound of salon to the double o sound of saloon. is obvious.
• Shakespeare, William – a bald headed playwright
• suffix – a piece of a word stuck to end of another word to form a new word (see fraternized*).

T

     toga

• Theseus – in Greek mythology a hero of Attis whose most famous exploit (edging out his slaying of the Crommyonian Sow) is his killing of the Minotaur, the half bull half human son of Minos and Phasipae.  The Minotaur was kept in the center of a labyrinth designed by the famous artisan Daedalus.  Every nine years Aegeus, Theseus’s father, had to send fourteen Athenian youths to be sacrificed to the Minoatur.  Thanks to help from Minos’s daughter Ariadne, Theseus managed to kill the fearsome hybrid.  An interesting sidelight is that Ariadne has become the unofficial patron saint of young women who send their husbands through medical school.
• togas – plural of toga, a loose fitting robe worn by ancient Romans but now virtually never seen outside of fraternity* parties or Hollywood film sets.
• transliterate -  to write the letters of one alphabet into the letters of another alphabet. (see etymology).

U

• unassailable – impossible to attack or disprove.  It is an unassailable fact that reading well is a big advantage in careers outside of professional sports.
• unicyclist – someone who rides a pedal driven one-wheel cycle (not be confused with a biker*).

V

• valet – a manservant who in olden days arranged clothing for an aristocrat but now someone who parks cars for tips.  The word is French, so that means it is pronounced va-lay.  Many of our chic words like chic and salon and debonair and bidet come from French. 
• vervet – a small African monkey with a greenish gray coat.  Though not chic, this word also comes from French, i.e. vert, being the French word for green.

W

Whistler’s Mother

• water closet– where English puritans* go to “tend to their business.”
• Whistler’s Mom - the mother of James Abbott McNeill Whistler who painted a very famous portrait of her entitled “Composition in Black and White” but better known as “Whistler’s Mother.”

X

• xenophobe – (pronounced zenophobe) – a person afraid of outsiders or strangers but especially foreigners.  The word is made up of the Greek root zeno (stranger) and the Greek suffix foboe   (fear).  To make it an adjective you drop the e and add ic. and get xenophobic.  Thinking Question #6:  Does calling a foreigner a barbarian* smack of xenophobia?
• X-ray – a very revealing photograph.

Y

• yearn – to desire something, to desperately wish for.  Yearn is an Anglo-Saxon word, and Anglo-Saxon is the most basic component of English.  The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribes who came over to Great Britain and conquered the Celts, running them off to Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Brittany.  Later the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity and thereby picked up a Latin phrase or two.  Still later, ax-wielding Vikings sporting biker* hair-dos and names like Erik Skullbasher invaded the Anglo-Saxons and set up shop in the North of England.  Their language Norse, being Indo-European, was similar to Anglo-Saxon but simpler, so they introduced new words into Anglo-Saxon like sky and ski, and also caused Anglo-Saxon to lose its complicated word endings (inflections).  Still later in 1066, the Frenchman William the Conquer conquered the English (hence the nickname) and brought with him lots and lots of French words, which made Anglo-Saxon so chic that people started calling it English.  With so many new words into English, folk found themselves with nicer sounding options.  For example, rather than sweating, people with money could perspire instead.  Thanks to all these invasions, English has a rich vocabulary. 
• Yeats, William Butler – Irish poet who lived from 1865-1939 and provided posterity with the following poem:  To a Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine
• You say, as I have often given tongue
  In praise of what another’s said or sung,
  ‘Twere politic to do the like by these;
  But was ever there a dog that praised his fleas.
         Can you figure out what metric foot Yeats is using? (see podiatrist*)

• yodel – to make inarticulate singing sounds that go from a normal pitch to falsetto. Though it is not his or her intention, the yodeler may sound as if he or she has received some sort of physical injury. 
• Z

• Zeus – the supreme Greek lightening god of mythology who reigned on Mount Olympus.  The son of Cronus, he and his two brothers Poseidon and Hades ruled the earth, the ocean, and the underworld respectively (though not respectfully).
• zoot suit – a cool 1940’s men’s suit with wide lapels and tight cuffs.
• Zuider Zee – Alack*, it won’t be possible for you to skate with Zeus* on the Zuider Zee for a number of reasons.  First, there’s no such thing as Zeus.  Second, the Zuider Zee (formally of North Holland) was closed in 1932 when a dike was built that changed it into a freshwater lake now called Ijsselmeer.  Third, the Dutch are reclaiming this body of water by turning it into dry land as fast as condos are popping up on both American coasts. Alas!
• Zuni – a member of a Native American people living in New Mexico.
• zydeco – a cool South Louisiana gumbo music, consisting of French, Caribbean, and African elements (especially the blues).  A zydeco band usually consists of guitars, an accordion, and a washboard.            

Answers to Thinking Questions

1. yes
2. yes
3. yes
4. yes
5. yes
6.   yes