Logophilia

People think I know words, but it’s just that I went to Catholic school and lived with a classicist for many years. And, oh yeah, I read a lot.

In Catholic school you learned enough Latin to understand the mass (before it was in English, of course) and on Sundays you stared at your missal with Latin on one side and English on the other and saw over and over again how the words were connected. Plus, you had the nuns saying “Break it down, break it down” whenever you were confronted with a new word in class. We learned our roots and prefixes; no problem.

The classicist expanded the base, with some Greek thrown in, so that I could be pretentious about words in three languages, two of them dead. I would be teaching an anthropology class and put a technical term on the blackboard – ambilateral, or matrifocal -- and say, Come on, you know this. Just break it down. No breakdown ensued, just blank stares.

I gave up on that ploy and started putting random words on the board that I loved, telling students that they’d never need to know this but it would enrich their lives immeasurably if they ever saw the word “prelapsarian” in a book and understood what it meant. Yeah, right. That went over well.

A while back a little girl I know told me that there were cumulonimbus clouds in the sky and that this meant it would rain. “Nimbus” means rain, she said. I said no, that kind of cloud does mean that it will probably rain, but nimbus itself means cloud, or aura, the special quality that some people and things have surrounding them. Her mother took issue with me: the handout from the teacher said that nimbus means rain. I gave up on what “mean” means and went home to my OED, the middle-aged Catholic schoolgirl’s best friend.