A friend forwarded one of his daily emails from Anu
Garg’s “A.Word.A.Day” feature.
Now, normally, I dislike “word a day” features,
unless (as on this site) they are full cultural/philological portraits, of
value in themselves even if you
never use the word in question -- which, they being mostly quite obscure, you
generally should not. Prose that
does not grow organically, but is mined autodidactically from dictionaries and
thesauri, tends to be a wretched breccia of jackdaw-bits. But today’s offering appeared, at first glance, an
interesting exception.
The entry as given by Mr. Garg:
paregmenon
PRONUNCIATION:
(puh-REG-muh-non)
MEANING:
noun: The
juxtaposition of words that have the same roots. Examples: sense and
sensibility, a manly man, the texture of textile.
ETYMOLOGY:
From
Greek paregmenon, from paragein (to bring side by side). Earliest documented
use: 1577.
USAGE:
"The
Songs poets also used paregmenon for more than two words in succession
("Climbed those high hills,/ Ridged hills and higher heights").
William
McNaughton; The Book of Songs; Twayne Publishers; 1971.
That stylistic phenomenon is indeed prominent and
needs a name.
As a young man, not knowing a word for it, and
requiring one for my own notes, I made one up based on something I had read,
and called such a relation “rhematic”. That use of the word (though it may have existed
once) is by now purely idiolectal -- though the duality “theme and rheme”
(roughly: topic and comment) has
latterly been revived for textual linguistics, in an unrelated (um,
nonrhematic) sense. So at this particular
onomasiological cubby-hole, the lexical cupboard is bare.
And those who specially need to fill it, are Arabists, such as myself: for Arabic does notoriously avail
itself of this morphosemantic flourish;
in classical Arabic, it's called jinaas,
or tajniis. Indeed, since both those words are slightly ambiguous (the
latter can also mean ‘naturalization’, for former not), their use together can
provide a case of “disambiguation via semantic intersection”, as in
old-fashioned law English.
Yet I've never previously seen a good English
equivalent, even among Arabists.
Classical grammars of Arabic translate the term as
"paronomasia", but that's no good, since that word usually means
"punning", and tajniis is
usually employed, not with the flavor of low puns, but with a touch of
appropriate elegance: as indeed,
Austen’s title Sense and Sensibility. The figure at its best suggests depth and dignity, bringing out a sense latent in the common etymon, though
commonly forgotten in the day-to-day use of the derivata: thus Gide’s serviable
mais non servile. Even that comical manly man -- though it smacks of Saturday Night Live twitting
Schwarzenegger, that does not inhere in the structure, but springs merely from
the degraded nature of our age;
for those who hark to the days when men were men indeed, it rings with virtus virumque.
So, paregmenon
has, in principle, a role to
play. The only problem is, it is a
word with -- so far as my own
experience goes -- no life outside of dictionaries of obscure and lifeless
words. It is not listed in the massive Merriam-Webster unabridged
dictionary (third edition). Nor
does it appear in the Oxford Companion to English Literature (3rd
edn. 1946), which does, however, list paronomasia. The word might even be a modern
invention, masquerading as ancient -- much as the old Beduin, pried and paid by
lexicographers of the pre-Islamic Arabic tongue, pulled words for the
occasion out of their ….. -- or rather, out of their foreheads,
like Minerva.
Thus, Curtius, in his Europäische Literatur und
lateinisches Mittelalter (1948), discusses much the variety of literary
wordplay, under the Latin name of annominatio
(a direct morphological equivalent of Greek paronomasia: both mean ‘names next to another’); for this, he gives three Greek equivalents -- none of them the supposed “paregmenon”. The latter seems to be a word
simply found among the bulrushes.
As example of annominatio, he gives a line of Matthew of Vendôme,
Fama
famem pretii parit amentis nec
amantis;
est pretium viae depretiare decus
and comments (here I quote from Trask’s
translation),
In
this distich, two pairs of homophonous words and three inflections of the same stem are introduced in true virtuoso
fashion.
None of this is to say that paregmenon might not prove useful, just because it is no veteran of the field, but a word still in the
womb. As such, it has not
accumulated the distressing plethora of senses which infects the whole
vocabulary of rhetoric’s termini technici. Cut it from whole cloth -- on a recognizable morphosemantic
pattern -- and use it consistently, in a stipulated
sense. -- C.S. Peirce defended,
and practices, this dodge, as regards the terminology of philosophy; and in the sciences (especially
mathematics) it is absolutely standard (homotopy,
holonomy, functorial, equicontinuous,
etc.). In cases where a
pre-existing word like regular or normal is pressed into mathematical use,
it winds up with fifty different meanings.
Note:
There is more that might be saidupon the matter of wordplay, not by way
of mere further exemplification, but of digging towards the depths: this would lead us in the direction of
Freud’s Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (1905 ff). We touch but on the edges of that
subject, here:
~
As it happens, our lexical diurnalist supplies likewise a daily
quotation. The one for today was:
Travel
is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. -Mark Twain
That thought is not intended to illuminate the
word, paregmenon, that it
accompanies; like everything in
the trivial “….-a-day” genre, it is paratactic, unattached, just one d*mn thing
after another. Yet as it
happens, both word and epigram share a characteristic: aureate at first view, they prove
pinchbeck upon inspection.
For, Twain’s contention is false; ce n’est pas fatale, du tout. It is true only for a minority of
determined voyagers.
The fact of that falsity has by now grown familiar:
so much so, that it has spawned a new dichotomy, by répartition de sens, which we mention (and sublate) in our post “Tourism vs. Travel”.
However, our intention here is not to segue over to
that topic, the travel through space to exotic locales; but rather through
time, to past civilizations, as revealed through their literature.
C.S. Lewis, in his essay “De Audiendis Poetis”,
addresses the problem -- often not even recognized
as such by readers -- of
coming to grips with expressions of thoughts of an earlier culture.
It is not only hapless students in High School English
class, forced to read something by Shakespeare, who funk the challenge. Here Oliver Elton, in The English
Muse (1932), p. 269, twits the premier English poet of the seventeenth
century, as regards his adaptations of the greatest poet of the fourteenth:
So great is his ‘veneration’ for
the master, that he must needs turn him into Revolution English. Strange that Dryden did not see that
the remedy for the ‘obscurity’ of Chaucer’s language, is to learn it.
The danger here is not the “obscurity” of Chaucer’s language,
but its specious familiarity (perhaps not for our struggling freshman; then substitute “Shakespeare” or
“Pope”). If a book is in Spanish
and you don’t understand Spanish, you know you have to either learn Spanish, or
read a rendering done by someone who did.
You don’t simply interpret bits here and there in terms of what you
think it might mean -- “casa, that
must mean ‘case’; mesa -- heck I know that one, that’s one
of those flat-topped mountain thingies; estar
-- that’s how a Hispanic pronounces the word star”. But when
Shakespeare writes “caviary to the general”, our listless reader might suppose
the reference is to a supreme military commander -- shrug, and skim on.
[Note: The
phrase means rather, ‘beyond the grasp of the groundlings’.]
Lewis helps us visualize the psycho-temporal dilemma, with a
spatial metaphor:
There are two ways of enjoying the
past, as there are two ways of enjoying a foreign country. One man carries his Englishry abroad
with him, and brings it home unchanged.
Wherever he goes, he consorts with other English tourists. By a good hotel, he means one that is
like an English hotel. He
complains of the bad tea where he
might have had excellent coffee.
He finds the ‘natives’ quaint, and enjoys their quaintness.
In the reading of literature, such self-centric ahistorical intellectual
laziness was catered to by the New Critics (though, to their credit, they did
require “close reading” of another sort), and was raised to a principle -- if
that is the word -- by the unprincipled blackguards and sluggards of
Postmodernism. What a text
means, is simply what it means for you
(and indeed: you in your least cultivated, most immanent, identity-politics
sense).
Really to read and think your way into the minds of our
great predecessors, is hard work even on the face of it, harder still if you
appreciate the depth of the problem, since you don’t know what you don’t
know. When learning a definitely
foreign language, you at least know when you come up with a bump. If you don’t know what, say, izquierdo means, you know you can’t just
pull an interpretation out of your ear or other orifice, you’ll have to do some
research.
It is in part for that, that I have so assiduously
cultivated a tiny number of other languages, while letting all the others
lie. The wordlist, or
word-a-day level of experience and understanding, is worthless. A word like paregmenon, for anyone who meets it for
the first time, not in genuine use, but in atomistic abstraction, is like a trinket from a souvenir store,
purporting to be some local cultural relic, but actually manufactured in
plastic in Taiwan, based on sketches in some manga.
To get anything lasting out of it, you have to burrow into
the language and its associated culture(s), and grow up in it. Just
as, to understand another country, it is not enough to have taken the whirlwind
packaged tour, you have to have lived there (and, preferably, loved there).
-- For more on
the distinction, consult our essay here:
.
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