Yeah--I have no idea what this word means. It came up in a post from Adrian McKinty's blog, and though I feel I should be able to figure it out from context, i.e., 'pusillanimous Italians', in fact I get no help from this. Except it's supposed to be a negative stereotype, I think. Pasta loving? Organ grinding? Chianti swilling?
What I think it means is 'cowardly'. Which is odd, since the word I get it mixed up with is 'pugnacious', which if I'm correct, would be more or less its opposite.
Okay--let's see.
Hey, I was right! It does mean cowardly. It derives from the Latin
pusillus, meaning weak, and animus, meaning courage.
Looking through the quotes at Freedictionary.com, I noticed that Jack London had a liking for the word. Best quote:
"Why, you pusillanimous piece of dirt, you'd run with your tail between your legs if I said boo."
That's from Valley of the Moon.
I'm just waiting for the opportunity to say that to someone. Though, being more than slightly pusillanimous myself, it might be better if I tried it on a small child first. Or maybe a youngish dog.
4 hours ago
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You know, I think you're bragging when you proclaim your ignorance. Your guesses at a word's meaning are always right.
ReplyDeleteI have always loved the sound of pusillanimous, though I am sorry to say I have never had occasion to use the word. I classify it with wretch, cur, scurvy dog as a delivious expression of contempt, though wretch is really more one of pity, I suppose.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
“Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Peter, you haven't been this blog closely enough if you think my guesses are always right. (Not that you should read it that closely.)
ReplyDeleteIt's kind of a funny game I'm playing with myself here, because I don't cheat, so I actually am always a little anxious before I go seek out the truth. I really do wonder how much of an idiot I'm going to look.
It's true, though, that I did have a fairly good feeling about this one.
I've never had an occasion to use it either, though when I was a kid, I did call a neighbor boy a 'sniveling coward' once, in jest really. I remember my father being both taken aback and impressed.
It occured to me that an antonym of pusillanimous is Braveheart.
I had an exceedingly odd suitemate my freshman year at college who demanded quiet of everyone else but once shattered everyone's nerve's by slamming a door exremely hard to draw attention to himself. I burst out of my room and yelled at the fellow that he was "a sanctimonious hypocrite." One of my suitemates in particular got a great kick out of this.
ReplyDeleteI can see why the neutral suitemate might have found that quite amusing.
ReplyDeleteGiven that all these Latin-Norman-Italian derived words have counterparts in my language (pusillanime,gravida) and come easy to me, I sometimes wonder whether I risk using them too much over more common synonims making my English sound too formal or highbrow.
ReplyDeleteI've never seen an organ grinder or a mandolin, chianti swilling is maybe limited to Tuscany, pasta loving is a safe bet.
The last two are not negative stereotypes however, unless you agree with Parviz.
Seana,
ReplyDeleteYet another good word! I love coming here to see what I know and don't know. What I don't know is more than I care to admit :)
Brian, I suppose you really ought to thank Adrian for the word--you can really only thank me for my lack of confidence in my understanding of it.
ReplyDeleteMarco, yes, most of my negative Italian stereotypes are actually good stereotypes, and even organ-grinding, which is probably an American and out of date one, is hardly what you could call bad. I was going to say that it's hard to come up with a negative Italian stereotype, but then of course the obvious one came to mind. It's odd but good that the Mafia did not actually raise it's ugly head here without a lot of thought.
As for whether your Latin language roots make you sound too highbrow.It hasn't registered that way to me at all. But there is a whole thing about language use in the U.S. where anybody who actually has a vocabulary of any sort is treated as a little suspect. I think it's actually sort of a class distinction. There is an unbelievably large segment of the American population whose language consists mostly of expletives and obscenity, held together by a few one syllable Anglo-Saxon nouns. You may think I'm kidding, but I'm not. And you may also think I'm judging it, but I think it conveys exactly what a lot of people need to convey, so it is sufficient.
I think of organ-grinding as a Dutch thing, to the point where my Dutch teacher at the University of Pennsylvania hired an orgran grinder for our class party one Koningindag (Queen's Day).
ReplyDeleteIn re stereotypes, here’s a post I made about a positive Irish one.
And Marco is right: Parviz is rather snooty about pasta.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
“Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Wow,I had no idea of a Dutch organ-grinding tradition.
ReplyDeleteHow did you end up at the University of Pennsylvania from Toronto? It seems fateful, to say the least.
Seana
ReplyDeleteInsightful as always. To be honset I dont really use the P word that much, it reminds me too much of some sort of Hartford Courant attack on Thomas Jefferson or something, but I had to use it in the post because it was too lazy to say cowardly twice in one paragraph.
The stereotypes of Canadians are all good. Who wouldnt want to be "nice" or "normal".
Adrian, if you can pull 'pusillanimous' out of your quiver, you can afford to be lazy. I reckon I will be able to pull it out of mine for about a fortnight before I start mixing it up with pugnacious again.
ReplyDeleteA lot of people don't want to be 'nice' or 'normal', though as they get older, they realize it's not a defect. I even let a couple of customers call me 'honey' and 'sweeetie' in one day recently. When I was twenty, I would have leapt over the counter and ripped out their hearts. But now I just think, oh, dear lord--if you only knew.
Marco and Peter, I don't get the Parviz reference. Please enlighten me.
Parviz Mansoor Samadi is one of the narrators and arguably the central character of Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous. He was a master chef at home in Iran, and he tells us on the opening pages that, among other things, "My hatred for pizza is beyond compare, but that doesn't mean that I hate everyone who eats it. I'd like things to be clear right from the start: I don't hate the Italians."
ReplyDeleteRe that other stuff, I'm from Montreal (like McFetridge). I went to university in Massachusetts and eventually wound up at a job in Pennsylvania. A few years ago, I had a semester-long fellowship at Penn, where I took a course in Dutch. If you take a train into Ameterdam, you're liable to find an organ grinder outside the station. And those organs are the size of small trailers, colorful, elaborately decorated and without monkeys.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Peter, that is all great information, which I'm happy to know. But I'm still not clear on the crucial jump from Toronto to, appparently not Pennsylvania, but Massachusetts. Why did you do your university level schooling in the U.S., if you care to tell us?
ReplyDeleteI can think about many negative Italian stereotypes, but I'll leave to your confession of blissful ignorance.
ReplyDeleteThough since you did in fact read Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, Parviz case shows more a lapse of memory.
You shouldn't be surprised by Adrian's eloquence -he's Oxford educated,after all.
I thought organ grinders were home appliances much sought after by Zombies with rotting teeth.
They should also be a hit at Donner parties.
Donner parties? I cannot let that Pass.
ReplyDeleteI can raise my hand this time and say that I knew the meaning of this word before I read your post. I think I came across it in some Asterix Comic-book where an especially scaredy-cat of a Roman soldier was named Pusillamous.
ReplyDeleteA marvelous name for a Roman cat, I must say.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
“Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
It is a marvelous name for a Roman cat. I trust that it's cowardly qualities were evident?
ReplyDeleteThis actually reminds me that I realized only after I posted the 'sniveling coward' anecdote that I probably got that straight out of a cartoon or some western I had seen on television, not out of the vast resources of my own vocabulary study.
Marco, it was very tactful of you not to point out just how recently I read Clash of Civilizations.... I think or at least hope if the reference had been to Amadeo, I would have had at least a couple of brain cells fire. I was so sure that you guys were talking about some obscure or even not so obscure sage, sort of like Rumi, that I didn't even think I would know who you were talking about.
Maybe my blog "A Lapse of Memory" would be more appropriately titled, "No Short Term Memory At All".
I'm just waiting for the day that one of the things I've posted about on Confessions of Ignorance beocmes so unfamiliar to me that I post about it again.
I give it six months.