moribund

A regular reader here could not be blamed if he or she thought that I'd lost interest in this blog, but though I have often wondered why I do this, I haven't actually become bored with this odd little project at all. Rather, it's been a busy spring, moving out of my home and then back in again, taking a class on line, entering a screenplay contest, and, oh yeah, working when I have to. The last few days, I've really wanted to take the time for this, but I knew if I sat down to do it, I wouldn't get up again fast to do something less agreeable, like sort through all the questionable stuff I've managed to accumulate over time.

But this afternoon I feel like I've done enough to justify sitting down for awhile, and the word moribund seems like it might be simple enough to explore without a lot of delving. It's come up a few times lately, I think mainly via writer Adrian McKinty, who has recently bemoaned the moribund nature of both American literature and Australian television.

It's a good word, and I think I know generally what it means, though not precisely. I think it means dead, stagnant, without vitality, caught in the doldrums--something like that. I'm guessing the "mor-"
at the beginning must have to do with mort, or death--the rest I'm not so sure. I think that when I hear it, I get a kind of 'bound in death' kind of sound going through my head.

Let's see.

***

Well, it's not so much dead as approaching death, or in danger of becoming obsolete. And yes, stagnant, or without force or vitality is a valid definition. It comes from the Latin moribundus, dying or at the point of death.

Pretty simple, right? Probably one of the most straightforward words I've looked into, actually. But that doesn't mean that it isn't tied up with a little mystery when you dig a bit deeper. It turns out that a common variant or really, misspelling/mispronunciation is 'moribound'. As an interesting comment on an Egghorn forum has it, there are very few words in English that keep that Latin -ibundus ending, so moribund lends itself fairly naturally to mutation. People hear 'moribund' and they think 'bound for death', as in headed for death or tied up for death. Hence, moribound. Nice.

The original commenter on that thread said that moribund was a "Latin adjectival gerundive form" which we would translate as dying". But a later commenter said, strictly speaking, it is isn't that at all. The second commenter says that -bundus is really a trick the Romans had for turning verbs into adjectives, and cited a few more examples of English words that had the -bund ending: cogitabund, errabund, ludibund. And one that has passed out of usage if the commenter is right (as if these last three haven't): lascivibund. He or she seemed to think it meant 'playing', but the Latin lascivibundus means about what you'd think--wanton or full of petulance. I actually am unable to find any other reference to it.

Finally, it was a little hard for me to believe that Jacques Brel's "Le Moribond" (yes, yet another spelling variant) is the same song that Rod McKuen translated into "Seasons in the Sun". Ah, the French...they  just have that certain je ne sais quoi, don't they?

 

The photograph which starts this out is of the Moribund Horseman in the Brāļu Kapi  or Brothers' Cemetary, in Riga. It was taken by someone named Exxu and was graciously uploaded on to Wikimedia Commons.