juggernaut

Okay, I think we all know what this means. It means something like 'a force that comes along and runs you down or tears you limb from limb'. Right?

I was having dinner with friends the other night and someone brought up this word, mentioning that 'juggernaut' stems from an Indian festival where the procession of the local god, in the form of a statue, would be wheeled through the streets, with the unfortunate side effect of, well, mowing down some of the devotees.

Fair enough. True or not, it wouldn't have roused my blogging instincts, except that someone asked, "India? But juggernaut's been around a long time in the West, hasn't it? Doesn't it have to with do Roman soldiers somehow?"

So I started thinking that the "-naut" part of the word "juggernaut" certainly sounds Western. Jason and the Argonauts, for example. And "astronaut" as well. But I am pretty sure the first person had it right about the Indian festival, because this sounded familiar. But "juggernaut" has got to be a hybrid.

Or does it?

Well, yes and no, but mostly no. I'll beg forgiveness in advance from any Indian or even Hindu knowledgable readers here for this cobbled together explanation, which they should of course feel free to correct. The source for "juggernaut" is Jagannath, or, more precisely, "Lord of the World", a title for Vishnu, particularly in the form of his avatar, Krishna. At a festival held in Puri (no, of course I don't know precisely where in India that is--must I do everything?) Krishna is drawn in a cart through the streets, and apparently western observers--I'm guessing British, since they were the colonizers--got the wrong end of the stick and thought that devotees threw themselves under the wheels in their devotion to the god, but apparently, it was more a case of devotees simply getting run over in the crush of the crowd.

So. Where are we? First, I can't find any indication that juggernauts had any connection with the Roman army at all. What I am curious about is where this friend got this idea. My hunch is that there is some confusion of words, maybe even with the fabled Greek Argonauts, which led her to think the word had reached the west a lot earlier than it did. I'm guessing that the "-naut" instead of the "nath" ending is simply a Western reaching for an approximately related sound. In reality, the word seems to have leapt the Hindi-English divide as recently as 1841, and it's revealing that "juggernaut" is used as a word for a big, heavy truck, the usage being "chiefly British".

I am a bit unhappy to report that our English word juggernaut may have taken a perfectly lovely Indian festival, and used it as a metaphor for the horrible. In one sense, we have it being used as a synonym for a steamroller, and in another extension, to mean a blind or destructive devotion to an institution that treats people like fodder.



We can end on a lighter note, though, surely. It's possible that one or two readers of this blog will be unhappy at my leaving out the most recent avatar of the word, Juggernaut of the XMen comics. It is possibly even a sign of hope and a changing attitude about juggernauts in general, that Juggernaut started out as a pure villain in the XMen comics, and then took on new and more complex roles for awhile. But like his Indian--born verbal counterpart, Juggernaut is finding that "villain" is a hard role to shake...

Copywriter, right?

After reading Nathanael Green's lucid blog post 6 Reasons Why You Need a Copywriter, I confessed that my idea of what a copywriter does had only become clear--or clearer--quite recently. He suggested that it might make a good post here, and whether or not it proves interesting to others, I did want to think about a kind of tangle of words that I was somehow caught up in, a situation which I'll assume is not unique to me, because, for better or worse, nothing ever is.


As Nate says on his blog, copywriting has nothing to do with copyrighting, which may seem obvious now it's spelled out, but perhaps is part of the problem. It's not that I thought copywriters were people who sat around crunching out copyrights all day, but I do believe that this second twin word lingering in the back of my mind may have lead me to think that copywriting was a more esoteric craft than it is.

(What it is I thought copywriters did I can no longer pin down, anymore than I can pin down a dozen other vague assumptions that I don't trouble to define.)

Copywriters write copy. Period. They write texts for others, often to help them sell something, though not always. (Hmm--perhaps the real word of ignorance here is simply "copy".).

At any rate, it's not hard to be a copywriter. If you can write, or more likely, type, you too can be a copywriter. Comforting, isn't it? Something to fall back on in these tough economic times. But there's a catch. (You knew there would be.) Writing copy doesn't make you a good copywriter. And if you want to get paid for your troubles, you'd better be a damn good one.

What does it take to be a damn good copywriter? Well, let me take my analogy from another medium--television. And not just television, but cable television. And not just cable television but a channel like QVC or the Home Shopping Channel.

I love these shows. I don't buy anything. I'm not even tempted to buy anything, because in my heart of hearts, I am not a shopper. But I love watching the host, or more likely the hostess, take one in a long line of very similar things--handbags, maybe, or jewelry, dolls, whatever and confer distinction upon it by their powers of description. "Look at these cute buttons!" she'll say, or "Doesn't Tanya look stunning in those peridot earrings?" (And, no, I don't know what peridot is--I only know that it is highly desirable--at least, I know it for the length of the show.)

It sounds easy, but you try it sometime. I once saw a hostess lovingly describe the front of a portable radio. If you think it's easy to lavish attention on a black plastic box capable of AM-FM reception in a new and inviting way, think again.

However if you think you could do that, and do it in the cold and less visually helpful medium of print, then, yeah, you should probably think of becoming a copywriter as one of your options.


If it works out, you can buy me a peridot ring to thank me. I know just where you can look for one.

heinous--or, how one word leads to another

Yep, I used this one recently. And, yes, I'm pretty sure I used it correctly. I'm even pretty sure I spelled it correctly. Does that mean I know what it really means?

Nope. Not a clue.

Here's my working definition: dastardly, low-handed, beyond the pale.

And here's what it really means:

Extremely wicked; evil and shocking. Flagitious. From the Old French heineaux, which relates to the modern French, haine, or hatred.

Uh-huh, uh-huh. So "hateable". Just what I thought, though I should have guessed that French connection... Wait a minute. Flagitious. Who the heck ever heard of that?

Well, apparently, I did. At least, I did read Edwin Abbott's Flatland at some point, so certainly came across this quote:

All faults or defects, from the slightest misconduct to the most flagitious crime, Pantocyclus attributed to some deviation from perfect Regularity in the bodily figure...

But I must have glided right over it, as is my wont.

Flagitious: Extremely wicked, deeply criminal, shockingly brutal or cruel.

And where does it come from, then? Why, from the Latin flagitare--to demand earnestly or hotly. In this, shall we say, heated aspect, it is related to "flagrant", a word I think we're all much more familiar with, which stems from flagrare , "to blaze, to burn".

Apparently, flagitium was an early Roman form of public humiliation, in which, in the most typical scenario, a debt-collector would gather a crowd around a person or their home and loudly shame them for not paying up.

Sounds a bit brutal itself.

"Flagitious" seems to have largely passed out of our daily speech, but one thing the word kept turning up in the course of my Googling was a girl grindcore band. From Japan.

If you're into that kind of thing, here's a good post about Flagitious Idiosyncracy in the Dilapidation. There's even a link to a download.

Call me naive, but somehow I don't think they researched the debt collecting practices of ancient Rome when it came time to thinking up their name.

Far Tortola?

It occurs to me that it's been some time since I've exposed my foggy yet all too quintessentially American lack of knowledge of world geography.

This is not because that knowledge has improved.

A week or so ago, a friend of mine departed for a vacation in Tortola. On Tortola, I must amend, as it soon emerged that Tortola was an island. I cleverly deduced that it was not an American possession, as she had some last minute scrambling to do about a passport. Among other things that came to light was that it was remote, without a lot of glitz, and possibly few amenities.

It was also a long way from California.

So, when I learned that there was a place called Tortola that I had not actually ever heard about, did I rush home to find my trusty atlas? Or at least rush to the nearest computer to home in on it with Google Earth?

Even though this is pure fodder for this blog, I did not. I said, have a nice vacation. See you when you get back. That was it.

As a mental space filler, I came up with a mental image of a lone, barren island, rising out of the water like the back of a whale, with maybe a few goat trails to roam upon.

It wasn't till another friend asked, where is Tortola, anyway? that I even began to think about the fact that I didn't have a clue. And that I had somehow been mixing it up in my brain with Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga, which, needless to say, I don't have a clue about either.

My friend posited that Tortola was in the British Virgin Islands, and this turns out to be right. And it is fairly sparsely populated. At least roughly 24,000 people on 21 and a half square miles of land would seem so to me. But that's all I got.

I suppose we should start with the name, as word origins are a popular feature of this blog, or at least I like to pretend that they are. There doesn't really seem to be a definitive answer, unfortunately. Some say that Christopher Columbus himself named it after the turtle dove. Another theory has it that after the Dutch settled it they named it Tor Tholen, after a small island off the coast of the Netherlands. And one I must say ingenious theory has it that as Columbus named the whole archipelago in honor of St. Ursula, the name may actually be a misreading of the inscription "ft. Urfula" or "St. Ursula", the old scripts being difficult like that.

Well, people, your guess is as good as mine. Okay, probably better.

Tortola, though my vacationing friend probably has not had recourse to this, is a tax haven. Its chief industries are 'financial services', and we can only wonder whether it too has been the site of some of the shell games of recent days that have played such havoc with people's savings.

If so, though, it probably shouldn't surprise us. Pirates, after all have hunkered down here before. The notorious Blackbeard actually used the west end of the island, a place called Soper's Hole, as a base to lie in wait in. Let's just say that it wasn't pretty for the trade ships that happened by.

Ironically, what finally drove the pirates out was not some benign force, but colonization in the form of sugar plantations, which were viable largely because of an active slave trade.

Slavery was abolished in Tortola in 1838. Oddly enough, many European residents chose exactly this point in time to leave.

Tortola was not done with the encroachment of western civilization yet though. (Come on now, you didn't really think it was?) In fact, an iconic name of American capitalism would grace these fair shores before too long. Laurence Rockefeller imagined tourists on its white, sandy beaches, and founded the Dix Resort here in the sixties. I suppose the 'financial services' industry was not long in following.

This is getting to be a rather long post, so I suppose I'll have to save the whereabouts of Tortuga for another day.

Besides, I'm an American. I have to get caught up on Mad Men before the new season starts.

discombobulate

Airports in recent years have learned how to put the 'travail' back in travel, so it can be refreshing to land in a smaller airport that, though still ever vigilant as to shoe bombs and Total War toothpaste attacks and the like, still manage to maintain a bit of whimsy about the whole ordeal. Last weekend, as my sister and her two young children and I were gathering ourselves after running the security gauntlet at the Milwaukee airport, we looked up to find that we were putting our shoes back on in the 'Recombobulation Area'. The word itself lightened the experience no end--in part, I think, because it humorously put us in solidarity with all the other travelers who had passed beneath this sign before us.

Of course, we all instinctively know what it means to 'recombobulate', even if we have never heard the word before. It means 'to put oneself back together again'. We know it because we have at least a passing acquaintance with the antonym discombobulate, which means something like 'to confuse, to take apart, to scatter'. I know that the 'dis-' negates the 'combobulate', and com is probably, 'with' or 'together' or something like that, but what's the 'bob' in aid of? I'm sure that 'bob' is not the root of this word, but it is a funny old sound in the midst of this very latinate sounding word...Shall we see where it comes from?

Hmm--I guess this is a first. Apparently, it's a made up word. FreeDictionary.com posits it as a possible alternative to 'discompose', but, not satisfied with this, I found this interesting post by someone who has walked this path ahead of me...

derring do

I just used this phrase in a Good Reads comment on Anthony Horowitz's Point Blank a little bit ago. Though I double-checked before posting, I did know it was 'derring do', not 'daring do', as I'm sure it has been spelled many a time. But I have no idea of where the phrase comes from. Nor, when I get right down to it, do I know what it really means. I know what I mean by it, which is roughly 'doing daring things'. But as I think about it,that's probably too easy. 'Derring' and 'daring' are probably not just variants of the same word. The only thing I can think of us is that derring might be from German or possibly the Nordic. The latter is probably only because I'm thinking of the word 'herring'. Well, before I drift too hopelessly out to sea, let's find out...


For once, I seem to have been pretty much right the first time round, which at first was a bit of a letdown. I guess it's actually more properly 'derring-do', but that's minor stuff--it still means something along the lines of 'heroic daring'. However, digging a little further often leads to more rewarding things, and it's certainly the case with this word or phrase. It is in fact, a word borrowed, passed along and variously shaped and misinterpreted by some of the brightest lights of English literature. It first finds it way into print in Chaucer's Troylus and Criseyde as 'durring don'--daring to do; becomes 'dorryng do' through the poet John Lydgate in a nod back to Chaucer; is misprinted later as 'derrynge do' and then misinterpreted by Edmund Spenser, who much like me (though in this one sense only) thought he was encountering a different word and took it to mean 'brave actions'-- though he too changed it a little to 'derring doe'--which Walter Scott then grabbed up for Ivanhoe, from which his version 'derring-do' then became part of the common parlance.

I pretty much lifted all that from phrases.org.uk, by the way, so have a look if you would like a fuller and very lively account of the above.

I was also pleased to learn that 'derring-do' is what the OED calls a 'psuedo archaism'. We like to think of those times when men were men and acted out brave feats of derring-do, except that, well, they didn't exactly. Or at least they didn't know that was what they were doing.

Chaucer, Lydgate, Spenser, Scott--great men and great writers--but not the most meticulous of spellers, I'm thinking.

You say satrap, and I say Satrapi

I have no idea, of course, if the two words are anything other than coincidentally related. But the word 'satrap' has come up twice in the space of about five hours--first in the very opening lines of Xenophon's Anabasis, which I took a quick look at in the library today, and then on Yoani Sanchez's blog, where it caught my eye as I scrolled down to her post on Thugs and Caudillos. Here's the relevant quote:

And so I am worried about Honduras. I fear what happened will pave the way for the emergence of another figure invested with full powers. Beware! In the broad range encompassing satraps, the worst combination is when the figure of the caudillo and the armed thug converge in a single person.

But it's a third element that finally motivates me. Because in Yoani's blog, she most recently cites the acclaimed Iranian graphic artist, Marjane Satrapi--she of Persepolis fame. Wait a minute, I suddenly think--Satrapi?

My understanding of the word 'satrap', minimal though it is, is that it refers to some sort of minor, dare I say provincial, power. I think of it as the guy who's sent out to keep peace, mainly by squelching dissent, in the hinterlands. It's a bit awkward in the English language--how would one say it, anyway? Sat-trap? Sah-trop? Suh-trop?

But now, based on Marjane, I'm going to guess that it's of Persian origins. Let's see how close I am, and maybe even how to pronounce it...


Yep. It's a governor of a province in Ancient Persia, which has translated over time, and through Greek, Latin and old French, to mean any minor official or bureaucrat. That's maybe too easy, except that I would never have gotten the Persian roots if I had not realized that Marjane's last name must reflect it.

Why would anyone label themselves as coming from a clan of minor officials or bureaucrats? Well, as it turns out, they probably didn't. 'Satrap' comes from khshathrapāvan, which means 'protector of the province'. Has a nice ring to it, one that anyone would like to have associated with himself or his family.

Oh, and however they say it in in Iran, in English, the predominant pronunciation is 'say-trap'.