That’s the word for it – Page 4

That’s the Word for It: Obstreperous

The word obstreperous comes from ob– which means in the way plus strepere, a verb that means to make a noise or to rebel against something. So the adjective works well especially with unruly children, politicians, rebel groups and certain kinds of families.

It’s fun to see the way this word is used in books:

“He’s got a wife,” I said. “Quite a nice wife, and two obstreperous children—boys.”
― Agatha Christie, The Clocks

“In an age of increasingly mechanized production, the genesis of scientific knowledge remains an unyieldingly, obstreperously hand-hewn process. It is among the most human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanizing effects of technology, science remains our last stand against it.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

That’s the Word for It : Zugzwang

Zugzwang is a situation usually found in chess where one player is put at a disadvantage because they must make a move when they would prefer to pass and not move. It’s a weak position but helps the other side to win. I found the word on Twitter in the Brexit context.

Here are some instances of this word in literature:

“Zugzwang. It’s when you have no good moves. But you still have to move.”
― Michael Chabon

“Who’s straight? I’m not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged… But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They’re rich, usually.”
― Martin Amis, Money

That’s the Word for It: Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is a complex emotion. Toddlers openly express the feeling while adults conceal it. The wry smile at someone’s misfortune reflects feelings that exist in the emotional spectrum. Sometimes schadenfreude erupts as a result of rivalry and sometimes it is justice based. The word schadenfreude was first used in English in 1853 by RC Trench, the archbishop of Dublin, in On the Study of Words.

Some instances of the word used in books:

“To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, On Human Nature

“When I was little, I used to pour salt on slugs. I liked watching them dissolve before my eyes. Cruelty is always sort of fun until you realize that something’s getting hurt. It would be one thing to be a loser if it meant that no one paid attention to you, but in school, it means you’re actively sought out. You’re the slug, and they’re holding all the salt. And they haven’t developed a conscience. There’s a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It’s when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question though, is why? I think part of it is self-preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it’s banded together against an enemy. It doesn’t matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself. You know why salt works on slugs? Because it dissolved in the water that’s part of a slug’s skin, so the water on the inside its body starts to flow out. They slug dehydrates. This works with snails, too. And with leeches. And with people like me. With any creature, really, too thin-skinned to stand up for itself.”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

That’s the Word for It: Satisfice

I first heard this term at a BYOB Party recently. Satisficing is a decision-making strategy or cognitive heuristic, a portmanteau of the words satisfy and suffice. It was introduced by Herbert A. Simon, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, to explain the behavior of decision-makers when an optimal solution could not be determined. Satisficing describes something that meets the minimum requirements of a goal, performing something at a satisfactory level rather than at the maximum level possible.

Besides being used in business terminology, satisficing means to pursue the minimum satisfactory condition or outcome.

Here are some places where the word has shown up:

“Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.”
― Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

That’s the Word for It: Tergiversate

The word tergiversate was first used way back in 1590. But the word came back in full force and in 2011 it was named the Word of the Year by Dictionary.com as it represented the changing attitudes of the time.

Here are some instances of the word being used:

“I had a feeling once about Mathematics – that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me – the Byss and Abyss. I saw – as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor’s Show – a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.”

― Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life, 1874-1904

“Ages of prolonged uncertainty, while they are compatible with the highest degree of saintliness in a few, are inimical to the prosaic every-day virtues of respectable citizens. There seems no use in thrift, when tomorrow all your savings may be dissipated; no advantage in honesty, when the man towards whom you practice it is pretty sure to swindle you; no point in steadfast adherence to the cause, when no cause is important or has a chance of stable victory; no argument in favour of truthfulness, when only supple tergiversation makes the preservation of life and fortune possible. The man whose virtue has no source except a purely terrestrial prudence will in such a world, become an adventurer if he has the courage, and, if not, will seek obscurity as a timid time-server.”

― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

That’s the Word for It: Adjudicate

The word adjudicate comes from the Latin root ‘judex’, the word for law. This word is part of legalese and is also used in terminology associated with construction, background investigations and emergency response.

Here are some instances in literature where this verb has been used.

“To me, the thing about friendship that makes it so singular is that it’s a relationship that’s central to our identity in that it doesn’t necessarily benefit us in any tangible way. It’s a relationship we don’t have to pursue – if we decide to stop being friends one day, nothing will happen, no one’s there to legislate or adjudicate it. It’s two people who every day choose to keep it going, and in that way it’s very powerful because it’s one you choose to work on, and you choose to without any agreement; it’s an unspoken bond.”
― Hanya Yanagihara

“Men have been adjudicating on what women are, and how they should behave, for millennia through the institutions of social control such as religion, the medical profession, psychoanalysis, the sex industry. Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from these masculine institutions and develop their own understandings.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism

That’s the Word for It- Auscultation

Auscultation, a term introduced by René Laennec, refers to the sounds of your body from the respiratory, circulatory and gastrointestinal systems that doctors listen to via their stethoscope. Listening as a diagnostic tool has been used way back since Ancient Egypt. Look out for heart murmurs, gallops, wheezes, crepitations and crackles and bowel sounds.

Found the word in these instances:

Restlessness, dyspnea, tachypnea, use of accessory muscles of respiration are signs of respiratory distress, which should be reported. Auscultate breath sounds q6h. ― Paul D. Chan MD, Nursing Care Plans: 650 NDA Approved Care Plans

Auscultate the heart for a murmur. ― Merriam-Webster dictionary

That’s the Word for It – Ebullient

An ebullient person is someone who is bubbling with excitement. This adjective originates from the Latin bullire, which means to bubble out. Ebullient also has an archaic meaning which refers to the roiling of a boiling liquid.

Here are some examples of the word found in literature:

“To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey’s tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna’s smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst – burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength?”
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

That’s the Word for It- Onomastic

Onomastics refers to the broad science of naming be it toponomastics (the study of place names) or anthroponomastics (the study of personal names). Onomasticians aid in data mining and study the process of naming of persons and places in myth, literature and film too.

There are names of places that are lived in and not and names for streets, roads and water bodies. Cities are named after kings or politicians, planets are named after mythical characters, and people are named after their parents. Naming conventions differ from country to country- sometimes the family name appears first as in Chinese or the place name appears first as it does in some Keralite names. Naming can be a personal business; in many cultures around the world naming ceremonies exist. Naming can also be a political exercise especially when the names of cities are changed.

I dug around to find how this word has been used and it isn’t used much at all unless you are talking linguistics. Except here in this article which describes Charles Dickens’s prowess when it comes to naming his characters.

“Allow me to introduce Mr Plornishmaroontigoonter. Lord Podsnap, Count Smorltork, and Sir Clupkins Clogwog. Not to mention the dowager Lady Snuphanuph. As for Serjeant Buzfuz, Miss Snevellicci, Mrs. Wrymug, and the Porkenhams… who the dickens are all these people? Why do they have such weird names?

They are the best of names, they are the worst of names, from an age of onomastic wisdom and hypocoristic foolishness, an epoch of… well you get the picture. You may recognize this raggle-taggle cast of minor characters, in all their rich variety, as stemming from the fevered imaginings of one Charles Dickens.”

That’s the Word for It – Quid Pro Quo

Quid pro quo is a Latin phrase and is most similar to the phrases ‘give and take’ and ‘tit for tat’. Initially, in the 1500s, the phrase implied substitution such as the substitution of one medicine for the other (the phrase has originally been used in late medieval pharmaceutical compilations). By the late 1600s, the meaning of the phrase extended itself to personal gain or reciprocity. Today the phrase lends itself to legalese and business exchanges. In his book Think and Grow Rich, Andrew Carnegie has explained that quid pro quo is the law of the marketplace.

The phrase also has its negative connotations. In legalese, quid pro quo is used in reference to sexual harassment when favors are requested in return for a promotion, etc.

Here are some instances of the use of the phrase in literature:

“A pun on the Latin expression quid pro quo, meaning an equal exchange (this for that), and the British word quid, meaning a pound sterling.”

— Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary

“To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising–the very half that makes rising necessary–is having first been nailed to the cross.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar