ɛpɪkærˈɪkəsɪ / ɛpɪˈkærɪkəsɪ

epicaricacy: malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others

What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing. And yet in more than one such a word is found. […] In the Greek ἐπιχαιρεκακία, in the German, ‘Schadenfreude’. Cicero so strongly feels the want of such a word, that he gives to ‘malevolentia’ the significance ‘voluptas ex malo alterius’ [i. e., makes ‘ill-will’ mean ‘joy in another’s ill fortune’], which lies not of necessity in it.

Richard Chenevix Trench, The Study Of Words (1851)

In my previous post about the rare English word epicaricacy, I traced its history and discussed some other words that use the Greek epi- prefix. This time, I’m going to deal with English words derived from the other components of epicaricacy—Greek kakos, “evil”, and khairo, “to be glad”.

Kakos has spawned a fairly large number of words for bad things of various sorts in English, but with the exception of cacophony, “bad sound”, most are quite obscure.

If you are cacopygian, you are possessed of ugly buttocks*—which might make you cacochymic, “ill-humoured”. Cacodoxy is the state of having wrong opinions—the opposite of orthodoxy. Cacœconomy is bad management, particularly of finances; cacotechny is bad art; a cacoethes is a bad habit; cacopathy is a bad or painful disease; and cacophagy is bad eating—the wrong food, or not enough food.

Something cacodorous smells bad—an example of which is the poisonous metallo-organic compound arsendimethyl, As₂(CH₃)₄, which is possessed of such a repellent garlic odour that it was given the common name cacodyl.

A cacodæmon is an evil spirit. By association of ideas, Robert Hooper’s New Medical Dictionary of 1811 listed the word as a medical synonym for nightmare. He also defined cacosphyxia as a “disordered or bad state of the pulse”, reminding me that asphyxia is literally translated as “no pulse”—which was its original meaning before it was co-opted to refer to the process of suffocation. On which usage the Oxford English Dictionary notes wearily:

It indicates a curious infelicity of etymology that the pulse in asphyxiated animals continues to beat long after all signs of respiratory action have ceased.

Cacology is a bad choice of words, whereas a cacemphaton is a swear-word, and a caconym is a rude name. Cacography is bad handwriting, and a cacophemism is an unfairly harsh description. Finally, cacoëpy is bad pronunciation—which has a certain irony, given how difficult it is to figure out how to pronounce that word.^†

Khairo has fewer relatives in English than kakos, and those there are have followed independent routes into English from a cluster of Greek words related to khairo. The verb khairo meant “to be glad”, “to be cheerful”, or “to enjoy [something]”. Epikhairo was “to rejoice at [something]”, from which the Greeks derived epikhairekakia, “rejoicing at misfortune”, the origin of our word epicaricacy. (There was also epikhairagathos, “rejoicing at good events”, but that seems not to have produced an English equivalent.)

Eukharisteo meant “to give thanks”, and in the Greek of the New Testament that verb featured prominently in the story of the Last Supper. Here’s the King James translation of the relevant verses in Luke 22:

And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves:  
For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.
And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.

It’s the recurrent use of the verb eukharisteo in this story that led to the name Eucharist being applied to the Christian ceremony of sharing bread and wine, in ritual commemoration of the Last Supper. Charister is an obsolete word for a song of thanksgiving.

Kharis, in Greek, referred to the spiritual sensation of being in a state of grace, of being blessed—the sort of state that would make anyone rejoice. Kharisma was the gift of such grace, and the original meaning of the English word charisma referred to a “God-given” gift or talent. Only in the twentieth century did it take on its current meaning, designating an ability to inspire devotion or enthusiasm. The original meaning is preserved in those Christian churches described as charismatic, which practise speaking in tongues, healing and prophecy.

Kharientismos meant “gracefulness of style”, and it has given us the useful but largely disused word charientism—the ability to impart unpleasant information in a soothing and pleasant way.

Finally, there is the herb the Greeks called khairephullon, “joy leaf”, presumably because it could be used to perk up the taste of a spring salad, or perhaps because it was considered to be effective against gout. This became chærephylla in Latin, cærfille in Old English, and finally chervil in modern English. As one of the four French fines herbes, it’s still used to add flavour to food.

And I hope this little dissertation has added flavour to your day.

* You’ll be pleased to learn that cacopygian has an opposite, callipygian, reserved for those among us with particularly well-formed buttocks.
^† The emphasis is on the second syllable, and the central -coë- rhymes with “snowy”.

ɛpɪkærˈɪkəsɪ / ɛpɪˈkærɪkəsɪ

epicaricacy: malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others

What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing. And yet in more than one such a word is found. […] In the Greek ἐπιχαιρεκακία, in the German, ‘Schadenfreude’. Cicero so strongly feels the want of such a word, that he gives to ‘malevolentia’ the significance ‘voluptas ex malo alterius’ [i. e., makes ‘ill-will’ mean ‘joy in another’s ill fortune’], which lies not of necessity in it.

Richard Chenevix Trench, The Study Of Words (1851)

The Classical Greek word quoted by Trench, above, transliterates as epikhairekakia, from epi-, “upon”, khairo, “to be glad”, and kakos, “evil”. To be glad about evil, in other words. It was familiar to scholars of the nineteenth century because Aristotle uses the word in his Nicomachean Ethics (translated here, by the Loeb Classical Library, as “malice”).

Latin, as Trench says, seemed to lack a single-word equivalent. While Cicero struggled and failed to find a word to do the job, Thomas Aquinas (in his Commentary On The Nicomachean Ethics) went with gaudium de malo—“joy of evil”.

The Greek word turns up, vaguely anglicized, in Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721):

EPICHARIKA’KY  [of ἐπι upon, χαρα Joy, and  κακον  Evil] a Joy at the Misfortunes of others

This is more than a century before the Oxford English Dictionary first cites an English writer using the German borrowing schadenfreude (literally “harm-joy”). And we’re into the start of the twentieth century before the OED reports anyone using schadenfreude in English without explaining what it means.

So it seems English speakers first met their need for such a word by stealing from Greek*, but then forgot the Greek and stole again from German.

Joseph Shipley resuscitated the Greek version (with modern spelling) in his Dictionary Of Early English (1963):

epicaricacy. Rejoicing at, or taking joy in, the misfortunes of others. From Greek epi, upon + chara, joy + kakon, evil. Bailey’s DICTIONARY (1751) spells it epicharikaky; the accent falls on the ick. The O.E.D. (1933) ignores the word, but alas! the feeling is not so easily set aside.

For Shipley, I’d guess it probably falls into the category he mentions in his Introduction: “Words that are not in the general vocabulary today, but might be pleasantly and usefully revived.”

And from Shipley, I suspect, it started finding its way into various lists of unusual words—first in sporadic paper format, and then in the burgeoning cottage industry of word lists on the internet. I turn it up, for instance, in my old copy of Josefa Heifetz’s Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary Of Unusual, Obscure, And Preposterous Words (1974).

And that’s how it exists today—limping along in the shadowy half-life of words largely unused except in word-lists. Shipley and Heifetz follow Bailey’s direction to place the stress “on the ick”; but such on-line resources as bother with an attempt at a pronunciation guide seem nowadays to favour putting the stress on the “car”. I think one could defend either, so I’ve given both options in my phonetics at the head of this post.

The Greek prefix epi-, with the sense “upon”, has spawned a host of English words, too numerous to deal with individually; I’ll restrict myself to listing a few that I think are of interest.

We’re tediously familiar with epidemic (“upon the people”), of course. Epicentre is the Anglicized version of Latin epicentrum, from Greek epikentron, “upon the centre”. Its original meaning comes from seismology in the nineteenth century—the point on the surface of the Earth directly above the subterranean origin of an earthquake’s shock waves. From there, people started to interpret it as meaning “the centre of something important”. The Oxford English Dictionary‘s first citation for this new meaning is dated 1970, in which Snape Maltings Concert Hall is rather dramatically characterized as the “epicentre” of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts. We’ve recently become used to politicians and journalists talking about the “epicentre” of the Covid outbreak in Wuhan. This can be relied upon to produce pedantic groans from those who cling to the original etymology, but the word is now demonstrably a term of art used by those who study the spread of disease, so the etymological groans are as futile as they always are.

The name of the hormone epinephrine comes from Greek epinephros, “upon the kidney”. This refers to the fact that it is produced by the adrenal glands (Latin prefix ad-, “to”, + ren, “the kidney”), which perch atop our kidneys like jaunty little hats. The hormone is therefore commonly referred to as adrenaline in British English, with epinephrine being the primary usage among American physicians. And when the hormone is prepared as a drug, its “British approved name” was adrenaline, while the “recommended international non-proprietary name” is epinephrine. When the UK (as part of the European Union) began to shift towards adopting international standard drug names at the start of this century, changes like frusemide to furosemide and amoxycillin to amoxicillin passed off with only a little eye-rolling among more elderly doctors, but there was a fairly stiff resistance to the replacement of the name adrenaline with epinephrine, for reasons summarized here.

Epicene adds epi- to Greek koinos, “common”, and started life as a technical term for Greek and Latin nouns which, without changing grammatical gender, can refer to either sex. French has a few of these, too—a male or female mouse is always une souris; a male or female nightingale always un rossignol. Back in the seventeenth century, the word was used for garments suitable for either sex—what we came to call unisex in the twentieth century. And epicene was also used, generally in a disapproving way, for people who did not conform to prevailing gender stereotypes in appearance or behaviour.

The adjective epicurean pertains to the Greek philosopher best known today by his Latin name, Epicurus. In Greek he was Epikouros, which means “assisting” or “defending”, and seems to have been derived from epi- and an unattested word that probably meant something like “running”. So perhaps the original sense was of a person who travelled with someone else in order to help or protect them. Whatever the origin of his name, Epicurus is now largely remembered for advocating philosophy as a way of allowing people to live a happy life—and so, rather unfairly, the noun epicurean now principally refers to someone who makes the pursuit of pleasure their primary goal. An epicure is someone who derives their pleasure from refined enjoyment of food and drink; in pursuit of that enjoyment, they are said to epicurize.

An epidiascope was a device for projecting images of an opaque object on to a screen. The name derives from the diascope (“see through”), which projects transparent images. So an epidiascope is an “upon diascope”—it was placed on top of something like a photograph or book page in order to project its image. The shorter, but rarer, alternative name episcope is less etymologically confused, but the point is now almost moot—the ubiquity of networked digital cameras has driven the device to near-extinction.

An epigraph (“written upon”) is an inscription on a building, or a short quotation placed at the head of a piece of writing in order to summarize or hint at its content (like the quotation at the head of this post, for instance). An epigram was also originally an inscription on a building, but usually written in verse. Its meaning shifted to label short, witty poems with the pay-off in the last line, and then to its current usage, designating a short, incisively witty saying. An epistle (“send upon”) is a written communication sent to someone who is elsewhere—a letter. An epitaph (“upon the grave”) is an inscription on a tombstone, or a short statement suitable for that use. An epitome (“cut upon”) is a brief summary of a longer work; if a person or thing can be considered to be a perfect example of something, they can be said to be an epitome of that thing. An episode (“entering upon”) was originally a short bit of speech sandwiched between choral parts in the performance of Greek Tragedy—the sense being of something extra added to the main performance. The meaning was then carried over into pieces of writing that were digressions from the main narrative of a novel or poem, and thence to the modern meaning, referring to the self-contained stories that make up each instalment of a television or radio drama. The Greeks would be puzzled to learn that much modern entertainment consisted of nothing but episodes.

Epilepsy is literally “seizing upon”—a disease that makes its sufferer fall to the ground and shake, as if in the grip of an invisible assailant. An epistaxis is a nose-bleed, from the Greek staxein, “to let fall in drops”.

Episcopal is an adjective meaning “pertaining to a bishop”, from the Greek episcopos, “overseer”. Our word bishop is just an Old English abbreviated form of the Latin equivalent, episcopus. Episcopalian churches are those in which administrative authority rests with a group of bishops.

And an epilogue (“upon the speech”) is a short statement delivered at the end of a narrative. Like this one. Next time I’ll write about words deriving from the paradoxical pair khairo and kakos.

* However, when Bailey wrote his dictionary, the philosophy of dictionaries was still settling down into the present descriptive format. It’s therefore possible that epicharikaky was never in use among English speakers of the time, but merely a word that Bailey thought could be usefully adopted. It doesn’t seem to be attested elsewhere.

kɒmplɪˈmɛntərɪ

complimentary: 1) expressive of, or conveying, polite praise or commendation; 2) presented as a gift or gratuity

So a guy’s sitting at the bar, drinking beer, when he hears a voice say, “You’re looking good tonight.” And he looks around, but there’s no-one there. After a while the same voice says, “That new haircut really suits you.” But still there’s no-one there.
The barman, seeing the guy looking around puzzledly, asks him if there’s a problem. And the guy confesses that he keeps hearing a disembodied voice saying nice things about him.
“Ah,” says the barman, “That’ll be the peanuts. They’re complimentary.”

Old joke

The joke plays on the two meanings of complimentary given at the head of this post. The use of compliment to designate an expression of praise or commendation goes back to the seventeenth century. A hundred years later, people began to use the phrase to make a compliment of [some item] when they were describing giving a gift as a mark of praise or respect. That usage of compliment has fallen into disuse, but the second meaning acquired by complimentary lingers on.

Compliment comes (by a roundabout route) from Latin complementum, “that which fills up or completes”, related to the verb complere, “to fill up”, and the adjective completus, “completed”. Complere is the origin of our word complete and the old word complish, “to fill up or complete”, which gives us modern English accomplish. Completus appears (in feminine form) in the Latin phrase completa hora, “finished hour”, which is the origin of the name compline for the final prayer-service of the day in Catholic ritual.

Complementum turned into Spanish cumplimiento, which referred to a very special type of completion—that of fulfilling the complex requirements of formal courtesy. This was adopted into French as compliment, and thence into English. Meanwhile, the idea of meeting an obligation was reflected in the associated Spanish verb cumplir, which passed through Italian and ended up in English as comply.

To further complicate matters, complementum had already found its way more directly into Middle English as complement, “that which completes”. Nowadays, it crops up in specialist uses in grammar, music, optics, mathematics and astonomy. And there’s a set of small blood proteins called the complement system that is activated when our immune system is triggered, helping it complete its destruction of invading microorganisms. The verb to complement means “to make complete”, and things that are complementary serve to complete a whole of some kind—complementary angles sum to ninety degrees, for instance, and complementary colours combine to produce white.

Which brings me, contentiously, to the topic of complementary therapies and the practice of complementary medicine. The underlying claim, evidently, is that these practices somehow complete conventional medical practice by providing something that medicine lacks.* (But at least it’s a better adjective than alternative, which sends the message that you don’t need conventional medicine if you’ve got alternative medicine.)

But we’ve reached the point that refers back to the photograph at the head of this post. It’s a view of the rather pleasingly frosted and lettered window of an establishment quite near my house. (I’ve cropped it down quite severely to remove the establishment’s name, so you’re not seeing it to its best advantage.) There are a couple of things to take issue with in the lettering I’ve shown, but the relevant one for this post is in the top line. I suppose it’s possible that the establishment provides “complimentary therapy”—presumably either free to the recipient or consists solely of flattering remarks—but I’m betting that what was intended was “complementary therapy”. (The error is, of course, extremely common—I once found it in an official hospital communication.)

Latin complere, “to fill up”, is derived from the prefix com-, a marker of intensity, and the adjective plenus, “full, complete”. Plenus has given English a family of words beginning plen- that have something to do with fullness or completeness. To plenish is to fill something up; to replenish is to do that again. Plenty indicates a full supply of something, as does plenitude. Plenary implies that something is full or complete—plenary powers are the most power you can be granted; a plenary session is a meeting at which an entire organization assembles. And an ambassador plenipotentiary has full power to make decisions and take actions on behalf of the administration she represents.

As rare curiosities, I can offer plenilune, “the time of the full moon”, and plenicorn, which designates those ruminants possessing solid horns (like deer) as opposed to those with hollow horns (like cattle) which are cavicorns. A plenisphere is a perfect sphere, and a plenum is a space completely filled with matter—the opposite of a vacuum.

Finally, Latin manus, “hand”, combined with plenus, “full”, to produce manipulus, “handful”. That came into English as the old word maniple, which could be used literally to mean “handful”, or figuratively to mean “small group of soldiers”. And the original meaning of manipulate was “to gather in handfuls”.

And I hope you’ve found something interesting among this latest few handfuls of words.

* But then there’s another the old joke that goes: “What do you call complementary medicine that works? Medicine.”

fɛˈstɪvɪtɪ

Festivity: Rejoicing, mirth, gaiety, such as befits a feast

Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused—in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened—by the recurrence of Christmas.

Charles Dickens, “Christmas Festivities”, Bell’s Life in London (1835)

Dickens would have considered The Oikofuge a misanthrope indeed, and would not be the first to do so, but the title of his short story (later collected as “A Christmas Dinner”) gives me the hook for this year’s Christmas word.

A festivity is an occasion on which one is festive, the original meaning of which is “pertaining to a feast”. Nowadays, though, festive has come to have connotations of joy and mirth and gladness. And the current Festive Season has links to both feasting and (as Dickens pointed out) “jovial feelings” of various kinds. A festival was originally a time for feasting, usually tied to the ecclesiastical calendar of feast days, but now has broader connections to themed celebrations, in the form of book festivals, music festivals, and so on. Things pertaining to festivals are festal; and if you write a treatise concerning ecclesiastical festivals, you have written a festilogy.

All these words come from Latin festum, “feast day”. So also, by a more circuitous route, does festoon, originally the name for a garland of flowers hanging in a curve between two points of support. Nowadays, we can refer to anything hanging in that sort of curve as a festoon. The word comes from Italian festone, which is thought to derive from festum—festoons were apparently considered to be appropriate feast-day decorations. The French turned festum into fête, a word we borrowed directly into English, originally as another word for festival, but now rather downgraded to designate mild-mannered charity bazaars. We also stole fest from the Germans, embedded in the word festschrift (“festival writing”), which refers to a collection of writings in honour of a scholar or author. And of course the idea of an Oktoberfest beer festival is no longer confined to Munich, these days.

Latin festum is derived from a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as dhes, which seems to have been used in relation to religious concepts like gods and sacred places—and its various descendants in English tend to be connected to religion, in one way or another, as we’ll see. Dhes also found its way into Archaic Latin as fesiae, which was transformed into Classical Latin feriae, “religious holiday”, from which we derive our noun fair, which originally referred to mass gatherings of buyers and sellers during religious festivals, but now is also used to designate other gatherings with a holiday atmosphere, such as a fun fair*. Latin feriae also came into English as feria, an ecclesiastical term for a day of the week that isn’t Sunday. A greater feria is such a day of the week that has some special religious significance, like Shrove Tuesday or Ash Wednesday.

A suffixed form of dhes reconstructed as dhesnom also ended up in Latin as fanum, “temple”. This gives us a largely disused English word for a temple, fane, which generally only turns up in wilfully archaic writings nowadays. Something profane is literally “outside the temple”. And our word fanatic comes from Latin fanaticus, “belonging to a temple”. Make of that what you will.

In Classical Greek, dhes gave rise to theos, “divine being”, which has been a fruitful source of god-words in English, from atheism (“no god”) to pantheism (“god everywhere”) via monotheism and polytheism. Sitting between mono- (one god) and poly- (lots of gods) is the rather rarely encountered henotheism, which is a belief that only one god is relevant to one’s own tribe, while accepting that other people may have other gods. A pantheon is a temple dedicated to all gods. An apotheosis is a promotion to godhood, though its meaning has worn smooth enough over the years that achieving A-list celebrity status also counts. An entheogen is a drug that creates a sensation of divine inspiration. (The term was coined in 1979 as a way of emphasizing the spiritual nature of the experience induced, while dodging the negative connotations acquired by hallucinogen and psychedelic.) Enthusiasm was original a state of divine inspiration—another word with a meaning that has worn down over time. And the cacao tree, from which we derive chocolate, belongs to the genus Theobroma (“food of the gods”).

A theophany is a “god manifestation”. This is the name the Eastern Christian calendar applies to the feast day known as Epiphany in the West, which falls on January 6th, marking the traditional date of the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus. Male children born on that date were sometimes named Theophanes, while female children were given the name Theophania—the origin of the English girl’s name, Tiffany. And the names Dorothy and Theodore both come from theos, “god”, coupled with doron, “gift”, albeit with the male order reversing the female.

There are many more theos words, and I’ve merely cantered through the ones I find interesting, in the hope you’ll feel the same way. But to end this festive post, I’ll loop back to Latin festum, and mention the “non-commercial secular holiday” Festivus. In Latin, festivus is an adjective, meaning “pertaining to feasts”, but that seems not to have been in the mind of Daniel O’Keefe when the name for an idiosyncratic family celebration “just popped into his head” in 1966. Originally a rather protean affair, the concept leaked into consensus reality when O’Keefe’s son, Dan, ended up as a writer for the television series Seinfeld. “Festivus for the rest of us” featured in a 1997 episode entitled “The Strike”, in which the date was nailed down to December 23rd, and the various components of the celebration (including the “Airing of Grievances”) were laid out.

I’m making this post on December 22nd, so you may well become aware of it in time to construct your own Festivus Pole, and to admire its simplicity, lack of decoration, and philosophical opposition to all that a Dickensian Christmas stands for. Have a good one, or at least have one as good as circumstances permit.

* The Oikofuge’s misanthropy, previously established, means that that phrase fun fair came very close to featuring scare quotes on the fun. But hey, it’s Christmas …