THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 20, 1995 TAG: 9510200062
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E9 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: JENNIFER DZIURA
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
THERE ARE TIMES when only the right words will do. For example, we just couldn't have Juliet perched on her balcony musing, ``O Romeo, Romeo! So, why do they keep calling you that?''
But while Juliet didn't have to create words to have her query immortalized, many nonfictional people have come upon situations in which the right word simply does not exist.
Many years ago in the newsroom at Time, an obituary writer discovered one of those little gaps in the English language and took action. His final product stated the cause of death of a man who had committed suicide by jumping out a window as ``defenestration.''
Noah Adams, the host of a National Public Radio show, once noted that the English language has no word for ``a mingling of pleasant aromas.'' If we just want to talk about a mixture, we have blend, amalgam, admixture, compound, hodgepodge, conglomeration, gallimaufry, olio, medley, salmagundi, potpourri, melange and an omnium-gatherum of other choices. But none of these specifically refers to smell.
Adams held up this little hole in the language for his audience to peer through (quite a neat trick on the radio). One listener came up with the word osmyrrah, from the Greek osmee and smurna, meaning ``to smell'' and ``to mingle with,'' thus saving subsequent generations of writers from angst.
As a writer, I am usually satisfied by the abundant offerings of Webster and Roget. However, I occasionally take the liberty of coining a few words myself.
It's fairly universal that, no matter what a conversation is about when it starts, the participants always wind up talking about something else. You call someone up to say, ``You know, I think Calvin Coolidge was the greatest president America has ever had,'' and 15 minutes later you find yourself saying, ``Wow, I never knew you could make macaroni and cheese that way.''
If you want to say ``Hey, we're getting off the subject'' without actually saying ``Hey, we're getting off the subject,'' you could say either ``Hey, we're divagating'' or the terse ``We digress.'' But what do you say when you no longer care to divagate?
Say, for example, that you began your discussion about Calvin Coolidge and then found yourself saying: ``Oh, I know exactly what you mean. After that happened to my uncle, he had dizzy spells for weeks.'' But then you realize that you really wanted to win the argument about Coolidge. So you say: ``But getting back to Calvin Coolidge. Wasn't it great when he created the Foreign Service and granted citizenship to American Indians?'' What you're doing is the opposite of getting off the subject; unfortunately, Webster's doesn't have a word for this.
And so, shedding my columnist's facade, I have come to the rescue with a lexical solution. It is contradigress, ``contra'' meaning ``against, contrary or contrasting,'' and ``digress'' being when you got off the subject in the first place.
Another cavity in our language revealed itself when I heard a College of William and Mary student refer to a potential flame as his ``half-girlfriend.'' There must, I agonized, exist a word better than this hyphenated monstrosity, something more concise and more dignified.
My forage through the English language produced no synonyms. With the help of amateur philologist Maureen Thorson, who spent last summer at the Governor's Spanish Academy, the pursued word was eventually found in the lexicon of South American street slang. The word the speaker really wanted was jugadora (pronounced WHO-go-dor-a). So now he knows. Unless, of course, his jugadora has graduated to being his inamorata.
Before the hypersensitive among you cry discrimination, perhaps you'd care to know that the Spanish language also lets us use judador, which is something like a ``half-boyfriend'' (which no self-respecting speaker of English would say in the course of casual conversation, even over his own dead body).
So, like the Normans who invaded England in 1066, this column has perhaps made a minute addition to the English language. Or perhaps each of you will forget ``contradigress'' and ``jugadora'' sometime between now and your next meal. But we digress. MEMO: Jennifer Dziura is a senior at Cox High School. Her column appears
bimonthly. If you'd like to comment on her column, call INFOLINE at
640-5555 and enter category 6778 or write to her at 4565 Virginia Beach
Blvd., Virginia Beach, Va. 23462. ILLUSTRATION: Comic strip
PORTER MASON
by CNB