Friend Tod introduced me recently to a term that is ancient but that has relevance for us in these long days of lockdown: acedia. If you look it up, you get a definition like “apathy, boredom” or maybe “spiritual torpor.”
But there’s a backstory to the word that explains a little better why it seems particularly apt today. The word is Greek, combining the roots a- for negation and kedos, meaning “care” or “anxiety.” So it originally meant something like “indifference” or “heedless.”
The word got attention from the early Christians who were working out things like what constituted sins and “evil thoughts.” In this early era, acedia was termed as “the noonday demon” (an expression that Andrew Solomon later used as the title of his book about depression). It was used to describe a condition in which a monk was suffering from a kind of cabin fever: “a strange combination of listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate,” as Jonathan Zecher describes it in an article.
The word acedia had fallen into disuse after the middle ages, but it turned up again in the 20th century. It was brought back to help describe the kind of spiritual malaise that people felt after the horrors of the century. You can see why Zecher feels like the word also applies today in an era where we, like hermit monks, are experiencing physical and emotional isolation leading to a condition that is something different from depression or anxiety. I recommend his article (link again) if you want to know more about the word’s journey through liturgical thinking.
Sorry about the downer there. Let’s turn attention to origins.
There are many names from literature that have become ordinary words. A couple of examples that come to mind are scrooge (from A Christmas Carol by Dickens) and grinch (from How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss).
Here’s one that surprised me, though: pooh-bah, as in grand pooh-bah. In case you’re not familiar with this word, it’s defined as “a person holding many public or private offices” or “a person in high position or of great influence.”
The word sounds vaguely silly, but one doesn’t want to judge a word if it comes from another language. But no, it sounds silly because it was intended to be silly. The word isn’t a borrowing; it was invented by Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan for the opera The Mikado, which is set in Japan. In the opera, a character named Pooh-bah holds all the offices in the town of Titipu except that of Lord High Executioner, and is therefore known as Lord High Everything Else. From this one character, the word emerged to describe anyone in a high position, or in some takes, “a pompous, self-important person.”
I was inspired to look into the word pooh-bah because I was rewatching the movie Topsy-Turvy by Mike Leigh, which dramatizes the creation and first production of the The Mikado. When I looked up whether the word pooh-bah had come out of this opera (yes), I learned that the opera spawned some other expressions as well, like short, sharp shock and let the punishment fit the crime. Or so says Wikipedia.
There are many ways that we get new words in English. Surely one of the coolest is when someone sitting at their desk makes up a name that is so perfect that it becomes a word on its own.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.