I have a screensaver on my work computer (a Mac) that displays a word of the day. I almost always recognize the word, even if I couldn’t necessarily give you a precise definition. This week, though, I got one that I’d never seen: nocuous.
Actually, I had seen the term before, but not in a way that was immediately obvious to me. That is, I know the word innocuous, which means something like “harmless” or “not likely to offend.” If innocuous means harmless or inoffensive, then nocuous must mean … harmful? Offensive?
Mostly. The various definitions I found all list “harmful.” But the word takes a bit of a turn at that point. It doesn’t just mean “offensive”; definitions include words like “venomous” and especially “noxious.” Noxious and nocuous both go back to the Latin word nocere, meaning “to harm.”
Are there other words like this? Why yes, there are. Of course you know the word innocent. Did you know there’s also a word nocent? Same deal as with nocuous: essentially means “harmful,” and is also based on nocere.
Some of our everyday English words are what are called unpaired words: words that seem like they should have an opposite but don’t. A few examples are ruthless, unkempt, dismayed, and feckless. There was a piece in the New Yorker about 25 years ago called “How I Met My Wife” that plays brilliantly with unpaired words. It begins like this:
It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.
I hadn’t really given much thought to the words innocuous and innocent before, but I would probably have guessed that those also were unpaired words. So I was surprised to discover that they’re not. Their opposites are obscure, but they do exist. Whether I’ll find occasion to use them remains to be seen.
For origins this week, the word pedigree. This means ancestral lineage, and because lineage was particularly important to inheritance-based aristocracy, the word pedigree took on connotations of purity and exclusivity. Thus a pedigreed dog is better, some might say, than the pupper you got at the shelter.
The word pedigree has its origins in the concern for lineage, but in an unexpected way: a kind of literal metaphor or perhaps metaphoric literal. It started as the French word pe de grue or pie de grue, which means “crane’s foot.” The word grue is a rare and now obsolete word for crane, the bird. Pe or pie is “foot,” which we see in pedestrian and many other ped/pod/pus-based words.
We got the word pedigree in Norman times, certainly a time when ancestry and lineage were extremely important for things like inheriting land, not to mention the English throne.[1] The notion is that in ancestry diagrams, the lines that showed descent were reminiscent of either a crane’s foot or perhaps the tracks that a crane leaves.
As a linguistic aside, it seems like it is and was common to represent ancestry as a tree, so perhaps another surprise about the word pedigree is that we didn’t somehow end up with a term based on an arboreal metaphor: branches or roots. However, Douglas Harper cites someone who said that “the crane … figures in many similes, proverbs, and allusions,” so perhaps that explains it. It’s not the only time that words didn’t follow the obvious path.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
______
[1] I suppose that we’ve always lived in times when such things are important; the field of probate law is still much concerned with lineage. [^]