Pre-note: Today the American Dialect Society will be voting on the word(s) of the year of 2021. Check out the candidates on their website. Some great words this year, including no-bones day, NFT, Fauci ouchie, hard pants, The Great Resignation, vax/vaxx (of course), and many more!
On to business. This week’s new-to-me word is, I believe, brand-new. It comes from the linguist and editor James Harbeck, who as far as I know made up this word just a few weeks ago.
As Harbeck explains, a polymath is someone who knows many things (poly “many, much” + math “learning”). But there’s also a different way of knowing things: knowing about them. Harbeck’s example is when he worked in a bookstore and knew about the shelves full of classic literature—enough to be able to direct patrons to the books—but he certainly hadn’t read all the classics himself. Based on the word polymath, he coined the word perimath to describe someone who knows about many things. He constructed this from peri, meaning “around,” as in perimeter, and math “learning.”
This strikes me as a useful word indeed. The phenomenon has been recognized for a long time—as Samuel Johnson said, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
There are words that are kind of similar to perimath, but not exactly. For example, the word dilettante also describes someone who has superficial knowledge of a subject, but it’s a dismissive term: a dabbler. Plus someone can be a dilettante in one area but an expert in another, whereas perimath, like polymath, addresses the totality of one’s knowledge. Or something like that.
I’m an editor (in case you didn’t know that), and one of the things I really like about the job is that you get exposure to a lot of different things. You don’t necessarily become expert—that’s the role of the authors you’re editing—but you do learn about a lot of subjects. Writers often dig into their subject, working on it for lengthy periods. Editors, on the other hand, often move from project to project and domain to domain, meaning that they accumulate (some) knowledge about a wide variety of topics.
Because of the nature of the job, editors also spend a lot of time looking things up: rules, conventions, spellings, names, … facts. To go back to Johnson, editors therefore also learn where to find information upon a subject. As such, editing is a vocation that’s perfectly suited to those who aspire to be or enjoy being perimaths. And as Harbeck notes, librarians are also necessarily perimaths.
Origins. A recurring clue in the New York Times crossword is some variant of “Soccer chant.” The answer is the word olé (just OLE, no accent, for purposes of the crossword). It’s a word that comes up often because it has a lot of vowels for a three-letter word (or that’s my theory).
I eventually got around to wondering about the word. I first looked in some dictionaries to see whether we can even consider it an English word. It shows up in M-W, American Heritage, Oxford (Lexico), and the OED. I’m going to generously assume that sure, it’s an English word, a synonym for the word bravo. (Another import, of course.)
We got the word olé—OBVIOUSLY—from Spanish. Can we trace it back any further than that? Yes, we can. Well, maybe.
Probably most people know that Spain was occupied for about 700 years by the Moors, who in the process brought Islam and Arabic to Europe. This long cultural mixing had a strong influence on Spanish as that language developed from Latin into its own idioma. (Okay, idiomas, plural, since there are many Spanish-ish languages/dialects on the Iberian peninsula.) An oft-cited stat claims that about 4000 words in modern Spanish come from Arabic.[1]
Olé appears to be one of those words. A theory you’ll see a lot is that olé is, in effect, the name Allah (“God”), used as an interjection. An ornate version of this story is told by Elizabeth Gilbert in a TED talk about creative genius (video):
Centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. […] And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, “Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God.”
Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from “Allah, Allah, Allah,” to “Olé, olé, olé,” which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, “Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo,” incomprehensible, there it is—a glimpse of God.
This proposed etymology has its skeptics. A Spanish scholar of Arab has called this a falso arabismo (“false Arabism”). Another scholar notes that “the phonetic development strains credulity.” So it’s possible that the Allah-to-olé story is a kind of etymythology: a story that sounds good but that, sadly, just ain’t true.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[1] Norman French had profound influence on English, of course, after William conquered the Saxons in 1066. [^]