I got a new word recently from the editor Christian Wilkie on Twitter:
The word tergiversation was not only new to me, but opaque: I could not imagine what it meant. (I mean, I did deduce that it was not a good thing.)
So I looked it up. Tergiversation is “to use evasions or ambiguities,” or in more colloquial terms, to beat around the bush. It’s a synonym for equivocate. There’s a verb also: to tergiversate. The term can also have the somewhat different meaning of “to change sides,” or in other words, to apostatize.
The origin is helpful in this case. It comes from Latin tergiversari, meaning to turn (vertere) one’s back (tergum). That certainly explains the apostasy sense—turning your back on a belief or on others. The meaning of “to be evasive” is a little less obvious from this etymology, though there is the sense of not facing or addressing something directly.
It’s a pretty obscure word. The COCA corpus has a mere 7 hits for tergiversate, and they all come from just 2 movie scripts. The word tergiversation has only 4 hits, one of which is from Newsweek: “Lost in the thick soup of apologies, bluster, and tergiversation that comprised Rupert Murdoch’s testimony before the Leveson Inquiry into the ethics of the British press was a dark forecast by the man whose name is synonymous with unethical newspapers.”
Given that there are better-known synonyms, it doesn’t feel like there’s a crying need for this word. But it definitely falls into the category of obscure-but-fun terms that one can pride oneself on knowing when encountering it on, say, Twitter.
For origins this week, I go back to what seems to be a favorite of mine: words based on phrases. I’ve visited this a couple of times before. The first visit was with terms that are based on “opening words” of texts, like subpoena, dirge, a hail-Mary pass, and our ABCs, which lexicographer Orin Hargrave suggested calling prolegoyms. The second visit was with the expressions hocus pocus, pony up, and culprit, which all seem to be corruptions of texts.
And here we are again. Today I have a couple more words based on texts.
The first is mass, in the sense of a church service. In medieval Latin, the word was missa. One theory is that this came from the Latin phrase Ite, messa est meaning “Go; the dismissal is made,” i.e., the service has been dismissed. In the phrase, messa means “dismissal,” which comes from the Latin word mittere, meaning to let go or send. A related word is the word mission, as in sending someone to do a thing.
The second phrase-based word is mumpsimus. This refers a custom or belief that someone sticks to stubbornly even when it’s shown to be wrong. A minor example is continuing to pronounce a name wrong even when you’ve been corrected. A more substantive example would be adhering to a philosophy when that has shown to be erroneous.
The word derives from the Dutch philosopher Erasmus, who had a parable-type story about a priest who instead of saying Quod ore sumpsimus (“What we have received in the mouth”) after communion says Quod ore mumpsimus, with an M.[1] As the tale goes, even when this mistake was pointed out to the priest, he refused to change: “I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus.” (Erasmus used this story to illustrate how old-school church fathers were not accepting his new, improved translation of the New Testament.) You can read a lot more about mumpsimus, including on Wikipedia and on Nancy Friedman’s blog, both of which explain the phrase-based origin of the word.
For the sake of completeness, I’ll also mention placebo, which I’ve written about before, and which is from the Latin phrase “I will please.”
Every time I find more words based on phrases, I wonder how many more there might be out there. I hope there are lots!
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[1] Priests in pervious eras were supposed to know Latin, since the liturgy was entirely in that language, but there are many anecdotes of priests who had, you know, imperfect grasp of that language. [^]