Friday words #253

Every once in a while, I run across a word that’s not only new to me but is a little, dunno, startling. Thus the word crapulent. I mean, you’d remember that word if you’d run across it before, wouldn’t you?

Anyway, I was reading a novel when I ran across it, and I had to stop immediately and look it up. The meaning is not obvious just from looking at the word, and it wasn’t even guessable from the context, which was the sentence “Did he go peacefully, dropping off into crapulent sleep?”

First, it doesn’t mean what it sounds like. Crapulent is defined as “sick from gross excess in drinking or eating.” There’s a related word crapulence, which refers to the sickness that one suffers from the previously mentioned excessive drinking or eating.

The word goes back to a Latin word crapula that refers to inebriation. The Romans in turn got the word from Greek, where it referred to “a drunken headache or nausea.” The Romans semantically combined the result (headache) with the cause (too much drinking), and we inherited this hybrid sense. We also expanded crapulent to describe people who are “given to gross intemperance,” as illustrated by this lovely example from the OED: “The crapulent monks.”

This is a rare word. In the iWeb corpus, which contains 14 billion words, crapulent shows up just 23 times. I imagine that to convey the meaning people generally use hungover or drunken or intemperate.  Per my interpretation of the context for the 23 hits that I found, it’s used mostly when people want to fling a highbrow insult like “the general Agustin Morales, who was as crapulent and bibacious as his predecessor” or “crapulent entitled sexist asshole Hollywood scumbags.” It does add a certain zing to the insult, I must admit. But I doubt I’ll be adding crapulent to my active vocabulary.

For origins today, I was looking something else up and saw that the word inauguration was trending. That seemed like a more timely term than the one I had in mind, and anyway, where does that come from? 

It’s not surprising to learn that it’s from Latin. The interesting part is the combination of in and augur. That’s the same augur that’s in augur well. Augurs (as we saw before) were officials in Rome who read the omens of bird flight “for guidance in public affairs.” (As an etymological aside, augur comes from a root meaning “to increase,” as in augment.) 

As part of these official duties, augurs blessed people who were being installed into a new office, or as the OED has it, inauguration is the action of “induction […] with auspicious ceremonies.” Douglas Harper cites a dictionary from 1842 that tied together the idea of augury with that of taking a new office: “If the signs observed by the inaugurating priest were thought favourable, the decree of men had the sanction of the gods.”

I didn’t watch the entirety of the inauguration ceremony this week, so I might have missed the part where priests scanned the skies looking for bird flight that indicated heavenly favo(u)r. But there was music and poetry and ceremonial recitations, which I guess is as close as we get these days.

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