I was reading a book recently about the Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti. His patron was Maria Barbara, originally a princess in Portugal, but eventually the queen of Spain. She was a great enthusiast for music, or as the author of the book (Ralph Kirkpatrick) referred to her, she was a melomane.
What does that even mean? According to Merriam-Webster, it’s someone who “exhibits melomania.” Gee, thanks. Melomania, it seems, is someone who has “an inordinate liking for music.” Someone who has a mania for melody.
This is not what you’d call a common word. The COCA corpus has just one entry for melomania and one for melomane. Oh, wait, those are both in the same work. The Google Ngram Viewer provides a little more information, namely that this was a word that peaked around 1830:
(Click to embiggen in a separate tab)
Why would an author who was writing in the early 1950s use a word like melomane that was so old-fashioned? It’s possible that melomane was a term kicking around in early-music circles in the 1950s. Perhaps Kirkpatrick, who taught at Yale, liked the sound of this old word for writing about the past. Perhaps he just liked the word, period.
I observe that melomania spiked up again after the year 2000. But the numbers overall are so small that we might be looking at just a few uses overall in 1830 and again around 2005.
Anyway, this is another word to add to the curiosity cabinet; it doesn’t seem practical for everyday use. Unless of course we decide collectively that we want to revive it.
For origins, the word ninja. I doubt anyone would be surprised to learn that we got this word from Japanese. A ninja is someone who knows martial arts and is stealthy, especially someone who engages in assassination and other covert activities as a mercenary.
The Japanese word is nin (“endurance, stealth”) + ja (“person”). Apparently the term originates in Chinese, but for our purposes in English, it’s a Japanese loanword.
I was thinking about the word ninja because I was watching the Netflix series Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan. At one point in a particularly belligerent time in medieval Japan, one of the warlords decides to invade the prefecture of Iga, which is small but mountainous and heavily forested. The inhabitants did not have the military strength to directly confront the invaders, but they excelled at ninjutsu and were adept guerilla fighters, and they waged asymmetric warfare against the army. (“They were so good at these techniques irregular warfare, that this is what gave rise to the legends of the ninja of Iga.”) Although the warlord eventually prevailed, it was a brutal campaign that came at high cost to the invaders.
The word ninja entered English only in the 1960s. In fact, my first exposure to it was also the first attestation in the OED: it appeared in 1964 in the James Bond novel You Only Live Twice, which Bond fans will remember took place in Japan.[1] Children of the 1980s grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which, I would venture, was how an entire generation was exposed to the idea of ninjas and ninjutsu.
Fairly soon after the word ninja entered English—like, by the 1970s—it developed a second and more general meaning to describe someone who’s an expert at something:
- Pitching ninja (baseball)
- Woodworking ninjas
- Code ninjas (programmers)
- Knowledgebase ninjas
In this sense, it’s a synonym of words like whiz or guru. Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s been some controversy about people using “fill-in-the-skill ninja” terms as a question of cultural appropriation. (The same question applies to the word guru, actually.) That’s not a question I can resolve here, but at least now I know where ninja came from and something about its evolving sense in English.
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[1] I was surprised to see that the OED also has cites from Dr. No, Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and The Man with the Golden Gun. [^]
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