Not long ago, friend Becky asked whether I knew the term anacrusis. Not a clue. When I looked it up, though, I realized that I knew the concept quite well by another name.
Becky is a singer, which might help set the stage, so to speak. In music, the word anacrusis refers to one or more unstressed notes that are played (or sung) before the downbeat at the beginning of a song or phrase. Or to cite a truly remarkable description of anacrusis from Wikipedia, “The grouping of one or more antecedent tone events to a perceived phrase gestalt may be rhythmically evoked by their temporal proximity to the phrase’s first downbeat (perceived phrase onset).”
Dictionaries that I consulted say that anacrusis is a synonym for [the] upbeat. The term I knew for this is [the] pickup.
There’s a great example at the beginning of the song “Happy Birthday to You.” The word “happy” is an anacrusis before you get to “birthday,” which is the first downbeat in the song.
Another example that they note in Wikipedia is the song “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles: “[1-2-3] In the TOWN where I was BORN …”, where “in the” is an anacrusis.
Anacrusis is a technical term in music, but it’s also used for poetry. Someone whose YouTube handle is TheStereotypicalScot uses this example (video) of anacruses (underlined) in a well-known verse:
Mary had a little lamb
whose fleece was white as snow
and everywhere that Mary went
the lamb was sure to go
If you say this out loud, you’ll see how the the words that follow the anacruses are where the stress begins in each line.
For origins this week, I was put onto a word history from an unexpected source: the show Ted Lasso on Apple TV. In season 1, episode 9, Ted and his boss get into a discussion about the origins of the word procrastinate. It looks Latiny-Greeky (that pro- prefix), but beyond that, nothing really stands out as a familiar root.
So, yes, it is a Latin term. (No Greek origins, for a change.) The Romans had a word prōcrāstināre that meant the same as the word we use today: “to put off till the next day, to defer, delay” (OED).[1]
In Latin, the word’s meaning was more transparent than it is in English. The pro- prefix has a number of meanings in Latin; in this case, it’s the pro of “in favor of.” The second part comes from an adjective crastinus, ultimately from crās, which means “tomorrow.” There’s a nice example of crās in Wiktionary: Crās Mārcus lūdōs vidēbit, “Tomorrow Marcus will see the games.” I haven’t been able to find any other words in English that use the cras root except the extremely obscure word crastin. Which I bet you hadn’t heard either.
I did learn that our word procrastinate is sometimes used with an object (that is, it’s transitive). The OED has cites like “You prevent yourself from procrastinating the movement” (1964) and “This issue has been procrastinated for six months” (2006). Me, I don’t recall ever hearing it used like this, so that was new.
This topic is more evidence that you just never know where you’ll learn something about words. It’s also possible that watching TV is a way of procrastinating the things I’m actually supposed to be working on, but I’m not going to think about that.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] It always pleases me to learn that people from long ago had the same issues we did. There’s probably a Latin text somewhere full of self-help advice, including how to overcome procrastination. [^]
It looks like there was also an earlier verb “procrastine,” but it’s easy to see why that word failed to stick. Most English words ending with -ine are adjectives — elephantine, serpentine — and nouns — turbine, chlorine, routine. There are exceptions, of course — entwine, decline (which was a n. before it was a v.), combine — but very few that have more than 2 syllables. Discipline is the only 2+-syllable -ine verb I can find (though I didn’t make an exhaustive search), but it, like decline, was a noun before it was a verb.