Apothaneintheloish (pronounced uh-poth-un-inn-th-loe-ish)
An
expression of a wish to die.
1968:
The construct was apo + thanein + thelo +
ish. The Ancient Greek prefix ἀπό-
(apó-) was from the preposition ἀπό (apó) (from, away from), from the
primitive Indo-European hepo (off, away), the ultimate source also of the
English words "off" & "of" and of (ab- came via
Latin). The English –ish was appended to
create the adjectival form. The -ish
suffix was from the Middle English -ish & -isch, from the Old English -isċ
(-ish (the suffix)), from the Proto-West Germanic -isk, from the Proto-Germanic
-iskaz (-ish), from the primitive Indo-European -iskos. It was cognate with the Dutch -s, the German
-isch (from which Dutch would gain -isch), the Norwegian, Danish & Swedish
-isk or -sk, the Lithuanian -iškas, the Russian -ский (-skij) and the Ancient
Greek diminutive suffix -ίσκος (-ískos).
It was used to create adjectives (standard and (in the modern era)
increasingly non-standard, even in slang as the stand-alone "ish"
indicating “sort of”, “kind of”, “tending towards” etc). In colloquial use it became a popular way to
create both adjectives & nouns with a diminutive or derogatory implication. The word was coined by the author Anthony
Burgess (1917–1993). Apothaneintheloish
is an adjective.
In Greek
mythology, Thantos was the god of death and the significance of Burgess's
choice was that Thantos was associated specifically with a “graceful, peaceful
departure from life”. So, a vision of
Thantos was a tap on the shoulder, a notice to quit the world and something
known in English as "the visitation
of the Angel of Death" and, except for those few wishing to go out in
a “blaze of glory”, as one's death goes, a visit from Thantos was about as good
as it got. Thantos appears sometimes in
commentaries by Freudians & neo-Freudians but Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
never used the word. He used Todestrieb (death drive), the construct
being Tod (death) + -es-
(in German a genitival interfix used to link elements in certain compounds) + Trieb
(sprout (but in the technical jargon of psychoanalysis specifically “drive” (in
the sense of “desire,
urge, impulse”)). Freud in his famous Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920)) borrowed the word (which he used more often in the plural
(Todestriebe) (death drives) from Russian psychiatrist Sabina Spielrein
(1885-1942 and a student and lover of Carl Jung (1875–1961)) who in 1912 had
published the essay Die Destruktion als
Ursache des Werdens (Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being). The relationship between Freud & Spielrein
was both convivial and entirely professional.
Thanatos came into popular use in psychoanalysis after it appeared in a
paper by Austrian-American psychologist Paul Federn (1871–1950 and, like Freud,
trained in Vienna). Federn used Thanatos
as a dichotomous contrast with eros (from the Ancient Greek ἔρως
(érōs) (love, desire”) which in
psychiatry) is used to describe the human “life drive” (the collective
instincts for self-preservation). In the
profession it's used also of the libido and it's not only among the Freudians
the link between the two uses is thought so fundamental.
The
Greek phrase Apothanein thelo (I want to die) concludes the epigraph of TS
Eliot’s (1888–1965) The Waste Land: “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis
meis vidiin ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις;
respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν
ϴέλω.” The text was from the satirical novel Satyricon, presumed written by the Roman
courtier Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter, circa 27–66), Eliot’s translation
being: “I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl
at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: ‘Sibyl, what do you
want?’ she answered: ‘I want to die.’”
The Satyricon was a
collection of tales, the misadventures of Trimalchio, a one-time gladiator in
the Roman Empire of the first century AD and the passage is one of the few
fragments of the text still extant. Sibyl
of Cumae was one of the great beauties of the age and Apollo, wanting her for
his own, offered to grant her any wish.
Without a moment’s thought she asked to “live for as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust.” Apollo granted her wish, but she anyway refused
his affections and she came to regret things, over the centuries growing older
and more decrepit but unable to die.
What she had wanted was an eternal youth but instead decayed into a
figure tiny, frail and confined to her bed.
When Trimalchio speaks of her in the Satyricon,
he describes her as a tourist attraction, a withered, ancient relic, longing to
die. As recounted by the Roman Poet Ovid
(Publius Ovidius Naso; 43 BC–17 AD) in his Metamorphoses,
Sibyl lived a thousand years and as she shrunk and shrivelled, eventually she
was kept in an ampulla (jar); in her
final years, only the faint echo of her voice remained. She might have said, as the 99 year old Archbishop
Daniel Mannix (1864–1963; Archbishop of Melbourne 1917-1963) grew fond of
saying: “I have lived too long, but that
is not my fault”. That would have
been half correct but, given Sibyl’s calling of prophesy, she had only herself
to blame.
Apothaneintheloish
appeared first in 1968 in an essay written by Anthony Burgess and published in
The Listener:
“Waking crapulous and apothaneintheloish, as
I do most mornings these days, I find a little loud British gramophone music
over the bloody mary helps me adjust to the daily damnation of writing.” It can be translated as: “Suffering from taking
too much strong drink and feeling I want to die.”
Burgess
had an extraordinary knowledge of words so probably felt entitled to kick
language around a bit and it’s likely he’d not much have been concerned at any
pedant drawing a red circle around the appended –ish, content the linguistic sin
of mixing an English suffix into a otherwise Greek formation was minor compared
with the world gaining a new adjective. Such
was the skill of Burgess that in his writing the rare and unusual words slurred
effortlessly into the text, avoiding the tiresome, jarring effect achieved by
some who seem intent to flaunt what Henry Fowler (1858–1933) in his austere A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
(1926) called the “pride of knowledge”; Henry Fowler knew sin when he saw it on
the page. Others can do it too: the
historian Piers Brendon (1940) made the discovery of novel forms a pleasure and
when reading Umberto Eco’s (1932–2016) Il
pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum (1988)), some can’t resist keeping
pencil & paper at hand, just to note down the most memorable.
Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.
Burgess
though probably made the trick most fun and without Burgess, would it have
become known even slightly that vaccine can be an adjective? It means “cow-like” so is a word for those
who find bovine too repetitive or a bit common.
He also included gems like myrmidon (a faithful follower of someone or
some institution who follows orders without demur), oneiric (of, suggestive of
or pertaining to dreams), proleptic (the act of anticipation) and exiguity which
should baffle most used to anything similar; it means “a tiny quantity” and was
from the Latin exiguus (scanty), the
antonym for which was the Pythonesque sounding adaequatus, the perfect passive participle of adaequō, the construct being ad-
(near, at; towards, to) + aequō (make equal, level or smooth).
Apothaneintheloish
will of late have gained a new audience with the publication in January 2024 of
The Devil Prefers Mozart, On Music and
Musicians, 1962-1993, a compilation (Carcanet Press, edited by PaulPhillips (b 1956), an associate professor at Stanford University)) of Burgess’s
(mostly) previously published pieces on the topic of music (something he grants
and unexpectedly wide vista). Although
now remembered mostly as a novelist and literary critic, his attachment to
music was life-long, reflected in the breadth of the 75 chapters of essays,
reviews and letters plus the odd interview & transcription. The book is divided into five parts (1) Musical Musings which ranges from
thoughts on Shakespeare to the Beatlemania of the 1960s and the punk movement a
decade later, (2) Composers and Their
Music which is a list hardly less eclectic, including Monteverdi, Mozart,
Wagner & Kurt Weill, (3) Burgess and
His Music, a more personal assortment of material including some intriguing
liner notes, (4) Performers and
Performances which includes some interesting reflections on the less
obvious aspects of affording a primacy to “the singer rather than the song” and
(5) Of Opera, the West’s supreme art
form. Of particular interest to some
will the focus on some of the now less than fashionable British composers,
notably William Walton (1902–1983) and Edward Elgar (1857–1934).
It’s really not even necessary to have
any great interest in music to be amused by this book because probably without
the reader realizing it, what is so often being explored is the interplay
between words and music, Burgess understanding “everything is text” even before
the postmodernists made a cult of it. It’s
worth reading also for the waspish comments about the Austrian-born music
journalist Hans Keller, best understood after listening to the composition Homage to Hans Keller (1982), written by
Burgess in reaction to Keller’s review of his opera Blooms of Dublin (1982) based on James Joyce’s (1882–1941) Ulysses
(1922). Scored for four tubas (which
should be a hint), the “homage” was very much in the spirit of Metal Machine Music which in 1975 Lou
Reed (1942–2013) handed to his record company. In that vein, an irony of his fame was that he
became best known as the author of the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) and that happened because of the notoriety
achieved by the film version (1971), directed by Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999).
Cover of a first edition A Clockwork Orange (1962), signed by the author, (Aus$18,975.08 on eBay (left)) and a promotional poster for the film version (1971, right). The film was based on the abridged US edition of the book which omitted the final chapter in which the protagonist undergoes something of a redemption. That does change the moral effect but some critics thought the distinction slight, the film just too gratuitous in its depiction of sexual violence for the original's anyway ambiguous conclusion to be rendered much different.
In Flame into Being (1985), his biography of DH Lawrence (1885–1930), Burgess would write: “The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d’esprit (literally “game of the spirit” and used here to suggest something intended as a quick comment on an idea rather than anything substantial) knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation, and the same may be said of Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).” Scholars cataloguing his papers later found A Clockwork Orange was some two years in the making but that he didn’t deign even to mention the book by name was an indication of something and many suspect he’d have been not unhappy if remembered for the book and not the film which gained him a new audience, if not exactly the one he’d have preferred. However, for those who like words, The Devil Prefers Mozart, On Music and Musicians contains enough expected Burgessian gems and like apothaneintheloish, there aren’t many other places to find multiguous, parthenogenetical, theodician, apodemoniosis, stichomythia or quinquennium.
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