Apricate

Apricate (pronounced ap-roh-keyt)

(1) To sunbathe, to bask in the sun.

(2) To disinfect and freshen by exposing to the sun; to sun.

(3) Figuratively, to uncover secrets (based on the idea of “exposing them to the light”.

1620s: The construct was the Latin aprīc(us) (sunny; exposed to the sun; having lots of sunshine; warmed by the sun) +‎ -ate.  Aprīcus was from aperiō (to open; to uncover), from the primitive Indo-European hepo (off, from) & hwer- (to cover, shut) + -cus (the suffix forming relational adjectives from nouns).  The Latin verb was apricari (to bask in the sun; to warm oneself by sitting in the sunlight).  The suffix -ate was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate).  Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel.  It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate).  Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee.  The forms were not cognate with “apricot”, although the latter was influenced by aprīcus.  The English verb apricate became rare in the twentieth century and use spiked only in the last decade but this is thought a statistical quirk because of the proliferation of instances on the internet explaining the rarity.  When actually used functionally, it’s mostly as a poetic or literary device, often to capture the simple pleasure and peacefulness of “sitting in the sun” although in politics and journalism there is the figurative sense of “to uncover secrets” (based on the idea of “exposing them to the light (of publicity)”.  Apricate, apricating & apricated are verbs and apricity & aprication are nouns; the noun plural is aprications.

The noun apricity (“the light or warmth of the Sun” and in its occasional use often use to impart the idea of “the warmth of the Sun in winter”) was from the Latin aprīcitās (the noun of quality from aprīcus) is said by more than one source to be the most commonly used variant (in the sense of “least rare”) but the numbers are distorted by the gathered data including the internet’s many lists of rare, obscure or weird words.  Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.

Snowbird: An apricating Lindsay Lohan on the Greek island of Mykonos in the Aegean, May. 2024.  Lindsay Lohan is a “snowbird” (in the sense of one who in winter travels to warmer, sunnier places).

Among those who long for apricity are the so-called “snowbirds” (those who avoid the cold by travelling to warmer climate).  Surprisingly perhaps, the use to describe those who flee the chill for the warmth of Florida or the Greek Islands, isn’t documented until the 1950s and for more than half a century before that, a “snowbird” was a cocaine dealer, the use extending by the 1970s to those with the habit of the odd line.  Only a few lexicographers acknowledge the (debatable) existence of “apricitie” (the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) including it though it doesn’t appear in the concise version (COED) and all appear to cite the entry in Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie or An Interpreter of Hard English Words (1623): “The warmenes of the Sunne in winter”.  Even among rare words, “apricitie” is a rarity but give the rhythmic possibilities and the obvious nostalgic value, it surprising it’s not more used as a literary device.  The lexicographers are probably sceptical because of the suggestion Mr Cockeram’s entry was either (1) a spelling mistake or (2) his own invention based on the better credentialed “apricity” (both not uncommon phenomenon in the early dictionaries).

Signature Claw Clip Petite in Dark Havana by Apricité Studios.

Maybe apricitie got tared with the brush of association with other obscure words because in his Letters to Squire Pedant (1856) Lorenzo Altisonant (Samuel Klinefelter Hoshour, (1803-1883 and described as “an emigrant to the West”) wrote: “These humicubations [the act or practice of lying on the ground], the nocturnal irrorations [a sprinkling or wetting with dew], and the dankishness [the quality of being dankish (dark, damp & humid)] of the atmosphere, generated by a want of apricity, were extremely febrifacients [tending to induce fever].  So maybe it got a bad name but apricate, apricite, apricity and the other forms are (1) easy to spell, (2) easy to pronounce and (3) can be used to describe something often described so it’s surprising there’s never been much of a revival; in English there is no discernible pattern about why some words are resuscitated and flourish and some remain moribund.  Actually, because the politics of climate change have made what used to be a “safe, go-to” topic of conversation now at least potentially dangerous, it may be there’s a revival of interest in ways to discuss the subject and not just the sunshine.  A “vacuum-cleaner” language, shamelessly English has for centuries adopted words for any number of tongues, retaining some (modified and not) while discarding others.  So it’s profligate in its forms and if one tires of describing the colder months as “chilly” or “wintery”, there’s “hibernal”, “brumal” or “hiemal”.  Then there’s snow and for that there’s “subnivean” (situated or occurring under the snow) or “niveous” (of or relating to snow; resembling snow (as in whiteness); snowy).  There are organisms (they’re probably not best described as “creatures”) which inhabit a niche in which things are subnivean and they are known as “psychrophilic” (thriving at a relatively low temperature), as opposed to “thermophiles” (which like it hot) and “mesophiles” (which insist on living in a “goldilocks zone”).  All of these can be used figuratively so women shivering in offices where men set the thermostat (more than one study has confirmed this really is a thing) can call their tormenters thermophiles.