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.

Etiolate

Etiolate (pronounced ee-tee-uh-leyt)

(1) In botany, to cause a plant to whiten or grow pale by excluding light.

(2) To cause to become weakened or sickly; to remove vigor.

(3) To drain of color; to make pale and sickly-looking; to become pale or blanched.

(4) In literary theory (usually as “etiolated verse” or etiolated text”), to revise a text to remove fanciful or pretentious forms.

1791: The past participle of the seventeenth century French étioler (to blanch) and used to mean “to make pale, to remove a light source from plants during growth to induce them to form in a lighter hue”, presumed to be a derivative of a Norman French dialect form of with the appended -ate suffix.  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 idea in French may have been derived from the notion of “to make the color of straw” or even literally “to become like straw” and it was used in a branch of horticulture to “turn a plant white by growing it in darkness”, the attraction of white being the association with “delicacy; purity” and it was a commercial approach in market gardens to create “high priced vegetables” and was from étiolé, past participle of the seventeenth century étioler (to blanch), probably from the Norman dialect étule (a stalk) and the Old French esteule (straw, field of stubble) from the Latin stupla from stipula (straw; stubble).  Etiolate is a verb & adjective, etiolation is a noun, etiolative is a noun & adjective, etiolated is a verb & adjective, etiolating is a verb and etiolatively is an adverb; the noun plural is etiolations.

In literary theory, “to etiolate” a text is to remove or revise the “purple passages” (known just as alliteratively also as “purple prose”).  In literature, purple passages are those sections of a text which are overly elaborate, flowery, or extravagant in style, often prioritizing ornate or decorative language and the use of needlessly long words, the meaning of which is often obscure.  Such writing is thought a literary self-indulgence or a mere pretentious display of knowledge; grandiose execution at the expense of clarity, the usual critique being “style over substance”.  The phrase is almost certainly derived from the historic use of the once rare and expensive purple dye being restricted (actually by statute or edict in some places) to royalty and even when availability became wider, the association with luxury & wealth continued.  The idea has long been a tool of critics, Roman lyric poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) in his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry, 19 BC) referring disapprovingly to the purpureus… pannus (a purple piece of cloth), the irrelevant insertion of a grandiloquent or melodramatic passage into a work.  Horace thought this disruptive at best and absurd at worst and “purple passages” continues to be used to describe writing which is needlessly ornate, florid and usually discordantly incongruous.  Used almost always pejoratively (although there do seem to be some admirers), comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) might have called such flourishes “formalism”.  Amusingly, in an example of how idiomatic use in English must baffle those learning the language, “purple patch”, also once applied to such tortured text, would come to be used to describes any particular good period or performance (in any context), the use always wholly positive.

Pencil sketch (circa 1845) of Anne Brontë (1820–1849) by her sister Charlotte (1816–1855).

What is a purple passage is a cultural construct and in literature fashions change, some works regarded still regarded as “literary classics” written in a style which if release now would be thought absurd or a parody.  That’s because such judgments tend now to be made on the basis of the manner in which people “actually talk” and although that is highly variable and influenced by social class and regional traditions, in the age of modern media there is probably a broad (if not at the margins wholly accurate) understanding of the range and it’s to this literature need to adhere.  So, consider what Anne Brontë has the Reverend Michael Millward say in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848):

“But I have heard that, with some persons, temperance—that is, moderation—is almost impossible; and if abstinence be an evil (which some have doubted), no one will deny that excess is a greater. Some parents have entirely prohibited their children from tasting intoxicating liquors; but a parent’s authority cannot last for ever; children are naturally prone to hanker after forbidden things; and a child, in such a case, would be likely to have a strong curiosity to taste, and try the effect of what has been so lauded and enjoyed by others, so strictly forbidden to himself—which curiosity would generally be gratified on the first convenient opportunity; and the restraint once broken, serious consequences might ensue. I don’t pretend to be a judge of such matters, but it seems to me, that this plan of Mrs. Graham’s, as you describe it, Mrs. Markham, extraordinary as it may be, is not without its advantages; for here you see the child is delivered at once from temptation; he has no secret curiosity, no hankering desire; he is as well acquainted with the tempting liquors as he ever wishes to be; and is thoroughly disgusted with them, without having suffered from their effects.”

Once that text is etiolated, the parson is suggesting if one’s children are introduced to strong drink under parental supervision, they’ll be less likely to grow up as drunken philanders and sluts.  Did, in general discourse, even the most loquacious Church of England clergy of the 1840s talk in the way the author would have us believe or did novelists write in an elaborated, formalized style because that’s what their readers wanted?  It can’t be certain because there are only letters and no audio recordings; such transcripts as we have are from formal, set piece events like public addresses or debates in parliament which are hardly representative but on the basis of what was reported as the way “educated folk” spoke in court proceedings, it was with nothing like the prolixity of Ms Brontë’s reverend gentleman.  But that was the way fiction so often was written and the works of some who have contributed much to the canon must strike the modern reader as “artificially ornate” including John Milton (1608–1674), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Herman Melville (1819–1891) and Thomas Hardy (1840–1928).  Write now as they did now and expect to be accused of writing purple passages.

Beans, etiolated (left) and not (right).

For most of human history, the purpose in agriculture was to cultivate plants for optimal growth and productivity but in the eighteenth century the technique of deliberate etiolation emerged as a niche industry with specific goals.  What the gardeners did was at certain point in a plant’s development to deprive it of light while continuing to supply water and fertilizer.  What this cause was for the foliage to lose its natural color and tend towards being white, manifested usually in a “straw-like” coloring although some outcomes truly were white.  Additionally, many plants would grow with long, weak & slender stems, the elongation thought elegant compared with the thick, robust structures of those which remained exposed to natural light.  In biological terms, what the plants were doing was devoting all available energy to grow longer in the search for light, that essential element of photosynthesis, the process with which plants convert the energy from light (historically sunlight) into the chemical energy (notably sugars) used by their metabolism.

Delightfully etiolated: A stunningly pale Lindsay Lohan leaving the Byron & Tracey salon, Beverly Hills, California, September 2011.

Although the technique was used of seedlings which were started indoors or in a sheltered spot, encouraging early growth before being transplanted outside in the spring, etiolated plants were valued most for their aesthetic appeal, the association of white with not only delicacy & purity but also wealth because the pale complexion of the rich was a symbol of a privileged existence not spent toiling in the fields under the harsh sun which so darkened the skin of peasants.  Thus, etiolated plants, with their long, slender stems were prized for their visual appeal in gardens and floral arrangements while small, leafed vegetables in an unusually pale hue were prized by the chefs of the rich because they were so useful in making food into “plate art” a thing then as now and that such produce invariably lacked taste was just a price to be paid for the effect.  Of course etiolation tended to weaken plants so it was only ever a niche product for a high-priced market segment but, in controlled conditions, it did prove a useful technique in selective breeding for specific traits and it’s believed some of the long-stemmed plants still cultivated today are varieties which date for the era.

Natural selection means plants do tend to grow towards the light but many like also to grow vertically, something Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) had plenty of time to observe while serving in Berlin’s Spandau prison the twenty year sentence he was lucky to have been handed by the IMT (International Military Tribunal) in the first Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) for war crimes (Count three of the indictment) and crimes against humanity (Count 4).  In his clandestine prison diary (Spandauer Tagebücher (Spandau: The Secret Diaries) (1975)) he noted the mixed behaviour of the seeds he planted:

June 25, 1951: A month ago I planted peas, in groups of three, at depths of seven, fifteen, twenty-five, and forty centimeters, and watered them plentifully.  Today I undertake a cautious excavation. Even when the eye was down, the shoot turned in a sharp arc and grew vertically upward. None of the many shoots left the vertical by so much as a few degrees, not even those that germinated at a depth of forty centimeters.  Only one pea at a depth of twenty-five centimeters lost its sense of direction and grew into a confused snarl of thick threads.  In greenhouses, heating cables often keep the temperatures under the roots higher than on the surface.  So it cannot be the sun’s warmth.  A pine tree twenty meters tall growing by a shady cliff in the Black Forest does not grow toward the light, but vertically upward. Gravity, then?  It is particularly important for technology, which tries to achieve reactions similar to that of the pea, to investigate such guidance mechanisms.  New experiment.  I have dug a pit forty centimeters in depth.  At the bottom of it I lay out a row of alternating beans and peas. I close off the side toward the south with a pane of glass.  Then I fill in the pit with topsoil.  The arrangement is such that the surface of the soil is just as far from the seeds as the pane of glass.  Consequently warmth and light operate with equal intensity on both sides.  If growth is determined by one of these influences, the peas would have to grow toward the glass.  But I am still assuming that the plants have a tendency to oppose the pull of gravity.

August 22, 1951: Once again the peas have grown upward with amazing directional impulse, without reacting to the sunlight offered from the side.  Out of thirty peas, eleven have found the long way, forty centimeters, to the surface. Two peas gave up after they had grown twenty centimeters, and several others became impatient with this long distance for growing.  About eight centimeters under the surface of the soil they sent out side shoots with formed leaves.  But these peas, too, were disciplined enough to abandon these energy-consuming shoots after half a centimeter. What vital energy is displayed in these physical achievements, elaborating from a tiny round pea a tube one to one and a half millimeters in thickness and forty centimeters in length.  As I suspected, no such strong biological “instinct” can be ascribed to the beans. Out of six beans, only a single one tried to make its way to the surface, and it too gave up several centimeters before it reached its goal, while the others, obviously confused, sent shoots out in various directions from the seed.  What brings about such different behavior in such closely related plants?

Obliterate

Obliterate (pronounced uh-blit-uh-reyt (U) or oh-blit-uh-reyt (non-U))

(1) To remove or destroy all traces of something; do away with; destroy completely.

(2) In printing or graphic design, to blot out or render undecipherable (writing, marks, etc.); fully to efface.

(3) In medicine, to remove an organ or another body part completely, as by surgery, disease, or radiation.

1590–1600: From the Latin oblitterātus, perfect passive participle of oblitterō (blot out), from oblinō (smear over) and past participle of oblitterāre (to efface; cause to disappear, blot out (a writing) & (figuratively) cause to be forgotten, blot out a remembrance), the construct being ob- (a prefixation of the preposition ob (in the sense of “towards; against”)) + litter(a) (also litera) (letter; script) + -ātus (-ate).  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.  True synonyms include black out, eliminate, exterminate, annihilate, eradicate, delete, erase & expunge because to obliterate something is to remove all traces.  Other words often used as synonyms don’t of necessity exactly convey that sense; they include obscure, ravage, smash, wash out, wipe out, ax, cancel and cut.  Obliterate & obliterated are verds & adjetives, obliteration & obliterator are nouns, obliterature & obliterating are nouns, verb & adjective, obliterable & obliterative are adjectives and obliteratingly is an adverb; the noun plural is obliterations.

Social anxiety can be "obliterated".  Who knew?

The verb obliterate was abstracted from the phrase literas scribere (write across letters, strike out letters).  The noun obliteration (act of obliterating or effacing, a blotting out or wearing out, fact of being obliterated, extinction) dates from the 1650s, from the Late Latin obliterationem (nominative obliteratio), the noun of action from the past-participle stem of oblitterāre (to efface; cause to disappear, blot out (a writing) & (figuratively) cause to be forgotten, blot out a remembrance).  The related late fourteenth century noun oblivion (state or fact of forgetting, forgetfulness, loss of memory) was from the thirteenth century Old French oblivion and directly from the Latin oblivionem (nominative oblivio) (forgetfulness; a being forgotten) from oblivisci, the past participle of oblitus (forget) of uncertain origin.  Oblivion is if interest to etymologists because of speculation about a semantic shift from “to be smooth” to “to forget”, the theory based on the construct being ob- (using ob in the sense of “over”) + the root of lēvis (smooth).  For this there apparently exists no documentary evidence either to prove or disprove the notion.  The Latin lēvis (rubbed smooth, ground down) was from the primitive Indo-European lehiu-, from the root (s)lei- (slime, slimy, sticky).

Obliterature

The noun obliterature is a special derived form used in literary criticism, the construct being oblit(erate) + (lit)erature.  It describes works of literature in some way "obliterated or mad void", the most celebrated (or notorious according to many) being those which "interpreted" things in a manner not intended by the original author but the words is applied also to texts deliberately destroyed, erased or rendered unreadable, either as an artistic statement or as a result of censorship, neglect, or decay.  La biblioteca de Babel" (The Library of Babel (1941)) by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was a short story which imagined a universe consisting of an infinite library containing every possible book but all volumes are some way corrupted or comprise only random strings of characters; all works wholly unintelligible and thus useless.  The chaotic library was symbolic of the most extreme example of obliterature in that all works had been rendered unreadable and devoid of internal meaning.

Nazis burning books, Berlin, 1933.

Probably for a long as writing has existed, there has been censorship (and its companion: self-censorship).  Some censorship is official government policy while countless other instances exist at institutional level, sometimes as a political imperative, some time because of base commercial motives.  The most infamous examples are literary works banned or destroyed as political or religious repression including occasions when the process was one of public spectacle such as the burning of books in Nazi Germany, aimed at Jewish, communist and other “degenerate or undesirable” authors.   The critique: “They burn the books they cannot write” is often attributed German-Jewish poet, writer and literary critic Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) whose work was among the thousands of volumes placed on a bonfire in Berlin in 1933 but it’s a paraphrase of a passage from his play Almansor (1821-1822), spoken by a Muslim after Christian had burned piles of the holy Quran: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”  (That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.")

The Address Book (1983) by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle (b 1953) was based on an address book the author found in the street which, (after photocopying the contents) she returned to the owner.  She then contacted those in the book and used the information they provided to create a narrative about the owner, a man she had never met.  This she had published in a newspaper and the man promptly threatened to sue on the grounds of a breach of his right to privacy, demanding all examples of the work in its published form be destroyed.  Duly, the obliterature was performed.  Thomas Phillips' (1937–2022) A Humument: A treated Victorian novel (in various editions 1970-2016) is regarded by most critics as an “altered” book, a class of literature in which novel media forms (often graphical artwork) are interpolated to change the appearance and sometimes elements of meaning.  Phillips use as his base a Victorian-era novel (William (WH) Mallock's (1849–1923) A Human Document (1892)) and painted over its pages, leaving only select words visible to create new narratives, many of which were surreal.  This was obliterature as artistic device and it’s of historic interest because it anticipated many of the techniques of post modernism, multi-media productions and even meme-making.

Erasure Poetry takes an existing text and either erases or blacks-out (the modern redaction technique) words or passages to create a new poem from the remaining words; in the most extreme examples almost all the original is obliterated, with only fragments left to form a new work.  Ronald Johnson (1935–1998) was a US poet who in 1977 published the book-length RADI OS (1977), based on John Milton's (1608–1674) Paradise Lost (1667-1674) and used the redactive mechanism as an artistic device, space once used by the obliterated left deliberately blank, surrounding the surviving words.

Some critics and literary theorists include unfinished and fragmentary work under the rubric of obliterature and while that may seem a bit of a definitional stretch, the point may be that such texts in many ways can resemble what post modern (and post-post modern) obliterature practitioners publish as completed work.  There are many unfinished works by the famous which have been “brought to conclusion” by contracted authors, the critical response tending to vary from the polite to the dismissive although, in fairness, it may be that some things were left unfinished for good reasons.  The Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was extraordinarily prolific and apparently never discarded a single page, leaving a vast archive of unfinished, fragmented, and often unreadable manuscripts, the volume so vast many have never been deciphered.  It’s interesting to speculate that had Pessoa had access to word processors and the cloud whether he would have saved as much; if he’d lived in the age of the floppy diskette, maybe he’d have culled a bit.

The obliteration of animal carcasses with explosives

Strictly speaking, “to obliterate something” means “to remove or destroy all traces” which usually isn’t the case when explosives are used, the result more a wide dispersal of whatever isn’t actually vaporized but there’s something about the word which attracts those who blow-up stuff and they seem often to prefer obliteration to terms which might be more accurate.  As long as the explosion is sufficiently destructive, one can see their point and obliteration does memorably convey the implications of blowing-up stuff.  The word clearly enchanted the US Forest Service which in 1995 issued their classic document Obliterating Animal Carcasses with Explosives, helpfully including a step-by-step guide to the process.  Given it’s probably not a matter about which many have given much thought, the service explained obliterating large animal carcasses was an important safety measure in wilderness recreation areas where the remains might attract bears, or near picnic areas where people obviously wouldn’t want rotting flesh nearby.  A practical aspect also is that in many cases there is no way conveniently to move or otherwise dispose of a large carcass (such as a horse or moose which can weigh in excess of 500 kg (1100 lb) which might be found below a steep cut slope or somewhere remote.  So, where physical transportation is not practical, the chemistry and physics of explosives are the obvious alternative, the guide recommending fireline devices (specially developed coils containing explosive powder), used also to clear combustible materials in the path of a wildfire. 

Interestingly, the guide notes there will be cases in which the goal might not be obliteration.  In some ecosystems, what is most desirable is to disperse the carcass locally into the small chunks suited to the eating habits of predators in the area and when properly dispersed, smaller scavenging animals will break down the left-overs, usually within a week.  To effect a satisfactory dispersal, the guide recommends placing 20 lb (9 kg) of explosives on the carcass in key locations, then using a detonator cord to tie the charges together, the idea being to locate them on the major bones, along the spine.  However, in areas where there’s much human traffic, obliteration is required and the guide recommends placing 20 lb (9 kg) pounds of explosives on top and a similar load underneath although it’s noted this may be impossible if the carcass is too heavy, frozen into the ground, floating in water or simply smells too ghastly for anyone to linger long enough to do the job.  In that case, 55 lb (25 kg) of fireline should be draped over the remains although the actual amount used will depend on the size of the carcass, the general principle being the more explosives used, the greater the chance obliteration will be achieved.  Dispersal and obliteration are obviously violent business but it’s really just an acceleration of nature’s decomposition process.  Whereas a big beast like a horse can sit for months without entirely degrading, if explosives are used, in most cases after little more than a week it’d not be obvious an animal was ever there.  With regard to horses however, the guide does include the warning that prior to detonation, “horseshoes should be removed to minimize dangerous flying debris.”  Who knew?

It’s important enough explosives are used to achieve the desired result but in carcass disposal it's important also not to use too much.  In November 1970, the Oregon Highway Division was tasked with blowing up a 45-foot (14 m) eight-ton (8100 kg) decaying whale which lay on the shores near the town of Florence and they calculated it would need a half-ton (510 kg) of dynamite, the presumption being any small pieces would be left for seagulls and other scavengers.  Unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan.  The viewing crowds had been kept a quarter-mile (400 m) from the blast-site but they were forced to run for cover as large chunks of whale blubber started falling on them and the roof of a car parked even further away was crushed.  Fortunately there were no injuries although most in the area were splattered with small pieces of dead whale.  Fifty years on, Florence residents voted to name a new recreation ground Exploding Whale Memorial Park in honor of the event.

Rebarbative

Rebarbative (pronounced ree-bahr-buh-tiv)

(1) Causing annoyance, irritation, or aversion; repellent (usually of people but can be applied to concepts or objects such as unpleasing buildings.

(2) Fearsome; forbidding (obsolete).

(3) An object (typically a fabric or other surface) having a coarse or roughly finish (rare and usually a literally device). 

1885: From the French rébarbative, the feminine form of the fourteenth century rébarbatif (disagreeable; repellent; unattractive), from the Middle French rébarber (to oppose; to stand up to;to be unattractive) from the Old French rebarber (to repel (an enemy), to withstand (him) face to face).  The construct was ré- + barbe (beard) + -atif (-ative).  The re- prefix was from the Middle English re-, from the circa 1200 Old French re-, from the Latin re- & red- (back; anew; again; against), from the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (again), a metathetic alteration of wert- (to turn).  It displaced the native English ed- & eft-.  A hyphen is not normally included in words formed using this prefix, except when the absence of a hyphen would (1) make the meaning unclear, (2) when the word with which the prefix is combined begins with a capital letter, (3) when the word with which the is combined with begins with another “re”, (4) when the word with which the prefix is combined with begins with “e”, (5) when the word formed is identical in form to another word in which re- does not have any of the senses listed above.  As late as the early twentieth century, the dieresis was sometimes used instead of a hyphen (eg reemerge) but this is now rare except when demanded for historic authenticity or if there’s an attempt deliberately to affect the archaic.  Re- may (and has) been applied to almost any verb and previously irregular constructions appear regularly in informal use; the exception is all forms of “be” and the modal verbs (can, should etc).  Although it seems certain the origin of the Latin re- is the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (which has a parallel in Umbrian re-), beyond that it’s uncertain and while it seems always to have conveyed the general sense of "back" or "backwards", there were instances where the precise was unclear and the prolific productivity in Classical Latin tended make things obscure.

Barbe was from the Latin barba (beard), literally “to stand beard to beard against”.  The French suffix -atif was used in to indicate “of, related to, or associated with the thing specified”.  The English equivalent was -ative, the construct of which was -at(e) + -ive.  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 –ive suffix was from the Anglo-Norman -if (feminine -ive), from the Latin -ivus.  Until the fourteenth century, all Middle English loanwords from the Anglo-Norman ended in -if (actif, natif, sensitif, pensif et al) and, under the influence of literary Neolatin, both languages introduced the form -ive.  Those forms that have not been replaced were subsequently changed to end in -y (hasty, from hastif, jolly, from jolif etc).  Like the Latin suffix -io (genitive -ionis), the Latin suffix -ivus is appended to the perfect passive participle to form an adjective of action.  Rebarbative is an adjective, rebarbativeness is a noun and rebarbatively is an adverb.

Although now applied almost always to tiresome people, rebarbative has been applied to buildings (modern architecture offering much scope for use), music (many the compositions of the twentieth century and beyond well deserving the critique) and poetry (again, modernism the culprit).  The French rébarbatif (repellent or disagreeable) was from the Middle French rebarber (to oppose), the construct being re- (in the sense of “again”) + barbe (beard) from the Latin barba (the distant relative of the English “beard” & “barber”) and etymologists say the literal meaning was “to stand beard to beard against”, leading etymologists to conclude the origin of the modern sense lay in the “itchy, irritating quality of a beard”, extended to anything or anyone “irritating or annoying”.  As recently as the 1930s it was also used in the literal sense of the tactile sensation engendered a surface “coarse or roughly finished”, applied to the fabric called “drugget”, from the French droguet, from drogue (cheap), of uncertain origin.  Dating from the sixteenth century, drugget was an inexpensive and coarse woolen cloth, used mainly for clothing.

Mutually rebarbative: Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021, left) & crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013, right), second presidential debate, 9 October 2016, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri.  Given recent events, crooked Hillary can now start calling him “crooked Donald”.

Since the 1890s rebarbative has applied now to anyone really annoying, repellent or generally disagreeable, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) listing the earliest known instance of the adjective rebarbatively as dating from 1934.  The state of disagreeability being obviously as spectrum, the comparative is “more rebarbative” and the superlative “most rebarbative”.  It’s not as if English lacks words with which to describe someone as “annoying or objectionable” but the charm of rebarbative is its rarity.  The meaning will however be obscure to many so if an immediate impact is important, the more commonly used synonyms include irritating, annoying, frustrating, disturbing, abrasive, exasperating, irksome, maddening, painful, bothersome, pesky, galling, peeving, carking, riling, rankling, chafing, troublesome, infuriating, disquieting, mischievous, burdensome, displeasing, discomforting, biting, troubling, offensive, importunate, distressing, stressful, upsetting, thorny, enraging, angering, worrisome, trying, jarring, grating & jangling; less heard forms include pestilential, pestiferous, vexatious, vexing, nettlesome, nettling, pestilent, plaguey, plaguy, pesty, distractive, brattish, bratty, spiny & importune.  Bridget Jones in Helen Fielding's (b 1958) Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) liked "vile" which is a wonderful word and one which for some reason is a genuine pleasure to say, the meaning emphasized by lengthening the sound.  Vile was from the Middle English vile, vyle & vyl, from the Anglo-Norman ville, from the Old French vil & vile, from Latin vīlis (cheap, inexpensive; base, vile, mean, worthless, cheap, paltry), from the Proto-Italic weslis, from the primitive Indo-European weslis, a deverbal adjective with passive meaning (which can be bought), from the root of venus (sale).  In Latin the comparative was vīlior and the superlative vīlissimus.

Ever the trendsetter, during one of her appearances in court (Los Angeles, July 2010), Lindsay Lohan illustrated a novel means by which rebarbativeness could be expressed: fingernail art.  However, after paparazzi photographs were published, Ms Lohan tweeted the message was not directed at the judge but was done “as a joke”, adding “It had nothing to do w/court… it’s an airbrush design from a stencil.”  Now we know, but it’s still a good technique.

For those who wish to convey a sense of resigned weariness the best choice is probably "tiresome" but a synonym of rebarbative which does sometimes annoy (though not aggravate) the pedants is "aggravate" which in Modern English has three senses: (1) To make worse or more severe; intensify (as anything evil, disorderly, or troublesome), (2) To annoy; to irritate; to exasperate and (3) In law (as aggravated), a class of criminal offence made more serious by certain circumstances which prevailed during its commission (violence, use of a weapon, committed during hours of darkness et al).  Dating from the 1420s, aggravate was from the late Middle English aggravate (make heavy, burden down), from the Latin aggravātus, past participle of aggravāre (to render more troublesome (literally to make heavy or heavier, add to the weight of)), the construct being ad- (to) + gravare (add to; to make heavy), from gravis (heavy), from the primitive Indo-European root gwere- (heavy).  The earlier English verb was the late fourteenth century aggrege (make heavier or more burdensome; make more oppressive; increase, intensify, from the Old French agreger.  Aggravate is a verb, aggravated & aggravative are adjectives, aggravator is a noun and aggravating a verb.

The literal sense in English (make heavier) has been long obsolete, the modern meanings (1) "to make a bad thing worse" dates from the 1590s while (2) the colloquial sense (to exasperate or annoy) is from 1611.  So, although it has for centuries disturbed the usage mavens, the meaning "to annoy or exasperate” has been in continuous use since the sixteenth century.  There are sources which note the later meaning emerged within twenty years of the first but it’s a highly technical point of definition and the original meaning, “to make worse” did have roots in Classical Latin.  Henry Fowler (1858-1933) in his authoritative A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) was emphatic in saying aggravate has properly only one meaning: “to make (an evil) worse or more serious” and that to “use it in the sense of annoy or exasperate is a vulgarism that should be left to the uneducated.”  Henry Fowler was always a model of clarity.  He was also a realist and acknowledged “usage has beaten the grammarians” and that condemnation of the vulgarism had “become a fetish.  The meaning “to annoy” is now so ubiquitous that it should be thought correct; that’s how the democratic, unregulated English language works.  However, for the fastidious, it may be treated in the same way as the split infinitive, something tolerated in casual but not formal discourse and certainly never in writing.

Deracinate

Deracinate (pronounced dih-ras-uh-neyt)

(1) To pull up by the roots; uproot; extirpate; eradicate.

(2) To isolate or alienate (a person) from a native or customary culture or environment (especially to expel people from their native land and into exile).

(3) To liberate or be liberated from a culture or its norms. 

1590s: A calque of the French déraciner, from the Old French desraciner (uproot, dig out, pull up by the roots), the construct being dé- +‎ racine +‎ -er.  The de- prefix was from the Latin dē-, from the preposition dē (of, from (the Old English æf- was a similar prefix).  It imparted the sense of (1) reversal, undoing, removing, (2) intensification and (3) from, off.  In French the dé- prefix was used to make antonyms (as un- & dis- function in English) and was partially inherited from the Old and Middle French des-, from the Latin dis- (part), the ultimate source being the primitive Indo-European dwís and partially borrowed from Latin dē-..  Racine was from the Old French, from the Late Latin radicīna (a little root), from the Classical Latin radix & radicis (root), from the Proto-Italic wrādī, from the primitive Indo-European wréhds & wrād- (branch, root).  The prefix –er was used to form infinitives of first-conjugation verbs and was from the Latin –are, from the Middle High German –ære & -er, from the Old High German -āri, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, from Latin -arius.  The -ate suffix -ate used in the English formation 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.  Deracinate, deracinates, deracinating & deracinated are verbs and deracination is a noun; the noun plural is deracinations.  The noun deracinater (or deracinator) is non-standard.

In English, deracinate is used mostly as a decorative alternative to the descriptive but brutish "uproot" and is probably one of those words which has survived to enjoy it's infrequent appearances because it appears in the Duke of Burgundy's speech in William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) Henry V (circa 1599); the Shakespeare connection has headed-off a few linguistic extinctions.  Use in agriculture and horticulture appears to be rare (the punchier alternatives better understood) although it might be expected when gardening is a part of a literary novel.  In figurative use, the inferences tend to be negative and focus on isolation, alienation, deportation and the cultural separation sometimes felt by diasporic communities.  In English, since 1921 it has been used to mean "uprooted from one's national or social environment" (especially to expel people from their native land and into exile).

Lindsay Lohan gardening with a lopper, decapitation a less demanding path to destruction than deracination, New York City, May 2015.  She appears to be relishing the task. 

However, in figurative form deracinate can carry a positive connotation.  It can mean "to liberate or be liberated from a culture or its norms" and in that sense sometimes appears in right-wing commentaries on certain aspects of the culture wars,  There the point being made relates to the different ways "cultural alienations" are treated, depending on who is being alienated from what.  Someone who is a white, middle class Christian and rejects the beliefs and cultural traditions of their church to emerge as a materialist atheist tied to Enlightenment values is not regarded as "culturally alienated" or a victim of "cultural oppression", indeed, if their transformation is noted at all it may be to call them a "rational" or "an intellectual".  Some might call them "a heretic" but gleefully a rationalist would anyway agree.  For others however, it's argued they can only ever be seen as "a victim".  This seems especially to apply to those from indigenous populations who, if they reject belief in or adherence to the sorts of things Christians are entitled to dismiss as "superstitions", they're treated as "oppressed" and "alienated".  In that sense, the critics say, being something like indigenous (or another ethnic or cultural minority) is "compulsory", some of the very intellectuals who are themselves proudly (and by choice) alienated from a cultural inherence of perhaps centuries declaring those from minorities similarly separated must be victims of hegemonic cultural oppression.  In this sense the critique is something like that made of Western anthropologists who opposed modernizing influences being allowed to "infect" traditional cultures, presumably so they could be preserved in their "unspoiled state" for anthropological study.

Although right-wing politics might seem an unusual source for such arguments, it is intellectually consistent and the internal logic conforms with their hierarchy of priorities.  Although usually they decry post-modernism and most flavors of critical studies (critical race studies (CRT) a particular target) as little more than glossings of nihilism, the right to adopt a world-view at variance with one imposed by cultural tradition has a long history and the importance of defending it well explained by the French philosopher Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778) and more succinctly still by the Anglo-Irish Whig statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797).  In the prevailing climate, minority ethnic & cultural identities do seem to remain compulsory (though it may be the converts to post-modernism wisely keep quite about it) but in the the culture wars, no truce has been declared.

Duke of Burgundy's speech (Shakespeare, Henry V Act 5, Scene 2)

My duty to you both, on equal love,
Great kings of France and England. That I have labored
With all my wits, my pains, and strong endeavors,
To bring your most imperial Majesties
Unto this bar and royal interview,
Your mightiness on both parts best can witness.
Since, then, my office hath so far prevailed
That face to face and royal eye to eye
You have congreeted. Let it not disgrace me
If I demand before this royal view
What rub or what impediment there is
Why that the naked, poor, and mangled peace,
Dear nurse of arts, plenties, and joyful births,
Should not in this best garden of the world,
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Alas, she hath from France too long been chased,
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in its own fertility.
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unprunèd, dies. Her hedges, even-pleached,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disordered twigs. Her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery.
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, withal uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country,
But grow like savages, as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood,
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire,
And everything that seems unnatural.
Which to reduce into our former favor
You are assembled, and my speech entreats
That I may know the let why gentle peace
Should not expel these inconveniences
And bless us with her former qualities.