Peripatetic

Peripatetic (pronounced per-uh-puh-tet-ik)

(1) Walking or travelling about; itinerant, wandering, roving, a vagrant.

(2) Of or of or relating to Aristotle, who taught philosophy while walking in the Lyceum of ancient Athens (with initial capital letter).

(3) A member of the Aristotelian school (with initial capital letter).

(4) Of or relating to the Aristotelian school of philosophy (with initial capital letter) so named because Aristotle, who used to teach philosophy while walking about the Lyceum in ancient Athens

(5) A person who walks or travels about.

(6) In the British educational system, one employed in two or more educational establishments and travelling from one to another; applied also to football coaches, used also as a wry reference to the pattern of them going from club to club, repeatedly sacked and hired.

1400-1450: From the French péripatétique, from the Latin peripatēticus, from the Ancient Greek περιπατητικός (peripatētikós) (given to walking around (especially while teaching)), from περιπατέω (peripatéō) (I walk around), the construct being περί (peri) (around) + πατέω (patéō) (I walk); in Greek texts from antiquity, peripatein (to pace to and fro) was commonly used.  Basis of the whole thing was Aristotle's custom of teaching while strolling through the Lyceum in Athens.  In fourteenth century Old French, the word was perypatetique, imported directly from the Medieval Latin peripateticus (pertaining to the disciples or philosophy of Aristotle)  In English, the meaning in the philosophical sense began to be used in the 1560s and in the literal sense from the 1610s (person who wanders about).  The adjective form (walking about from place to place; itinerant) emerged in the 1640, often humorously tinged.  Related forms are the adverb peripatetically and the noun peripateticism.  The old alternative spelling peripatetick is obsolete.  Charles Dickens (1812–1870) extended the meaning in Our Mutual Friend (1865), using it in a figurative sense to mean “rambling” or “long-winded”, describing someone who tended to long to meander around the topics sometimes never quite reaching the point.  Peripatetic is a noun is a noun & adjective, peripateticism is a noun and peripatetically is an adverb; the noun plural is peripatetics.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (circa 1710) by José Risueño (1665–1721).

The Peripatetic axiom is Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu (Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses).  It appears in Questiones disputatae de veritate (Disputed Questions on Truth) (1256-1259), a collection of twenty-nine disputed questions on aspects of faith and the human condition by the Italian Dominican theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).

Aquinas derived the principle from Aristotle’s Peripatetic school of philosophy.  Aquinas insists the existence of God could be proved by reasoning from “sense data”, an argument he developed using a variation of the Aristotelian notion of the intellectus agens (active intellect) which he defined as the ability of the mind to abstract universal meanings from specific empirical data.  The essential idea that human experience can be based only on sensory input does sound reasonable, after all, what choice do people have?  Such however was the reverence in the West for Aquinas that his writings on the matter for centuries influenced not only the theological question but also the interpretation of Aristotle.

Peripatetic Painting (2015) by Charles Yates (b 1941).

What Aquinas calls the Peripatetic axiom is his distillation of Aristotelian thought, not a quote or even a paraphrasing from antiquity but it is anyway certainly a “disputed question”.  Regarding the proposition “nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in sense” he notes:  "That axiom is to be understood as applying only to our intellect, which receives its knowledge from things. For a thing is led by gradual steps from its own material conditions to the immateriality of the intellect through the mediation of the immateriality of sense. Consequently, whatever is in our intellect must have previously been in the senses. This, however, does not take place in the divine intellect.”

So ensued centuries of argument between those who maintained empiricism was no part of the way Aquinas reconciled revealed religion with Aristotelian thought and those who found Saint Thomas perhaps the proto-empiricist in the sense (1) he held all our ideas are derived from experience so (2) by definition there can be nothing in the intellect not previously in the senses and (3) that this was implicit in Aristotle.  Despite the implications of that, most however seemed to conclude he did not think all knowledge either consists of sense experience or is inferred inductively from experience.  From all this, although some remained still unconvinced by his position the existence of God could be proved by reasoning alone, few were unimpressed by the intellectual gymnastics it took to get there.

A peripatetic existence; Lindsay Lohan wandering the palnet: Istanbul, Nice, Los Angeles & Mykonos (top row), Dubai, Athens, London & Tokyo (middle row) and Washington DC, Melbourne, New York & Venice (bottom row).

Baffle

Baffle (pronounced baf-uhl)

(1) To confuse, bewilder or perplex.

(2) To frustrate or confound; to thwart (a now archaic and probably obsolete seventeenth century use which didn’t of necessity involve the creation of confusion or bewilderment).

(3) To check or deflect the movement of (sound, light, fluids, etc.).

(4) To equip with a baffle or baffles.

(5) To cheat or trick; to hoodwink or deceive someone (used between the sixteenth & eighteenth centuries and now obsolete).

(6) To struggle ineffectually, as a ship in a gale (a nineteenth form rare except in Admiralty use).

(7) Publicly to disgrace, especially of a recreant knight (used between the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries and now obsolete).

(8) Something that balks, checks, or deflects (also called a baffle-board); an artificial obstruction for checking or deflecting the flow of gases (as in a boiler), sounds (as in the loudspeaker system of a radio or hi-fi set), light (as in a darkroom) or fluids (as in a tank).

(9) In audio engineering, any boxlike enclosure or flat panel for mounting a loudspeaker.

(10) In military camouflage, an architectural feature designed to confuse enemies or make them vulnerable.

(11) In coal mining, a lever for operating the throttle valve of a winding engine (US dialectal use).

1540-1550: Of uncertain origin but may have entered English from the Scots dialectal bauchle (to disgrace, treat with contempt, especially a perjured knight), from bauch or bachlen (publicly to condemn) and probably related to the early-modern French bafouer (to disgrace, to scorn, abuse or hoodwink) or the obsolete French befer (to mock) which was definitely picked up from the Scots bauchle.  The most likely root is the German natural sound of disgust, like bah which appears in the language as baff machen (to flabbergast) and the familiar modern meaning “to bewilder or confuse” is from 1640s while that of “to defeat someone's efforts” is from 1670s.  The use meaning “shielding device” dates from 1881 and “artificial obstruction” is from 1910.  The alternative spellings bafful & baffol are both obsolete.  Baffle is a noun & verb, bafflement & baffler are nouns and baffled & baffling are verbs & adjectives; the noun plural is baffles (or the rare bafflers).

As a noun, baffle emerged in the early 1880s, initially used mostly of the shielding device attached to stoves and ovens where it was short for “baffle-plate”, derived from the noun.  The earlier noun (from circa 1860) in the same sense was baffler, a word which can still be used to describe (1) something that causes one to be baffled, particularly a difficult puzzle or riddle & (1) in gaming, one of the projections inside a dice tower that serve to deflect the die unpredictably.  The noun bafflement (state of being baffled) dates from 1841 while the adjective baffling (bewildering, confusing, perplexing) was from 1733; it was the present-participle adjective from the verb baffle but also emerged in Admiralty slang (soon picked up in the merchant service) in the eighteenth century as a sailor's adjective for winds that blow variously and make headway difficult; although now rare, it survived into the age of steam.  The noun and verb bafflegab was first noted in 1952 and describes pretentious, incomprehensible, or overly technical language, especially legal or bureaucratic jargon; a synonym of gobbledygook (but not “hocus-pocus” or “mumbo-jumbo” which reference something nonsensical although use of those two is now probably proscribe because of their origin when speaking dismissively of the speech of African “witch doctors”.  The companion word is baffound (to perplex, bewilder by the use of bafflegab).

Although it had probably before been on the tips of not a few tongues, the words “baffle”, “baffling” & “baffled” in connection with Lindsay Lohan really spiked in 2016 when footage circulated of her speaking in distinctively different accent which used a conventional US English vocabulary but was delivered, with an occasionally halting delivery, the accent vaguely Russian or eastern European.  She later clarified thing by saying it was “…a mixture of most of the languages I can understand or am trying to learn”, adding that she’d been “…learning different languages since I was a child.  I'm fluent in English and French can understand Russian and am learning Turkish, Italian and Arabic”.  Taking advantage of the interest, she named the latest addition to the planet’s linguistic diversity “LiLohan” and a limited edition LiLohan clothing line was quickly made available as a philanthropic endeavour, part of the proceeds from each item sold going to Caudwell Children and the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency of Turkey (AFAD).  Turkey is now properly called Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (Republic of Türkiye); the accepted short form Türkiye.

Baffled sump (left) and fuel tank (right).In cars, baffles are used in sumps and fuel tanks to prevent fluids sloshing around when subjected to the high lateral forces encountered in high-speed cornering.  With fuel tanks this ensures weight transfers are minimized while the purpose in a sump is to (1) avoid the oil surge or starvation which can happen if movement means the oil becomes removed from the oil-pump’s pickup & (2) assist in reducing the oil’s tendency to foam.  In Australia Ford included a baffled sump on the Falcon GTHO Phase III (1970-1971) and this was to be carried over to the abortive Phase IV (1972), the novelty with the latter being the race cars gaining tear-drop shaped “ears” welded to each side of the sump, adjacent to the oil pump.  The ears not only increased oil capacity but also, sitting as they did in the air-flow passing under the body, enhanced cooling.

Speak no evil: Alan Tudge.

Given the number of times the Australian Liberal Party has in recent years sought to celebrate the virtue of “personality responsibility” the evidence given by Alan Tudge (b 1971) to the royal commission investigating the “robodebt” scheme (a system which sought to “recover” what were alleged to be debts incurred by citizens who had failed to inform the government about their earnings) must to some have seemed baffling; not necessarily surprising, just baffling.  The scheme had been found to be unlawful but Mr Tudge, who served as (Liberal) minister for human services in 2017-2018 and was (under the Westminster system) “responsible” for the administration of “robodebt”, refused during questioning to accept ministerial responsibility for the unlawfulness of the scheme.  Despite being the minister in charge, Mr Tudge said it was not his responsibility check whether or not the robodebt scheme was lawful although he did seem to concede he was responsible for the scheme’s “lawful implementation”, adding that he assumed it was lawful, and had never been shown legal advice regarding its legality.  His position appeared to be based on what sounds a reasonable assumption: that the departmental secretary (the public servant in charge of the department) would not be implementing a program which he or she would know to be unlawful, something he described as “unfathomable”, adding that the scheme had gone through a rigorous cabinet process “which always has a legal overlay”.

Justice Jackson prosecuting, Albert Speer in the dock, Nuremberg, 1946. 

There are many books by academics, historians and former politicians which discuss the doctrine of ministerial responsibility but it's not known if the transcript of 20 June 1946 of the International Military Tribunal (the Nuremberg Trial) was in Mr Tudge's mind: Mr Justice Robert Jackson (1892–1954; US Supreme Court Justice 1941-1954; Chief US Prosecutor at the Nuremberg (IMT) trials of Nazi war criminals 1945-1946) cross-examining Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945):

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Your statement some time ago that you had a certain responsibility as a Minister of the Government.  I should like to have you explain what responsibility you referred to when you say you assume a responsibility as a member of the Government; your common responsibility, what do you mean by your common responsibility along with others?

DEFENDANT SPEER: In my opinion, a state functionary has two types of responsibility.  One is the responsibility for his own sector and for that, of course, he is fully responsible.  But above that I think that in decisive matters there is, and must be, among the leaders a common responsibility, for who is to bear responsibility for developments, if not the close associates of the head of State?

This common responsibility, however, can only be applied to fundamental matters, it cannot be applied to details connected with other ministries or other responsible departments, for otherwise the entire discipline in the life of the state would be quite confused, and no one would ever know who is individually responsible in a particular sphere. This individual responsibility in one's own sphere must, at all events, be kept clear and distinct.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Well, your point is, I take it, that you as a member of the Government and a leader in this period of time acknowledge a responsibility for its large policies, but not for all the details that occurred in their execution. Is that a fair statement of your position?

DEFENDANT SPEER: Yes, indeed.

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: I think that concludes the cross-examination.

Alan Tudge at the 2017 Midwinter Ball with Liberal staffer Rachelle Miller.

Ms Millar also provided some interesting evidence to the “robodebt” royal commission and (pursuant to an unrelated matter) received from the Commonwealth a taxpayer-funded Aus$650,000 settlement for damages while working in two ministerial offices.  Ms Millar had accused Mr Tudge of being physically abusive towards her while in a consensual relationship and part of the settlement related to these matters, including compensation for loss of earning, hurt, distress, humiliation & medical and legal costs.  The Commonwealth did not admit liability but in paying Aus$650,000 seems to have assumed responsibility.  In a Clintonesque touch, Mr Tudge admitted he was at times sexually intimate with Ms Miller but insists he did not have “sexual intercourse” with that woman.

Trivia

Trivia (pronounced triv-ee-uh)

(1) Matters or things that are very unimportant, inconsequential, or nonessential; trifles; petty details, trifles, trivialities (functions as both singular & plural).

(2) In the religion of Ancient Rome, (used as the epithet Trivia) a name for the deity Diana: so called because she was trivius dea (goddess of three ways) and also because she was regarded as a deity with three personae (Selene/Diana/Proserpine).  In Greek mythology, the role (though not the epithet, which is from the Latin) is associated with Artemis (the Greek equivalent of Diana) and also with Hecate.

(3) A quiz game involving knowledge of (sometimes obscure) facts, the best known of which is the commercially available Trivial Pursuit (and its forks).

1700–1710: From the Latin trivia, feminine plural of trivius, from trivium (place where three roads meet; junction of three roads), the construct being tri-(three) + -vium, from via (way, road).  Tri- was from the Ancient Greek τρεῖς (treîs), from the Proto-Hellenic tréyes, from the primitive Indo-European tréyes.  The Latin adjective triviālis was from trivium and thus came to mean “appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar”.  In English trivial seems first to have appeared (in the same sense as triviālis) in 1589 and within decades was in common use in the modern sense: “Matters of little importance or significance” and thus far removed from the original Medieval scholastic triumvirate of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.  The adjective trivial meant “ordinary" in the 1580s but by the turn of the century the sense had shifted to “insignificant, trifling” and was from the Latin trivialis (common, commonplace, vulgar (and literally “of or belonging to the crossroads”)).  The verb trivialize dates from 1836 while the noun triviality was known as early as the 1590s in the sense of “quality of being trivial” and was at least influenced by the French trivialite or else from trivial, the phrases “a trivial thing” & “a trivial affair” emerged during the 1610s.  There is also the idea that because the trivium was an introductory-level course, it became associated with things at their most basic and simple but this notion came later and is thought by etymologists to be a grasp at linguistic straws.  Trivia is a noun (and proper noun), trivial is a noun & adjective, triviality is a noun and trivialize, trivialized; trivializing are verbs; the noun plural is trivias.

Trivial was picked up by Middle English (in the usual haphazard way) but was used in senses different from the familiar modern meaning.  In the mid-fifteenth century there was the phrase arte triviall an allusion to the three liberal arts that comprised the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), the lower division of the seven (the advanced four (or quadrivium) being arithmetic, geometry, astronomy & music.) taught in medieval universities, the link between pedagogy and the Latin trivium (place where three roads meet; junction of three roads) presumably the tradition of use in Antiquity that the point at which the roads met was “a place of public resort”.  Some etymologists also connect the very publicness of such places with the pejorative association attached to “trivia”.

As a packaged commodity, trivia had long existed but it began to labeled as such early in the twentieth century, the US-born British essayist (and a genuine authority on the language) Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) in 1902 publishing Trivia which was initially a commercial failure, his own mother’s critique of the text that it “began nowhere, ended nowhere and led to nothing” but for whatever reason it became so popular immediately after the World War I (1914-1918) that in 1921 he released More Trivia, the two combined in a best-selling edition (with annotations) in 1933.  Whether so named or not, books and later television series devoted to trivia (some quite specialized) became an established niche in these industries and the most celebrated product of all, the game Trivial Pursuit, was released in 1981 and it begat literally dozens of thematically-specific editions such as the “Horror Movie Edition” and “X”, a version described as “edgy” and “For Adults” which Amazon recommends for, inter alia, “family games nights & kids parties”.

Trivia by its nature attracted comic coinings.  Administrivia (the construct being adminis(trative) +‎ trivia) was created in 1922 by a US academic lawyer to refer to the administrative load (of mostly minor, procedural matters) carried by a head of department or dean in a law school.  A triviaphile (the construct being trivia +‎ -phile) is a person excessively fond of trivia, often boring others by reciting (obscure or unimportant facts) and the word for practical purposes may be synonymous with triviaholic (trivia +‎ -holic on the model of alcoholic) and both can also refer to those obsessed with the game Trivial Pursuit.  Although of concern only to a learned few (including one supposes, triviaphiles & triviaholics) there is a technical point about the use of administrivia.  In formal use, trivia, as a derivative of a Latin plural, required a plural verb but modern authorities ten now to be more permissive, extending the same tolerance enjoyed by Latin plurals such as data; the “game” sense has always been thought of as a singular noun.

Long a staple of tabloid newspapers and trashy magazines, trivia pages are among the oldest clickbait on the internet and uselessdaily.com, cleveland.com, tvtropes.org, triviaplaying.com, diply.com, absurdtrivia.com and funtrivia.com all have Lindsay Lohan trivia pages, some interactive and some mere lists.

Noon

Noon (pronounced noon)

(1) Midday; twelve o'clock in the daytime or the time or point at which the sun crosses the local meridian (the time of day when the sun is in its zenith).

(2) Figuratively (usually in literary or poetic use), the highest, brightest, or finest point or part; culmination; capstone; apex.

(3) The corresponding time in the middle of the night; midnight (archaic but historic use means old documents with the word must be read with care, entries appearing as both “noon” & “noon of the night”).

(4) Three o’clock in the afternoon (archaic).

(5) To relax or sleep around midday (as “to noon” “nooning” or “nooned”) (archaic).

(6) The letter ن in Arabic script.

(7) Midday meal (archaic).

Pre 900: From the Middle English noen, none & non, from the Old English nōn (the ninth hour), from a Germanic borrowing of the Classical Latin nōna (ninth hour) (short for nōna hōra), the feminine. singular of nonus (ninth), contracted from novenos, from novem (nine).  It was cognate with the Dutch noen, the (obsolete) German non and the Norwegian non.  Synonyms (some archaic) include apex, capstone, meridian, midday, noontide, noonday, noontime, nones (the ninth hour of daylight), midpoint (of the day), & twelve.  Descendants include the Modern English none and the Scots nane (none), Noon the proper noun enduring as a surname.  Noun is a noun and noons, nooning & nooned are verbs; the noun plural is noons.

Although derived from the Latin word for the number nine, the English word noon refers to midday, the time when the sun reaches the meridian.  The Romans however counted the hours of the day from sunrise which, for consistency, was declared for this purpose to be 06:00; the ninth hour (nona hora) was thus 15:00.  The early Christians adopted Jewish customs of praying at certain hours and when Christian monastic orders formed, the ecclesiastical reckoning of the daily timetable was structured around the hours for prayer.  In the earliest schedules, the monks prayed at three-hour intervals: 6-9 pm, 9 pm-midnight, midnight-3 am and 3-6 am.  The prayers are known as the Divine Office and the times at which they are to be recited are the canonical hours:

Vigils: night
Matins: dawn
Lauds: dawn
Prime: 6 am (first hour)
Terce: 9 am (third hour)
Sext: noon (sixth hour)
None: 3 pm (ninth hour)
Vespers: sunset
Compline: before bed

The shift in the common meaning of noon from 3 pm to 12 noon began in the twelfth century when the prayers said at the ninth hour were set back to the sixth, the reasoning practical rather theological, the unreliability of medieval time-keeping devices and the seasonal elasticity of the hours of daylight in northern regions meaning it was easier to standardise on an earlier hour.  Additionally, in monasteries and on holy days, fasting ended at nones, which perhaps offered another administrative incentive to nudge it up the clock.  An alternative explanation offered by social historians is that it was simply the abbots deciding to align their noon meal with those taken in the towns and villages, the Old English word non having assumed the meaning “midday” or “midday meal” by circa 1140.  Whatever the reason, the meaning shift from "ninth hour" to "sixth hour" seems to have been complete by the fourteenth century, the same path of evolution as the Dutch noen).  Noon is an example of what etymologists call a fossil word, one which that embeds customs of former ages.

The use as a synonym for midnight existed between the seventeenth & nineteenth centuries, apparently because the poetic phrase “noon of the night” entered popular use.  The noun forenoon (the morning (ie (be)fore + noon)) applied especially the latter part of it, those hours “when business is done”, the word emerging circa 1500.  The noun noonday (middle of the day) was first used by Myles Coverdale (1488–1569), the English cleric and ecclesiastical reformer remembered for his printed translation of the Bible into English (1535) and it was used as an adjective from 1650s.  In the Old English there had been non tid (noon-tide, midday, noon) and non-tima (noon, noon-time, midday).  The noun afternoon (part of the day from noon to evening) dates from circa 1300 and it was subject to an interesting shift in grammatical form.  In the fifteenth & sixteenth centuries it was used as “at afternoon” but from circa 1600 this shifted to “in the afternoon”; it emerged as an adjective from the 1570s.  In the Middle English there had been the mid-fourteenth century aftermete (afternoon, part of the day following the noon meal).

Lindsay Lohan at nuncheon, Scott's Restaurant, Mayfair, London, 2015.

The noun nuncheon was from the mid-fourteenth century nōn-schench (slight refreshment of food (with or without liquor) taken at midday, the name shifting with the meal, nuncheon taken originally in the afternoon (ie notionally the three o’clock meal), the construct being none (noon) + shench (draught, cup), from the Old English scenc, related to scencan (to pour out, to give to drink) and cognate with the Old Frisian skenka (to give to drink) and the German & Dutch schenken (to give).  The most obvious descendent of nuncheon is luncheon (and thus lunch).

Lāhainā Noon is the solar phenomenon (known only in the tropics) when the Sun culminates at the zenith at solar noon, passing directly overhead, thus meaning objects underneath cast no shadow, creating a effect something like the primitive graphics in some video games.  The name Lāhainā Noon (Lāhainā Noons the plural) was the winner in a contest organised by Hawai'i's Bishop Museum in 1990, the museum noting the word lāhainā (originally lā hainā) may be translated into English as “cruel sun” but makes reference also to the severe droughts experienced in that part of the island of Maui.  The old Hawai'ian name for the event was the much more pleasing kau ka lā i ka lolo (the sun rests on the brains).

Copacetic

Copacetic (pronounced koh-puh-set-ik)

In slang, fine; completely satisfactory; OK.

1919: An Americanism said to be of utterly obscure origin, the entirely speculative attributions of the word to Cajun (Louisiana) French, Italian, Hebrew, African American English, Yiddish, barracks Latin or even gangster slang all lack any supporting evidence.

Given that the English language offers: pleasant, satisfactory, acceptable, enjoyable, attractive, tempting, appetizing, cordial, OK, nice, fine, likable, sweet, cheerful, convivial, satisfying, amusing, agreeable, pleasing, pleasurable & amiable, copacetic filled no obvious gap although it was said by some (without evidence) to be specific to a mood, or relationship without problems.  The richness of the English vocabulary meant there were already plenty of ways of saying that and women have anyway long been skilled in loading the word “fine” with just a change of inflection, covering the spectrum from the first, fine careless rapture of love to homicidal loathing.  Copacetic wouldn’t seem to improve on that but some tried to get it to catch on, the alternative spellings including copasetic, copesetic & copesettic.  Copacetic is an adjective.

Obscure and unnecessary, copacetic exists mostly as a fetish word discussed between consenting etymologists and lexicographers in the privacy of their chat groups.  It does occasionally appear in literature or other places, either because the author is searching for linguistic variation or just as the type of flourish Henry Fowler (1858–1933) condemned in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) as a “pride of knowledge”, something he thought “a very unamiable characteristic”, the display of which “sedulously should be avoided”.  In other words, except between word-nerds, copacetic need not be used (because there are so many alternatives) and should not be used (because most won’t know what it means).  Knowingly or not, most seem to have followed his advice.  Henry Fowler, although disapproving of much, may have been more tolerant of another wilful display of the obscure: Oojah-cum-spiff.   Oojah-cum-spiff (all right; fine) appeared in PG Wodehouse's (1881-1975) novel Very Good, Jeeves (1930), possibly as an alteration of oojah-capivvy, Wodehouse's interpretation of an Indian or Persian expression of uncertain origin.  Wodehouse remains something of a nerdish cult but oojah-capivvy is now as rare as copacetic.

As far as is known, copacetic appeared first in the novel A Man for the Ages (1919) by Irving Bacheller (1859-1950).  The author had a character, noted for her idiosyncratic speech, twice use the word and added it and “coralapus” were “her peculiar property” and “prized possession”.  Coralapus vanished without trace but copacetic has never quite gone away, the novelty attracting journalists, headline writers and songsmiths but the place it was first embedded was elaborated African-American speech, especially among those associated with jazz music and by the 1930s, it was regularly included in dictionaries of US slang and etymological discussions in literary journals.  At this time, the speculation seems to have begun, one of the earliest claims of origin by a gentlemen from Milwaukee who claimed it was from the Cajun (Louisiana) French couper-sètique (able to cope with), the correspondent even providing a couplet from “a charming old Acadian poem.”

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, during an "RU OK?" moment, Los Angeles, 2012.

However, this theory gained no support.  Also dismissed were other suggestions of origin including the Chinook Jargon copasenee (which seems actually to exist in Chinook Jargon), the Israeli Hebrew hakol beseder (all is in order (in a transliteration from the pointed spelling ha-kōl bĕ-sēdher)), a calque on expressions in European languages such as the German alles in Ordnung, the Polish wszystko w porządku and the Russian vsë v porjadke.   All were debunked by one authority or another and the consensus is that Irving Bacheller simply coined the word for his character in the manner of the malapropisms Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) created as comic devices for his Mrs Malaprop in the play The Rivals (1775).  What supports this perhaps disappointing conclusion is that Mr Bacheller had a bit of previous in such coinings, the construct of copacetic presumably a blend of the Latin copia (plenty) + ceterum (otherwise, in other respects).

Sassy

Sassy (pronounced sas-ee)

(1) Disrespectful or impudent; impertinent; insolent.

(2) Boldly stylish and smart; pert.

1830–1835: An invention of American English, the colloquialism thought an alteration of “saucy” which in the context of human interaction could mean either: (1) brazen, cheeky, discourteous & disrespectful, (2) audacious, bold & assertive or (3) ribald.  Sassy picked up these variations (although the use to hint at the mildly erotic faded) and gained also the notion in fashion of something stylish or avant-garde.  Sassy is another of those words in English which must seem strange to those learning the subtleties of the language: It can be either a compliment or an expression of disapproval, used sometimes variously to reference the same conduct.  Of objects (usually in fashion), it’s less ambiguous, sassy always said in admiration.  The unrelated sasswood (or sassy wood) is a West African leguminous tree, Erythrophleum guineense, with poisonous bark (sassy bark) and hard strong wood; an alkaloid from this source used in pharmaceuticals.  The etymology is thought to be from a language of the Kwa family.  The comparative is sassier and the superlative sassiest.  Sassy is an adjective, sassiness is a noun and sassily an adverb.

On sale between 1988-1996, Sassy magazine was nominally classed as a “teen magazine” but in terms of editorial content was aimed at the “young women” targeted by the other glossies such as Seventeen and YM but with content which attempted to straddle the gap between the emphasis on weight-loss, make-up & clothes in such titles and what might be called “serious content”.  That turned out to be something of a sweet spot (a gap in the market as it were) because it turned out that what Sassy did was validate that young women could simultaneously be interested both in feminist issues and boy bands.  It may not sound remarkable now but at the time, including in such magazines articles about suicide or sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) was actually subversive.  Sassy also was of note in that when Australian feminists Sandra Yates (b 1947) & Anne Summers (b 1945) took control, it was only the second only women-led management buyout in US corporate history.  To mark the significance of suddenly being in the same business as Rupert Murdoch (b 1931), the bolshie pair described themselves as “mogulettes” (in the sense of being on a smaller scale than News Corporation rather than a feminized form) and Sassy was immediately successful, circulation almost doubling within a year.  Sassy's message was that girls didn't have to be sassy but if that's what they wanted, sassy they should be.

Sassiness: Lindsay Lohan with sassy Hermes Pink Ostrich Birkin Bag & Charlotte Olympia Kitty moccasins in chestnut brown suede and leather, London, 2015.

It was also quite innovative, people of color showing up on the pages and sometimes even on the cover and Sassy anticipated crowd sourcing when it published the December 1990 issue consisting wholly of “reader-produced” content.  However, if the daughters of America were reading, their mothers were watching and groups representing evangelical Christian women mobilized, claiming Sassy’s advice on sex would encourage promiscuity and a flood of unwanted pregnancies.  What Sassy printed was actually little different to what appears in the brochures in doctors’ waiting rooms but, just as Sassy had achieved consistent profitability, advertisers pulled their support, the threat of boycotts too great a risk.  Just as the printing presses has started to roll in 1988, Sandra Yates had told the New York Times (NYT) “I’m going to prove you can run a business with feminist principles and make money” and briefly she did but, spooked by Christians threatening to stop buying stuff, capitalism bit back and Sassy never recovered, officially folded into `TEEN magazine with the coming of 1997 but actually quietly put into a burka.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia (pronounced skit-suh-free-nee-uh or skit-suh-freen-yuh)

(1) In psychiatry (and once called dementia praecox), a severe mental disorder characterized by some, but not necessarily all, of the following features: withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and varying degrees of other emotional, behavioral, or in emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations.

(2) A state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements; informal behavior that appears to be motivated by contradictory or conflicting principles.

(3) In informal use, used to suggest a split personality, identity or other specific forms of dualism.  In popular usage, the term is often confused with dissociative identity disorder (also known as multiple personality disorder).

1908: From the German Schizophrenie, (split mind), coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939) as an umbrella term covering a range of more or less severe mental disorders involving a breakdown of the relation between thought, emotion, and action and literally "a splitting of the mind", the construct being the Ancient Greek σχίζω (skhizein or skhízō) (to split), from the primitive Indo-European root skei (to cut, split apart), + φρήν (phrḗn) (genitive phrenos) (mind, heart, diaphragm) + -ia (the suffix from the Latin -ia and Ancient Greek -ία (-ía) & -εια (-eia), which forms abstract nouns of feminine gender).  It's from phrḗn that English gained phrenes (wits, sanity) and hence phreno-.

In English, the adjective schizophrenic (characteristic of or suffering from schizophrenia) dates in the medical literature from 1911 (in translations of Dr Bleuler's publications) and was immediately adopted also as a noun (schizophrenic patient).  That survived but another noun formation in English was schizophrene which emerged in 1925, the construct presumably a tribute to Dr Bleuler's original work having been written in German.  As such things became more publicized during the post-war years (and picked up in popular culture including film and novels), the transferred adjectival sense of "contradictory, inconsistent" emerged in the mid 1950s, applied to anything from the behavior of race horses and motor-cycles to the nature of musical composition.  The jargon of psychology also produced schizophrenogenic (tending to spark or inspire schizophrenia).  The adjective schizoid (resembling schizophrenia; tending sometimes to less severe forms of schizophrenia) dates from 1925, from the 1921 German coining schizoid (1921), the construct being schiz(ophrenia) + -oid.  The suffix -oid was from a Latinized form of the the Ancient Greek -ειδής (-eidḗs) & -οειδής (-oeidḗs) (the “ο” being the last vowel of the stem to which the suffix is attached); from εἶδος (eîdos) (form, shape, likeness).  It was used (1) to demote resembling; having the likeness of (usually including the concept of not being the same despite the likeness, but counter-examples exist), (2) to mean of, pertaining to, or related to and (3) when added to nouns to create derogatory terms, typically referring to a particular ideology or group of people (by means of analogy to psychological classifications such as schizoid).  Before Dr Bleuler's term became standardized, the condition had been known as dementia praecox (from the Latin dēmentia (madness; insanity) +‎ praecox (premature; untimely), thus the sense “untimely madness” or “premature dementia”).  Schizophrenia is a noun, schizophrenic & schizoids are nouns & adjectives and schizophrenically is an adverb; the noun plural is schizophrenics.

The term “psychiatry” seems to have been coined by German physician Johann Christian Reil (1759-1813) and while doubtlessly he wasn’t the first clinician to notice some people were “odd”, he was a pioneer in attempting to a novel approach to their treatment; his idea was as well as their skills and knowledge, doctors should use their “psyche” (a learned borrowing from Latin psychē, from the Ancient Greek ψυχή (psukhḗ) (soul) as a therapeutic agent.  In summoning their souls for this good work, there may been an element of German romanticism but “psychiatry” caught on in a way the English term for such things never did; being English, they called it “moral treatment” which to patients and physicians alike must have sounded ominously censorious.  Coming into a post-Enlightenment world, the discipline of psychiatry was from the beginning scientific in a way older forms of medicine originally were not; right for the start it was concerned with classification, something in the last seventy odd years refined and greatly expanded by the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

One early example was to divide mental illness into a binary: there were neurotics (those with a capacity to harm themselves) and there were psychotics (those with a capacity to harm others) but the “crown jewels” of psychiatry was schizophrenia.  Whatever the debates about the increased prevalence of the condition induced by “modern life” (however and whenever defined) the medical literature makes clear it’s not a recent addition to the human condition, being recognized as a clinical entity in the Hindu Ayur Veda (an ancient, holistic Indian system of medicine) and there are detailed descriptions in the surviving notes of Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a celebrated physician of Ancient Greece who practiced late in the second century AD; doctors have long been dealing with madmen.  By the end of the eighteenth century, based on the literature, some consensus seems to have been reached regarding schizophrenia’s symptoms but the first recognized “codified” description of the condition is thought to have appeared in the fifth edition (1898) of Ein Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie (A Textbook: Foundations of Psychiatry and Neuroscience) by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926); it was a seminal work in modern scientific psychiatry.  In 1911 Dr Bleuler coined “schizophrenia” (split mind) and the rest is history.

Madness

Within the profession of psychiatry, schizophrenia has a long (and technical) definitional history although, in essence, it’s always been thought a severe and chronic mental disorder characterized by disturbances in thought, perception and behavior.  Lacking any physical or laboratory test, it can be difficult to diagnose as schizophrenia involves a range of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional symptoms.  In the fifth edition of the DSM ((DSM-5 (2013)), the lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia is noted as 0.3%-0.7%, the psychotic manifestations typically emerging between the mid-teens and mid-thirties, with the peak age of onset of the first psychotic episode in the early to mid-twenties for males and late twenties for females.  The DSM-5 editors also made changes to the criteria to make a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the most significant amendments since DSM-III (1980).

Madness and Modernism.

Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (1992), by US clinical psychologist Louis A Sass (b 1949), was an exploration of why mystery continues to shroud schizophrenia, which, despite advances in biological psychiatry and neuroscience, appears little changed in almost a century  Sass quoted approvingly a description of schizophrenia as "a condition of obscure origins and no established etiology, pathogenesis and pathology…" without "…even any clear disease marker or laboratory test by which it can readily be identified."  That "threshold" problem is not unique to schizophrenia (it was much debated when the controversy about Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) was at its height in the 1990s) but it remains of great interest to the profession.  

However, in a departure from most writings on mental illness, Sass explored the "striking similarities" between the seemingly bizarre universe of schizophrenic experiences and the sensibilities and structures of consciousness revealed in the works of modernist artists and writers such as Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Paul Valéry (1871–1945), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008), Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and Salvador Dalí (1904–1989).  Applying the techniques of psychology to modernism, he traced similar cognitive configurations reflected in schizophrenia and modern art & literature, finding both artist and schizophrenic characterized by a pronounced thrust to deconstruct the world and subjectively to reconstruct human experience without reference to objective reality.  Layers of reality, real and constructed, co-exist and interact, frequently fusing into each-other, producing an acute self-awareness Sass called "hyperreflexivity", as well as a profound sense of alienation from the empirical world.  Sass allowed his analysis to reach its logical conclusion, that there is a tenuous, though clearly discernible, connection between modern culture and madness, speculating that insanity might be “…a disease of certain highly advanced forms of cultural organization, perhaps a part of the price we pay for civilization?"  His thesis wasn’t without critics although most acknowledged Madness and Modernism was at least a minor literary classic.

Duncan's Ritual Of Freemasonry (2021 edition) by Malcolm A Duncan.  It was first publish in 1866.

As the DSM makes clear, not all schizophrenics are the same.  In 2011, Lindsay Lohan was granted a two-year restraining order against alleged stalker David Cocordan.  The order was issued some days after she filed complaint with police who, after investigation by their Threat Management Department, advised the court Mr Cocordan (who at the time had been using at least five aliases) “suffered from schizophrenia”, was “off his medication” and had a "significant psychiatric history of acting on his delusional beliefs.”  That was worrying enough but Ms Lohan may have revealed her real concerns in an earlier tweet on X (then known as Twitter) in which she included a picture of David Cocordan, claiming he was "the freemason stalker that has been threatening to kill me- while he is TRESPASSING!", adding "im actually scared now- the blood in the 'cults' book was too much.  All my fans, my supporters, please stand by me. (sic)".  Being stalked by a schizophrenic is bad enough but the thought of being hunted by a schizophrenic Freemason truly is frightening.  Apparently an unexplored matter in the annals of psychiatry, it seems the question of just how schizophrenia might particularly manifest in Freemasons awaits research so there may be a PhD there for someone, the obvious question to explore being (1) does Freemasonry tend to attract schizophrenics or (2) does Freemasonry tend to induce schizophrenia?  As far as is known, there have been no further reports of Ms Lohan being a victim of Masonic stalking but few doubt the Freemasons will have kept open their "Lindsay Lohan file".