Still Nascent

This is my second post. Due to some technical glitch this appears first in the oeuvre. Of my five favourite words, portmanteau has been talked about in the first post, The Inception: A Portmanteau ; the remaining four are here.

Friday again and time to commit to digital paper the rest of the four words that top my list along with ‘portmanteau’ and that are clamouring (not deafening though) to be published! Without further ado, I’ll escort you to the first one, a common thing (like ‘portmanteau’) that we all have experienced without many of us not knowing it has a name.

Have you not taken an extra-long breath to get a little more of that intoxicating wisp which emanates when the pristine pearl drops from above grace the parched terra firma in the afternoon of a real scorcher?

That sounds like a lengthy rhetoric question, but the answer is in affirmative, isn’t it? That subtle smell is known as ‘petrichor’! How delightful to put a name to such a wonderful redolence! Next time you indulge in the pleasure of this inhalation, you’ll certainly remember ‘petrichor’ that has its origin in ‘petro’, meaning ‘relating to stone’. Food for thought: we always save up for our ‘rainy days’, do we save enough ‘rain’ for our literally non-rainy days? Price of a litre of milk in a local retail store is skyrocketing as we keep contributing towards the drought relief fund for farmers!

Now that we’ve inhaled petrichor vicariously, let’s move on to ‘primogeniture’. You can easily find out what it means, so, I’m more interested to reveal how it’s been used by a great author and how you can easily recall the word whenever you think of the British Royal Family. This renowned author is Jeffrey Archer. If Jeffrey Archer’s writing were a man, he’d be a suave one, elegantly wending through the peaks and troughs of a story with well-chosen words and that’s where he introduced me to this wonderful word: Clifton Chronicles, Volume IV, Chapter 47

‘Were you hoping for a boy or a girl?’ asked Sam as the head waiter pulled back a chair for her.

‘I didn’t give Gwyneth a choice,’ said Giles. ‘Told her it had to be a boy.’

‘Why?’

‘For purely practical reasons. A girl can’t inherit the family title. In England, everything has to pass through the male line.’

‘How archaic,’ said Sam. ‘And I always thought of the British as being such a civilized race.’

‘Not when it comes to primogeniture,’ said Giles.

Immediately he mentions the ‘Queen on the throne’, but I’m not a history aficionado, the web will do a better job to inform you how she inherited that after her father George VI, - thanks to the abdication of Edward VIII for Wallis Simpson! I’m nonetheless happy that Princess Charlotte of Cambridge is 4^th in the line of succession as of 2019 while her little brother is 5^th – no more prejudices – kudos to the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013 signed by the Queen after which Princess Charlotte became the first princess to overtake a prince. This word again is one of those familiar day-to-day life matters, but the word itself isn’t so familiar to us!

That is a reason why these 5 words (‘portmanteau’ in my first post, ‘The Inception’ and the 4 words described here) top my list – familiar phenomena but the words aren’t that well known. Talking about it, I’d like to bring to you my next one ‘constitutional’. I might sound that I read only Jeffrey Archer when I cite his writing again, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do for this word and the next!  I can’t claim that I have an eidetic memory (used by Audrey Tautou as Sophie Neveu in The da Vinci Code movie), but I have a proclivity to retain the context from where I’ve picked up an unusual word or a collocation. Jeffrey Archer, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, and J.R.R. Tolkein have provided quite a few of them and I’ll discuss those eventually. For now, let’s focus on Jeffrey Archer’s Clifton Chronicles, Volume VI, Chapters 4 & 26:

Chapter 4: Maisie had lived in a cottage on the Manor House estate since her second husband’s death three years before. She remained actively involved with several local charities, and although she rarely missed her daily three-mile constitutional, it was now taking her over an hour.

Chapter 26: ‘Capital,’ said the colonel. ‘I rarely miss my constitutional. Gets me out of the house. Well, must be getting along, or the memsahib will be wondering where I am.’

By now you must’ve deduced what it means or looked up the meaning, but beware - this is a trick in English, it differs in meaning with a different part of speech. As an adjective, it can be used to express something related to a person’s nature or physical condition as in ‘constitutional weakness’ or something related to legal matters as in ‘constitutional amendment’. But I’m sure you’ll remember it whenever you go for your next morning walk!

Consummate, deliberate, appropriate are few other words whose meaning differ widely with variation in part of speech. 

A personal anecdote – when I moved to this English-speaking country, I was awed to fathom the high standard of British English. Local news articles and list of words circulated among children of primary school as a preparation for Spell Bee competitions piqued my interest. Win the contest or not, I insisted that my child should learn the words on the list to build a healthy lexicon. To boost his morale we embarked together upon the seemingly impossible journey of learning all the words on the list. It was a wise endeavour, because I was sure if we could retain at least 60%, our vocab would be considerable.  

One word that I learnt from the list was ‘investiture’, but Jeffrey Archer rendered it special through his Clifton Chronicles, Volume VII, Chapter 2:

‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, ‘and welcome to Buckingham Palace. Today’s investiture will begin in a few minutes’ time. Can I remind you not to take photographs, and please do not leave before the ceremony is over.’ Without another word, he departed as discreetly as he had entered.

Later in the news that attempted to dispel the rumours of HM's demise, I came across this:
Gradually, while still being very hands-on, the Queen has cut down the amount of investitures she does, spending longer weekends at Windsor and reducing her public duties.

Now, I’m sure you’ll pay more attention to news that pertains to investiture henceforth. 

I’ll be back with more in my next post, which I’ll aim to keep short and effective! Thank you for reading!