Concatenation -- The Chain Gang

During a recent catching-up-on-our-lives chat, my college friend Claressa reminded me once again why I've always admired her. Talking about her lab work or new beekeeping hobby -- can't remember which -- she employed the term concatenation. There was no particular motive: She wasn't aiming to be formal or ironic or anything else. We were casually chatting. She just knows such words and employs them as breezily as others use the or going. (And before you go thinking she's just some prissy vocabulary geek, let me note that this is a woman who introduced me to Sid & Nancy, who cultures Legionella bacteria, and who displays on her mantel a black velvet painting of Yoda that she got as a gift from a Hell's Angel.)

Concatenation has been stuck in my head since I started this blog with my hubby's encouragement. Among the helpful tools he bought to noodge me into the blogosphere was a copy of The Lexicon, a compendium of words collected from the writings of wordsmith William F. Buckley Jr. Flipping through this pocket-sized tome, one of the first words I landed on was concatenation. As Mr. Buckley knew, the word means "a series or order of things depending on each other as if linked together," or, in the most basic sense, "a chain of events." It's not a term I happened to have had at the ready in my vocabulary bag of tricks at the time. Nor is it one I've had opportunity to employ since then. So my ears pricked up and I had to smile a little when concatenation tripped off Claressa's tongue. Ah, there it is! If I can't get around to using it, I'm glad someone else could.

Dictionary Definition:

Roots: Latin catēnāre, "to bind," from Latin catēna, meaning "chain"

Pronounced: [kon-kat-n-ay-shuhn]

1. union by chaining or linking together

2. union in a series or chain, of whihc he things united form as it were links

3. an interdependent or unbroken sequence