Fecund -- Pregnant With Meaning

I'm not sure I want to feel like I can relate to the character of Jules in the new film The Kids Are All Right, but during a particular scene, I most definitely did.

When Jules suggests allowing the garden to be untamed and fecund, I'm sure many people in the audience had the same reaction as the character Paul, namely a quizzical "what?" Except for any word nerds in the theater, some of whom may have shared my reaction: "Feh-kund? Isn't it fee-kund?"

I've been in that situation, rambling along in a conversation and blurting out some 5- or 10-dollar word that brings the chatter to a stumbling halt and elicits a "wait, what did you just say?" reaction. Most often that reaction is accompanied by a bemused smile, like Paul's, though sometimes by a jeering snicker: "A whatsit?" "C'mon, say that again!"

Oh, sure, some of us logophiles are word snobs, dropping terms like bloviating or versimilitude into a conversation just to show off. (Yeah, I'm thinking about you, George Will.) But many former vocabulary quiz acers really aren't thinking about it when they employ a word like fecund. It's a good word. It perfectly encapsulates the intended meaning. It's just not used by many people, as Paul notes.

Jules is hardly a word snob. Playing Scrabble with her daughter, she argues the case for why zoomer is a perfectly valid word: zoom is a word; ergo, something that zooms is a zoomer. (Hence, I can use acer to refer to someone who aces vocabulary quizzes.) Of course, no dictionary will back up her case (or mine).

If you're going to drop polysyllabic or obscure terms into conversations, you just have to be prepared to accept the smiles and occasional scoffs. Still, as I've stated before in this blog, it's a pity that many people accept the convention that such words should be the sole purview of bookworms or the collegiate set. Whether you pronounce it fee-kund or feh-kund, it's a nifty word to trip off your tongue. I like that Jules and Paul can appreciate a word like fecund. Doesn't make up for their significant character flaws, but it adds a likeable aspect to their characters, at least in my book.

As for the pronunciation of fecund, it's a to-may-to, to-mah-to situation; either is accepted by all dictionaries. However, I prefer the long e given that the term derives from the same root as fetus. Somehow, feh-kund feels as odd to my tongue as feh-tus or feh-tal position. Or as feet-ah cheese does, for that matter. Eeyw.

Dictionary Definition
from Webster's Third New International Dictionary
fecund
1 a: characterized by having produced many offspring or having yielded vegetation, fruit or crops to a marked or satisfying degree
b: capable of producing : not sterile or barren : markedly fertile
2: marked by noteworthy intellectual productivity and inventiveness Syn. see fertile

Minions & Myrmidons - To Serve and Obey

After watching the animated theatrical treat Despicable Me, how could you not want your own bevy of minions? As cute as little yellow pill bugs, yet ever so much more capable and resourceful, they can shop for a child's toy or build you a fully operational spacecraft! Yes, I want me some minions, as I noted on Facebook recently. To which a friend responded he would prefer some myrmidons. Well, same difference, I wrote back. To which he retorted, au contraire, they are hardly close to the same thing, myrmidons being the warriors who followed the heroic Achilles into battle against Troy and minions being dime-a-dozen servants.

So who would be the better underling -- a minion or a myrmidon? A thorough scan of several dictionaries shows that both terms have at some point been used positively and negatively to label a dutiful follower (see definitions farther down). Minion seems to have carried the negative sense longer and more routinely, but myrmidon at some point accrued its own connotations of lackey.

Perhaps the dualistic definitions of these terms hint at an age-old hierarchy of esteem in which we hold leaders and followers. One follows the leader, as we learn in childhood games. Leaders inspire admiration and even awe. They are exemplars who can do things better than others, or visionaries who can see farther than others, or simply individuals of such great charisma, they inspire loyalty and imitation (for better or worse). Followers are, well, not really celebrated and revered. They are, at best, sidekicks to the heroes. Sure, there are cases when the worker bees get due credit for their essential role in saving the day, as Scotty manages to skirt the Enterprise past a black hole, or dozens of men claim the name of Spartacus, or Patroclus rallies Achilles' men to the Greeks' rescue against the Trojans as the great warrior sits out the battle in a fit of pique. But leaders generally carry the day.

Myrmidon's etymology is entertaining in its own right with its derivation from the Greek term myrmex for ant. According to the renowned classics scholar Edith Hamilton, the Myrmidons were men created by Zeus from ants to repopulate the island nation of Aegina after its people were decimated by a plague. As recounted by the Latin poet Ovid, the pestilence was sent by an enraged Hera, the divine wife of Zeus, after she discovers her husband has once again been philandering, this time with the maiden for whom the island is named. King Aeacus, son of Zeus and Aegina (and grandfather of Achilles), begs his father for help, pointing out a colony of industrious ants and asking Zeus to make of them a people numerous enough to fill his depleted city. The next day he discovers his prayer has been answered as a multitude gathers outside his palace crying out that they are his faithful subjects.

Of course, Ovid and his ancient Roman contemporaries didn't know that the majority of ants are female.

Here's what the dictionaries had to say about minions and myrmidons:

From the American Heritage Dictionary:
Myrmidon
1. Greek Mythology, A member of a warlike Thessalian people who were ruled by Achilles and followed him on the expedition against Troy.
2. myrmidon. A faithful follower who carries out orders without question.

minion
1. An obsequious follower or dependent; a syncophant.
2. A subordinate official.
3. One who is highly esteemed or favored; a darling.
From French mignon, darling, from Old French mignot, mignon.

From the New Oxford American Dictionary:
Myrmidon
• a member of a warlike Thessalian people led by Achilles at the siege of Troy.
• (usu. myrmidon) a hired ruffian or unscrupulous subordinate: e.g., he wrote to one of Hitler's myrmidons.
ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin Myrmidones (plural), from Greek Murmidones

minion
a follower or underling of a powerful person, esp. a servile or unimportant one.
ORIGIN late 15th cent.: from French mignon, mignonne.

And from the granddaddy of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary:
myrmidon
1. (With capital M.) One of a warlike race of men inhabiting ancient Thessaly, whom, according to the Homeric story, Achilles led to the siege of Troy (Illiad II. 684).
2. A soldier of (one's) body-guard; a faithful follower or servant. [OED notes this usage is now obsolete.]
3. An unscrupulously faithful follower or hireling; a hired ruffian; a base attendant.
b. Chiefly mymrdon of the law, of justice: applied contemptuously to a policeman, bailiff, or other inferior administrative officer of the law.

minion
The ultimate etymology is disputed: according to some the word is a derivative of OHG [Old High German] minnja, minna love; others refer it to Celtic min- small.
1. A beloved object, darling, favourite. [OED notes that this usage is now rare or obsolete.]
a. A lover or lady-love. Chiefly, and in later use exclusively with contemptuous or opprobrious sense, a mistress or paramour.
b. One specially favoured or beloved; a dearest friend, a favourite child, servant, or animal; the 'idol' of a people, a community, etc. Now only in contemptuous sense.
c. esp. a favourite of a sovereign, prince, or other great person; esp. opprobriously, one who owes everything to his patron's favour, and is ready to purchase its continuance by base compliances, a 'creature'.
2. A gallant, an exquisite. [Also obsolete.]
3. A small ordinance. [Ditto.]
4. A kind of peach, in full minion peach. [Apparently still in use as not labeled rare or obsolete.]
5. Printing The name of a type intermediate in size between 'nonpareil' and 'brevier'.
6. adj. Dainty, elegant, fine, pretty, neat.

Cudgel -- Nothing Cuddly About It

During a conversation last night on group politics and the misunderstandings people in the midst of a debate can have of the other side's intentions, I picked up on Mark's use of the phrase "offer an olive branch." "Well," I said, "one person's olive branch is another person's cudgel."

Mark laughed at that, not because he thought it particularly witty on my part, but rather because of my use of cudgel, which he noted sounds like something sweet and cute, kind of pet-like. "Here, little cudgel!"

I don't why cudgel popped out of my mouth rather than the more pedestrian term club, but that's what a cudgel is. There's nothing cute or fluffy about a cudgel or the verb form to cudgel, which means to beat something -- or someone. Though, for what it's worth, cudgel and cuddle are separated by a mere single definition in Webster's Third International Dictionary.

Webster's defines cudgel as:

1. noun, a short heavy stick that is shorter than a quarterstaff and is used as an instrument of punishment or a weapon.
2. verb, to beat with or as with a cudgel: belabor, thrash, drub, rack.

I was amused to see that a couple of dictionaries offered idiomatic expressions linking the term to the act of thinking: "I cudgeled my brains to recall her name" on Dictionary.com and "cudgeled his brains for a rhyme" in Webster's. Ouch -- that's some painful pondering!

Nominal - A Little Normal

During Sunday night's landing of Space Shuttle Endeavor, which Mark was watching on his laptop, I caught a command from the CapCom in Houston to the shuttle crew to do a "nominal chute deploy." "Nominal?" I asked. "I would think they'd want full deployment of their parachutes upon landing." "Nominal means normal," Mark said. "No, it means little or less than the full amount," I countered. After a bit of back and forth on the term's meaning, I went to the arbiter of word matters, the dictionary (in this instance the Oxford New American Dictionary loaded on our Mac) and quoted:

nominal
1. (of a role or status) existing in name only: Thailand retained nominal independence under Japanese military occupation. • of, relating to, or consisting of names. • Grammar relating to, headed by, or having the function of a noun.
2. (of a price or amount of money) very small; far below the real value or cost: some firms charge only a nominal fee for the service.
3. (of a quantity or dimension, esp. of manufactured articles) stated or expressed but not necessarily corresponding exactly to the real value: legislation allowed variation around the nominal weight (that printed on each packet). • Economics (of a rate or other figure) expressed in terms of a certain amount, without making allowance for changes in real value over time: the nominal exchange rate.
4. informal (chiefly in the context of space travel) functioning normally or acceptably.

As so often happens, we were both right and our understanding of the term rested on the context within which we were most familiar with it. To a space geek like Mark, NASA staffers' use of the term made perfect sense whereas it sounded bizarre to me. Mark found some information suggesting that NASA's use of the term is borrowed from the term's usage in statistics. "Mission control-types are looking for unusual readings, so readings within an expected, or nominal, range are normal," he noted. This Wikipedia article on the term's various usage contexts provides further insights.

Fortunately, the shuttle experienced a nominal, full deployment of its chutes during its Sunday night landing, completing a safe and successful mission.

Pogonology & Hirsute - A Wild Hair

There's an ologist for everything under the sun. This morning, a Washington Post article on the waning popularity of mustaches and beards in India enlightened me to the term for the study of facial hair: pogonology. The feature cited commentary from pogonologist Richard McCallum, author of Hair India: A Guide to the Bizarre Beards and Magnificent Mustaches of Hindustan. Now, that's a book to display prominently on your coffee table.


Reading the Post feature about the dwindling of the "facial foliage" that has long distinguished Indian men -- to the extent that someone could create a coffee table book about it -- brought to mind a particularly choice term that didn't find its way into the piece: hirsute. I just like this word. Hirsute is a fun and funky term for "hairy." More specifically, it connotes being covered with hair. Pronounced "her-suit," it sounds vaguely similar to ursine, the Latin term for bear, a creature sporting a great, shaggy pelt. But all good qualities aside, it's a true ten-dollar term. You can see why there aren't many hair restoration product ads proclaiming to "return you to your full hirsute glory in just two weeks!"


Speaking of hair and India, I remember how perplexed I was staring at the saffron-robed men I encountered for the first time in my life in Boston Commons during a vacation many years ago. The sight of their shaved heads was entirely antithetical to the image I'd formed upon hearing my father point out the "hairy krishnas" -- at least that's how my callow teenage brain interpreted the moniker.

Refulgent -- I Gotta Wear Shades

Mining Simon Mawer's novel The Glass Room for vocabularic gems is proving a most enriching experience. Today, I came across refulgent in this passage describing the the installation of the glass panes forming the eponymous room of the book's title:

It had become a palace of light, light bouncing off the chrome pillars, light refulgent on the walls, light glistening on the dew in the garden, light reverberating from the glass. It was as though they stood inside a crystal of salt.

Refulgent, according to the Kindle's built-in dictionary, means "shining brightly." The OED says a bit more expansively, "shining with, or reflecting, a brilliant light; radiant, resplendent, gleaming."

Mawer uses the term in this instance to describe the effect of the newly erected glass space, or glass room, as the couple for whom this modernistic house is being built experience it for the first time.

But this isn't the first instance Mawer uses the term in the novel. My eyes skipped over the first usage in an earlier passage when pregnant Liesel, the female half of the couple, is submitting to her friend's efforts to divine the gender of her unborn baby via an old wives' trick (the novel is set pre-ultrasound) of suspending her wedding ring by a string over her belly and watching its movements:

'It's a girl.' The turning is obvious now, incontrovertible, a description of a perfect female circle over the smooth and refulgent dome of Liesel's belly.

Nor is it the term's the last usage in the novel. Mawer applies it once more to Liesel in a passage where he describes her as she "now appears fantastic, a shining refulgent creature."

I'm tempted to take issue with the redundancy of shining. However, I'm more intrigued by the parallels that the author seems to be drawing between the woman and the unparalleled and resplendent house she occupies, a unique structure built exclusively for her and her family. I'm not far enough along in the novel to draw conclusions about the relationship between the character of the house and the character of the woman. However, this strikes me as a good example of how authors can suggest deeper meanings even by something as seemingly simple as their word choice.

Glaucous -- Vocabulary from The Glass Room

In between snow shoveling, pounding ice out of the gutter downspouts, and chipping away at ice dams on the roof, I've begun reading Simon Mawer's novel, The Glass Room. It's clearly a book full of vocabulary gems, which I'll make a point to mine along the way. My first fun find: glaucous.

The term means, according to the dictionary in the Kindle on which I'm reading the novel:
1. of a dull grayish-green or blue color.
2. covered with a powdery bloom like that on grapes.

The word's ultimate root is the Greek glaukos meaning "bluish-green" or "bluish-gray." This root is shared by glaucoma, the medical term for a gradual loss of sight due to increased pressure on the eyeball, which can be marked by a gray-green haze in the pupil.

Usage of glaucous in the novel is in reference to a model of a pavilion that the modernist architect Ranier von Abt has designed and is now showing off to his new acquaintances and perhaps potential clients:

The colours of the model were those that von Abt had extolled in their voyage down from Saint Mark's: ethereal white, glaucous pearl, glistening chrome.

It sounds cold but lovely to me.

Surfeit -- Let It Snow? Let It No!

Dear Mother Nature, thank you for your enthusiastic response to my husband's wistful comments lo these past few years about the dearth of snow to mark the winter season, but really, enough is enough. There's a hill of snow in front of our house created from our efforts to shovel a 20-inch deep blanket off our car and driveway, and now we hear forecasts of another 5 to 10 inches that may fall in a couple of days. Thanks, dear lady, but no thanks. We are suffering a surfeit of the white stuff.

I'm afraid that the evidence outside our windows suggests you may not be familiar with the meaning of surfeit, so permit me to share with you this definition from the venerable OED: "1. Excess, superfluity; excessive amount or supply of something." The tome also offers: "An excessive indulgence," and "Disgust arising from excess; nausea, satiety." Not to seem too ungrateful, but it's that last definition that really resonates at the moment.

Oh, sure, come the dog days of August, as I stand in a sweltering Metro train car with beads of sweat slithering down the backs of my legs, I'll think back longingly to plowing through snow up to my kneecaps this winter. But, dear Mother Nature, we're surfeited. Satiated. Done with all that. So that next round of snow on Tuesday? I hear Vancouver is experiencing a deficiency.

Chagrin over Chagrined

My husband asked me the other day if chagrined was the right word in the opening sentence of my previous blog post.

As the American Heritage Dictionary notes, chagrin can be a noun or verb.

n. A keen feeling of mental unease, as of annoyance or embarrassment, caused by failure, disappointment, or a disconcerting event: To her chagrin, the party ended just as she arrived.

tr.v. chagrined, chagrining, chagrins To cause to feel chagrin; mortify or discomfit: He was chagrined at the poor sales of his book. See Synonyms at embarrass.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary offers these definitions:

As a noun:
1. obs. disturbance of mind resulting from care or anxiety: worry: depression of spirits: melancholy.
2. vexation, disquietude, or distress of mind brought on by failure or error

As a verb:
1. archaic to cause to feel anxiety: trouble: grieve
2. to vex through humiliation, hurt pride, or disappointment

As an adjective:
1. feeling or made to feel chagrin: disappointed: mortified

Well, I must express my chagrin that I didn't hew to the nuances of the term's meaning when I used chagrined in my previous posting to mean simply "vexed" or "disappointed." The term has a clear history and linkage to the concepts of shame and humiliation, and while I may feel embarrassed now as a word nerd who misused a term, I certainly had no cause to feel shame myself for the removal of the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary from the classrooms of a school district in California as I had no part in that.

You could argue that my use of chagrin was ok, given that the definitions allow for a broad sense of disappointment not necessarily always connected to humiliation, the same way people sometimes use shame colloquially to mean disappointment, as in "what a shame the rain ruined our picnic." However, as someone who is writing a vocabulary blog and pointing out the importance of the nuances of words' meanings, I have to 'fess up to this lapse. I plead guilty to allowing the allure of alliteration to supersede accurate usage. So, honey, you were right.

School District Blows Off Dictionary Over Graphic Term

Normally I'm chagrined but not shocked when I hear that a school has banned a book, but my mouth hung agape when I read that a California school district has banned the Merriam Webster Dictionary from its classrooms. Oh, wait, sorry; according to the Los Angeles Times article, the school district didn't ban the tomes, but rather "temporarily housed [them] off location" till their suitability for the district's pupils can be assessed, said a spokeswoman for the Menifee Union School District in southwest Riverside County.

So what evils lurk inside Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10th ed.)? Well, oral sex, for one thing. A Menifee parent contacted the principal of Oak Meadows Elementary School to complain that book contained the term and its graphic definition. Now, a committee is being formed to sift the dictionary -- which I'll refer to henceforth as the MWCD -- to see what other potentially explicit terms and definitions skulk inside.

I grant that the aghast parent contacted the elementary school, which presumably means her/his child is at an age at which, you could argue, the term oral sex should not be a part of the common vernacular. Also, the school district's spokeswoman took pains to note that the MWCD, which had been available in the fourth and fifth grade classrooms, is not the only dictionary available in the district's schools. But it turns out that the term oral sex was not actually in the MWCD, according to the Southwest Riverside News!

Does a collegiate dictionary belong in elementary school classrooms? As the district's school board president Rita Peters noted, the schools use the MWCD for their spelling bees. I'm personally inclined to agree with Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, who told the LA Times, "At the end of the day, if my kid is digging through the Merriam Webster dictionary to find words he and his friends are going to giggle over but along the way find other words they will use, I think that is a day well spent in school." But are there other word tomes that eschew terms such as oral sex, yet still provide the range of a collegiate dictionary? I suppose the school district's committee will attempt to figure that out.

In the interim, if you're like me, imaging this group's working sessions conjures more than a few grins.

What's A Looter?

Think words are innocuous little scratches on paper or so much ephemeral vapor on the air? Then clearly you've not stumbled across the Comments section following a blog post or article talking about the increase of looting in Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake there. People are vigorously engaged in an emotional, sometimes heated, debate about the appropriateness and propriety of using the words looters and looting in the context of this disaster.

People's takes on whether these are the "right" or "wrong" terms to use get into issues of race, equality, and socioeconomic status. As vocabulary is the focus of this blog, I will leave the exploration of those topics for other venues. Those interested in delving into the social issues should peruse this useful collection of commentaries my husband compiled regarding earlier debates of the use of looters in coverage and discussions of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath five years ago:

• NPR: A Perspective on Looters and Race
• N.Y. Times: Who's a Looter? In Storm's Aftermath, Pictures Kick Up a Different Kind of Tempest
• Washington Post: Natural Disasters in Black and White
• Poynter Institute: American Behemoth

Turning to a purely logocentric perspective, what do the origins and definitions of the words looter and loot tell us?

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, the foremost definition of loot as a noun is "goods, esp. private property, taken from an enemy in war." The dictionary continues:

• stolen money or valuables: two men wearing stocking masks, each swinging a bag of loot.
• informal money; wealth: the thief made off with $5 million in loot.

verb [ trans. ]
steal goods from (a place), typically during a war or riot: police confronted the rioters who were looting shops.
• steal (goods) in such circumstances: tons of food aid awaiting distribution had been looted.

The granddaddy of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary, says of loot:

1. Goods (esp. articles of considerable value) taken from an enemy, a captured city, etc. in time of war; also, in wider sense, something taken by force or with violence; booty, plunder, spoil; now sometimes transf., illicit gains, 'pillage' (e.g. by a public servant). Also, the act or process of looting.

2. slang. Money.

A quick tour through the options on Dictionary.com shows references to spoils, plunder, pillaging, burglary and theft.

The word loot's origins are Sanskrit, either lotra or luptra meaning "booty" or "spoil," the root lup meaning "to break;" or lunt meaning "to rob."

So is what's happening in Haiti looting by definition? You could say yes, whether it's a bag of rice or a bicycle or a TV, something taken without payment is theft and at its origins and within its principal definitions, loot means robbery.

On the other hand, is a desperately hungry individual stealing food or water committing thievery in the same way that someone walking off with a TV is? When the theft is for the purpose of survival, I think it may be more apt to call that person a scavenger. Of course, how does a witness know whether the person taking something out of store or a truck is doing so as a matter or survival or as an opportunist who plans to turn the goods over for profit?

Delving further into the nuances of the term, loot in the sense of "booty" and "valuable goods" conveys the idea that looters are people with the upper hand, conquerors seizing the spoils of their victory. Hard to look at Haiti and see much in the way of victory; rather, it's a scene of utter desperation.

At the same time, loot in the sense of "pillage" conveys disorganization and randomness as well as opportunism. Those seem to be hallmarks of the aftermath of major upheavals such as natural disasters.

I think your sense of whether loot is an appropriate term for discussions about the Haitian earthquake rests on which nuance of the term is embedded in your mind. And if it means theft pure and simple to you, then your sense of appropriateness is likely further shaped by where you come down on the philosophical question of whether taking necessities such as food or clothing without payment as a matter of survival is scavenging or thievery. May we who've never been in a situation to have to weigh that moral distinction as a reality rather than a hypothetical continue to be so fortunate. And may all the help possible come to those in need right now in Haiti.

Inflection Upon Reflection

Got into a discussion today about the use of the term inflection with another individual who appreciates the finer nuances of words. We were discussing a written description of a program that has encountered sufficient obstacles to undermine its ongoing success. As the document stated, it has "reached an inflection point." I contended that this is an obscure term for conveying the idea that the program has reached a point where change must happen and this usage seems pretentious. I suggested that a more straightforward way to say it would be turning point. My colleague countered that inflection is a particularly apt term that conveys a more deft nuance that turning point doesn't capture. After delving into the matter, I think you could decide either of us is right, depending on how you're familiar with the term.

My understanding of the term inflection comes from the context of language. I am, after all, a former English lit grad student. Inflection is a word I think of as associated with speech, more specifically intonation, how someone inflects, or modulates, his voice to convey meaning. For example, by the inflection of his voice, you can tell whether a person is making a statement or asking a question. Or you can tell whether a teen is using "dude!" to mean "way to go!" or "no way!" The term is also a grammatical device, the variation of a word -- generally the ending -- to signify a particular tense, mood, gender, etc. Given this context, I'd say it's not entirely surprising that I would stumble over its usage upon first read of this document.

Had my background been more science and mathematics oriented, however, perhaps I would have encountered the phrase inflection point or point of inflection previously. In geometry, inflection point refers to the particular point on a line that is changing from convex to concave (or vice versa) at which this change takes place. It's the stationary point right as the change occurs. The Wikipedia page on the topic (assuming it's generally accurate) offers a useful example for us non-math majors: "If one imagines driving a vehicle along a winding road, inflection is the point at which the steering-wheel is momentarily 'straight' when being turned from left to right or vice versa."

At its roots, the word inflect means "to bend inwards, to curve or bend into an angle," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED's first definition of inflection is the literal meaning of "the condition of being bent or curved" and then the figurative meaning of "a mental or moral bending or turning." The use of inflection to refer to the modulation of written or spoken language derives from the figurative use of the term's sense of alteration, change.

So are inflection point and turning point direct synonyms in the context of the document we started with, or do they convey different meanings? My colleague made the case that inflection point conveys a sense of a less radical or less dramatic change, which is appropriate to the program being described, whereas turning point can convey a sense of a sharper or quicker rate of change, a right-angle or 180-degree change. (Grant you, I'm paraphrasing here.) From a scientific mindset, thinking of that steering wheel at that static point before veering into the next curve, I can see how that makes sense. Moreover, in that mathematical sense, the term means being on the cusp of change, and that is another point I think the document's authors wished to convey.

However, as a layperson who found the term's usage in the document akin to a stumbling block that tripped up my reading, I'm still not convinced that it works here. Nor am I convinced that turning point isn't a reasonable substitute. After all, turns can be gradual as well as sharp; and bends can be sharp as well as gradual.

The bottom line of what this document is trying to convey is that this program is at a point where change must happen. Curve, inflection, and turn all figuratively convey the idea of change and therefore, I think, all could substitute for one another in most readers' minds. Given that of these choices, inflection is the least familiar, I personally think turning point would better achieve the ultimate goal of communicating the essential idea to the greatest number of potential audience members.

But you may side with my colleague and my mind is still open to inflection.

New Year, New Commitment & A Supreme Court Vocabulary Lesson

Talk about taking a hiatus! A fun word in and of itself, from Latin hiare literally meaning "gape." Given the gaping maw between this post and my last, this blog had basically flat-lined. But 'tis January, the month of Janus, the two-faced deity who looks both forward and backward, the god of gateways and doorways, of beginnings and endings. It's the season of resolutions and so mine is to revive my blog and reimmerse myself in the joys of both word-play and writing.

I was reminded of the pleasures of the playground of vocabulary by a fine little item in today's Washington Post, encapsulating an amusing exchange in the hallowed chamber of the Supreme Court, not of legal repartee, but of verbal badinage. Richard D. Friedman, a University of Michigan law professor testifying to the court in the case of Briscoe v. Virginia, piqued the justices' interest with his use of a 10-dollar term in his response to a question from Justice Kennedy. Friedman "added that it was 'entirely orthogonal' to the argument he was making" in the case. As the Post article continued:

Friedman attempted to move on, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stopped him.

"I'm sorry," Roberts said. "Entirely what?"

"Orthogonal," Friedman repeated, and then defined the word: "Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant."

"Oh," Roberts replied.

Scalia then jumped in:

"What was that adjective?" Scalia asked Monday. "I liked that."

"Orthogonal," Friedman said.

"Orthogonal," Roberts said.

"Orthogonal," Scalia said. "Ooh."

I'm tickled to point out that as of 10:30 p.m. ET on the day this article ran as something of a sidebar to the main article about the hearing of the case at hand, the Post web site had logged 29 comments on this vocabulary story. The main article? 14.