Wordcatcher by Phil Cousineau Read Free Book Online

languages, like the mythic source of the Nile. To attempt to prove his point, he exiled two babies to a hut in the
mountains and left them there to live in silence, visited occasionally by a shepherd who brought them food. Eventually, the story goes, the children spoke. What they said was bekos , which the Pharaoh interpreted as meaning that Phrygian was the mother of all languages. Never ones to leave a colorful folk etymology alone, modern linguists connect bekos with the Albanian buke , also meaning “bread,” and to the eventual English bake . Companion “first” words include one that many of us devour with the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. A historian of dictionaries, Jonathan Green, recounts a study in Chasing the Sun about the search for traces of the earliest words common to all Indo-European languages. After the elimination of thousands of words, the true and noble survivor was the noble friend of bagels everywhere, lox . Hmmmmm , you say, and I say we’re on to something. Roy Blount Jr. cites Stephen Mithen’s work in The Singing Neanderthals , “that the first stirrings of language were hmmmmm .” All origin stories have the strange contours of poetry. The physician and etymologist Lewis Thomas speculates: “‘ Kwei ,’ said a Proto-Indo-European [PIE] child, meaning ‘make something,’ and the word became, centuries later, our word ‘poem.’” Incidentally, the oldest phrase in continuous use in English is the still popular “Woe is me,” which first appeared as “Woe unto me,” in the Old Testament, Job 10:15.

BERSERK
    Ferociously out of control; displaying superhuman strength in battle. In 1822, Sir Walter Scott raided the Old Norse language for the right word to convey the sense of utterly blood-thirsty warriors for his novel The Pirate : “The berserkars were so called from fighting without armour.” After the book was published , berserk became all the rage. Within fifty years the word shape-shifted into its figurative sense of deranged behavior, so that “to go berserk” became the English version of the Malaysian “running amok.” North Beach photographer Mikkel Aaland, whose family hails from Norway, told me what his uncle told him, “The Berserkrs were a Viking tribe so called because they wore bear, ber , skirts or garments, serk . They were known as ferocious fighters who went to battle after eating psychedelic mushrooms. They were known to tear the flesh off their opponents with their teeth, and so, berserk , uncontrollable rage, is derived from this behavior.” Howling like animals, foaming at the mouth, and biting the edges of their iron shields, the berserkrs spread terror from Ireland to Russia, and were frenzied champions when they returned home to plow their fields and tell their tales in front of the home fires. Why the bear skin? Some say donning the bearskin was sympathetic magic. If you kill the bear, wear its skin, you absorb its fury , display its courage and strength. In 1908, Kipling wrote in Diversity of Creatures , “You went Berserk . I’ve read all about it in Hypatia. … You’ll probably be liable to fits of it all your life.” Companion words
include anger , from the Viking angr , their red-face response to injustices of the world; and Herb Caen’s “ Berserkely, ” or “Berserkelier-than-thou.”

BEWILDER
    To confuse, bespudder, or discombobulate . A 16th-century folk memory from the days when most people in Europe lived either in the forest or in towns surrounded by woodland. Bewilder derives from the Old English be , thoroughly, and wilder, to lead one astray. Figuratively, it means to be lost in the pathless woods, and by extension to lure an innocent into the wild. Scholars suggest that it’s a “backformation” from wilderness , whose roots are in wilde’or , the wild deer that once roamed the untamed land. Companion words include bedevil , bewitch , and the wonderfully clangorous bewhape , an archaic English word from the