WORD DRUNK

The other day, while making lunch and listening to the radio—a program on Middle East politics—the guest, whose name I never got, used the adjective “pusillanimous” when describing John Kerry’s position on the topic under discussion.

I was startled—even if this was NPR—that this word fell so easily and naturally out of the guest’s mouth.  I stopped what I was doing and went straight to the first of my three reference books, The Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus (2^nd edition) to look up the word’s meaning, though I’d guessed at it from the context within which it was used.

In the Oxford, there were only two listings for pusillanimous: lacking courage and timid.   Oops, but then just three words down, I saw the word “pustule,” whose sound has always intrigued me.  It also puts me in mind of the Black Death, with which I am slightly obsessed.  (Really, just last night I watched a DVD about it.)        

I'm also obsessed—and more than slightly—with words, which was why doing dictionary work as a college freshman kept me up most of the night.  For on the way to looking up, say, pusillanimous, I'd get waylaid in the D's (diffident) or F's (flotsam) or surely the L's (lobelia).

But I’ve made progress since then, I think, so I didn’t tarry long on pustule, but went straight to my second reference book, the large and unwieldy Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Second Edition) which sits on a built-in dresser in my walk-in closet.  It’s pretty heavy, but at chest-height it’s easy to flip open, which I did—and paused but a second at “piddle”—the meaning of which seemed momentarily apt :“to spend time in a wasteful, trifling, or ineffective way; dawdle (often fol. by around).”

Indeed.

But I quickly quit piddling around and pushed on through the “P’s”—pusillanimous being quite toward the end.  Once there I was rewarded with a more extended definition of the word, and hence a more nuanced one.  In addition to lacking courage and timid, pusillanimous means lacking resolution; cowardly; faint-hearted.  And there were synonyms: timorous; fearful; frightened.

Next stop was my third reference book, The Oxford Pocket American Thesaurus of Current English, and even more pusillanimous synonyms, including “lily-livered, chickenhearted, spineless, and craven (and it took just a second for me to spy two pustule synonyms I rather liked: boil and blister).

Finally, I felt sated.

Well, not quite.  I went on the internet, to my latest discovery,  dictionary.com.  This site searches several on-line dictionaries, including The Etymology Dictionary, which I refuse to bookmark, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

At any rate, dictionary.com didn’t have anything new to add, though it did suggest “related words”: poor-spirited and unmanly, both of which sound less like timid and faint-hearted and more like something else.

Now, though, I was sated.  Exhausted, actually.

P.S.  (Before leaving dictionary.com, I just had to check on pustule.  A find!  Here it is used as a metaphor: "a cool glimpse of green between hot pustules of sooty sprawl" (Nicholas Proffitt).

And who exactly is Nicolas Proffitt?  And whence the quote?  Sorry, you’ll have to discover that on your own.