Postby George Kovac » Sat Apr 29, 2023 11:49 pm
Fair warning: This is a long post about the use and abuse of vocabulary, and you may prefer to resume doom-scrolling on Facebook.
The Agora lets us explore the power and dynamics of vocabulary.
Unusual words are special cases. Sometimes those words are mere bijoux—delightful, interesting, historical, specialized—but of limited utility. That’s OK: there is a place for delight in discovering such oddities. Sometimes rare words can be far more valuable, if thoughtfully deployed. “Fress” is one of the latter. Bear with me as I defend my argument.
Using a fancy vocabulary is tricky business. Precocious high school students will sprinkle a few high-flautin words in their essays. The result is often funny or pretentious. Yet we should encourage this experimentation. It is how an inexperienced writer learns their powers and limits, and ultimately develops their craft and their voice. Yeah, it can result in some awkward teenage prose, but what part of adolescence doesn’t involve some productive awkwardness?
With grown-ups, the judgments get harsher. There is a political columnist I read who, when at a loss for convincing arguments, will use words like “risible” or “condign” as lame pejoratives because such words deliver a punch and a veneer of erudition lacking in the exact synonyms “laughable” and “well-deserved.” William Buckley could be like that, too, in his day. I recently finished a short novel by a local writer (I try to read local authors and first-time writers) with a plodding style abruptly punctuated every third page with a distractingly showy word. For example, that author used “penumbra” promiscuously (five times by my count), slightly inappropriately each time.
At the other end of the spectrum are accomplished writers who deploy unusual words where near-synonyms lack the appropriate nuance or impact. It is a technique that arrests the reader’s attention to highlight a point in the narrative or thesis. John Updike was a master wordsmith and practitioner of this technique (even though his imagination as a storyteller was not always a match for the quality of his prose, but that’s a digression.) For example, in “The Centaur” Updike used the word “coruscating.” No near synonym would have been as good in the context. Updike used the word twice—separated by over 200 pages—so that a careful reader might link the two scenes in which this word appeared.
Which brings me back to “fress,” a word even the worldly Dr GoodWord found elusive. I have encountered the word only once myself, in a New Yorker article from 2010, in a review of several recent books about the historical Jesus. The word is not theological. The reviewer summarized the thesis of one of the books as follows: Jesus was radical in that he ate ravenously and chose to dine with people of all social classes, contrary to the norms of the times; this one trait of Jesus was the fulcrum which supported all of Jesus’ larger moral teachings. It is an interesting thesis. But the reviewer’s use of the rare word “fress” brilliantly commands the reader’s attention, and—like a pithy bumper sticker—makes the reader remember the issue.
The review (and the author’s thesis) would have been far less memorable had “eating” been substituted for “fressing”. Well if you’ve read this far, judge for yourself: I have pasted the relevant excerpt from the New Yorker article below. BON APPÉTIT!
<<What Did Jesus Do?
Reading and unreading the Gospels.
By Adam Gopnik
May 17, 2010
The table is his altar in every sense. Crossan, the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, makes a persuasive case that Jesus’ fressing was perhaps the most radical element in his life—that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees Jesus living within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on “commensality,” would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal allegiance, which would have shocked most Jews. The most forceful of his sayings, still shocking to any pious Jew or Muslim, is “What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.” Jesus isn’t a hedonist or an epicurean, but he clearly isn’t an ascetic, either: he feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He’s interested in saving people living normal lives, buying and selling what they can, rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves.>>
"Language is rooted in context, which is another way of saying language is driven by memory." Natalia Sylvester, New York Times 4/13/2024