AGENBITES
BOTTUM, JOSEPH
Casual AGENBITES Thwart. Yes, thwart is a good word. Thwarted. Athwart. A kind of satisfaction lives in such words—a unity, a completion. Teach them to a child, and you’ll see what I mean:...
...Sheer sound won’t make one of these agenbites, however pleasurable the word feels on the tongue...
...And since they do bite back on themselves, like a snake swallowing its tail, Michael’s term will do as well as any other...
...Words about words, typically: Noun is a noun, though verb is not a verb...
...But what about jab or fl uffy or sneer, each of them true in a way that goes beyond logic...
...Pertussis, the scientifi c name for whooping cough, is one of those bad Latin terms that doctors used to invent, back in the days before they settled on the odd convention of naming diseases after doctors...
...Perspicacious is a succulent thing, I suppose, but who ever heard its perspicacity...
...Let’s coin a term for this kind of poetic, extralogical accuracy...
...Now there’s a word that says just what it means...
...Maybe not, but you always know where you are with words like dreary and gossip and gut and bludgeon...
...And this logical notion of autology can be extended...
...Polysyllabic is self-true, and monosyllabic is not...
...Grammarians may have a technical term for these words that sound true, though I’ve never come across quite what I’m looking for...
...Rapier, swashbuckler, erstwhile, obfuscate, spume—agenbites, every one...
...That’s a word Michael of Northgate cobbled up for his 1340 Remorse of Conscience—or Agenbite of Inwit, as he actually titled the book...
...Ethereal is an agenbite, isn’t it...
...Ipsoverific...
...Odd...
...Gargoyle sounds like a word that knows just what it is...
...JOSEPH BOTTUM...
...And, as far as the sound goes, you can’t ask for a better word to pronounce than pertussis— but where’s the whoop...
...Homological, maybe...
...Whooping cranes, as well, and when I was little, I pictured them as sickly birds, somehow akin to whooping cough...
...Teach them to a child, and you’ll see what I mean: skirt, scalp, drab, buckle, sneaker, twist, jumble...
...Or one more lethargic than lethargic...
...All ethereal and airy...
...Pickle, gloomy, portly, curmudgeon—sounds that loop back on themselves to close the circle of meaning...
...If short seems a short word, true of itself, then the shorter long must be false of itself...
...They’re what all language wants to be, when it grows up...
...Autological...
...The animal cries of quack and oink and howl...
...Pragmatic seems closer, but in the end it’s not quite hardnosed enough to get the job done...
...English would later settle on the French-born word “remorse” to carry the sense of the Latin re-mordere, “to bite again...
...A friend insists that machination is a word that tells you all about its Machiavellian self, and surely sporadic is a clean agenbite, with something patchy and intermittent in the taste as you say it...
...And yet, that word akin—that’s a good word, too, though it lacks even the near-onomatopoeia of percussion and lullaby, or the ideophonic picturedrawing of clickety-clack and gobble...
...In a logical sense, of course, some words are literally true or false when applied to themselves...
...The mechanical noises of click and clack and clank...
...And was there ever a more supercilious word than supercilious...
...Chickadees, cuckoos, and whip-poor-wills all get their names this way...
...Hiccup, for instance, and zip...
...Let’s call it agenbite...
...But Michael didn’t know that at the time, and so he simply translated the word’s parts: again-bite or (in the muddle of early English spelling) agenbite...
...They’re perfect, in their way...
...Dwindle wants to fade away even while you’re saying it...
...Admittedly, some of this comes from onomatopoeia: words that echo the sound of what they name...
...Snake and swoop and spew all reach back to gnaw on themselves—agenbites of speech...
...The words I’m thinking of are, rather, the ones that feel right when we say them: accurate expressions, somehow, for themselves...
...Or with onomatopoeics like flap and slurp and splash and gurgle...
...They’re part of what makes poetry work...
...Reverberation reverberates, and jingle jingles...
...More like proper nouns than mere words, they match the objects they describe...
...They’re what all language wants to be when it grows up...
...Anyway, these words that sound true need some kind of name...
...And surely splendiferous is a solid agenbite, expressing its own hollow pomposity...
...Or with the whole set of English -umbles: fumble and mumble and bumble...
...Apple, for instance, has always seemed to me the perfect name—a crisp and tanged and ruddy word...
...Verbose has always struck me as a strangely verbose word...
...Squeamish, for that matter...
...Peppy has that perky, energetic, spry sound it needs...
...They taste good in the mouth, and they seem to resound with their own verbal truthfulness...
...For that matter, isn’t hollow a little hollow, with the sound of a hole at its center...
Vol. 13 • May 2008 • No. 34
