March 9, 2004

• Lingo Lover

  
  

  I thought I’d got a hypnogogic inspiration.  It happens.  Sometimes I wake with thoughts hanging, maybe leftovers from a dream, and sometimes things stranger than that.  That half-asleep state, more correctly called “hypnopompic” when it is coming out of sleep, not going down into it, is when a lot of my prescient stuff happens.  The first time I ever  heard the word, “Pinatubo”, it was my own voice saying it.  I repeated the strange word a few times as I woke one morning in the Spring of 1991, when I’d just gotten home from  my honeymoon.  I didn’t recognize the word, so I looked it up in the dictionary.    The dictionary said it was a mountain in the Phillipines.  Okay, I wondered, “Why am I waking up with a mountain on  my mind?”  A week and a half later, Pinatubo erupted and I learned that the “mountain” was a volcano.

  
  

  Where that stuff comes from, I’d really like to know.  The prescient stuff is sometimes more helpful to me than that Pinatubo flash, when I can identify the references.  But it isn’t always prescient awareness that comes to me in the hypnopompic flashes–and I think I’ll go on using the now-commonly-generic (in psychic and shamanic circles) incorrect usage, “hypnogogic”, because I like it and it has become current idiomatic lingo in the circles where I hang out.  The “state”, the Theta brainwave state, is the same whether one goes through it on the way from Beta wakefulness to Delta sleep, or coming “up” in frequency from Delta into Beta.  Sometimes the things that come to me in that state are just silly, like the word-association thing that was hanging there in my mind when I woke today.

  
  

  Turpitude/turpentine… I thought about those words as I was waking up, and by the time I was ready to sit up and speak I had a product-development idea.  Do you think we could market moral turpentine, a solvent for cleaning up one’s act–or scrubbing a dirty mind?  I sorta spoiled the idea for myself when I went to the dictionary and learned that turpentine comes from the terebinth tree and turpitude is from Latin turpis, meaning vile or base.  It did, however, get me into the dictionary, one of my favorite places to be.

  
  

  I love language, or as my mother used to call it, “lingo”.  She was always criticizing people who did not speak her lingo, whether they were furriners or just high-flown egghead-types.  Trying to rear me must have made her feel like one of those mama birds in whose nests a cuckoo has slipped an egg.  Before I was old enough for kindergarten I was picking up Spanish words from neighbor kids.  It infuriated Mama.  She said “leche” sounded like something dirty, and forbade me to speak Spanish in her house.  Leche and susu, I learned a couple of years ago, are the same thing.  Susu is Finnish, I think, but SuSu is just short for Susitna Sue.

  
  

  A few weeks ago, I learned that “addict” comes from the same root as “edict”, a legal decree.  In Mediaeval times a prisoner or serf could be “addicted” to a landowner by a court, in servitude.  It was not until Shakespearean times, and maybe in the Bard’s own work, that today’s common usage developed and we started speaking of being addicted to habits, passions and drugs.  When I picked that factoid out of a thick book on drugs, I went to the dictionaries again, and none of the first five paper dictionaries I picked up (I was not at home at the time, not online) mentioned the older, now obsolete, meaning of addict.

  
  

  Okay, that’s the language lesson for today.  I hope the information compensated my readers for their time in reading.  I was supposed to go to town today, but I’m wimping out, got the flu or something very like it.  I’m outta here, off to Couch Potato Heaven, if Doug will move.

  

  • 2:38 pm
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