palimpsest /’pælɪmpˌsɛst/

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an aging man in possession of a good intellect, must know that he gets more stupid by the year. The older one gets, the less one knows. There is so much I realize I don’t now that I seriously doubt any knowledge I think I do! This is regularly reinforced when I find that a word I thought I knew turns out to be totally wrong.

The Oxford University Press has a new blogger; Lauren Appelwick. In her inaugural blog, I asked her what her favorite three words are, to which she answered palimpsest, legit, and curdle. Now palimpsest is a word I know of, but not about. By that, I mean I sort of know that it’s a word, recall having heard it during my life,  but not know what it means.

But what made seeing the word particularly irritating was that I could have sworn blind that the word was actually *palimpset. Honestly. Ironically, I had to check the OED itself to confirm my error – an error that has clearly been in my head for decades.

Another example of how little I know and how inaccurate what I think I know may be.

Palimpsest derives from the Latin palimpsestus, which refers to a piece of paper or parchment that has been written on again. In a sense, palimpsests represent an ancient form of recycling, where old writing would be removed from a parchment and new script added. Either that or a precursor to the Magic Slate or Etch A Sketch®.

Codex Armenicus palimpsest

Incidentally (and what’s a Word Guy article without an “incidentally”) the Etch a Sketch was invented in the late 1950’s by a Frenchman called Andre Cassagnes, an electrician by trade but a toy designer at heart. He developed a toy that he modeled on the shape of a TV screen, which used two knobs to move a pointer across a glass screen covered in aluminum dust. He called it the Telecran, itself derived from télévision and écran, the French for screen. Cassagnes took the toy to the International Toy Fair in Germany in 1959 under the name of L’Ecran Magique, where the Ohio Art Company took a look at it and promptly said “non!” Fortunately for the Cassagnes, the “non” became a “oui” on a deuxième viewing, and in 1960, the Etch A Sketch burst forth onto American TV screens and became a huge hit.

Telecran

So thousands of years earlier, Hellenistic Greek had the word παλὶπφηστος meaning “scraped again,” which derived from Ancient Greek πὰλιν = again along with φηστός = to rub smooth. φηστός has the same Indo-European base as the Sanskrit bhas, which means “to crush, chew, or devour.”

In 1661, Robert Lovell mentions the palimpsest in his A compleat history of animals and minerals when he says, “The chalked skinne for a palimpsestus, serving in stead of a table book.” A full definition appeared in 1701 in Phillips’s New World of Words, Vol 6. as;

… a sort of Paper or Parchment, that was generally us’d for making the first draught of things, which might be wip’d out, and new wrote in the same Place.

It is also used to refer to brass plates that have been reused on the back

By the 19th century, the word had taken on extended meaning as “a thing likened to such a writing surface, esp. in having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier form; a multi-layered record.”

Palimpsest was used to described the brain (“What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?” – De Quincey, 1845); the soul (“Let who says ‘The soul’s a clean white paper’ rather say a palimpsest… defiled” – Browning, 1856); history (“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary” – Orwell, 1949); and even entire countries (“The absurdity and high emotion that characterises the palimpsest that is India” – The Times, 9 Mar., 1995).

At the beginning of the 20th century, the word was assimilated by the fields of physical geography and geology to specifically refer to structures that are characterized by superimposed features, produced at two or more distinct time periods. In 1914, an article by Taylor in the Geographic Journal contained the line “I explain the topography as follows (in accord with the ‘palimpsest’ theory)…”

The word can be used as an adjective to described things of a palimpsest nature, as evidenced by The Times in 2001:

They [sc. television reruns] are another manifestation of today’s palimpsest pop culture, in which everything is ripe for sampling and nothing stays dead.

By adding the “-ic” suffix, it’s possible to turn the adjective palimpsest to – the adjective palimpsestic! This is referred to as a pleonasm, the addition of a redundant morpheme or word. If I were pretentious, I might want to suggest that a pleonasm is a type of linguistic palimpsest: but I am not pretentious 😉

Hmm, it’s surprising that no-one at Rolling Stone has yet used the phrase “palimpsestic rap” or “palimpsestic dance remixes” – or maybe they have.

The word also exists as a verb, to palimpsest, but it sounds weird when you see it inflected in a sentence. For example, in Scribes and Scholars (1991), Reynolds and Wilson wrote “The toll of classical authors was very heavy: amongst those palimpsested we find Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Livy.” And in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Pynchon wrote, “Down both the man’s cheeks runs a terrible rash, palimpsested over older pockmarks.”

It’s hardly a popular verb. The Corpus of Contemporary American doesn’t have an example of palimpsested, palimpsests, or palimpsesting. Nor does the British National Corpus. Here’s an opportunity for wordies to start promoting

So now I know enough about the word palimpsest to feel temporarily content that in the infinite universe of things I don’t know, there’s at least one more word that I can be reasonably confident about. Until someone makes a comment…

Catherynne M. Valente's "Palimpsest"

stupid /ˈstʊ:pɪd/ (US), /ˈstjʊ:pɪd/ UK

My daughter decided to use her “text a friend” option yesterday while being involved in a heated online linguistic discussion in the XBox world of Halo. She is a freshman at college so naturally this message arrived in the afternoon, when no sane student is actually working.

Those of you who have spent any time with an online Halo team will know that the level of verbal interaction tends not to be at a particularly high level. I would hazard a guess that the average Halo language sample is made up mostly of profanities, some of which I’m not sure even I would recognize as such. However, the big, big topic for the day was all about the gradeability of adjectives, specifically as applied to the word stupid.

The question was; which is correct – stupidest or most stupid? A natural sub-question was whether is was better to say stupider or more stupid. It was after a round of arguing that my daughter decided to call in The Word Guy.

Typically, I always love to be right on questions like this, but in practice, some English language “truths” turn out to be more opinion than science, and the rules that are used to determine what is and isn’t “correct” are more complex than hyperdimensional probabilistic quantum equations where you aren’t allowed to use vowels or the number zero.

In general, adjectives (or words that can behave like adjectives) with a single syllable can be graded by adding an -er or an -est to form the comparative and superlative forms. Dumb, dumber, and dumbest are OK, as are thick, thicker, and thickest. Words with three or more syllables stay the same but need more and most to be added to the front. So, we see simple-minded, more simple-minded, and most simple-minded, as well as ludicrous, more ludicrous, and most ludicrous.

However, when you use two-syllable words like stupid and inane, things can get a little wooly, which I accept is not a formal linguistics term but certainly seems to fit the general feeling one gets when faced with choices between adding an ending or using a preceding more/most.

So in true prevaricating style, I texted my daughter back that both stupidest and most stupid are fine.

But that, of course, wasn’t satisfying enough for me,  so I decided to try to find a few numbers using the Google search engine. Here are the results expressed in ghits (Google hits):

Stupidest: 1,575,000
Most stupid: 593,000

We can see that stupidest is the winner by far, being used almost three times more often than its most stupid counterpart.  If you were to describe this article as “the stupidest analysis of stupid on the planet,” you might be factually wrong but grammatically with the majority.

Moving on to the comparative forms, I found the following ghits:

Stupider: 489,000
More stupid: 662,000

Here, the figures as less conclusive. I’d be OKish to say that more stupid is the more popular, but it would be better to chase down more data to support this. What IS worth noting is that if these figures are reasonably correct, the “correct” gradeable triplet is as follows:

stupid – more stupid – stupidest

As I said earlier, the “rules” in this case seem to be slipperier  (more slippy?) than a bucket of eels that’s been filled with baby oil.See how the comparative and superlative forms are inconsistent with each other? Welcome to the English language, eh?

The word stupid is defined by the OED as;

Having one’s faculties deadened or dulled; in a state of stupor, stupefied, stunned; esp. hyperbolically, stunned with surprise, grief, etc.

As an adjective, it pops up in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale back in 1611;

Is not your Father growne incapeable Of reasonable affayres?
Is he not stupid With Age, and altring Rheumes?
Can he speake? heare? Know man, from man? (Act IV, Scene iv)

The word appears to come from the Latin stupere, which means “to be stunned or benumbed,” and is the same root for the word stupor that can be seen as a noun in 1358 to describe;

A state of insensibility or lethargy; spec. in Path., a disorder characterized by great diminution or entire suspension of sensibility.

John de Trevisa, in his Bartholomeus (de Glanvilla) De proprietatibus rerum (1398), uses the wonderful phrase;

Stupor is a lettynge and stonyenge of lymmes and crokynge of the vtter partyes of the body for colde so that it semyth that the lymmes shrynke and slepe.

Having one’s “vtter partyes crokynged” sounds more painful than stuporific, but it is at least a good definition of the word.

There is some evidence that stupid was also used to describe a paralyzed part of the body, but this is confined to a usage in 1638 and this connotation clearly never caught on.

Now, at about the same time as Shakespeare was using stupid to describe a state of stupor, its use to describe someone “wanting in or slow of mental perception; lacking ordinary activity of mind; slow-witted, dull” (OED, Vol XVI, p.1000) was also growing. It’s this more pejorative use of the word that is typical of today’s use.

During the 19th century, it took on the flavor of meaning of something “Void of interest, tiresome, boring, dull,” which could be applied to objects and situations, not just people. When Mary Braddon wrote “We were quartered at a stupid sea-port town” in her 1862 novel Lady Audley’s Secret, she wasn’t referring to the mental state of the town but its tedious nature.

It was also used during this period as a noun to refer to someone as being a stupid, as in “You do not know what a thoughtless, heartless stupid I have been. (Mrs. Alexander, Valerie’s Fate, 1885.) This is similar to how someone might refer to a person as a stupid today, or in the now-cliched T-shirt phrase, “I’m with stupid.”

It seems that in the mid-to-late 20th century that the word took on a more insulting slant and became a term of abuse or disparagement. In J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), we find the sentence, “Anyway, it was December and all, and it was cold as a witch’s teat, especially on top of that stupid hill.” Unlike Braddon’s stupid sea-port, the stupid used to refer to the hill is derogatory.

Since the 20th century, the word seems to be used almost exclusively as a pejorative and calling someone who appears a little sleepy or unfocused as stupid would be unwise.

The word can also function as the noun stupidity, and as the adverb, stupidly, to describe something being done foolishly.

And don’t forget, as Einstein once quipped;

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.

shilling /ˈʃɪlɪŋ/

There are two TV ads currently running (December 2009) to which I have different reactions. Both involve famous actors promoting products but although I like one of them, I hate the other. So let’s get the bad one out the way first.

Luke Wilson tries hard to convince me that the AT&T network is better than Verizon’s. This all came about after Verizon launched a very witty ad taking a swipe at poor 3G availability via AT&T. Basically, using a parody of the Apple iPhone’s “There’s an app for that,” they came up with “There’s a map for that” and show folks with phones and a map hovering above their heads, which in turn uses color coding to illustrate the weak coverage areas for 3G.

Luke Wilson sells AT&T

AT&T had a hissy fit at this and began showing Wilson tossing postcards across a huge floor map of the US to show where AT&T had phone coverage. After covering the map with cards, the implication was that AT&T coverage was fine, thank you very much. But here AT&T were being a little disingenuous because the Verizon criticism was about 3G coverage, NOT general phone coverage. AT&T ignored this aspect, hoping, no doubt, folks would interpret that the two were the same. They are not.

In fact, AT&T tried to sue Verizon for the ad but failed precisely because of this – that the claim was specifically about 3G and not general coverage. Not only that, AT&T is now also the target of a class action suit over alleged “throttling back” of download speeds – the very thing Wilson shills for in the ads! Another slice of Umble pie, anyone?

All this leaves Luke Wilson with, to my mind, a sizable amount of egg splattered over his smug face. And no, this is not an ad hominem attack on Mr. Wilson, just a comment on how he actually does appear pretty smug in the commercials.

Meanwhile, William Shatner continues to rule the shilling roost with his ads for Priceline, where he successfully commands the screen and takes himself none-to-seriously in his over-the-top performances. Shatner, unlike Wilson, comes across as more “smirk” than “smug” and as such doesn’t offend me in the least. At worst, I remain ambivalent to Priceline as a product but actually feel some hostility toward AT&T. I leave the psychology of that to the analysts because this is an etymological column, not a psychiatric.

Shatner for Priceline

Using famous people to promote products is not new nor unusual. It’s also unlikely that buyers really believe Wilson uses AT&T because he feels it is the better network, nor that Shatner books his hotels on Priceline. I also don’t give a shit whether Jamie Lee Curtis actually gets bowel movements after eating Activia yogurt. What advertisers really want is to make their brand name memorable through association with a popular personality.

The use of the word shill to describe a person who promotes a product for financial gain rather than for its intrinsic value originates in the US at the beginning of the 20th century. In Jackson and Hellyer’s 1914 A vocabulary of criminal slang, with some examples of common usages, the word shill is defined as “to act in the capacity of a hired criminal.” Note it is used as a verb but it also is a noun.

A decoy or accomplice, esp. one posing as an enthusiastic or successful customer to encourage other buyers, gamblers, etc. (OED, Vol. XV, p.263.)

By 1928, the word had less criminal connotations as noted in the journal American Speech, volume 3; “Shill, to boost for the auctioneer.”

By second half of the century, the idea that famous people could be described as shills appears in, for example, Montreal’s Weekend Magazine (11th Jan. 1975): “Canadian advertisers are confined mainly to hockey players when they’re looking for an athlete to shill for them.”

The actual origin on the word is noted as being obscure. The OED suggests it may be a shortening of the slang word shillaber, which makes an appearance in 1913, just a year before the Jackson and Hellyer definition, but because the origin of shillaber is also obscure, it’s still unsatisfying.

I’m up for speculating on this as being a back-formation from the other meaning of the word shilling:

A former English money of account, from the Norman Conquest of the value of 12d. or 1/20th of a pound sterling. Abbreviated s., formerly also sh., shil.; otherwise denoted by the sign /- after the numeral. No longer in official use after the introduction of decimal coinage in 1971, but still occas. used to denote five new pence. (OED, Vol. XV, p.263.)

The origin of this word is the Old English scilling, which has other variations among Teutonic languages (e.g. Old Frisian and Old Norse skilling) and is thought by some etymologists to come from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *kel, which includes among its meanings “ring” or “resound” and “divide”or “cut.” The latter leads to the interpretation of a shilling being derived from pieces of silver or gold.

English shilling coin

Incidentally, the US slang word ringer,which appeared around 1890, refers to;

A horse or other competitor fraudulently substituted for another in a race or other sporting activity; one who engages in a fraud of this kind.

Anyway, my thinking on shill as a person who accepts money for promoting a product could derive from the phrase “take the King’s/Queen’s shilling,” or as the OED puts it;

To take the shilling, the King’s or Queen’s shilling: to enlist as a soldier by accepting a shilling from a recruiting officer (a practice now disused). (Op. cit.)

This is first mentioned in Thomas Hearne’s Remarks and collections 1705–12 (ed. C. E. Doble, O.H.S. 1885–89) where he writes, “He did take a shilling, but not with any intent of listing.” Men would “take the shilling” reluctantly, simply as a means of getting cash and not as an expression of undying allegiance to the monarch!

It’s not too much of a stretch to see a back-formation of the word shilling to create the new meaning of a shill, and from there it’s only an inflection away from the verb to shill and shilling as the action. The phrase was certainly around at the beginning of the 20th century, as evidenced by a report in the Scotsman newspaper in March 1901 that said, “A contingent of Volunteer Engineers was sworn in for service in South Africa. Each man was presented… with the King’s shilling.”

And should anyone out there we looking for turning the Word Guy into a syndicated column, I’m happy to shill for whatever product you want to promote. The Word Guy – brought to you by Shamwow!

feckless /’fɛkləs/

The suffix -less is usually found added to words to mean “without” or “devoid of.” It’s matchless in its ability to help create new words and in the main, it is added to nouns to make adjectives. So if you have hair, but then lose it, you become hairless. If you have brains, but then stop using them, you become – metaphorically – brainless.

And if you have feck but then lose it, you are feckless.

Most folks are aware of the meaning of feckless in relation to people as  “weak, helpless, lacking in vgor.” They may also be familiar with it being applied to objects as beng “ineffective, feeble, futile, valueless.” But they are less likely to know the word feck from which is is derived.

In the 1500’s, it appeared as a dialect word in Scotland and the north of England to mean “the purpose, drift, tenor, or substance of a statement.” It was also used to described “efficacy, efficiency, and value.” This is the obvious root meaning of the word feckless – being devoid of feck.

Actually, it can be seen in Henry the Minstrel’s The actis and deidis of the illustere and vailzeand campioun Schir William Wallace (c1460) in the phrase, “Swa sall we fend the fek of this regioun.” Here it means “amount, quantity… greatest part, practically the whole.”

There is a more obscure meaning that first appears in 1701 – one of the stomachs of a ruminant. This may, in turn, be a variant of the word faik, which can mean “folded,” like the inside of a stomach. Those of you who have ever been subjected to that unappealing delicacy called “tripe” will know exactly what I mean by “folds in the stomach!”

Tripe - folded cow's stomach

Feck can also be used as a salng verb for “to steal.” James Joyce uses it in Portrait of an Artist as  Young Man; “They had fecked cash out of the rector’s room.” This seems to me such a wonderful verb that I am tempted to start using it. Maybe.

The similarity in sound between feck and fuck has also lead to it being used as a euphemism. It inflects in the same way fuck does, hence its value. The Urban Dictionary suggests that this meaning originated in Ireland although this may be due to the frequency of its use in the mid-90’s UK sit-com, Father Ted. I couldn’t find any sources to sat when the euphemistic feck first appeared but it is clearly a phonetic derivation.

Feck Off - a euphemism

It can be used as an adjective, feckful, and even an adverb, feckfully, but the incidence of these words in modern times (20th and 21st centuries) is woefully small. Feckful gets just over 1000 ghits and feckfully just about scrapes together 300, of which many are simply web sites defining the word feck in the first place.

Who would have thought that the word feckless could have been so interesting?

Un-fecking-believable!

obstinate /’ɒbstinət/

In a recent performance appraisal, where folks are invited to comment anonymously on what they think of me, someone described me as obstinate. Now here’s a word that the philosopher Bertrand Russell once described as an “irregular verb.” During an old BBC radio program, he offered the conjugation, “I am firm; you are obstinate; he is a pig-headed fool.”

Another example comes from the BBC’s Yes Minister series where the civil servant, Bernard Wooley says;

“That’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.”

It’s a great party game for the literati who prefer it to things like chugging a beer bong or seeing who can eat the most hot dogs in a minute. Well, maybe before chugging a beer bong or eating hot dogs.

It comes from the Latin obstinat-us, which means determined or stubborn, which is in turn a derivative of obstare, meaning to persist. However, although being persistent and determined could be seen as highly sought-after qualities, the connotation of obstinate has been negative.

Allegory of the 5 Obstinate Monsters

The OED describes it as “pertinacious or stubborn in adhering to one’s own course; not yielding to argument, persuasion, or entreaty; inflexible, headstrong.” Phew, that’s quite a thing to say about someone!

It has been used as a noun in the 16th century, such as in the wonderful phrase, “Out of the bosome of these heretikes, rebelles, and obstinates.” However, I can’t say I have heard it used as such in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Of course, I ultimately don’t care too much about being called obstinate because my obstinacy is counter-balanced by my arrogance.

heinous /’heɪnəs/

Like most regular middle-class folks, there are times when I like to watch some terrible sex crimes that end in death and/or dismemberment. And as long as this is taking place in my home, it’s perfectly legal.

NBC’s Emmy-award winning show, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, has been popular with audiences since September 1999, with each season never failing to find new ways of sexually abusing victims in the interest of entertainment.

As the voice over reminds us at the beginning of each, the Special Victims Unit was created to handle such transgressions because “sexually based crimes are the most heinous.”

Defined as hateful, odious, highly criminal or wicked, atrocious, or infamous, heinous comes from the Old French hainos meaning hatred. In Paradise Lost, Milton uses a different spelling in the phrase, “The hainous and despightfull act of Satan done in Paradise,” and uses the superlative form when he writes “These men will suffer the worst and hainousest inconveniences to follow.”

Bill and Ted in danger

The word can also be used to mean grave, grievous, or severe, which is slightly tamer than hatred. In the classic movie, Bill &Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), on the eve of an important exam, Bill says, “We are in danger of flunking most heinously tomorrow,” using the word (a) in its milder meaning and (b) as an adverb.

sexting /’sɛkstɪŋ/

One of the challenges of being a self-appointed chronicler of words is that language is dynamic. Every day, new words are added to the global lexicon, some of which fizzle out and become obsolete before ever really becoming “solete,” whereas others end up as standards, eventually making the hallowed pages of the OED.

Top of my current list of neologisms is sexting. It refers to the act of sending sexually explicit material via a phone. This can be simple text of a graphic nature or a picture of a much more explicit nature. Sexting is high profile at the moment because it involves three elements that are irresistible in the media:  sex, death, and teenagers.

Sexting

In July 2008, Cincinnatti high schooler Jessie Logan was found dead in her bedroom after hanging herself following the sexting of nude pictures of her that she’d sent to her ex-boyfriend. The ease with which images can be shared via phones and the Internet makes this sort of tragedy likely to re-occur.

The word itself clearly derives from the phonetically similar, texting, the act of sending text messages. Texting itsef is also a new word, or at least a new use of an old one. The noun, text, switched to becoming a verb – to text – fairly quickly after the ability to send text messages appeared. This metamorphosis is a regular way of creating verbs – painful as it may sometimes sound. And adding the -ing ending creates what used to be called a gerund or verbal noun.

What also happened with texting is that it expanded its meaning to include non-text items. A request to “text me that picture” may sound odd but makes perfect sense if “to text” means “to send data via a cellphone. So, to send sexy pictures or sexy messages almost begged to be described as sexting.

Being curious about whether sexting was expanding its coverage of the lexisphere (yes, I have made that one up) I googled (another noun-to-verb example) sexted (-ed participle), sexts (both s-form of the verb and maybe plural), sext (noun/verb?). Google results show you how many hits a word gets so its a rough guide to a word’s frequency.

Sexted = 10,500

Sexts = 10,200

Sext = 1,120,000

Whoa Nelly! Over a million for sext? Ah, problem is that sext is the Sixth Hour of prayer in a cycle – midday prayer following terce and before vespers! The first reference to the word to describe a sex message by phone turns up as a link to the Urban Dictionary – a wonderful source for all things slang and profane.

These scores in Google are quite low. For comparison, verisimilitude scores 629,000, much higher. So sexting is still pretty new and pretty fluid.

And remember, boys and girls; linguistics is fun, but sexting nude pics of yourself to a significant other is a dangerous thing to do. Maybe even stupid.

envatment /ɛn’vætmənt/

There is a philosphical thought experiment known as the “brain-in-a-vat.” It’s a fun thing to bring up at a party, especially if you’ve imbibed a few fermented beverages. What you have to do is imagine that you have had a terrible accident where all that the doctors could salvage was your brain. In an effort to provide you with some quality of life, the wire up your brain to a computer and float it in a big bucket of fluid.

The computer is designed to run a virtual world that is just like the one in which you live. It can send electrical impulses to your brain in just the same way your sense organs would. The computer is so fast and the virtual world so realistic that to all intents and purposes, you feel exactly as you did before the accident. And to make it even more realistic, you have lost all memory of the accident and so have no idea your brain is no longer attached to your body.

Now comes the fun question: how do you know you are not already a brain in a vat?

Those of you who have seen the movie The Matrix or Vanilla Sky will have a sense of deja vu. Both these involve people who “wake up” to find their world is not the “real world” but a computer-generated virtual life.

This little thought experiment is now so well known that a word has appeared to described the process of being a brain-in-a-vat; envatment.

Envatted brain

The word is so new that you are unlikely to find it in a dictionary but it is used by philosophers and science writers alike. What spurred me on to writing about it in the first place was its use by Paul Davies in his book The Goldilocks Enigma, first published in hardback in 2006 as The Cosmic Jackpot. It also appeared in a 1992 paper by the philospher Hilary Putnam entitled “Brains in a Vat.” I also found reference to it as the basic noun envatment, as the adjective envatted, and the verb envat in a 2009 in-press paper by Diego Cosmelli and Evan Thompson with the title Embodiment and Envatment: Reflections on the Bodily Basis of Consciousness.

The word clearly derives from the word vat /væt/, which is a variation on the Old English word, fat /fæt/. It corresponds to the Middle Low German and Dutch vat. Its earliest use seems to be in Beowulf, where it refers to a vessel capable of holding fluids. This is the most commom meaning still.

What’s also of interest is how the word envatment is constructed. The word is built using what is know as affixation, a process whereby pieces are added to an existing word to create a new one.

One affixation process is prefixation. Here, something is added to the beginning of a word. And one example of prefixing is to add the opener, en-, to change a noun to a verb. Thus, if you want to make a word to mean “put inside a vat,” then envat is the option.

Then, a second piece of affixing is applied to change the verb into a noun – suffixation using the -ment ending. This gives you envatment.

Notice how cleverly the word goes from noun to verb then back to noun – but in the process becomes a different noun! The original noun refers to an item – a thing; the second derived noun refers to a process – an operation. Two different types of noun but from the same root.

And when someone talks about an “envatted brain,” the word has magically shifted again to become an adjective. Yes, the -ed makes it look like a verb (and it could still be used as such) but the -ed form of many verbs can be used as an adjective. For example;

He polished the car versus The polished car

He smashed the plate versus The smashed plate

Affixation is an important process in the English language; it allows for the rapid creation of new words in very short periods of time. Anyone who has googled or spends a lot of time googling already knows this.