Wordcatcher (48 page)

Pleasingly, plumply pulchritudinous; alluringly curvaceous.
My now nearly forty-year-old going-to-college gift from my parents, the wheel-stop-worthy
Random House Dictionary
, simply and safely defines
zaftig
as “sexually attractive.” That hardly does justice to the sizzling
z
, the long-sighing
a,
and the suggestive “tig.” We come closer if we think
full-bodied, full-bosomed,
or if we consult a Yiddish dictionary or a Yiddish-speaking friend.
Zaftig
comes from the Yiddish
zaftik
, which means “juicy,” from
zaft
, juice. So, properly speaking, a
zaftig
woman is a
juicy Lucy
, full of life,
saucy
, full of sass,
ripe
and
luscious
. To further appreciate
zaftig
, look at Rembrandt’s
Delilah
, Titian’s
Venus of Urbina
, or Diego Rivera’s portrait of his wife, Frida Kahlo. Woody Allen writes, in
Mere Anarchy
, “I never once in forty years looked at another woman except for Elsie, which candidly was not so easy as I’m the first to admit she’s not a dish
like those
zaftig
courvers who pose in God knows what positions in magazines you probably wait drooling on the docks for as the boats arrive from Copenhagen.”

An unhappy accident or unfortunate encounter; the opposite of serendipity.
Coined by novelist William Boyd, in
Armadillo
, after reading of the unfortunate fate of the Arctic island Novaya Zemlya, north of mainland Russia, which was riddled with atomic blasts set off by the Russians. Boyd figured it was news he could live without, but he couldn’t quite find the word to say that, so he plucked the word right out of the paper.
Zemblanity
is an experience you didn’t want to happen and no one wants to hear about. While researching my book
Once and Future Myths
, in 2000, I came across a column by one of my favorite word virtuosos, William Safire, on “Zemblanity.” The word caught my eye because it didn’t remotely resemble any word I’d ever seen before. I clipped the column for future reference and recently dug it out. Safire wrote, “The novel’s hero … is undone by an outbreak of
zemblanity
, the opposite of serendipity. … Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound—Zembla. Ergo:
zemblanity
, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.” Writers from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope to Jules Verne and Salman Rushdie have used Novaya Zemlya’s arctic wastes as
symbolic of what Charlotte Brontë called “forlorn regions of dreary space.” Now this site for testing non-nuclear explosives at a nuclear facility has given birth to
zemblanity
, the discovery of what we don’t want to know.

One of the eight gods of the winds in classical times; a soft breeze in ours.
A refreshing breeze from the West, a gentle wind.
Zephyr
is from
Zephyrus
, the West Wind. While traveling in Taiwan for work on a film and book about tea, I carried with me a
translation
of the first known book on the subject, the 8th-century
Classic Book of Tea
, by Lu Yu. There, he writes, with metaphors as rich as the finest mountain Oolong, “The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a
zephyr
, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.” Thomas Gray wrote liltingly, in “The Bard,” “Fair laughs the morn, and soft the
zephyrs
.” Tenderly, Emily Dickinson wrote, “Good Night! Which put the Candle out? / A jealous
Zephyr
—not a doubt—” In August 2009 Leah Garchik wrote in the
San Francisco Chronicle,
“It had been a rare warm day in San Francisco, and I’d pictured after-show lounging on the veranda, with
zephyrs
gently fanning the flames of the nearby fire pit.” And this just in from the curiosity department: a
zephyr
is also a lightweight garment worn by rowing crews.

A sitcom for teens.
One of the more colorful of the bountiful examples of newly slung slang. In all
truthiness
, as Stephen Colbert calls slippery talk, it takes a
staminac
, a sleep-starved overachiever, or a
sleep camel
, a power-sleeping workaholic who slaves away for a few days, then draws on those stored
z
’s for the long trek across a week of nineteen-hour workdays, to keep up with the slang. Other eclectic examples:
Spendorphins
is the curious boost of shopping endorphins released upon entrance into the local mall.
Banalysis
is a trivial recap of complex material;
blamestorming
is faultfinding among co-workers.
Chipmunking
is looking all scrunched up while typing out text messages.
Digitalia
refers to indispensable gadgets from the wired world.
Infonesia
is amnesia about information, possibly due to being overwhelmed by
infoglut
. And for me the most stirring neologism of all,
tankmanning
: standing up to authority, after the anonymous man who defied the tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, providing the world with a modern equivalent of Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Selma March, and the actions of the current titan of courageous protest, the pro-democracy figure Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been calmly defying Burmese authorities for the last nineteen years.

Turning the living into the walking dead by administering the evil potion of consumerism
. Coined by the court jester of NPR, poet-satirist Andrei Codrescu, who based an essay on the word
zombie
. From Haitian, actually a 19th-century word from West African Kikongo,
zumbi
, and
Kimbundu nzambi
, god, a snake god. In the Caribbean it evolved to mean a corpse that’s come back to life, as depicted in the
vodou
cult of Haiti and in the American cult of horror films such as
Night of the Living Dead
. Codrescu’s revival of the word promises to be even more lethal, suggesting a culture of the walking dead, people deadened by a culture of consumerism and soul-sapping popular culture. By the 1930s
zombie
had also come to suggest a “slow-witted” person. With no little irony, Codrescu writes, “The world is undergoing
zombification
. It was gradual a while, a few
zombies
here and there, mostly in high office, where being a corpse in a suit was de rigueur. … The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis they induce in people who aren’t quite
zombies
yet.” A curious-to-strange companion word is
cad
, from
cadaver
, a corpse or dead body, an example of campus black humor, according to Brewer, meaning anyone not enrolled in a university, thus, uneducated, a deadhead. And who can forget the
Zombies
, the ‘60s rock group from England, with hits like “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No,” and “Time of the Season.” You see, there’s still some life in those old dead words.

(Source: The British Council, 2004; based on a poll of 40,000 people in 102 countries)

1. mother

2. passion

3. smile

4. love

5. eternity

6. fantastic

7. destiny

8. freedom

9. liberty

10. tranquility

American Heritage Dictionaries, eds.
Word Histories and Mysteries: From Abracadabra to Zeus
. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

American Psychiatric Association.
A Psychiatric Glossary
. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1964.

Asimov, Isaac.
Words from the Myths
. New York: Signet Books, 1961.

Ayto, John.
Dictionary of Word Origins: The Histories of More Than 8,000 English-Language Words.
New York: Arcade Publishing, 1980.