Language By Example

I like to think I have a pretty large vocabulary, and more than that I kind of pride myself on understanding why words mean what they do–what the history behind them is.

Even so, there are lots of times I find myself using a word or phrase in a way that I’ve heard it used before, often many times before, without actually understanding the background.

When I catch myself doing that, I have to go find out. It’s already happened twice this week, both times with “F words”.

The first was “foil”. Yeah, I know, we all know what foil is. That’s not the sense in which I mean it though. I mean it in the sense in which it’s used in this sentence: “More and more it becomes clear that Wilson is less a real character than a foil for House”.

I think I always imagined that this was a fencing term–that a “foil” in this sense was someone that a character could cross swords with, as ’twere, to illustrate the character’s prowess. The ultimate example then perhaps being “Inigo’s primary role is as a foil for Westley”, or something close.

I actually looked it up this week, and while I wasn’t far off in effect, I was in the origins. I especially like the one description of the verb form of “foil” as “enhance by contrast”, which makes the literary usage’s antecedents so clear.

The second was “festooned”. I found myself commenting on a particular home that was “festooned with Christmas lights” and realized that while I know what festooned means, and how to use it, I had no idea why it means what it does.

So it was back to the books, where I discovered that–big shock–that “festooned” is formed by extension from the noun “festoon“. Who’s ever heard of a festoon? Well, OK, fine, those guys over at Wikipedia have, but who else?

This kind of thing probably happens to me five times a week. (Of course, it’s much more common now that I typically have instant access to the sum total of human knowledge pretty much continuously throughout my day–the friction bump that you have to get past to actually look something up is so very small these days…) I wonder how many times an hour I use a word or phrase without really understanding it, and just fail to notice.