Rapid Rhetoric: WITENAGEMOT

This is an irregular feature - both in frequency and oddness - dedicated to a word or phrase I came across that I have never previously used.

witenagemot (WIH-ten-EYE-yah-moat) n. a political body in Anglo-Saxon England that operated from approximately the late 6th century through the 11th century.

The term witenagemot is derived from the Old English phrase ƿitena ȝemōt ("meeting of wise men"). The witenagemot was an assembly of social and political elites served in an advisory role to the king. Members of the witenagemot were known as "witans," and the assembled group lacked the power to create legislation.

The king called the witenagemot as he saw fit, and the assembly possessed at most limited authority, ultimately answering to the monarchy. Weaker kings sometimes relied more heavily on the advice of the witenagemot, while more powerful kings called the assembly infrequently or even disregarded the advice of the witans. I suspect that the witans had little interest in life insurance without medical questions, either, but this is altogether another topic.

I possessed a fuzzy notion of the origin of the term prior to this afternoon, when I came across a reference to the witenagemot in the 1913 text The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development. Now, to form my own witenagemot, as I seek solutions to the male canines in my home who have recently engaged in nefarious behavior involving leg-lifting and a certain kitchen chair.

Rapid Rhetoric: MISOGAMY

This is an irregular feature - both in frequency and oddness - dedicated to a word I came across that I have never previously used.

misogamy (miss-AH-guh-mee) n. hatred of marriage.

After I came across this word in a lit-crit book about Shakespeare, I realized I could have easily discerned the meaning of misogamy by looking at its constituent parts, both of which are Greek in derivation: μισέω (miseō, "to hate") and γάμος (gamos, "marriage").

Note to self: cognition and caffeine work hand in hand (pauses to drink a half-cup of black coffee). Ah, much better.

Misogamy is joined in its antagonism toward matters marital by the noun misogamist ("one who hates marriage") and misogamic ("related to the hatred of marriage"). I have known people with misogamic tendencies, and they are just as likely to be women as men.

No cracks about misogamy and the Roman Catholic Church, please.

Rapid Rhetoric: PERLUSTRATE

This is an irregular feature - both in frequency and oddness - dedicated to a word I came across that I have never previously used.

perlustrate (PEHR-luh-straight) v.to travel through and thoroughly survey; to traverse and inspect carefully.

Derived from the the past participle stem of the Latin word perlustrare ("to wander through"), this word conveys both a visual and movement sense.

I came across the related word perlustration in The Memoirs of Count Witte. The Baltic German Sergei Witte was an influential Tsarist minister who led the drive toward industrialization and modernization in the last decades of the Russian Empire. In the following passage he expressed his discontent with a perlustrative practice:

I believe that perlustration of private correspondence is essentially a harmful practice. It lays before the Administration intimate and purely confidential matters, thus giving the Minister of the Interior a means for settling personal accounts. I am certain that if Stolypin had not been given to the study of perlustrated mail he would have acted more properly with regard to many people, and would have had fewer enemies.

While Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin certainly garnered many enemies in his career - especially after the Coup of June 1907 - I suspect his habit of perlustrating other peoples' mail was the least likely of his behaviors to cause him to become the recipient of the bullets of an assassin.