What? I used to talk about words? Psh! It’s true. I used to hunt down, then lovingly research words that were new to me. Then I stopped. I think because I’m lazy, but I can’t be sure. Nevertheless, I realized that, having finished Gentlemen of the Road a few weeks ago, and writing down many interesting words from that book, I was not going to be able to ever talk about them. I still have a truck of words from Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake to talk about. So if I ever want to move on, and lexpiate different books or read the next Gormenghast book, I am going to have to get back on task.
Insert whip cracking noise here. And if you’ve come this far, and cracked that whip, maybe follow it up with “Minimum Wage,” by They Might Be Giants. That is a great song!
And adjure is a great word:
“Your name is TITUS,” said Sourdust very simple, “TITUS the seventy-seventh Earl of Groan and Lord of Gormenghast. I do adjure you hold each cold stone sacred that clings to these, your grey ancestral walls. I do adjure you hold the dark soil sacred that nourishes your high leaf-burdened trees. I do adjure you hold the tenets sacred that ramify the creeds of Gormenghast. I dedicate you to your father’s castle. Titus, be true.”
To adjure is to charge, bind, or command. Possibly with threats. The root of the word is jury, right. All these things are so obvious to me when typing about them. But when reading, they just seem so brand new. Have I mentioned nine or ten times that Peake makes me punch drunk with new words? I might as well have little bluebirds flitting around my head. Countess Groan pun intended!
Anyway, Latin jurare means “swear” and jus means “law” and that’s a tall order for an infant, don’t you think? But you, me, and Sourdust all know that words have power. And now so does the 77th Earl of Groan.
Interestingly enough, for those of you who are familiar with the plot of the novel, this ceremony (of all of Gormenghasts endless, interminable ceremonies) happens immediately before the first really humongous event of the book. I don’t want to spoil it too much for anybody who might care to read it through someday, so I’ll just say that them all getting out alive is in question, even though you know someone is going to try to kill them (all of them: Sourdust, Titus, the Earl, the Countess, Fuschia, Nanny, Flay, everybody). One of the first literary examples of the use of the word “adjure” is Joshua 6:26:
And Joshua adjured them at that time, saying, Cursed be the man before the LORD, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay its foundation in his first-born, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.
Gormenghast is a contrast to Jericho– the walls must never, ever come down. Interesting allusion Peake sets up there, don’t you think?
Speaking of thinking, there’s gibbous:
His body gave the appearance of being malformed, but it would be difficult to say exactly what gave it this gibbous quality. Limb by limb it appeared that he was sound enough, but the sum of these several members accrued to an unexpectedly twisted total.
This word I had to chew on a while. I was used to seeing gibbous to describe celestial bodies, never human ones. And then I started to wonder if it had anything to do with primates. And while it’s all contextually evident, I still wanted to dig around in it. Gibbous is primarly an astronomy term, but it also means “humpbacked.” The literal definition is “characterized by convexity” and it’s root is Latin, gibbus, which simply means “hump.”
The passage describes the character Steerpike, the novel’s big mover and shaker. I read that passage and visualized him as being someone whose body was strangely proportioned, perhaps top heavy, with oddly long arms and oddly short legs, like a Gibbon. That he would be hunchbacked never occurred to me. And now I find I can’t repair my mental image of him to fit his author’s description.
But does that really matter? I’m moving on anyway, to pellucid:
Beneath them swam the pellucid volumes of the morning air. Above them spread the withered elegance of the dead tree, and to their left its lace-like shadow.
I look at this word and think, “Ooh, prefixes!” To be pellucid is to allow for maximum transmission of light; in other words, translucent. The prefix here is “per” not “pel,” which is really interesting, don’t you think? I don’t remember enough Latin at all to tell you why r would change to l in front of the root lucere meaning “to shine” except that perlucere (“through shine”) could get really hard to say, two laterals in a row like that. So a bit of shift in the mouth and a bit of shift in the orthography, and the air around Gormenghast is see-through. Reading that passage, I imagine that the air is clear, but has some humidity to it, so it’s a bit swimmy. You can see through it, but it might distort your view ever so slightly.
What might volume 8 of the Gormenghastocabulary hold? Find out next week! Provided I remain even vaguely motivated! No promises!
