Funky word stories

Wilfred Funk

Wilfred Funk (1883-1965) was not one of the founders of Funk & Wagnalls but rather the son of one of them. His own claim to fame, however, was also related to books — he wrote more than a dozen of them — and words.

He once proposed a list of the most beautiful words in the English language. These include dawn, hush, lullaby, murmuring, tranquil, mist, luminous, chimes, golden and melody. We might all add our own words to the list, daffodil perhaps or rendezvous. Meaning seems to be as important as sound in making a word beautiful. Thus, weekend might be a beautiful word to some, or wine but not whine.

In 1937 he listed the 10 most overworked words: okay, terrific, lousy, definitely, racket, gal, honey, swell, contact and impact. Some of these words are still overworked today, although we might now want to find a spot on the list for such words as nice and actually, perhaps replacing racket and swell.

I have one of Funk's books before me now, Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories. This book was popular when it was published in 1950 and remains interesting today. Opening it to a random page, here are, in brief, some of Funk's "romantic stories." 

Gossamer, surely a contender for Funk's list of most beautiful words, means "goose-summer." Funk says summer is when geese are most likely to be plucked and when cobwebs are most likely to be seen in the breeze, and gossamer looks something like cobwebs. He doesn't actually make a connection between geese and spiders' webs. Perhaps gossamer just looks like a cobweb and is as soft as feathers.

We get the word lace, he says, from laqueus, a Latin word meaning noose. Huh? How romantic is that? The noose in question, however, seems to refer less to execution than to a snare, and I guess one purpose of a woman's lace is to entrap.

Garter comes from a French word meaning "the bend in the knee."

The word mirror stems from a Latin word meaning "admire." Don't you suppose good-looking people spend more time looking into mirrors than the rest of us do?

We get jade from a Spanish phrase meaning "stone of the side." That's because the gem was once thought to relieve a pain in the side.

I don't know how romantic these word-origin stories are, but the book can be fun to browse through, perhaps the next time you are in a funk.