Sometimes, his affinity for the words he chooses reflect his thoughts of the world around him, which prompt us to construct the sentences found at the end of this article. Enjoy.
Ostracize . The Greek word
ostrakon means a shell or
a broken fragment of an earthen vessel.
Such fragments, which we call "potsherds",
served ancient Athens as ballots in a
particular kind of popular vote. Once each
year the citizens would gather in the
market place to decide who, if anyone, should
be banished temporarily for the good of
the community. Each voter wrote a name on
his ostrakon . If at least 6,000
votes were cast and if the majority of them
named one man, then that man was banished or
ostracized . The ostracism, exclusion
from acceptance by a group.
Petard . This word, borrowed from the French, was derived from the French verb peter (pronounced "paytay") meaning "to break wind", and the noun pet has the secondary meaning, "the report of a gun". The first meaning can be readily divined. It obviously involves noise-making of dubious social desirability.
In Medieval times, an excellent noise-maker was the petard. It was an explosive device used in siege warfare. It was shaped like a bucket, filled with gunpowder and closed with a stout wooden lid. During the night, soldiers who were called "petardiers" , would sneak the device against the gate of the besieged fortress, light the fuse and run. If the soldier was not fast enough in his getaway, he could be blown up by his own petard. In Shakespeare's "Hamlet", one may recall the well-known lines: "hoisted on his own petard".
Pandemonium . In "Paradise Lost", Milton coined this word for the capitol of Hell. It is formed from the prefix pan , meaning "all", plus the Latin daemonium , "evil spirit", thus aptly naming the place where all the demons were gathered together. This word generally became the word for hell, described as a place where noise and confusion abound. In the 18th Century, the word was used for any wicked, lawless, or riotous place. Later it began to appear for a term for the uproar itself and not simply for the place where the tumult occurs.
Gypsy . In the 16th Century, there began to appear in Briton some members of a wandering race of people who were of Hindu origin. It was believed they came from Egypt, and thus were called Egipcyans . This soon became shortened to gipcyan , and further changed to Gypsey . The earliest known example to appear in print was in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" where two pages sing a ditty "....like two gipsies on a horse".
In France these same people were thought to come from Bohemia, and thus called Bohemians and used synonymously with Gypsy. In a Sir Walter Scott novel, one of the gypsy characters says, "I am a zingario, a Bohemian, an Egyptian, or whatever the Europeans may choose to call me, but I have no country". The extended sense of a Gypsy or a Bohemian is a person living an unconventional life, by taste and circumstance.
In other words, we read the above as:
"The pandemonium caused by my gypsy son,
the virtual bohemian, leaves him two choices:
he may be ostracized, or be
hoisted on his own petard.
The choices are not, however, mutually exclusive."
June 27, 1996 Michael W. Paparella All Rights Reserved