A man walks into a restaurant and sits down. The waitress asks him whether he wants to have something to drink, to which he answers, “A glass of Sancerre, please,” whereupon the waitress responds with the currently ubiquitous and hypertrophic substitute for the affirmative in American English (particularly among younger speakers), “Absolutely.”

For those who lament the demise of the simple word “Yes” and share my animus against its replacement, I offer the following alternatives (in order of personal preference) as an antidote to “Absolutely”:

irrefragably, adv. < irrefragable, adj.: impossible to gainsay, deny, or refute

irrefrangibly, adv. < irrefrangible, adj.: that cannot or must not be broken or violated; inviolable

indefeasibly, adv. < indefeasible, adj.: not defeasible; not capable of or not liable to being annulled or voided or undone; that cannot be forfeited

indisputably, adv. < indisputable, adj.: that cannot be disputed or called into question; that is beyond argument; truly existing; existing beyond the possibility of doubt or denial

indubitably, adv. < indubitable, adj.: not dubitable; not open to question or doubt; too evident to be doubted.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, God speaks Hebrew in the first instance, then (presumably) whatever language is needed in order that believers understand divine speech, i. e., Latin, Greek, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Old Provençal, etc., etc., ad infinitum, depending on the particular time and place in human history. This utterly protean linguistic variability may advert to a theological point.

One of God’s divine attributes is immutability. In terms of apophatic (negative) theology, God is unchanging. But from the linguistic point of view, God speaks whatever language is current among his addressees at any given time and place, including all regional dialects, which means that God is always linguistically au courant. In this (possibly singular) respect, then, God may be said to adapt to circumstances. Whether this implies changing is for a theologian to say.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Last year’s Hurricane Irene, which wreaked such terrible damage in the Caribbean and the United States, carries an English name derived from our classical patrimony (< Greek εἰρηνικ-ός < εἰρήνη ‘peace’), also reflected in the recherché adjectives irenic/eirenic ‘pacific, non-polemic, tending to or productive of peace’.

Hurricanes and tropical cyclones are given names by the National Hurricane Center in a predetermined order, so that no name has any natural connection with the storm’s cumulative force. One wonders how many persons who suffered in Irene’s wake are aware of the onomastic exacerbation lurking in the name’s ironic presence, made all the more bitter by its paronomastic connection to Latin īrōnīa < Greek εἰρωνεία.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

I once said to a class of undergraduates in a course on the Philosophy of the Russian Novel that pity––a subspecies of love–– was the most important emotion. The context was a discussion of the four Jerusalem chapters in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Parenthetically, the two greatest novelists of the Russian canon might both be said to privilege pity indirectly, each in his own way: Dostoevsky by posing the question, “How do we live a life?,” Tolstoy by asking, “How do we achieve happiness?”

In English, the word pity is part of a lexical family that includes mercy, compassion, and perhaps even loving-kindness, a compound noun coined by Myles Coverdale for his Coverdale Bible of 1535 as an English translation of the Hebrew word khesed חסד ‘kindness’, which appears in the Vulgate as misericordia.

Here is some historical information from the Oxford English Dictionary Online that helps situate the centrality of pity:

pity
a. The disposition to mercy or compassion; clemency, mercy, mildness, tenderness
b.Tenderness and concern aroused by the suffering, distress, or misfortune of another, and prompting a desire for its relief; compassion, sympathy
Etymology: < Anglo-Norman pité, pittee, peté, peti, Anglo-Norman and Old French pitet, pitee, pitié (Middle French pité, pitié, French pitié) compassion (c1100), piety (15^th cent.; rare) < classical Latin pietās .
The sense of Latin pietās ‘piety’ was in post-classical Latin extended so as to include ‘compassion, pity’ (Vetus Latina), and it was in this sense that the word first appears in Old French in its two forms pitié and pieté. Gradually these forms were differentiated, so that pieté, which more closely represented the Latin form, was used in the original Latin sense, while pitié retained the extended sense. In Middle English, both pity n. and piety n. are found first in the sense ‘compassion’, and subsequently in the sense ‘piety’, and the differentiation in sense is not complete until the 17^th cent.

It is both interesting and germane to realize that pity is related to piety and pious, whose classical Latin etymon pius means ‘dutiful, devout’:

pious

a. Of an action, thought, resolve, etc.: characterized by, expressing, or resulting from true reverence and obedience to God; devout, religious
b. Of a person: having or showing reverence and obedience to God; faithful to religious duties and observances; devout, godly, religious.
Etymology: < Anglo-Norman piu, pi, etc. and Middle French pius (end of 10th cent. in Old French) and its etymon classical Latin pius dutiful, pious, devout (cognate with Oscan piíhiúí , Umbrian pihaz ; perhaps related to classical Latin pūrus pure adj.) + -ous suffix, perhaps after Middle French pieux (1st quarter of 15th cent.; compare Old French pieus, pious; French pieux). Compare Old Occitan pis, piu ( c1070), Catalan (rare) pio (1560), Spanish pío (late 14th cent.), Italian pio (1255 or earlier).

Mercy is subtended by a moral compass pointing toward a different azimuth, the most surprising datum being its origin in the language of commerce (payment and reward):

mercy
a. Clemency and compassion shown to a person who is in a position of powerlessness or subjection, or to a person with no right or claim to receive kindness; kind and compassionate treatment in a case where severity is merited or expected, esp. in giving legal judgment or passing sentence.
b. spec. Forbearance, compassion, or forgiveness shown by God (or a god) to sinful humanity, or to a particular person or soul.
Etymology: < Anglo-Norman merci, mercie, Old French merci (c1000; Middle French, French
merci), mercet (c1000), mercit (c900) < classical Latin mercēd-, mercēs wages, fee, bribe, rent, price, commodity (in post-classical Latin also: favour, grace (see further below)), cognate with merx (see market n.). Compare Old Occitan merce favour, mercy, thanks (12th cent.), Catalan mercè favour, mercy, thanks (c1200), Spanish merced reward, favour (1207), Portuguese mercê payment, reward, favour (13th cent.), Italian mercè grace, mercy, (arch.) reward, thanks (13th cent.), mercede payment, reward, (arch.) mercy (13th cent.).
The basic sense ‘wages, payment, reward for service’, present in classical Latin, survives in several Romance languages, but this sense seems not to have been present in Gallo-Romance (Middle French, French †mercede is a borrowing < Spanish: see merced n.). Senses attested in post-classical Latin include ‘pity, favour, (secular) grace, heavenly reward’ (6th cent.), ‘thanks’ (9th cent.), and the earliest senses attested in Old French are ‘pity, (secular or divine) grace, discretionary judgement, mercy’. Except in certain fixed expressions, merci is in modern French chiefly restricted to use as noun or interjection in the sense ‘thanks’ attested in Old French from the mid 12th cent., frequently in the phrase grand merci (see gramercy int.); in religious application merci has in French been largely superseded by miséricorde misericord n.
The Middle English adoption < Anglo-Norman shows stress-shifting and shortening of the final vowel, although, in common with many other words showing Middle English ĭ of various origins in a post-tonic syllable, variants with secondary stress and the reflex of Middle English ī in the second syllable are recorded in the early modern period by orthoepists. Forms in a show normal late Middle English lowering of e to a before r. Regional pronunciations with loss of /r/ and a short vowel in the first syllable probably result from assimilation of /r/ to a following /s/.

Contrast the above with the history of the word compassion:

compassion
The feeling or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines one to spare or to succour.
Etymology: < French compassion (14th cent. in Littré), < late Latin compassiōn-em (Tertullian, Jerome), n. of action < compati (participial stem compass-) to suffer together with, feel pity, < com- together with + pati to suffer.

That even the designation of the most fundamentally benign emotions can become linguistically perverted is attested by the partial historical coalescence of the adjectives pitiful and pitiable:

pitiful
1. Full of or characterized by pity; compassionate, merciful, tender.
2. Characterized by piety; devout.
3. Arousing or apt to arouse pity; deserving pity; moving, affecting.
4. Evoking pitying contempt; very small, poor, or meagre; paltry; inadequate, insignificant; despicable, contemptible.

How pity came to be degraded in meaning from ‘loving-kindness’ to ‘contempt’ would be an object lesson in human morals were its trajectory not a commonplace of historical semantics.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Idioms are fixed phrases that are normally not subject to alteration, proverbs being the longest of such constructions. Any of the components of idioms may have a set of (near-) synonyms, but these semantic alternatives are not available for substitution in idiomatic expressions. Thus, one says “break a leg,” but not “break a foot,” when one intends the to wish someone good luck.

Apropos, words that name the parts of the body are particularly frequent in idioms in all languages. A generalized reference to the head in American English, for example, can be made by using head, mind, brain, cranium, skull, noggin, noodle/noddle, pate, etc. But the contemporary idiom “get one’s head around” cannot be altered, though one occasionally hears even native speakers mistakenly tampering with it in utterances recorded by the broadcast media.

Parenthetically, the professional linguist’s injunction to “Leave your language alone” not only encourages users to turn a deaf ear to prescriptivism but may also license a linguistic freedom which turns a blind eye to error.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

Etymology, the science of word origins, is a venerable and well-established branch of (historical) linguistics in need of no explication, but what is not sufficiently appreciated is the variable extent to which a speaker’s internalized knowledge of their language involves a so-called etymological component. One prominent aspect of language use that exploits historical knowledge is paronomasia or punning, where occasionally the force of a pun simply cannot be appreciated without such knowledge.

The knowledge of a word’s origin can also have cognitive force, and even the power to expand one’s experiential horizons. For instance, sitting in an authentic Provençal brasserie in the wilds of rural Vermont during a rain-swept, gloomy afternoon, suddenly one recalls that the English word restaurant is (after all) derived from the present participle of the French verb restaurer ‘restore’ (< Old French restorer), this sort of eating establishment as a cultural institution having originated in France.

Whereupon, one feels restored despite the weather, for as the poet said:

By order Lydian
And virtue pyramidian
I am allowed to love you just a bit.

But heart’s desire
And Music’s lyre
Make me for moral quite unfit.

I see you often in my dreams
And then your radiant eyes throw beams
Just in my bosom.

But after all the clouds do vanish
And sinful thoughts I have to banish,
The ghosts of love, I lose ’em.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO