Do you suffer from molassitude?

"Lassitude" by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Dr. Goodword enlightens us on similar words for a familiar state of being. Taken together, he writes, these words provide a nice little lexical toolkit for dividing inactivity into several more precise senses.

lassitude (læs-ê-tyud) means:

1. Lethargy, torpor, listlessness, a lack of energy, spirit, vitality.
2. Apathy, a lack of interest in things.

Lethargy is a drowsiness that interferes with alertness.
Torpor is a deeper drowsiness, right on the edge of sleep or unconsciousness.
Listlessness suggests more of a disinclination to move or be active rather than a change of mental state.
Lassitude is more of a lack of motivation to act.
Molassitude would be the slowest sort of lassitude—if only it were a word!

Lassitude, the good doctor informs, comes from Old French which inherited it from Latin lassitudo, the noun from adjective lassus "weary". This word is based on a stem (las-) that goes back to Proto-Indo-European *le- "let go, slacken" plus a suffix -d, *led-, that also gave English let and late, not to mention German lassen "let". With the suffix -n, it pops up in Russian as len' "laziness", in Latvian as lens "slow", and Latin lenis "soft, gentle", which is also at the bottom of English lenient.

Victorian novelists would have been good shrinks

As it turns out, one set of 19^th-century writers had insights into human nature so nuanced and profound they still ring true today.

“Victorian authors do seem to be good intuitive psychologists,” concludes a research team led by psychologist John Johnson of Pennsylvania State University, DuBois. According to a large-scale study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, the authors’ depiction of the personality traits, mating strategies and goal-oriented behavior of their characters “largely mirrors the view of those variables as revealed by modern research.”

Hundreds of raters assessed, among other things, the degree to which characters reflect five essential personality traits, including “extraverted, enthusiastic,” “critical, quarrelsome,” “dependable, self-disciplined” and “calm, emotionally stable.”

By crunching this data, the researchers created psychological profiles of these fictional characters. For example, the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre scored “very low on extraversion, well above average on agreeableness and emotional stability, and high on conscientiousness and openness to experience.”

Still fascinated with Twain

The humorist Garrison Keillor has written a review of the Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume I, which can be summed up as: don't bother buying or reading it. "Here is a powerful argument for writers burning their papers," he writes.

It is the sad fate of an icon to be mummified alive, pickled by his own reputation, and midway through this dreary meander of a memoir, Sam throws up his hands in despair: “What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. . . . His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world . . . and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. . . . Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

In cataloging the passages he uses as evidence of the vacuousness of the book, Keillor inadvertently (or perhaps advertently?) makes the point that even he is interested enough in the minutiae of the great man's life that he would read these words and then produce a long piece reciting them.

So you want to be a journalist

(Thanks, Ed)

Want to write like Mark Twain?

Use plain, simple language. In a letter to D.W. Bowser in 1880 he says:

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."

Going forward, let's not say "going forward"

The excellent Johnson blog at The Economist takes up business cliches, including "going forward."

Usage: A favourite disfavourite of mine, this notionally means "from now on", but often just signifies "now" and is just as often totally redundant:

I am pleased to announced that I have nominated Kiyasha Gonzalez-Guggenheim to be our new head of meatball packaging going forward.

or

Kiyasha's contribution will be particularly valuable in ensuring that all our customers have a consistent and satisfying meatball presentation experience going forward.

Source: Not a clue.

Real meaning: Again, as with "to your point", this is all about having the right attitude. In business it is good to look to the future; one of the most damning subtle indictments you can make of ideas or people is that they are "not forward-looking". Reminding everyone that we are, indeed, going forward and not moving backward is essential in boosting morale. This is especially true after cataclysmic setbacks:

“Our charge going forward is to have realistic, clear goals and to execute them expeditiously.” (New Orleans deputy mayor Cedric Grant, after Hurricane Katrina).

(And by the way—I look forward to "execute expeditiously" becoming widespread enough, going forward, to include on a future version of this list.)

I do note in passing that last year some people set up an entire website devoted to purging their organisation of the phrase "going forward", and reported some success. But in the wider world it seems very much alive.

Try this with peanut butter in your mouth

Okay, boys and girls:

I have a sieve full of sifted thistles and a sieve full of unsifted thistles, because I am a thistle sifter.

Let’s go gathering healthy heather with the gay brigade of grand dragoons.

She sifted seven thick-stalked thistles through a strong thick sieve.

In the 19th century, tongue twisters were developed by experts in elocution as a means of mastering proper enunciation.

One practitioner was Lionel Logue, who trained as an elocutionist in his native Australia, and from that work he began taking on students for lessons in “speech correction.” Along with the tongue twisters, Logue was known to draw on other time-honored elocutionary exercises, like having a stutterer shout vowel sounds out of an open window for long periods.

Logue worked with Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), who was crippled by a stammer that made public speaking a devilish chore.

Logue prescribed a regimen of vocal calisthenics, tongue twisters among them, to improve the mechanics of Bertie’s speech. After the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936 opens the throne to Bertie, the therapy has geopolitical consequences, permitting the new king to address the nation in live radio broadcasts on the brink of World War II.

Perhaps there was more involved in his exercises.

Few, if any, of Logue’s linguistic techniques, from the tongue twisters to the word substitutions, would be used by modern speech pathologists, according to Caroline Bowen, an Australian speech therapist who maintains a Web site with information on Logue. But for Logue, the focus on vocal mechanics was most likely just a means to an end, enforcing a bond of trust with his royal patient.

Logue may not have “cured” the stammer, but by instilling a sense of confidence and chipping away at Bertie’s anxieties, he made it possible for the king to untwist his tongue and find his voice at a moment when his country most needed to hear him speak.