Had someone said,” You’re going to meet triage today…”, I would have imagined that an encounter with a sultry French lady, not a sign in bold red lettering on a wall of the emergency room of my closest hospital. “TRIAGE” informed me that it was the reason for the doctor on duty not immediately attending to my mangled middle finger: the severity of a wound determined the order in which the doctor would see the casualties, not the order of admission. I would have time to calm down and recognise that it had been stupid to tell my wife to press the remote when I had my fingers in the cogs of the electrical gate mechanism.
Little more remains of that wound than a slight scar, but I now know the meaning of that word, triage, first hand, and will never forget it. That slow second syllable – no note of emergency room trauma – just some necessary French calm.
Recidivism is another unusual word. (If you don’t have the word redlined on a first spelling, well done.) Why a word of such serious import falls our way in so complicated a form is strange. Would an habitual criminal, hearing the judge refer to him as a recidivist, understand his problem? Even the few around who studied Latin are unlikely to gather the falling back element which originates from cado. I am not suggesting that recidivism would be remedied if the problem was expressed as a more comprehensible word, but were it not such a “Huh?” word, it would help get the message across.
But if recidivism might have Latin students a touch perplexed, “transhumance” shouldn’t pose a problem; almost everybody knows that “trans-” means “across”, and so we’re looking at some type of feral being, a sort of human cross-over, perhaps? Oh, you didn’t know that “human” comes from humus, meaning earth? Fine, so it probably describes the nomadic nature of the human race. Wrong again. Transhumance is the practice of moving livestock from one seasonal grazing ground to another. I just hope that those who lead the livestock do not mislead them as much as this word, which looks and sounds more to do with astral travelling than moving sheep.
When encountering a word, sound is significant. But first impressions based on past experience, especially when that experience is of restaurant menus, are not always trustworthy. With its “-ee” suffix, garnishee sounds like a practitioner of the subtle art of decorating food in an exotic way, a dervish of earthly delights. Could anything be further from this than someone whose money is about to be seized after a court ruling? I would not like to be garnished.
“Usufruct”. Did that word come out of some artificial intelligence agency? It looks clumsy and needs to be very clearly articulated when spoken in polite company. Were its meaning so obscure that it had been used only twice in the past decade, its existence would be appropriate. Not the case: usufruct is quite frequently invoked in wills and grants someone “the right to enjoy another’s property short of destruction or waste”. It has been known to cause serious family issues – talk about exacting revenge from beyond the grave!
Words… and that’s only five of them.
