The Blaine County Journal News-Opinion - We've Got The County Covered

A good game one can play with oneself is to look at new words that crop up here and there and try to figure out what they mean, before consulting the dictionary..

A “tool kit” of basic Greek and Latin roots will take you a long way along the path of making friends with oddities such as acromegaly and vadose.

How about proscenium? When I first ran into this utterly mysterious word in high school, I could not imagine what it might mean, nor that any normal person could pronounce it or understand it, still less ever find a use for it.

The dictionary, of course, was at hand. Its reason for being was and is to bring light into the dark corners of our beloved—oh, yes, it is beloved—English language, and it did then, too.

A proscenium is the space on a theater stage between the curtain and the footlights. So the meaning is not mysterious after all.

Although it is pronounced pro-see-nee-um, its roots are Greek: pro-, before, in the sense of in front of; -skene, skay-nay, scene; plus a touch of Latin, -ium.

Is this a really useful term? I didn’t think so till I realized that not every stage is a proscenium stage. In dinner theater, for example, there won’t be a curtain, nor in an amphitheater.

Vadose is the word that seemed so obscure and hard to analyze that I couldn’t leave it alone.

It is pronounced vay-dose, and so far as I, knowing little Latin, can see, it does not in any way reveal its origins or any possible glimmer of meaning.

It’s too short to allow much analysis of syllables.

Is the -vade the same –vade as in evade and invade?

Is the -vade the same vade as in vade mecum?

Is the -dose possibly the same as in a dose of aspirin or a dose of his own medicine?

All wrong.

Vadose is a term used in geology and it means, “Of or pertaining to or due to circulation of liquids and solutions in the earth’s crust as far down as the level of ground water.”

So it’s an adjective, as in “the vadose zone.”

The Latin root is vadum, a shallow, or ford. Do Latin teachers recognize the word vadose as arising from a word meaning “a shallow or ford”?

Vade mecum is as different from vadose as chalk is from cheese. (I came upon this interesting term by happenstance.)

First, this vade rhymes with lady and mecum is meekum.

It means go with me in Latin and is presently defined as, “a book or other thing that a person carries with him [or her] as a constant companion; hence, a manual; a handbook.”

What about acromegaly?

“Oh, I know what that means,” I thought. “It has something to do with height, or athletics of some kind.”

This odd word looks like “high, big,” acro- from circus acts, megaly, as in megalomania, but there’s even more to it than that.

Acrobat actually means, “walking on tiptoe, climbing aloft,” from Greek, akros, high + bainein, to go.

An acrobat is one who “practices rope dancing, high vaulting, or other daring gymnastic feats.”

Back to acromegaly: The scene changes. Only traces of “high, big” remain.

In 2016, acromegaly is a medical term for a benign tumor, one not cancerous, of the pituitary gland. The tumor causes a disease called acromegaly, or Marfan syndrome.

In it, the long bones grow too long. The facial bones change and various other abnormalities appear. Some think that Abraham Lincoln suffered from Marfan syndrome.

So in a way, the word acromegaly shows its true colors right away, in another way it has some hidden and marginal meanings beyond “high, big.”

We have some choices among odd words. If we like long odd words seldom met with in daily life, we have proscenium and acromegaly.

If we like short odd words seldom met with in daily life, we have vadose, and there must be plenty of others somewhere, for our enjoyment and education.