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San Francisco Chronicle
Word play
Marin chiropractor doubles as a crack language detective
Dave Ford, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, April 26, 2002
Beneath the accommodating exterior of chiropractor Jeffrey
Kacirk beats the heart of a fierce amateur
anachronistic-word junkie.
An obsessively fierce amateur anachronistic-word junkie. A
really obsessively fierce anachronistic-word junkie.
Spend any time with Kacirk -- author of three books,
including the just- released "Altered English" (Pomegranate
Communications; $22.95) -- in his cozy 1908 cottage tucked
among the trees in hilly Corte Madera, and he'll start
opening some of his several hundred ancient reference books
and dropping all kinds of titillating nuggets.
He will, for example, consult one of the 13 first-edition
volumes of the original Oxford English Dictionary at the
bottom of one of two tall, full living-room bookshelves:
"Did you know that pornography meant 'a description of
prostitutes or prostitution as a matter of public hygiene?'
"
In his new book -- subtitled "Surprising Meanings for
Familiar Words" -- Kacirk has collected current words and
provided earlier definitions and their sources.
The go-cart, which we know as a small motorized vehicle in
which kids zoom around, was, according to Dr. Samuel
Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, "A
machine in which children are enclosed to teach them to
walk, and which they push forward without danger of
falling."
The sneaking notion today means a creeping sense of
something. Ah, but back in 1849, James Bartlett noted that
"To have a sneaking notion for a lady is to have a timid or
concealed affection for her."
And so it goes, alphabetically, beginning with abandon ("to
banish, to drive away" -- John Phin, 1902) and ending with a
zig-zag ("drunk" -- Edward Fraser and John Gibbons, 1925).
Kacirk's book is a flip-through find, perfect for everyone
from lay word nerds to top-dollar scholars.
Granted, not all in the world of musty tropes is fun, a word
Kacirk uses often.
"You can read a lot of dull stuff in these books," he says,
referring to such works as the Scottish Gallovidian
Encyclopedia, by John Mactaggart, published in 1824, or the
1825 Glossary of North Country Words, by John Trotter
Brokett.
"But when you find something," Kacirk says, "it makes it
worth the time."
Indeed. Consider the example included in the definition of
invasion in Johnson's dictionary: "Reafon finds a fecret
grief and remorfe from every invasion that fin makes upon
innocence." Literary, lovely (it's from South's Sermons) --
and packed, in the old font, with an s that look like an f.
What more could a locution lover want?
Kacirk became a word sleuth the same way competitor, which
used to mean "partner," came to mean "rival": circuitously.
Raised in a San Diego household, Kacirk had an epiphany as
an 11-year-old when he watched Shakespeare productions at
the Old Globe Theatre there.
"The plots went over my head, and the costumes were
interesting, but it really was the language I identified
with right off the bat," he says.
At 13, he'd hole up in the school library with the Oxford
Dictionary of Etymology.
"He's that kid that sat next to you in the sixth grade and
always had his glasses on and was working," Pomegranate
publisher Katie Burke says with a laugh, imagining the
boyhood Kacirk.
After graduating from the University of San Diego with a
degree in history, Kacirk spent a couple of summers in New
York, and would write to his family about speech patterns he
heard there.
"I must have had more interest (in language) than just
hearing things and letting them go," he says.
But the real seed for Kacirk's word-collection mania was
planted when he lived in New Orleans for two years in the
mid-70s. He began clipping newspaper articles with quotes
heavy on local colloquialisms.
"I swore I would turn those into something," he says. "But I
thought it would have to be a hobby, something to share with
people one-on-one."
He bought an Oxford English Dictionary -- complete with
magnifying glass -- in 1980, and his collection obsession
sprouted.
"That's when I got serious about trying to make little pages
of words and put them in notebooks, thinking, Someday I'll
do something with these," he says.
Someday turned out to be 1997, when Kacirk released
"Forgotten English" (Morrow), a collection of antiquated
words. That was followed by "The Word Museum" (Simon and
Schuster) in 2000. He also has released page-a-day calendars
with his word finds -- the first appeared in 1998, and he's
currently working on 2004.
Burke says the calendars sell between 50,000 and 100,000
copies per year, and that the company decided to publish
"Altered English" because they knew they had a built-in
audience for it. Plus, she already knew Kacirk.
"He is passionate about what he does, and he's got so much
integrity," she says. "He doesn't want anything to go into
print that's not exactly right."
If Kacirk is passionate, his audience is more so. He was
corrected for a "Forgotten English" calendar entry by a
woman who lives in Wales. She wrote to tell him in kindly if
no uncertain terms that, contrary to what he'd written, a
certain shepherding aid was still very much in use there.
"That's part of the fun of this, that I get to interact with
people," Kacirk says. "I'm not sitting in an ivory tower."
Indeed, Kacirk, who lives with Karen, his wife of 14 years,
spends most of his spare time burrowing into books in his
comfy study, where old books resting on tall shelves gaze
down their spines at homeless tomes stacked on the floor.
(In his non-word life, Kacirk is a substitute chiropractor
for various Bay Area practices, a career for which he
studied in the late 1980s.)
"Have you ever seen a hole made by a bookworm?" he asks with
typical gee- whiz enthusiasm, the kind that perpetually
erases four-fifths of his 50 years. He holds up the pages of
a book with a perfect worm-size hole in it.
He has mostly found the books by scouring used bookstores
here and overseas.
The Internet, he says, has become a useful tool for finding
certain books and booksellers.
He shows another of his enthusiasms, Chamber of Horrors: A
Glossary of Official Jargon both English and American. The
1952 collection was edited by the apparently cranky Eric
Partridge, who fulminates throughout about the decline of
language due to distortions by bureaucrats and other
miscreants.
The book offers a word, its definition, and a snippy
Partridge comment. Example: "Plottage. The area of a plot of
land. (The deplorable result of an illicit union between
plot and acreage. Compare to the equally horrible beddage
held up for derision by two London newspapers within the
space of five weeks during the summer of 1951.)"
That kind of attitude is endemic to word snobs (including,
it must be said, certain journalists). But Kacirk says his
hobby has taught him to see language as a living form bound
to transmogrify. That keeps him from worrying about word-use
shifts or wanting to scold their proponents.
"I don't feel like an English teacher," he says. "It's more
fun to witness (language growth) than to try to change it."
That said, Kacirk likes old words not for their novelty
value, but for what they say about a certain place or set of
customs.
"Anything that'll tell me more about the past, that's what
I'm looking for, " he says. "I seem to have an unquenchable
thirst for the past and how things came about."
Yet something else seems to arise from Kacirk's quest. Many
of his books' flyleaves are are inscribed with people's
names: humans once here, now gone. They, too, pored over
these books; in so doing, they kept language alive as long
as they were. Some words went with them, or with their
generation. Some, like those in "Altered English," stayed,
but in a form those people would find unrecognizable.
Even seemingly timeless words are time-bound, like humans.
Kacirk's work suggests a yearning for a kind of immortality:
resurrecting words as if by doing so one could resurrect the
people who spoke them; and, by doing that, could resurrect
humanity, and so stave off time's sad and inevitable work.
Whatever the motive, Kacirk will keep poring over old books
of word usage and folklore, scouring the texts for the
phrases that perfectly highlight how language shape-shifts.
"Sometimes my wife speaks about me bringing something back
to the English language, but I don't think of it like that,"
Kacirk says with a chuckle. "I'm just putting stuff out
there for people to have fun with."
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A WORD BY
ANY OTHER NAME
In his new book, "Altered English," Jeffrey Kacirk cites
sources providing old meanings for familiar words. Some
examples:
BRAT: ". . .It is now used always in contempt, but was not
so once. Gascoigne's 'De Profundis' (has) 'O Abraham's
brats, O brood of blessed seed, O chosen sheep that loved
the lord indeed.' (Richard Chenevix Trench, 1859-60)"
CANCEL: "To fence in, to enclose, or surround with a fence
of railing; from Latin cancellus, a grating, cancelli,
lattice-work. (Edward Lloyd, 1895)"
DAD: "To beat one thing against another. 'He dadded his head
against the wall.' (Adam and Charles Black, 1851)"
FABULOUS: "Dealing in, or belonging to fables, fiction or
falsehood. (Daniel Fenning, 1775)"
INCONTINENT: "One who indulges in sexual passion unlawfully.
(Joseph Worcester, 1881)"
PIMPING: "Little, petty; as in a 'pimping thing.' Used in
the interior of New England. (James Bartlett, 1849)"
RED-NECK: "A name given to a Roman Catholic (in) Lancashire.
(Joseph Wright, 1896-1905)"
SHRUG: "A shake of the hand (1400s-1700). (James Murray et
al., 1888-1928)"
SINGLE MEN: "Young men are called single men if their
fathers are alive to advanced life. (Wright, 1896-1905)"
TASTE: "To smell (John Ray, 1674-91)"
VOLATILE: "That (which) can fly. (John Kersey, 1772)"
WARDROBE: "A privy; a water-closet. (Edward Lloyd, 1895)"
WOMANIZE: "To act or behave one's self like a woman.
(Kersey)"
WRETCH: "A term of endearment. 'The pretty wretch.' 'Romeo
and Juliet.' 'Excellent wretch!' 'Othello.' (Alexander Dyce,
1902)"
YELP: "To squeak, as a mouse; to chirp, as a bird. (Wright)"
. -- Dave Ford
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©2005 San Francisco Chronicle
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