Word of the Day

Flapdoodle, “nonsense; bosh,” is a colloquialism that first appeared in print in 1834 along with a definition: “It’s the stuff they feed fools on.” Flapdoodle has no reliable etymology; the meaning of flap is pure conjecture, but some scholars suggest that doodle has its archaic sense “a fool, silly person.” Mark Twain uses flapdoodle in chapter 25 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): “…[the King] works himself up and slobbers out a speech, all full of tears and flapdoodle about its being a sore trial for him and his poor brother….”

Insouciant, “free from concern or anxiety; carefree; nonchalant,” comes straight from French insouciant, literally “not caring,” a compound of the French negative prefix in- “not” (from Latin in-, and naturalized in English in- from both Latin and French borrowings), and the present participle souciant “caring,” from the verb soucier “to trouble, care.” Soucier comes from Vulgar Latin sollicītāre “to worry, vex,” from Latin sollicitāre “to disturb, harass.” The French noun souci “care, worry” is part of the phrase sans souci “without worries, carefree,” which, spelled Sanssouci, is the name of the summer palace built by King Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, in Potsdam, between 1745 and 1747. Insouciant entered English in the first half of the 19th century.

Gallicism has three related meanings in English: The first one is “a French phrase or idiom used in another language," as when in English one says Je ne sais quoi, meaning "an indefinable, elusive quality" (literally, "I don’t know what”); the second meaning is “a feature characteristic of or peculiar to the French language”; and the third, “a custom or trait considered to be characteristically French.” Gallicism comes via French gallicisme from the Latin adjective Gallicus “pertaining to Gaul (modern France, roughly) or the Gauls.” Gallicism entered English just after the middle of the 17th century.

Zeitgeist, “the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period,” comes straight from German Zeitgeist. In German, the noun dates from the late 18th century; it is a compound of Zeit “time, age, epoch” (related to English tide, which waits for no man) and Geist “spirit, mind, intellect” (related to English ghost). The English translation of Zeitgeist as “Time-Spirit” appears in English in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834). Time-spirit still occurs in English publications, but nowadays zeitgeist, spelled without a capital z in English, is becoming common (in German all nouns are capitalized, e.g., Zeit, Geist, Butter “butter,” Milch “milk,” and Eier “eggs”). Capitalizing important words (not only nouns) was also formerly the custom in English, as in the preamble to our Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another....” Zeitgeist entered English toward the middle of the 19th century.

Just the mere sound of velleity makes one loath to leave one’s hammock. A velleity is a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it, too weak even to be a desire, a perfect word for a July afternoon. Velleity comes from Medieval Latin velleitās (inflectional stem velleitāt-), a noun made up of the Latin verb velle “to be willing, want to” (from the same Proto-Indo-European source as English will) and the abstract noun suffix -itās, which via Old French -ité becomes the naturalized English suffix -ity. The odd thing about velleity is that its earlier occurrences, from the first half of the 17th century through the mid-18th, are in theological controversies, gradually yielding to philosophical arguments during the early 18th. Velleity entered English in the first half of the 17th century.