Smells like a trend.

Dear Word Detective: In the past three weeks, having read three different novels by three different authors (That’s a lot of threes, isn’t it?), I have come across the usage of the word “redolent” in all of them. Although 70 years old and fairly well educated, I must admit that neither I nor any of my friends have ever used this word before. I am sure I must be making “a mountain out of a mole hill,” but considering its frequent use lately, I am wondering if the word is the new darling of the literati (I can just visualize the author sitting there with his/her thesaurus open). I firmly believe in increasing one’s vocabulary and consequently have added this word to mine, but the seeming over-use of the word tends to render it somewhat trite and artificial to me. Or is it just my provincial Midwestern roots coming to the fore? — John E. Bowles.

Well, mountains have to come from somewhere, don’t they? Think of all the brave little moles it took to make the Himalayas.

I understand your skepticism about the apparent sudden affection for “redolent” among writers. A search of Google News produces 214 hits for the word at the moment (versus 902,000 on plain old Google), and I would bet that the count for “redolent” in news stories a few years ago would have been near zero. I too am annoyed by vogue words and phrases that whoosh in from nowhere and are suddenly popping up in one’s face every few minutes. I was ready to mount a campaign to outlaw “at the end of the day” when it swamped the airwaves and magazine racks a few years ago, but pundits are fickle critters and the phrase faded away before I had a chance.

On the other hand, I’m sort of fond of “redolent.” I’ve used it several times in this column over the years (“They were lovely big dill pickles, crisp and pungent, redolent of garlic and onion and the teeming germs from countless grubby little hands”), and I love the rolling sound of the word: RED-oh-lent.

“Redolent,” from the Latin “redolere” meaning “to emit a smell,” literally means “to smell of something.” While that odor was presumed to be pleasant in the 15th century when “redolent” first appeared in English, today a person or place can be “redolent” of unpleasant things as well. More importantly, “redolent” has also developed a figurative sense meaning “strongly suggestive or reminiscent of” a quality or feeling, whether good or bad (“On every side Oxford is redolent of age and authority,” 1856). While some uses in this sense have become trite (“redolent of wealth,” for instance, is a deadly cliche), I think it’s still a useful word.

Just don’t ever moult.

Dear Word Detective: I saw this on Ken Jenning’s website (www.ken-jennings.com) — he was looking for the origin of a phrase in his blog:

Etymology help! In an Eric Rohmer short story I was reading last night, some French expression had been translated as “my fine-feathered friend.” That’s right, with the hyphen. So my whole life, I’ve been assuming that a “fine feathered friend” is one who is both fine and feathered. Could it be that the hyphen is actually correct, and the expression is limited to a friend with fine feathers (i.e., not coarse ones)? The Web has been little help here: Google Book Search shows more hits for no-hyphen, but many of the hyphenated examples are older, more literary, or otherwise seem more likely to be correct. The expression goes back at least to “My Fine Feathered Friend” (no hyphen), an ornithologically themed 1937 standard later made a hit by Glenn Miller, but did the phrase pre-date the song? And did it originate as a way to refer to birds, or humans? In other words, what’s it for? –Anonymous.

Yikes. I went to look for the lyrics to “My Fine Feathered Friend,” but nearly every site I found prompted a warning from Google about the site being a menace to my computer. Evidently lyrics sites are a major source of spyware and the like. Anyway, the lyrics are purportedly birdy but obviously applicable to humans as well: “I’ll make just one request, my sweet chickadee, Don’t find some cuckoo’s nest and fly out on me, We do belong together, what do you intend? You’ve got me up a tree, my fine feathered friend.”

“Fine-feathered,” with a hyphen, was definitely the original form, and its first known appearance predates Glenn Miller’s recording by nearly 200 years, occurring in Robert Patlock’s decidedly odd 1751 novel “The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins.” Patlock’s story is the tale of a traveler, reminiscent of Swift’s Gulliver, who wanders into an underground world inhabited by flying people, one of whom he marries. While I don’t have a copy of the book, it seems probable that “fine-feathered friend” is used in reference to this bird-woman, Youwarkee, and, given that this hyphenated form seems to be the original, the “fine” would refer to the “feathers” and not the “friend.”

It also seems likely that he meant “fine” in the sense of “beautiful” rather than simply “not coarse.” There was also, at the time, a popular proverb, “Fine feathers make fine birds” (meaning that good clothes “make” the person), which undoubtedly influenced Patlock and makes his use of the phrase (if indeed in praise of his flying fiancee) a nicely done pun.

So, to sum up, “fine-feathered friend” seems to have been, all along, a compliment to humans by allusion to a bird with beautiful plumage. The loss of the hyphen over time has simply clouded a very nice metaphor.