Among the nebulons.

I was writing a column recently on the term “ne’er-do-well,” meaning a worthless or disreputable person, when I remembered that every entry in the Oxford English Dictionary Online (www.oed.com) has a link to the OED Historical Thesaurus (OEDHT) entry for that particular word. The Historical Thesaurus, which was completed in 2009 after 44 years of work, is the largest thesaurus in the world, and the online version links every synonym of a word to the synonym’s entry in the OED. It sounds complicated, but using it is very easy, endlessly fascinating  and weirdly addictive. The OED Online, which includes the OEDHT, is available through many public libraries, so it’s worth checking your local library’s website.

Meanwhile, when I clicked on the OEDHT link next to “ne’er-do-well,” I discovered that it was categorized by the thesaurus under “society > morality > moral evil > evil nature or character > lack of magnanimity or noble-mindedness > worthlessness > good-for-nothing person” and that there were 81, count ’em, synonyms for it dating back to the late 13th century. Makes sense, I guess. Deadbeat nephews aren’t exactly a recent invention.

The earliest term for “worthless fellow” in the list is “bretheling” (circa 1275), which later appeared in the 15th century as “brethel,” derived from the Old English “breothan,” meaning “to go to ruin.” That Old English root also gave us “brothel,” which originally meant a degenerate person of either sex. In the late 15th century “brothel” came to mean “an abandoned woman” and then “prostitute.” A house of prostitution was called a “bordel,” an Old French word, but somehow “brothel” (person) and “bordel” (place) became confused and today a place of prostitution is a “brothel” and “bordel” is obsolete except in its Italianate form “bordello.”

Around 1475 in the timeline of worthlessness we meet a truly wonderful word: “nebulon,” meaning “a worthless person; a fool” (“Why you brute Nebulons, … cannot [you] yet tell how to [edify] an argument?” 1586). It seems a crime that such a concise, modern-sounding word should be classified as “obsolete,” and I plan to introduce it into my business correspondence forthwith. As you might have guessed, the root of “nebulon” is the Latin “nebula,” meaning “cloud or mist.”

The 17th century gave us the odd “ragabash” for a scoundrel, which is probably related to the earlier “bash-rag,” “ragman,” “ragmall,” and possibly “ragamuffin.” All these terms use “rag” to evoke a sense of raggedness and disorder. Today we use “ragamuffin” to mean “a scruffy lad or urchin” of the sort found in Dickens or Disney, but in the 16th century it could apply as well to a not-at-all-cute adult vagrant or drifter of ragged and dirty appearance. The first “ragamuffin” in literature was, in fact, a genuine demon, Ragamoffyn, in William Langland’s 14th century epic Middle English allegorical poem “Piers Plowman.” The “muffin” of “ragamuffin” has nothing to do with cozy cakes and coffee and may, in fact, hark back to the Anglo-Norman “malfelon,” meaning “devil.”

There are dozens of other strange and wonderful synonyms of “ne’er-do-well” in the OEDHT, but the truly strange ones slowly give way to the 20th century dullness of “loser,” “punk” and, around 1964, the evocative but unexciting “schlub” (worthless person, oaf, from Yiddish, possibly originally the Polish “zlob,” meaning “blockhead”). But it’s never too late to bring back “nebulon.”

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah

Dear Word Detective: The GF and I were wondering how attached vim/vigor/vitality are. I argued that vitality is third wheel. She is livid. — Tyler Richart.

Well, here we go. If this question seems a bit terse, a tad telegraphic, like something that you might blurt as the elevator door is closing, there’s a reason. It’s the very first question that I’ve received over Twitter (@word_detective, of course). Twitter has a well-known requirement that all “Tweets” be exactly 140 characters long and include nine non-alphanumeric characters and one cat picture. Tweets thus rely heavily on abbreviations; “GF” in this case apparently stands for George Foreman, the electric griddle guy. Or maybe “Grande Fromage,” meaning “the Big Cheese.” That’s what’s great about Twitter: it’s so ephemeral that no one cares what any of it means. Oh look, there’s a rabbit wearing a top hat.

Onward. I’m gonna go ahead and assume that by “attached” our Tweeter means how “related” the words “vim,” “vigor” and “vitality” are, and the answer is “not much,” although they all come ultimately from Latin.

Of the three words, “vigor” (which almost everyone not in the US spells “vigour”) is the oldest, first appearing in the early 14th century. English derived “vigor” from the Latin verb “vigere,” meaning “to be lively, alert, productive,” which in turn came from the same Indo-European roots that eventually gave use “wake” and “watch.” The meaning of “vigor” in English has developed and expanded over the centuries, but has never strayed far from the general sense of “strength, energy, power, effectiveness” (“Bob’s lawyer mounted a defense so full of vigor and passion that the jury voted to convict the District Attorney.”). The connotation of “vigor” is generally more positive than simply “strength,” carrying the sense of something functioning well or a person in radiant health, but it does have a darker side, as in laws enforced with a “vigor” and inflexibility sometimes synonymous with brutality.

“Vitality” dates to the late 16th century and comes ultimately from the Latin “vita,” meaning “life,” and its derivative “vitalis,” meaning “possessing life; consisting of or characteristic of life.” (Vitalis is also a hair tonic popular in the 1960s, inexplicably still available, and most famous for its TV commercials deriding its competitor Brylcreem as “Greasy kid stuff.”) Like “vigor,” “vitality” carries connotations of “strength,” “energy” and “animation,” but “vitality” also pertains to the future prospects of a thing or person; an elderly person evidencing great “vitality” with an active social life and cheerful outlook is probably going to be around for a while. The adjective “vital” originally meant simply “relating to or possessing life” or “necessary for life,” but took on the somewhat diluted modern meaning of “really important” in the 17th century.

“Vim” is a synonym of “vigor” and “vitality,” but much newer than either of them, first appearing in the mid-19th century. “Vim” appears to have developed from the Latin “vim,” which is a form of “vis,” meaning “strength or energy,” but it’s also possible that it was simply a fanciful coinage. Whatever the source, “vim” now plays alliterative second fiddle to “vigor” and is almost never seen outside the phrase “vim and vigor.”