Billingsgate is foul and abusive language, coarse invective. The word comes from Billingsgate, London, for hundreds of years the site and name of a fish market where fish sellers and porters were notorious for their foul, coarse language. The market was near a gate in the old city wall named after a property owner, Billings. To talk billingsgate (sometimes capitalized) is to indulge in vituperation and vilification. The women who worked there were particularly offensive; from the Middle English fisshwyf we get fishwife, a term applied to coarse, vituperative, foul-tongued women who belie the traditional gentility of their sex. These lines appear in The Plain Dealer, a play by the English poet and dramatist William Wycherley (c. 1640-1716):

QUAINT: With sharp invectives—
WIDOW: Alias, Billingsgate.

To abjure something is to renounce it, retract, repudiate, forswear it. Abjure comes from the Latin verb abjurare (to deny under oath); abjuration from Late Latin abjuratio (recantation); both are based on ab- (away) plus jurare (to swear). Reformed sinners abjure the errors of their ways. A number of American communists abjured their allegiance to the Communist Party and informed on their former colleagues. The noun abjuration (abjoo RAY shuhn) implies renunciation upon oath, or at least some measure of solemnity and formality, something more than a mere change of mind. Born-again Christians abjure their former unbelief. The English poet John Donne (1572-1631) wrote:

The heavens rejoice in moiion, why should I
Abjure my so much loved variety

In Paradise Lost, the English poet John Milton (1608-1674) says:

I waked To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure.

Verjuice, literally, is the sour juice of unripe fruits, especially crabapples and grapes. Figuratively, verjuice is sourness of temperament, disposition, or expression. It is the hallmark of a curmudgeon, itself an interesting word, generally described in dictionaries as of unknown origin though Samuel Johnson (the English lexicographer, 1709-1784) says in his Dictionary: "It is a vitious [the old spelling, based on Latin vitiosus] manner of pronouncing coeur méchant [ French for wicked heart ]. . ."

To traduce someone is to slander him, vilify him, malign, defame, and calumniate him, speak falsely and with malice toward him or his character; from Latin traducere (to disgrace), a variant of transducere (literally, to carry over; figuratively, to expose, "show up"). In Shakespeare's Othello (Act V, Scene 2), Othello cries to Lodovico who has come to arrest him:

...In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the State,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus.

Whereupon, he obeys Shakespeare's stage directions: Stabs himself. Things are tough all around and it's a bloody mess; but getting back to words and definitions, avoid the common error of identifying slander or defame with libel. Without going into legal minutiae and ramifications, libel is slander in written form and "published", i.e., communicated in that form to a third party or parties. Best advice: Keep your mouth shut and your pen in your pocket.

Quotidian means "daily," i.e., recurring every day, as in a quotidian report, and in that sense is synonymous with diurnal but only in the first meaning given under that entry, i.e., "daily," as opposed to "daytime" used attributively. By extension, quotidian has acquired the second meaning of "everyday" in the sense of "ordinary, commonplace," and in certain contexts, "trivial." In this extension, it follows its Latin antecedent quotidianus (daily), which acquired the meaning "common, ordinary." Things that go on day after day do become run-of-the-mill after a while. Variety is the spice, etc. The American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), in The Comedian as the Letter C, wrote: "...the quotidian saps philosophers."

A pismire is an ant, but the term has been applied contemptuously to a despicable individual. Robert Penn Warren, the American poet and novelist (b. 1905), used it that way, "What do you think I'd do with a young pismire like you?" Shakespeare knew the word. In Henry IV, Part 1 (Act I, Scene 3), the impetuous young Harry Percy, known as Hotspur, cannot bear to hear the name of Bolingbroke:

Why, look you, I am whipped and scourged with rods, Nettled and stung with pismires, when I hear Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke.

In the same play (Act III, Scene 1) the same Hotspur uses the word ant. In reviling Mortimer's father, he says:

...sometimes he angers me With telling me of the moldwarp (mole) and the ant...

In the earlier speech, the Bard obviously needed a two-syllable synonym for ant. Pismire is derived from Middle English pissemyre (a urinating ant, based on Middle English pisse, urinate, plus obsolete mire, ant). A pismire, then, is a urinating ant, i.e., an ant exuding formic acid.

To objurgate is to denounce harshly, to upbraid vigorously, to berate sharply, to reproach in no uncertain terms, to give 'em hell. Objurgate is from Latin objurgatus, past participle of objurgare (to scold, chide, reprove), based on prefix ob- (against) plus jurgare (to rebuke), based in turn on jur-, stem of jus (law, right) plus agere (to drive). Objurgation (ob jur GAY shun) is the noun, and a geat deal of it is heard at the United Nations (which is given as an example of oxymoron in another part of this book).

Meliorism is the belief that everything tends to get better and better. One who lives by this doctrine is a meliorist (MEEL yuh rist, MEE lee uh-). These words are derived from Latin melior (better), the comparitive of bonus (good). The superlative is optimus (best), which gave us optimism and optimist. It may be hard to find much difference between the attitudes of meliorists and optimists, but the English novelist George Eliot (1819-1880) did find a shade of difference: The English poet A.E. Housman (1859-1936) wrote, in an autobiographical note: "I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist)..." In Latin, pejor means "worse" and pessimus means "worst." A pejorist (whose doctrine is known as pejorism) believes that everything is getting worse; a pessimist thinks that it's all going to be as bad as possible: superlatively bad, shall we say, in this atomic age? In any event, George Eliot thought that the world was going to get better - but not as good as possible; and that is the fine difference between meliorism and optimism. Other words from melior are ameliorate (uh MEEL yuh rate, -ee uh-), to improve; amelioration (uh meel yuh RAY shun), improvement generally, but with a special use in linguistics: semantic change to a better, i.e., more favorable meaning, the way Okie, once a pejorative term for a migrant farm worker, usually from Oklahoma, became merely a colloquial nickname for any Oklahoman, and exactly opposite to the way egregious (from Latin egregius, extraordinary, preeminent, based on prefix e-, out of, plus grege, a form of grex, herd, i.e., out of the herd) changed from preeminent to glaring, flagrant, notorious, as in an egregious blunder. But caution: meliority (meel YOR ih tee, mee lee OR-) hs nothing to do with attitudes about which way the world is moving; it is only an uncommon synonym for superiority.

The lamiae, in classical mythology, were a race of monsters with female heads and breasts and the bodies of serpents, who enticed young people and little children in order to devour them. The story went that the original lamia was a Queen of Libya with whom Jupiter fell in love. Juno became furiously jealous and stole the children of the queen, who went mad and vowed vengeance on all children. Lamia became a term for any vampire or she-demon. The literal meaning of lamia in Greek is "female man-eater." In medieval times, witches were sometimes called lamiae. The English poet John Keats (1795-1821) wrote a poem entitled Lamia a short time before his untimely death. In it, a bride, recognized as a lamia by the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana (born shortly before the birth of Christ), vanishes instantaneously. Keats based his theme on an incident related in The Anatomy of Melancholy of the English churchman and writer Robert Burton (1577-1640), who took it from The Life of Apollonius by the Greek philosopher Flavius Philostratus (born c. 170). The enticement or devouring of the young has long been a theme in legend, all the way from the Minotaur of Crete to the Pied Piper of Hamelin. There were no Missing Persons Bureaus in those days to trace the Hamelin kiddies.

To lapidate is to stone to death, an old Biblical penalty first suggested by the Lord to Moses, as set forth in Leviticus, for various crimes including adultery, incest, homosexuality, and other such naughty practices, and latterly instituted by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for similar offenses. Jesus was gentler: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." (John 8:7.) Whatever one's views may be on the question of capital punishment, lapidation (lap ih DAY shun) is beyond the pale; and never, never associate it with those honest gem cutters and stone engravers discussed under lapidary, even though it comes from the same source, lapid-, the stem of the Latin noun lapis (stone). Further, lapidate has nothing to do with dilapidate or its more familiar form, dilapidated, which comes from Latin dilapidatus, past participle of dilapidare (to demolish), based on the prefix di- (asunder; variant of dis- before certain consonants) plus the same old lapid-. From "dismantled, stone by stone," dilapidated has come to mean "fallen into decay," through neglect or abuse, and can apply to things having no connection with stones, from wooden houses to clothing in rags to moldy furniture and books, to say nothing of ravaged bodies.

A jeremiad is a tale of woe, a lamentation, a doleful complaint, a plea for compassion, deriving its name from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet of the sixth and seventh centuries B.C. A book of the Bible attributed to him bears his name. He called for moral reform, threatening doom if his message went unheeded. It is the prediction of doom and disaster that we associate with his name. "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!...She weepeth sore in the night...all her friends...are become her enemies...Jerusalem hath greviously sinned...The joy of our heart is ceased...O Lord...wherefore dost thou...forsakes us...thou art very wroth against us." Thus spake Jeremiah; but how very boring it can be to be forced to listen to the jeremiads of one's trouble-prone acquaintances! Jeremiah is a name given to any person who takes a gloomy view of his times and denounces what is going on in the world.