by Kevin Burton
I was sure I would see it. Lead-pipe sinch said I. Metaphysical certitude, as John McLaughlin used to say on The McLaughlin Group.
Merriam -Webster put together a list of words about energy and enthusiasm and I happily scrolled to see what they had to say about the word “spunk.”
Not there. Missing. Glaring omission.
I’m into words and language. I go along with most of what Merriam-Webster says and I publish a fair amount of it. But we will part ways over spunk.
Americans of a certain age will immediately leap from spunk, to the Mary Tyler Moore show. The show is on everybody’s list of top 70s sitcoms. It is number three at http://www.imdb.com, a site dedicated to movies and television.
Very early in the series, Mary Richards, played by Moore, goes into an interview with Lou Grant, played by Ed Asner. The job is Associate Producer at a television station in Minneapolis.
Grant conducts a highly inappropriate interview, asking a lot of personal questions that having nothing to do with Mary’s qualifications. She lets him know about it too.
After some spirited give-and-take, Grant gets up from behind his desk.
“You know what? You’ve got spunk,” Grant spits.
Mary takes it as a compliment and is blushing and sputtering until Grant spews again, “I hate spunk.”
It’s one of the funniest moments of an all-time great show.
I was looking forward to the dictionary reliving the moment, but that was not to be.
Despite their error of omission, I’m going to list some of their words, even though mine is better. This is me taking the high road, as Mary Richards always did on the Mary Tyler Moore Show.
The noun pluck can mean “an act of plucking” or be a synonym of tug or pull.
Another meaning derived from this one, “the heart, liver, lungs, and trachea of a slaughtered animal especially as an item of food,” since these parts are removed by plucking (and if it’s about a chicken or other fowl, the feathers would have been plucked as well).
These organ meats correspond to a common English word for courage and energy: guts.
The noun pluck is also sometimes used to refer the action of making a sound on a stringed instrument.
Pep means “energy or enthusiasm” in informal and maybe old-fashioned language. This is a bit paradoxical because it’s a very young word in English, relatively speaking—it was first used in the early 1900s. It is used both as a noun and a verb:
Pep is short for pepper, transforming the connotation “something spicy or pungent” into the denotation “something or someone energetic.” We see it most these days in pep talk and pep rally, and the adjective that comes from it, peppy, is also a handy way to say “energetic” (as in “a small car with a peppy engine”).
Vigor is a word that came from French in the Middle Ages. It is synonymous with both strength and force, the latter of which also came from French at about the same time as vigor. It’s a word that most usually refers to physical strength but can sometimes be found in phrases like “intellectual vigor” or “mental vigor” as well. It is paired with vim in the fixed phrase vim and vigor, meaning “energy and enthusiasm.”
Vim is a bit of an odd duck, a word that is now rarely used without being paired with vigor or sometimes vinegar, which, like the derivative of pepper, pep, is a word for something tangy or spicy or pungent that has also come to mean “full of energy.”
In the 1800s, vim was used by itself as a synonym of “energy” or “strength.”
The oldest meaning of zeal was used in the English versions of the Bible, beginning with the first translation made in the late 1300s. That original meaning was “passion” or “ardor of feeling taking the form usually of jealousy or indignation,” a definition that is no longer used today, but one that connects the word to the related word jealous, which has the same Latin root derived from Greek.
Yes, the words jealous and zealous are in fact cousins, and the first uses of zeal six hundred years ago overlapped with today’s jealousy. Today, zeal implies aggressive but positive energy and enthusiasm in an activity or belief.
Gumption started out as a slang word meaning “common sense” in the 1700s. Over time, gumption has evolved in meaning to “energetic action” or “strength and endurance” or “courage and confidence.”
Moxie today is used to mean “energy, pep” or “courage, determination,” but it originated as the brand name of a soft drink.
In the late 1800s, several beverages were marketed as patent medicines that were health-giving or nutritious, including Coca-Cola. These drinks usually had sugar and sometimes exotic ingredients in them; Coca-Cola famously initially contained cocaine, and the special element in Moxie was the less toxic gentian root. Later, many of these drinks were marketed as alternatives to alcohol during the temperance campaigns of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Fortitude comes from the Latin word that means “strength.” These two words co-existed for a while as synonyms (Shakespeare used fortitude to mean “strength”).
Fortitude added to the meaning “strength” the idea that it takes strength of mind to enable a person to endure pain or face adversity with courage. Strength is physical, and courage is abstract: fortitude brings these concepts together into one word. And we use the phrase intestinal fortitude as a euphemism for guts.
We all know that metal is a strong material. But the literal strength of metal, used for swords and armor in the Middle Ages, when this word came to English from French, was soon used as a metaphor for strength of spirit or stamina. Usually, metaphors for common nouns don’t change their spelling—think of “paper-thin alibi” or “tall tales.”
But when metal began to be commonly used to mean “strength of spirit,” it changed shape as a word and was respelled to mettle. It’s often used with the verbs test and prove: Mettle conveys the solidity and strength of iron as personal qualities.
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