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‘Keep your cool, Hari. Don’t forget that you’re always in the glare of publicity. As a performing artiste you’ve to take the rough with the smooth’. ‘Downright stupidity I call it – this snooping and bitching about a casual meeting between two artistes. They can’t do this to us!’ Hari is wringing his hands and his exasperation is tinged with anxiety about the fallout of unfavourable publicity. We’re familiar with ‘exasperation’, the state of being greatly annoyed or irritated by persons or by situations. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) lists three senses in which the word can be used. The transitive verb ‘exasperate’ has the meaning, ‘make worse’ or ‘aggravate’ ill feeling, disease or pain. ‘Exacerbate’ conveys the same sense (of increasing the intensity/gravity of something). The Latin root is ‘acerbus’ (bitter) for the word ‘ex+acerbare’. The second meaning is ‘to provoke’ (a person to ill, to do something). The third is the ordinary sense of ‘irritate, annoy (person) greatly’. The verb is followed by ‘at’ or ‘by’ Examples: Hari was exasperated by (at) his companion’s stupidity. The girl at the sales counter exasperated him with her dilatory tactics. Hari had the exasperating experience of waiting in the cinema queue for hours and then drawing a blank. Here is an example from Hazlitt (from the ‘Lectures on the English Poets’): ‘Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration’. Hazlitt has used the word (exasperate) in the sense of ‘make grievous, more grievous or malignant’. The word is derived from the Latin ex+’asperare’, to make rough (from ‘asper’-rough). A related word having the same stem is ‘asperity’: it stands for roughness, severity (in relation to weather, usually plural), harshness and sharpness (of temper). ‘Asperity’ is derived from the Middle English ‘asprete’ from Old French and from the Latin ‘asperitatem’. ‘Asperity’ is a formal term for harshness of manner. Examples: Persistent questioning seemed to irritate the official who replied with some asperity that the information sought was not for publication. Ramesh has put off his visit, unwilling to risk the asperities of the London winter. A Hazlitt quote again crossed my mind as I looked up ‘hate’ in the dictionary to pick out words/phrases conveying the same sense, though ‘with different degrees of force and propriety’ The list is long, spanning ‘abhor’, ‘abominate’, ‘execrate’, ‘detest’, ‘loathe’ and ‘show aversion/disgust/strong dislike.’ ‘Abominate’ and ‘execrate’ are not familiar words at all but formal ones. ‘Abominable’, however, is used informally for ‘very unpleasant’. We speak of ‘the abominable weather/food/music’. The ‘Abominable Snowman’ (yeti) is ‘a large, hairy man-like or bear-like creature reported to live atop the Himalayas. The search for the origins of these words was rewarding. To ‘abominate something or somebody’ is to ‘hate something or somebody in the highest degree’ (as if with a religious dread)/’turn away from something or somebody as ill-omened’. Example: I abominate drug running. The Middle English word ‘abominable’ is derived from the Old French and Latin ‘abominabilis’, from ab (away)+ominari (from omen). The meaning of ‘abominate’ is ‘to deprecate as ominous’ (a bad omen), ‘to curse’, ‘to abhor’ ‘Ominous’ and ‘omen’ are related words. The obsolete meaning of ‘loathe’ (Old English ‘lathian’) is ‘to feel disgust or nausea’. Loathing now means ‘strong dislike’/’extreme disgust’/or ‘aversion’ for something or someone. ‘Abhor’ is another Middle English word meaning ‘regard with hatred or disgust’. The transitive verb is often remembered for the saying, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’. The related Latin word is ab+horrere (shudder). I shall take up ‘execrate’ and ‘detest’ later. We saw in an earlier piece that an author’s ‘choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise’. The measure of success is the ‘perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling’ sought to be conveyed, whether of delight or distress, ridicule or repugnance. This comes from boldness of design and mastery of execution, whereby (to quote Hazlitt again) ‘the spark of genius meets with its congenial matter’. Published on 8th June 2002 Readers' response/inputs can be e-mailed to mhdevan@chennaionline.com.
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