You can get a pretty good idea of the functions of a language by examining its words. This is more than that old saw about “Eskimo having 27 words for ‘snow’.” That was probably apocryphal anyway, but I’m not just talking about nouns. The nouns in a language do, of course, give some insight into the physical surroundings of the speakers. It’s based on what we assume to be a generalized human tendency to want to efficiently refer to things. In the days of sailing ships, the crew had nautical jargon to enable them to be more efficient about saying things like “take down that third sail from the top on the second mast from the front before this unexpectedly strong wind breaks the…oh never mind, too late.”
One pervasive use of English is to compare and contrast things, and there are hundreds — maybe thousands — of words coined to do just that. Instead of saying “let’s build a facility where everyone within about 100 miles of this town can come here to find doctors and nurses,” you can call what you’re talking about a regional medical center. And if you’re fascinated by pheasants and everything about them, you can just explain to your friends that you’re into everything gallinaceous. They’ll get the idea. Or at least they’ll get an idea…
The vast array of “relational” words — that is, words that describe a state of connection between something and something else — contains some surprises. For every well-known or easily understandable word (“familial,” say, or “suburban” — which could also be “suburbicarian”), there are several like “suidian” (about pigs), “thionic” (having to do with sulphur), or “xilinous” (pertaining to cotton).
Some of the obscurity of these words is because English has been pasted together out of so many different pieces; “xilinous” is simply derived from a different name for what we use the word “cotton” for. “Cotton” simply happens, arbitrarily, to be more commonly used nowadays. And if you look up “xilinous” in just any dictionary, you probably won’t find it — another reason it’s obscure is because of time. People today don’t know this word because it’s been replaced, for the most part, by “cotton” and related words. If you want to point out a resemblance between something and cotton today, you’d probably say “cottony” and everyone would know what you mean.
If you happen to work in a rodeo, you’d probably be mocked for this, but you could call some of your duties “tauric” because they relate to bulls. If, on the other hand, you deal with somewhat smaller animals, those duties might be “procyonine” (about raccoons), or even “sciurine” (related to squirrels).
There are also a few words that have acquired a figurative meaning and completely lost their connection to any original meaning. Many people know, for example, that a “pyrrhic victory” is where you win, but at such a cost that you’ve lost much more than you won. The word comes from Pyrrhus, who was the king of Epirus around 280 BCE. He led an army that defeated the Romans, but suffered so many losses that he supposedly said “one more such victory and we are lost.” But before “pyrrhic” acquired that meaning (in the late 1800s), it simply referred to an ancient Greek war dance invented by a different fellow named Pyrrikhos — and from the 1500s to the late 1800s if you said “pyrrhic” you were talking about dancing.
As for today’s title, “rhematic” means pertaining to words. And if I prattle on much longer, this piece will also be paginal (related to pages), so this is a good place to stop.
