When a craftsperson, artist, musician, or writer manages to fit a set of components together to make a congruous, harmonious whole, there used to be a word for it. Well, of course, there still are words for it — after all, I just used “congruous” and “harmonious.” And “consistency” and “elegance” could be added as well. But there used to be a word very specific to the circumstance: “concinnity.”
Concinnity was used in 1697 to describe the process of careful thinking: “Art is to polish our Notions, and bring them to Exactness and Concinnity” (John Sergeant), in 1771 to refer to coins: “The Sicilians…excelled…in the elaborate concinnity of their money” (notes from the Royal Society of London), and in 1855 to describe pleasant, effective oratory or writing: “A discourse..not likely, with all its concinnities..to exert a soothing influence upon the people” (John Lothrop Motley).
In fact “concinnity” seems to have been a quite useful word, and reasonably common back in the day. Its origin is unexpected; it comes from the Roman word “cinnus,” which was some sort of beverage that sounds pretty off-putting. It was made of wine, honey, water, and grain (barley or wheat). It’s not entirely clear whether the grain was just mixed into the stuff by itself, or whether it was first used to brew beer, which was then poured in. Either way it doesn’t sound like we’re missing much.
Possibly as a result of the effects of drinking too much “cinnus,” the Latin word had a second meaning: a grimace. But the general opinion around Rome seems to have been that grimace or not, that cinnus stuff was pretty good, because another Latin word is based on it: “concinnare.” “Concinnare” is the one that was borrowed by English in the 1500s as “concinnity,” and both words meant the same thing: harmoniously fitting elements together to make something elegant.
The Latin root word also seems to have had at least a bit of the same meaning too, but not in a positive way. In the 1715 Latin Dictionary by Adam Littleton, “cinnus” is defined as “A mingle-mangle or gallimaufry of several things together; a hotchpotch or mish-mash, a medley.”
I cant help but notice that “mingle-mangle” and “gallimaufry” don’t really bring the words “elegance” or “harmony” to mind. Unless, of course, that mind has been affected by sufficient quantities of cinnus.
