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The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins
To untangle the knot of interlocking meanings of these painted words, logophile and mythologist Phil Cousineau begins each fascinating word entry with his own brief definition. He then fills it in with a tint of etymology and a smattering of quotes that show how the word is used, ending with a list of companion words. The words themselves range from commonplace — like biscuit, a twice-baked cake for Roman soldiers — to loanwords including chaparral, from the Basque shepherds who came to the American West; words from myths, such as hector; metamorphosis words, like silly, which evolved holy to goofy in a mere thousand years; and words well worthy of revival, such as carrytale, a wandering storyteller. Whether old-fangled or brand new, all the words included in The Painted Word possess an ineffable quality that makes them luminous.
“A mytagogue, a carrytale and a thaumaturge, Cousineau makes us Argus-eyed to the ubuntu of the aprocryphal and Gemutlichkeit it provides, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you definitely need this book.” -Lemony Snicket
“A mytagogue, a carrytale and a thaumaturge, Cousineau makes us Argus-eyed to the ubuntu of the aprocryphal and Gemutlichkeit it provides, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you definitely need this book.” -Lemony Snicket
336 pages, Paperback
First published September 11, 2012
101 people are currently reading
767 people want to read
About the author
Phil Cousineau
79 books93 followersPhil Cousineau is a writer, teacher, editor, independent scholar, documentary filmmaker, travel leader, and storyteller. The author of more than 30 nonfiction books, Cousineau has more than 15 documentary screenwriting credits to his name, including the 1991 Academy Award-nominated Forever Activists. His life-long fascination with art, literature, and the history of culture has taken him on many journeys around the world; one of his bestselling books is The Art of Pilgrimage, inspired by his many years of meaningful travels.
Born in an army hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, Cousineau grew up in Detroit, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years. American mythologist Joseph Campbell was a mentor and major influence; Cousineau wrote the documentary film and companion book about Campbell's life, "The Hero's Journey." The “omnipresent influence of myth in modern life” is a thread that runs through all of his work. He lectures frequently on a wide range of topics--from mythology, film, and writing, to sports, creativity, travel, art, and beauty. Currently he is the host of the much-praised “inner travel” television series, Global Spirit, on Link TV and PBS, and is finishing a book on beauty.
Born in an army hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, Cousineau grew up in Detroit, and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years. American mythologist Joseph Campbell was a mentor and major influence; Cousineau wrote the documentary film and companion book about Campbell's life, "The Hero's Journey." The “omnipresent influence of myth in modern life” is a thread that runs through all of his work. He lectures frequently on a wide range of topics--from mythology, film, and writing, to sports, creativity, travel, art, and beauty. Currently he is the host of the much-praised “inner travel” television series, Global Spirit, on Link TV and PBS, and is finishing a book on beauty.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 1, 2014
I love books about words, and was looking forward to reading my first one by Phil Cousineau.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed.
A book like this has two primary responsibilities: to be entertaining, and to be enlightening.
On the former, I just didn't find it to be engaging. There was this odd tendency to present "companion words", without explaining how they went with the word being discussed. I got the sense that perhaps the author has explained some of these concepts in other books, and just assumes a level of understanding which I didn't have.
On the latter, the enlightening part, it requires that a writer be reasonably accurate. Certainly, trivia, both academic and pop cultural, can be fun and helpful for people in understanding word origins. Like some others, though, the author appears to feel that pop culture references don't require the same level of fact checking as other references.
For example, there was this:
"It's hard not to hear the echo of Sly and the Family Stone's funkadelic song, 'Play that funky music right, boy!..."
Um...I don't think it's that difficult, since to my knowledge, that song doesn't exist. It might be hard not to hear Wild Cherry's original, and there have been other covers, but I don't Sly did one.
That's also not the lyric, as I know it, and people familiar with the song will know that this apparent misquotation removes one of the key points of the song.
Similarly, there is this:
"More recently, the cleverly contrived Inspector Gadget was an animated television series featuring an oafish, half-cyborg, gabardine-wearing detective hero endowed with bionic gadgets built into his body that he activated by uttering the word 'Wowser'..."
I'm curious how someone can be a "half-cyborg", since a cyborg is be definition part "cybernetic" and part organic.
Inspector Gadget did not activate devices by saying "Wowser" (or even, more accurately, "Wowsers". Gadget would say, "Go, go, gadget [whatever it was]"..."Wowsers" was more of a general exclamation, like "Jeepers".
While many readers many feel that Wild Cherry and Inspector Gadget don't warrant the same care as quoting, say, Plato or Twain, errors like this make me doubt the validity of all of the background stories in the book.
There were some intriguing tidbits, but overall, I wanted more coherence and more accuracy.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed.
A book like this has two primary responsibilities: to be entertaining, and to be enlightening.
On the former, I just didn't find it to be engaging. There was this odd tendency to present "companion words", without explaining how they went with the word being discussed. I got the sense that perhaps the author has explained some of these concepts in other books, and just assumes a level of understanding which I didn't have.
On the latter, the enlightening part, it requires that a writer be reasonably accurate. Certainly, trivia, both academic and pop cultural, can be fun and helpful for people in understanding word origins. Like some others, though, the author appears to feel that pop culture references don't require the same level of fact checking as other references.
For example, there was this:
"It's hard not to hear the echo of Sly and the Family Stone's funkadelic song, 'Play that funky music right, boy!..."
Um...I don't think it's that difficult, since to my knowledge, that song doesn't exist. It might be hard not to hear Wild Cherry's original, and there have been other covers, but I don't Sly did one.
That's also not the lyric, as I know it, and people familiar with the song will know that this apparent misquotation removes one of the key points of the song.
Similarly, there is this:
"More recently, the cleverly contrived Inspector Gadget was an animated television series featuring an oafish, half-cyborg, gabardine-wearing detective hero endowed with bionic gadgets built into his body that he activated by uttering the word 'Wowser'..."
I'm curious how someone can be a "half-cyborg", since a cyborg is be definition part "cybernetic" and part organic.
Inspector Gadget did not activate devices by saying "Wowser" (or even, more accurately, "Wowsers". Gadget would say, "Go, go, gadget [whatever it was]"..."Wowsers" was more of a general exclamation, like "Jeepers".
While many readers many feel that Wild Cherry and Inspector Gadget don't warrant the same care as quoting, say, Plato or Twain, errors like this make me doubt the validity of all of the background stories in the book.
There were some intriguing tidbits, but overall, I wanted more coherence and more accuracy.
February 19, 2015
It's an intriguing book for curious person and an irresistible one for a word lover. I'm both. Therefore I have no choice but to recommend it. However, even when sometimes there were words I saw nor rhyme nor reason to be there, I could move on and find something interesting to justify my curiosity.
I was totally rewarded in finding dozens of lovely quotes, and best of all, two definitions that have a lot to do with me, and I didn't even know that there was a word for it (even though I'm not an English native speaker, I'm talking about the concept, I didn't know that these feelings were defined). One of them is "abibliophobia", the fear of running out of reading material. Isn't it terrifying? The other one is "pseudomnesia", the memory of things that never happened. This is not about invented memories, something that someone puts in your mind so that you will have, say, a history of some trauma. I'm not delving into that. I'm talking about forgetting some bad experiences, and imagining that all you had in life was a fairy tale. Kind of a photoshopped life, if you will. I love words, always did. In the end, the author mentions a quote by Patrick Kavanagh, "let words laugh", and gives us a few more funny words. But I know that words can also cry, and I don't mind, because if words can bring us sadness, they can bring us beauty, joy, amazement... a whole world.
I was totally rewarded in finding dozens of lovely quotes, and best of all, two definitions that have a lot to do with me, and I didn't even know that there was a word for it (even though I'm not an English native speaker, I'm talking about the concept, I didn't know that these feelings were defined). One of them is "abibliophobia", the fear of running out of reading material. Isn't it terrifying? The other one is "pseudomnesia", the memory of things that never happened. This is not about invented memories, something that someone puts in your mind so that you will have, say, a history of some trauma. I'm not delving into that. I'm talking about forgetting some bad experiences, and imagining that all you had in life was a fairy tale. Kind of a photoshopped life, if you will. I love words, always did. In the end, the author mentions a quote by Patrick Kavanagh, "let words laugh", and gives us a few more funny words. But I know that words can also cry, and I don't mind, because if words can bring us sadness, they can bring us beauty, joy, amazement... a whole world.
April 14, 2015
The Painted Word is a collection of interesting words with definitions, insight into each word’s origins and evolution, and interesting or humorous usages. These aren’t all GRE words (massive and mostly useless words that have little value beyond impressing admissions committees.) Many of the words will be familiar to readers without huge vocabularies. On the other hand, there will be words that are new to even New York Times crossword puzzle solvers.
As the title suggests, there’s a little bit of an art-related theme. However, I’m not sure I would have noticed this if it hadn’t been for the title. There are a number of colors included among the words—colors known mostly to interior decorators and not to most heterosexual men. There are also a few artistic styles (e.g. intimism.) However, the bulk of the words aren’t clearly related to the fine arts. Many of the entries are loan words, i.e. words that have been used in English literature or other English-language media but which are of foreign origin.
I’ll include a few of the words that captured my own interest:
Autologophagist: one who eats his / her own words
Bafflegab: language that misleads—intentionally or not
Cataphile: a lover of catacomb crawling
Inkhorn: an over-intellectualized word
Lambent: shining with soft light on the surface of something
Millihelen: the amount of beauty that would result in the launch of a single ship.
Monogashi [Japanese]: the sigh or sadness of things
Sonicky: A great sounding word—coined by Roy Blount Jr.
Oculogyric: eye-rolling
Phlug: belly-button lint
Snollygoster: a shrewd but corrupt politician
Ubantu [Bantu / Xhosa]: the interconnectedness of all things
This book is full of fun insights and statements. I learned that “hush puppies” were literally carried to throw to noisy dogs to get them to stop barking. There are many interesting and humorous quotes. For example, Brendan Behan said, “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.” Brief vignettes are used to help give depth of understanding to words. One such story is about a Luddite looking upon the operation of a steam shovel who said to his friend, “Were it not for that steam shovel, there would be work for hundreds of men with shovels…” to which his friend replied, “or thousands of men with teaspoons.”
I enjoyed this book. You don’t have to be fascinated by the minutiae of semantics to find it readable and interesting. It’s not as much like reading a dictionary as one might suspect.
As the title suggests, there’s a little bit of an art-related theme. However, I’m not sure I would have noticed this if it hadn’t been for the title. There are a number of colors included among the words—colors known mostly to interior decorators and not to most heterosexual men. There are also a few artistic styles (e.g. intimism.) However, the bulk of the words aren’t clearly related to the fine arts. Many of the entries are loan words, i.e. words that have been used in English literature or other English-language media but which are of foreign origin.
I’ll include a few of the words that captured my own interest:
Autologophagist: one who eats his / her own words
Bafflegab: language that misleads—intentionally or not
Cataphile: a lover of catacomb crawling
Inkhorn: an over-intellectualized word
Lambent: shining with soft light on the surface of something
Millihelen: the amount of beauty that would result in the launch of a single ship.
Monogashi [Japanese]: the sigh or sadness of things
Sonicky: A great sounding word—coined by Roy Blount Jr.
Oculogyric: eye-rolling
Phlug: belly-button lint
Snollygoster: a shrewd but corrupt politician
Ubantu [Bantu / Xhosa]: the interconnectedness of all things
This book is full of fun insights and statements. I learned that “hush puppies” were literally carried to throw to noisy dogs to get them to stop barking. There are many interesting and humorous quotes. For example, Brendan Behan said, “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.” Brief vignettes are used to help give depth of understanding to words. One such story is about a Luddite looking upon the operation of a steam shovel who said to his friend, “Were it not for that steam shovel, there would be work for hundreds of men with shovels…” to which his friend replied, “or thousands of men with teaspoons.”
I enjoyed this book. You don’t have to be fascinated by the minutiae of semantics to find it readable and interesting. It’s not as much like reading a dictionary as one might suspect.
January 10, 2024
To be honest, I could write a review, cherry-pick a few amusing phrases and anecdotes, and call it a day. However, that would be criminal. There were perhaps five (a handful) of such moments in this 400-page book that somehow took me nearly a year to get through. Cousineau makes reading a dictionary, which this essentially is, exactly that. Watching paint dry would perhaps be more entertaining. Conceptually, this book is awesome...pick a bunch of oddball and colorful words and explain their origins. Despite opting to read just a few entries at a time (to avoid eye-glazing), this volume manages to be incredibly boring; full of useless examples (i.e., Brian used "useless in an example" and "Brian ended this sentence with the phrase 'waste of time.' The words he chose are arbitrary and puzzling...why include words that he couldn't write interestingly about. Toward the end, he writes, " 'wordridden, as Mackay writes, 'to be a slave to words without understanding their meaning: to be overawed by a word rather than an argument.' A warning to us all!" Needless to say, "us" was not a word. Cousineau is grandiloquent to a mortal excess. Worse, still, were some factual errors that casts doubt on everything written. No, Phil, Geraldine Ferraro was not a politician from Colorado. I can't find the citation, but I think he called her the governor. She was, in fact, picked as Walter Mondale's running mate in large part to her draw in the Northeast.
June 29, 2017
3.5
The problem with books like this are that they can be too much of a good thing and so have to be extraordinary in order for me to go much beyond three stars. While I enjoyed this, I thought it was a little disjointed. The "companion words" often didn't make a lot of sense in context of the rest of the entry for a word, and I would have liked a little more etymology and a lot less meandering through quotes. I read the e-book version, in which the pictures are gray-scale, and I didn't feel like they added much to the book. (Maybe they are in color in the print version? That might make them more interesting.)
So, a fun read, especially read a few entires at a time, but not different enough from similar books or the author's other books to go into four or five star territory.
The problem with books like this are that they can be too much of a good thing and so have to be extraordinary in order for me to go much beyond three stars. While I enjoyed this, I thought it was a little disjointed. The "companion words" often didn't make a lot of sense in context of the rest of the entry for a word, and I would have liked a little more etymology and a lot less meandering through quotes. I read the e-book version, in which the pictures are gray-scale, and I didn't feel like they added much to the book. (Maybe they are in color in the print version? That might make them more interesting.)
So, a fun read, especially read a few entires at a time, but not different enough from similar books or the author's other books to go into four or five star territory.
October 9, 2020
This is not my jam. And this is despite my love of words, wordplay, etymology, and quotations. The cleverness too often gets in the way of clarity, the etymologies are torturously tortuous, the quotes too often do not illuminate the word, and some of the definitions are shockingly incomplete, at best. There’s a space on my shelves for a work like this, but this particular oeuvre fails to fill it.
July 26, 2017
Such a fascinating book.
August 25, 2017
Very nice, readable book. Good for jumping around or reading straight through. I appreciate and share the authors love of words. I now know a lot more about a lot more words.
June 25, 2017
This book is really interesting. I really enjoyed learning the origins of these words. It makes for interesting dinner party conversations too. I did skip over a few; the foreign language entries didn't really interest me. There were several words in here that I had never heard before, so I definitely learned a lot from reading this book. I have its sequel also (The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins and look forward to reading it sometime.
February 22, 2013
I want to own this book! It's more a reference than literature, but each description of of word is experiential with both etymological and personal history of its use woven in. It feels like sitting down with a twinkly-eyed scholar who just wants to tell you about some of their favorite things. Having taken this out of the library, I didn't want to rush through - or deprive other readers - so I think it's something to own. To pick up every day for a touch of whimsical beauty.
May 31, 2015
I just read a dictionary of words with their origins. I've read dictionaries from A to Z in the past and this activity is fascinating. It's meaningless, because you forget 95% of the words right away, but once you start, you can't stop until you reach the last letter. Of course, the 5% of stories that you remember are the stories you tell.
Off topic, I wanted to read another book with the same name, but got the wrong one :)
Off topic, I wanted to read another book with the same name, but got the wrong one :)
July 22, 2014
Such a clever book that is a non-stop page turner due to the curiosity that sparks from learning the roots of common words to words you'd never knew to use, but now you want to stuff them into every sentence.
May 10, 2013
Genius.
May 28, 2014
A gem of a book; it takes me back to Sunday dinners as a child of two English majors.
August 6, 2016
Loved it!
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews