As a noun, respair means “the return of hope after a period of despair.” As a verb, respair means “to have hope again.” Although both forms are rare and obsolete, they seem ripe for reviving. Respair is among dozens of uplifting terms collected in Paul Anthony Jones’s new book The Cabinet of Calm: Soothing Words for Troubled Times. (Bookshop|Amazon) Other heartening words include meliorism, “the belief that the world, or society, may be improved and suffering alleviated through rightly directed human effort,” and cultellation, originally a surveyors’ term, which denotes “the solution of a problem by dealing with it piecemeal,” from Latin cultellus, meaning “knife.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Respair, A Return to Hope”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, this show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Here’s a word worth reviving, respair. It’s R-E-S-P-A-I-R, respair.
And as a noun, respair means the return of hope after a period of despair. And as a verb, respair means to have hope again.
And both forms of this word are apparently modeled after their older etymological relative, as you can imagine, Grant, despair, which comes from the Latin sperare.
Meaning to hope. The Oxford English Dictionary lists only one citation each for the noun and the verb forms of despair, and they’re both from the early 15th century.
So for some reason, the English language hung on to the word despair, but this other word, despair, is all but forgotten.
So I think it’s high time we revived it. And I learned this word from a new book called The Cabinet of Calm, Soothing Words for Troubled Times. It’s by Paul Anthony Jones.
And it’s a collection of 51.
Obscure words. It’s sort of a browsing book of words chosen to provide comfort and inspiration and peace of mind. That sounds lovely. It sounds a good way to like balance your spirit or clean up your mood.
Let me give you another one. Meliorism, M-E-L-I-O-R-I-S-M. It’s the belief that the world or society may be improved and suffering alleviated through rightly directed human effort. That’s the OED’s definition of it. And it’s as opposed to optimism or pessimism, meliorism, like ameliorate.
Oh, yeah. So related to ameliorate to make better. Yes, yes, or words like mejor in Spanish.
Another one I really like is cultillation, C-U-L-T-E-L-L-A-T-I-O-N, cultillation. It comes from Latin cultelis, which means knife, and it’s the solution of a problem by dealing with it piecemeal. And it’s a term that comes from surveying.
And I thought that was so cool.
You know, you’ve got this big problem or this big piece of land to survey, and it’s too difficult to do it all at once.
So you break it up into little pieces.
Cultillation.
Oh, and that’s the best advice, isn’t it?
Yes.
So often a big amorphous problem broken down into pieces suddenly seems manageable.
Yes.
When you can turn a problem into a list of to-dos, you’re like, wait, that wasn’t that hard after all.
Yeah.
Yeah, you do one, and then you get encouraged, and you do another.
Cultillation.
Anyway, the book is called The Cabinet of Calm, Soothing Words for Troubled Times.
By Paul Anthony Jones.
Correct.
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