WORDS AS EGGS: “Moiling”
Those of you who know my book Words As Eggs, know that I can’t leave words alone, or, more accurately, words won’t leave me alone. I’ll be reading along and, without warning, a word will leap at me, tethering me to it until I give in and take up what I call “word work” with it.
The most recent experience occurred while reading James Howard Kunstler’s acerbic critique of artist Damian Hurst, in the course of which he used the phrase, “Zombies moiling outside the building.” Moiling leapt at me. I had not seen the word used in years, and even longer since I used it. I recalled its meaning as “toiling,” and this sent my mind into an associative spree, with “boiling, coiling, poiling, roiling, soiling.” Hey, at my age, the mind being spontaneously associative is a good sign, neurogenesis and all that. As I began my word work, I saw that the word derived most immediately from the Middle English moillen, meaning “to soften by wetting.” As you can see, it’s not immediately clear how we get from “soften by wetting” to “toil.” Such word puzzles I find very useful in keeping an active mind. In looking through the historical usage of the word (as is possible in the Oxford English Dictionary), one begins to see it and often a phrase will make the picture easier to see: to toil in muck and mire. To dig deeper into the pre-history of the word, we find its Indo-European root to be mel-1, which refers to “melt, soften, slime” The root is intertwined with mel-5, meaning “grind, mill.” Sloppy work, one might say, as befits the toil of Zombies.
These words that grip me, often lead to dreams as well. Such was the case with moil. In the dream, I am writing on a blackboard and though I am not aware of any students, I am teaching. I am listing words related to moil: goiling, hoiling, joiling, koiling, loiling, voiling, woiling, xoiling, zoiling. As you can probably tell, none of these words I am listing are “real” words. I am about to ask the class to take one of these words and to develop a meaning for it. At this point I wake up.
We live in a time where we are quite aware of words newly made up—most especially words related to the advancements in technology. Now here is a dream that introduces nine new words. (How does the dream know these words I’ve never experienced before?) So to linger with the dream itself, rather than ask what the dream means, I focus on what the words mean. In a subsequent post, I’ll let you know what I did with this “task.”
But now, let me ask you to focus on this task as if you were a student in this class of mine.
What a wonderful dream to go with the flirting word. Melting, slimy, soft and grimy. Isn’t this the work of psyche in her solutio mood. Softening the hard, the what has become to rigid, too sure, too ensconced in it’s ways……But I must not close too fast….Let’s linger with the moiling.
Amazing Russ… I will pick another word and enjoy it later.
George, thank you for your comments. For those not familiar with this use of the word “flirting,” it is a word from Arny Mindell’s process work and refers to those experiences that cause a momentary flicker of attention to something in one’s experience (inner or outer) that one typically then disregards. However, turning one’s attention to these “flirts” will invarioably lead to something deeper and important. I call these things “sparks” to connect them more strongly with images of fire, creativity and “divine” intention (in the psychological sense of divine). Following a word flirt or spark will always take one on an unintended but meaningful journey.
Here is Estela’s report on her experience:
When I saw the list of words from your dream, the word that captured me right away was “joiling.” As I focused on the word, whose sound I liked, in my mind two other words immediately came up: “joy” and “jovial.” So I started the word work by looking up these two words, and this is what came up:
JOY: 1. A condition or feeling of high pleasure or delight; happiness; gladness. 2. The expression or manifestation of such feeling. Synonym: joying.
Appendix – gau: To rejoice; to have religious fear or awe.
JOVIAL: Marked by hearty conviviality. Synonym: jolly. {Originally “born under the influence of Jupiter” (the planet,
regarded as the source of happiness), from French jovial. See Jove.
JOVE: 1. The god Jupiter. 2. The planet Jupiter.
Appendix – deiw: To shine (and in many derivatives “sky, heaven, god.” Noun deiwos, name of the sky god. 2. Latin
deus, god: Deity. . . . 3. Latin divus, divine . . . . 5. Suffixed form deiwo-yo, luminous in Latin Diana, moon goddess.
When I did some further research on Wikipedia regarding deiwos, there was quite a bit of information in terms of the various sky gods and goddesses from Ancient Egypt, to Greece and Rome, as well as Germanic and Norse mythology. In ancient times, the qualities derived from Jupiter (Jove) were seen to be happiness and merriment. Now I understand where the phrase, “By Jove, you’ve got it,” comes from.
Since “joiling” is an adjective, the meaning I would ascribe to it is “the spreading of joy.” And thinking of the word ending, “iling,” the word “caroling” came into my mind. So the meaning of “joiling” could extend to “the spreading of joy (or merriment) through song or music.”
In any event, the word took me back to the ancient past, the gods and goddesses, and the planets, as well as mythology. An interesting journey – “journey” is also associated with the word “joy.” Or perhaps it’s “jovial.” Can’t remember which one.
The word “journey” is related to a variant of “deiw,” the etymological root of Jove. The variant is “dye”- in Latin “dies” (both these words have a small horizontal accent over the “e”) meaning “day” and leading to other words such as “journal,” “journey,” and “sojourn.”
(Thanks Estela!)