In the audio version of this episode Penny Kome asks me to do incongruous juxtaposition .
Yikes!
Here's a helpful definition: incongruous , not congruous. It really says that in the Oxford English Dictionary .
Let's dispense with this one as quickly and mercifully as we can. Congruous came from Latin and meant “agreeable.” So incongruous meant “disagreeable” though these days we might more figuratively attach a meaning of “not consistent.” Juxtaposition is a French import that was built in France out of Latin parts. Juxta was from a Latin root that meant “come together” and also gave us our English word joust .
People who joust come together in battle.
Juxtaposition just means putting things beside each other.
Both of these words appeared in English in the 1600s but the story I'm going to tell you took place in 1885. In that year a French linguist named Arsène Darmesteter gave a series of four lectures—in French—at a private house in London.
The topic: The Life of Words.
We can read an English translation of his lectures at Google Books and the notable thing about them are that they were translated and published in English before they were published in French.
The reason for this is that the reception of his lectures in London had been so enthusiastic.
This was six years after the Philological Society of London got Oxford University started working on what eventually became the OED . So it's pretty likely that a number of those Victorian gents who gave us the OED were in the room when these lectures were given. In its etymology for juxtaposition the OED refers to a French dictionary co-written by Darmesteter, and Darmesteter actually used the word in his lecture.
A small irony is that in his lecture he used juxtaposition to describe words built by putting other older words beside each other.
Examples he gave were French but some of the English equivalents are policeman , a juxtaposition of police with man ; and pedestal which back in Old French had arisen from a juxtaposition of the French words for “foot of the support” The irony: juxtaposition is a juxtaposition of juxta and position .
