Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Reviving "Seva" as "Sevacious"

Some time ago I wrote a poem which among other things utilizes several old[er] English terms now obsolete from usage as a means to revive them as "The Sciolist" desires. Of course, given I'm no famous poet, that could take a while, with some unknown means of that poem actually reaching broad circulation), and given the older forms and plays in the poem, I don't know that it's the best course for such resuscitation's. I wanted to make yet another link to "The Sciolist's" page with the list of terms he's seeking regeneration for, and then suggest a way to revive a suggested word that I did not poem, "seva". The proposal is simple, relying upon analogy of sound and tacking-on an ending, -acious . Savacious already has a ring in common with words like salacious, spacious, etc., and -acious words aren't unusual in English, e.g. vivacious and so on, and just Googling it turns up results showing that people already are willing to tack it onto unusual places (often for cheesy marketing purposes), though sometimes with much less tact than the sound of this combination (e.g. "Audi- acious" ). See also -ous to understand that the combination of word and part that I'm about to propose for "emotional intelligence" is something probably very acceptable to modern society, especially when applied to women, which I say given the text given by Harper in his proposal for the word,
SEVA - As a noun, it meant "mind, heart, spirit," but with a sense of perception, of knowing through the heart. It could serve as a word for the concept we fumble at with words like "emotional intelligence" or trivialize with phrases like "women's intuition."
though I'm unsure why he says this concept is "trivialized" when it's said to be a quality commonly or significantly noticed about women.

One might propose sev-i (pr. "say + vī" or "say+vee") but that's too close to "savvy", which merits remarking that perhaps the baser connotations of "salacious" might ruin "sevacious" as well: the sadder since the denotation of "salacious" is "salt" (i.e. "wise"), and where the "spicy" connotation of sexual perversion came from I can only guess as misuse (esp. given that salt is not spicy). The real point to "salacious" is that too much or too little salt, and something is ruined, and the wise are "salacious" because they understand this and how to apply. Pulling back from digression though, the combination not only allows for the word's revival as an immediate adjective, but also as one for state of being by simply tacking on "-ness" ("sevaciousness") another pattern common to modern English norms.

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