WTN: figment
James Harbeck
figment
“I wonder what that fig meant,” Maury said, as we walked through the art gallery.
“What that figment what?” I said. “Which figment?”
“No, the fig,” Maury said. “In the painting.”
“Which one?” I looked around us to see which he meant; there were paintings in all directions.
He nodded his head back towards a room we had lately left. “The Bosch. The busy one.”
“I saw no fig,” I said. “Perhaps it was a pigment of your imagination.”
“No, I gave it a paints-taking examination.”
“Well, why would there a be a fig there? They’re not natural to the Netherlands.”
“Nor the netherworld, but no matter: it’s fiction, you know.”
“Ah,” I said, “a figment indeed, then: the ficus was fictus.”
I will explain this: ficus is Latin for ‘fig’ and is where we get our word fig from; fictus (not related to ficus) is where we get our word fiction from, and is the Latin past participle of fingo, ‘I make’ or ‘I fake’, which is the source of our figment – and also our feign. Maury knew this, of course, since he is also a figment of my mind (you do know these vignettes are fiction, right? The narrative details, that is – the linguistic facts are facts. By the way, fact is from factus, which, like fictus, means ‘made’, but in a different way and from a different verb).
“But it was not just my imagination, running away with me,” Maury said. “It was Bosch who was the boss. He decided to inflict the ficus on us.” He halted and held up a finger. “Let us reconfigure.” He turned and headed back towards the Early Netherlandish room.
“And you decided to focus on it,” I said, following him. “But I think you were foggy. This fig leaves some questions unanswered.”
“Oh,” said Maury, feigning befuddlement, “there were no fig leaves in the painting. All figures were unimpeachably there.”
“And apple-y so,” I said. “The fruits were looming. But a fig? Under where?”
Maury rolled his eyes and turned the corner into the room. “In short, over there.”
We made a bee-line for the painting. “Is that it?” I pointed.
“No, that’s fragmentary. Over there.”
“That dab of pigment?” I gestured to a roundish pinkish patch.
“Yes, I think… oh, my word.”
“What is your word?” I asked.
“Nothing at all, in fact. It’s just a figure of peach.” He turned away in disappointment.
“Well, then,” I said. “That fig meant your imagination.”
Please send comments, replies, and suggestions for words to taste to me to ja...@harbeck.ca.
Feel free to pass this on to friends. If you've received it as a forward, feel free to join the Word Tasting Notes email list at http://groups.google.ca/group/word-tasting-notes .
Visit my blog at http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com .