WTN: obsequious, bosque
James Harbeck
obsequious, bosque
You know what obsequious means, I’m sure. You’re far too intelligent, well-educated, literate, and lexically endowed not to. But if I were to venture a definition in my prolix, fatuous way, I might say that it means something like ‘obvious sucking up’, like a weak, squeaky blob, a queasy wuss, fawning, sycophantic.
Or I could just say, anagrammatically, that it is the way of “IOU bosques.”
No, of course obsequious and IOU bosques are not etymologically or, per se, semantically related; you’re far too clever for me to put one over on you like that. But allow me to explain, if your patience will tolerate me for so long.
Obsequious is transparently Latin; it comes, following a course of derivation, from the verb obsequor, ‘I comply, I yield, I gratify, I oblige, I submit’, et cetera. That is in turn formed from ob- ‘toward, against’, as obvious, object, and so on, and sequor ‘I follow, I pursue, I comply’. You could say it means ‘I obviously follow your will’. The word obsequious has been in the English language since the 1400s; at first it just meant ‘compliant, dutiful’, but by the time Shakespeare used it it tended to imply extremely or ostentatiously so. There is a related word, obsequies, that refers specifically to the obligations surrounding funerals, and obsequious has also been used (even by Shakespeare) to mean ‘dutifully observant of funerary rites’, but that is merely a side branch.
However, speaking of branches: in all this, bosque is very much in the woods, bush league, as it were. It has a classical connection – Latin boscus – but that came into Latin from Frankish, which came from Proto-Germanic, and so this word has various cognate cousins, such as English bush and bosk, French bois, and Dutch bos. But while the Spanish word bosque means, simply and broadly, ‘forest’, the English borrowing of it – said the Spanish way, which is like Canadian “bosk, eh” – has a narrower sense… sometimes as narrow as just a row or two of trees on either side of a river bank.
For that is what, in English, bosque means: a gallery forest that follows a river or stream (or lakeshore) on a riparian flood plain. Look at an aerial view of the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and El Paso and you will see 500 kilometres of winding bosque, following the river obsequiously, obviously seeking hydration. Like all obsequiousness, there is no great depth to the bosque; get away from the river and it becomes dry, arid, not lush with trees or bush. But, oh my, how the bosque flourishes and flatters as it follows the flow of the water.
And so, likewise, should you choose to be obsequious to someone, you have decided that, for them, “IOU bosques.” You will treat it as their due for you to lavish lush love over them for what they can give you… though you may quietly cast shade where they can’t see.
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