Wordly Wise | Clairvoyant, paranoid, mordant: Some words from Milan Kundera’s many obituaries

The obituary on Page 1 of The Indian Express carried the headline: ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Milan Kundera: the clairvoyant, the writer of moment’. Clairvoyant is someone who has the powers of clairvoyance – an ability to know or perceive things that others cannot and to foresee the future and communicate with the dead. It comes from French clair (clear) and voyant (seeing).

Among other interesting words that the write-up employed was Gulag, which was a system of forced labour camps established in Russia first under revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, before being substantially enlarged during the rule of Josef Stalin. Stalin wielded them as a tool of political repression and exploited prison labour to spur the country’s industrialisation. In common English usage, a gulag is a prison camp where conditions are extremely bad and the prisoners are forced to work very hard under inhuman conditions.

Paranoid comes from commonly used prefix para– and Greek nous (meaning mind) and refers to a mental disorder marked by delusions of persecution or a state of being extremely suspicious and afraid of other people. Interestingly, the word nous, the adjective form being noetic (for example, noetic abilities), has also become popular. It means the highest intellect, someone with the additional idea of expertise.

A rather interesting expression used was charnel house: “The world of communism, it turned out was a charnel house of meaning, and rotting ideals.”

It is a place used in the past for keeping dead human bodies or bones.

An obituary piece in The New York Times ran the headline: ‘Milan Kundera, Literary Star Who Skewered Communist Rule, Dies at 94’.

As a noun, skewer is a long metal pin which is used to hold pieces of food together while cooking. As a verb, if you skewer (past participle, skewered) something, you push a long, thin and pointed object through it. In common usage, it means to criticise someone or something or ridicule sharply in a way that reveals the truth.

The article referred to the author as someone “who became a global literary star with mordant, sexually charged novels that captured the suffocating absurdity of life in the workers’ paradise of his native Czechoslovakia”.

The word mordant has come to modern English through Middle French which is ultimately derived from the Latin verb mordere. It means to bite, to bite into, nip, or sting. In modern parlance, it suggests a wit that is used with deadly effectiveness, causing hurt or pain. Words like morsel (a small bite) and remorse (a sense of guilt for a past wrong) have the same derivative, the Latin remordere, meaning to bite again”.