Guachapear

Friends, apologies for my recent silence. I have been a little lacking in inspiration of late, and I would not want to bore you with banalities. True, I do have a post's worth of material on the Great Books, but I'm not ready to fashion it quite yet. Last week I began my doctoral sojourn at the Warburg Institute, and have spent the first days in a state of rapturous excitement. Do you know, there are people there to whom one can actually talk about Brunetto Latini, or illuminated Aristotle opuscula, or Walter Pater, or Renaissance geomancy? It seems hard to fathom without choking up in delight.

I was sitting in the Institute's rather crepuscular library yesterday, reading a Montaigne essay. ('Of Coaches', one of his more rambling ventures.) The sheer thrill of the Institute had not yet worn off, and so I found my eyes distracted by shelves and shelves of neighbouring possibilities. I got down on my hands and knees and peered at the linguistics section. From the lowest shelf I plucked the Variorum edition of Yakov Malkiel's collected papers. I opened it at random and immediately my attention alighted upon this passage—from the 1948 essay ‘Italian guazzo and its Hispanic and Gallo-Romance Cognates’:

Guachapear, basically ‘to strike and stir up stagnant water with the feet’ (its second component is reminiscent of apear), has been known since Covarrubias to apply to the rattling of a poorly adjusted iron plate, e.g. a horseshoe. The Academy Dictionary of 1936 records the further meaning of ‘doing something hastily and crudely’; perhaps the compilers had in mind two passages of La Picara Justina in which the word had been interpreted by the editor of the text, J. Puyol y Alonso, signifying ‘to write in a slipshod fashion.’ Guachapear has also been identified at widely scattered points of Seneca’s former colonial empires. In Honduras, guachapeado is a ‘sickly old man’; in Chile, the verb stands for ‘stealing trash just for fun’; along Colombia’s Atlantic coast, it means ‘to clear the ground (superficially) of brambles and bushes.’ It would seem that the idea of inadequacy, of “things done by halves,” which pervades the derivative meanings of guachapear, goes back ultimately to the image of muddiness and thus fits again into the general configuration of the AQUATIO family.

Have you ever seen such a sublimely broad and elaborate range of meanings?