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bathos of sentiment.” Companion words include bathykopian , deep-bosomed, from bathos , deep, and kolpos , cleft; bathyscape , a small submarine designed to explore the depths of the ocean; and bathetic , which is a pathetic drop in the gravitas of the word pathos .

BEAUTY
    The quality or perception that pleases. Some say beauty is the inner quality that brings calm to the observer. Others, like Stendhal, say it is “the promise of happiness.” Beauty is a beaut’, as we use to say of a gorgeous shot on the
basketball courts of Detroit, where I grew up. She dates back to around 1275, from the Anglo-Saxon beute , and Vulgar Latin bellitatem , the state of being handsome, from Latin bellus, fine, beautiful, used mostly of women and children. Companion words include beauty sleep, the rejuvenating rest taken just before midnight, beautician, beauty parlor, beauty shot, beauty shop, and bonify, “to make good or beautiful. Callipygian means “gifted with shapely buttocks,” such as those of prehistoric goddess sculptures. Callisteia was the name of a sought-after beauty prize won in beauty competitions in ancient Greece. Callomania is the delusion that one is beautiful, after the goddess Callisto . Calligraphy describes the ability to write beautifully . Kalokagathia is the harmonious Greek worldview that joins the beautiful ( kalo ) and the good ( agathia ). The subtle French jolie laide combines “pretty and “ugly” to describe an unconventionally attractive face you can’t stop looking at. The sublime Navajo hozh’q refers to the ultimate aim in life being the beauty that can be created by human beings. Shakespeare’s Romeo sighs of Juliet, “I never saw beauty until now.” Art critic Elaine Scarry underscores all the above when she writes, “Beauty is sacred.” “Beauty in art,” Charles Hawthorne told his art students, “is the delicious notes of color one against the other.” And in an old leather-bound book of travel poems at Ansel Adams’s cabin in Yosemite, I catch the tender dedication that Everett Dawson wrote to Ansel and his wife, Virginia: “ Beauty has its roots in the fitness of things. May 27, 1930.”

    Beauty

BEDSWERVER
    A wandering, lusting lover . A lubricious Shakespearean term, from A Winter’s Tale , for a woman who swerves from the marriage bed. In 1753, Dr. Johnson defined a bedswerver with avidity, as one who “is false to the bed; one that ranges or swerves from one bed to another.” A playful euphemism for an adulterer from a time rife with bed references. Consider the lubriciously descriptive bedganging , a beguiling bedventure in which a lover seeks
a bedworthy partner, an ibedde , or bedsister , whom Herbert Coleridge calls a “concubine,” or a bedfellow , in “a bed of sin.” The male equivalent to a bedswerver was a bedpresser , a john-among-the-maids, knave-of-hearts, or belly-bumper. Companionable bed words include curtain-lecture , which Dr. Johnson defined as “a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed.” Memorably romantic terms from Old English include hugsome , huggable, and kissworthy , worthy of a kiss; and in hipster slang , bedwarmer , bed partner, and bedroom furniture , a woman, doll, or dame. Figuratively, essayist E. B. White described his bedfellows as Fred, his pet dachshund, as well as Harry Truman (in the New York Times ), Adlai Stevenson (in Harper’s ), and Dean Acheson (in A Democrat Looks at His Party ). Recently, I caught up with shrimping , a clever coinage from Sarajevo writer Aleksandar Hemon, which he describes as “curling up in a fetal position” with a lover, which is a remarkably clever alternative to the Victorian spooning .

BEKOS
    Bread . Not only the most famous Phrygian word, but some say the very first word, period. According to Herodotus, bekos meant bread, and he then said why. In his Histories he tells the yeasty story of Pharaoh Psammetichus, who believed there was one proto-language, the source of all