There used to be another word in the dictionary between the words direful and direwolf. (I am using American Heritage College Dictionary 4th ed.). It was a perfectly good word but is now missing. I believe it was dropped for lack of usage from earlier or more extensive dictionaries, like the Oxford English in two volumes, and should be replaced. The word is diremption.
That’s rough company, between those other two words. Direful defined: adj. 1. Inspiring dread; terrible. 2. Foreshadowing evil or disaster; ominous. Direwolf defined: noun. A large wolflike mammal that inhabited North America during the Pleistocene Epoch. Yikes.
I turned to Google and found it. Diremption noun. A sharp division into two parts; disjunction; separation; a sharp division into two parts. That confirmed my understanding of the word and made me wonder why it had been dropped.
I was encouraged by Google’s thoroughness, so I went to my Thesaurus (Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, 1992.) I couldn’t find diremption there either, but I found: disjunction, and separation, both of which did not list diremption as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb in their accompanying meanings and synonyms. Other words related to diremption, the words segregation and dichotomy, turn up in some of the synonyms. Those are close and informative but not exactly what I mean. They miss the thrust I’m looking for. So, diremption may not recover from obscurity. Too bad.
Why am I obsessed with that word right now? Years ago, at Millersville University, in Pennsylvania, where I got my degree, I took two philosophy units with Professor Joshua Fischel, who became a close friend. At one point, he allowed me to read his doctorate thesis, as an outside-the-class project, because I was interested in what he thought, philosophically, about our contemporary situation. It was a frequent topic in our casual conversations.
He used the word diremption as describing our current position. Without going into the details and nuances of his thinking, that word has stayed with me and it often flavors my own thinking process. The word is almost gone, but it carries with it an important concept that should not be lost.
I would agree with my professor and describe our current political situation as a world in diremption. It feels not only fractured or split but separated in a way that implies a violent or at least an energetic splitting. To me, the word itself implies the physicality that draws us to action films, battle scenes, and violent spectacles, such as pro football and prizefights. Most of us are riveted to the screen when we see glaciers “calving” into the ocean or earthquakes splitting a neighborhood apart. That’s diremption. It’s fascinating and frightening all at once.
The person I’m looking for in this political year is a person who will be as welcome as a mason after an earthquake; a person who will be able to pick up the pieces, look carefully at how they used to fit together and start putting them back in place, with cement.
I don’t think that’s asking too much. History is littered with constructive leaders and America has already had her fair share. I can think of three or four without thinking too hard. I’ll bet you can too. I’ll also bet some of your three or four will be people who I don’t have on my list. That should be encouraging.
There have been a lot of different healers in our nation’s history, and because they have all been human, they were all flawed and none was perfect. Nevertheless, because of their timeliness in their own moment of responsibility, they turned out to be giants. Most may not have been as giant as the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Probably we have historically overlooked many of them. I think we need one now.
Let’s take our time, look carefully, and find the next one, the one who suits our particular time of diremption.
Dan Morris