مُخَلِّص
root: خ-ل-ص / form II active participle / definition: saviour, Salvador
These days, I’ve been thinking a lot about Salvador—the diabetic former boxer who drove my mum and I to the airport two years ago. He was driving between motorway lanes whilst scrolling through photos on his phone to share with us and pulling miscellanea from different pockets of his swerving car.
We were close to certain we’d die on that car ride, so we surrendered to Salvador’s motto, something he kept repeating after telling us about each of the many traumas in his colourful life: c’est la vie.
“C’est la vie!”, we repeated after him, throwing our hands up, as if they were our last words.
Over two years on from that one-and-a-half-hour journey, we still repeat his motto and recall the painful memories he divulged. They all feel too personal to even allude to online, but he was quite happy to share them with us, as strangers along for the ride.
I said he had a colourful life; but I wonder how many of his days were painted black.
I pull myself from spiralling thoughts, even though I could write an essay about Salvador—whose name (ironically, based on that car journey) means “saviour”.
We have some business to get to here. Serious dictionary business.
Go to page 1293 of the Hans Wehr dictionary, and if you’re anywhere near as curious about words and meanings as I am, you’ll notice something interesting:
From وَي to وَيحَ to وَيكَ to وَيل, the right side of this dictionary page is filled with expressions of woe.
The و + ي combination isn’t really surprising. We’ve previously looked at exclamations of lament involving these semivowel sounds, so we know about their association with profound emotion.
But still, it’s cool to see them in alphabetical order like this, with the وَيْ taking on various suffixed letters. And you have to ask, what does the final ـح add to the meaning? Or the final ـل?
(I can’t help but to think back to The لِ and كَ of Distance…)
Or is وَي—rather than being the original stem—the shortened form of one of these original forms?
At least we’re told that وَيكَ is an abbreviated form of وَيلَكَ—which is either وَيل plus the ـك possessive suffix, or a contracted form of وَيلٌ لَكَ.
Oh—but it doesn’t end there.
Because Lane’s Lexicon has something else for us:
…telling us that, in addition to وَيل and وَيح, we also have وَيب and وَيس carrying the same core meaning!
And Lane continues, giving insight into a key distinction:
Apparently, ويب and ويح and ويس have the connotation of compassion. Whereas ويل is used to revile and curse.
Lane actually says a whole lot more about this set of words, but I’ll let you explore that yourself.
As I was writing the start of this post, sitting on the balcony with the soft breeze flowing under my scarf, I told my mum I was writing about Salvador and woe and isn’t it fitting?
“It’s the way,” she said, “that he alphabetised his traumas.”
That’s what I couldn’t put into words.
That’s it: that human inclination to put all our woes in some sort of logical order. So maybe we can perhaps turn the page, and say c’est la vie.
His name, upon more reflection, seems very fitting after all.
!إلى اللقاء
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