The Lady or the Poisonous Witch?

Despite the absence of a word of the week last Saturday, you’re only getting a short one for today, mostly because there’s not all that much written about it. Why rush it, I figure. Strange words abound.

veneficial (ven-e-FISH-el) — adjective: 1. acting by poison, or poisoning. 2. acting by, or used in, witchcraft or sorcery. 3. relating to the doings of Venus, the goddess of love.

The value of this word, of course, lies in the fact that it’s pronounced almost identically to beneficial, even though veneficial would be most often used in a negative context. (Witchcraft isn’t necessarily bad, I suppose, depending on what side of the hex you’re on, and the more venereal of the three meanings could easily turn out badly, as anyone who’s hit puberty can attest.) Most dictionaries that include veneficial — which is not many, by the way, though it does appear in the 1913 edition of Webster’s — note that it’s a variant of the more-common-but-actually-all-that-common veneficious. I found it in Peter Bowler’s The Superior Person’s Book of Words, which doesn’t include an etymology, though it would appear to come from a combination of the Latin venenum, “poison,” and the verb facere, “to do, make, perform or cause.” The linking of poison and sex struck me as strange, initially, since I never associated Venus and venereal with venom, but Derrida’s Dissemination notes that the concepts may be connected, even “double-faced” if explorations into Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European are any indication

Previous words of the week:

• ucalegon
  
• toby
  
• tiffin
  
• shebang
  
• roynish
  
• qualtagh
  
• quacksalver
  
• pismire
• orf
  
• nobiliary particle
  
• mongo
  
• lemniscate
  
• longicorn
  
• kakopygian
  
• jehu
• itaiitai
• grandgore
• fissilingual