Apricate

Now it is summer, at least it is in the northern hemisphere, there is the faint chance that we may be able to indulge in a spot of aprication. For those of us who are blessed with a knowledge of Latin, the root and meaning of the word is fairly obvious. It comes from apricari which means to bask in the sun or to sun oneself. The adjective apricus means of a sunny place but doesn’t have anything to do with the origin of the name of my least favourite fruit, the apricot. The only fruit that the ardent applicator may resemble is a brown berry.

Some words come and go out of fashion while others have really struggled to get into the limelight. Apricate is firmly in the latter camp, a shame because I think it has a nice resonance to it and, perhaps, with a bit of prompting it will come to enjoy its day in the sun.

It first appeared in the 1690s, when the author of Brief Lives and noted antiquarian, John Aubrey, described the habits of one Sir John Danvers thus; “his lordship was wont to recreate himself in this place, to apricate and contemplate, with his little dog with him.” A charming vignette, for sure, but one which earned Aubrey a sharp rebuke from his rather sniffy editor, John Ray. Ray wrote back in September 1691 with a critique of the manuscript and included a list of “some words I have noted, that do not sound well to my ears.” One such word that offended the sensibilities of the diligent Ray was apricate which he regarded as a new-coined word to be avoided. Like many a writer, Aubrey ignored the sage advices of his editor and when the book went to print in 1697, apricate was included.

Other instances of its use in print are few and far between but it did cross the pond and make an appearance in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1863 in what was ostensibly meant to be a satirical attack on Yankee pedantry, penned by James Russell Lowell. The text includes the following; “the infirm state of my bodily health would be sufficient apology for not taking up the pen at this time, wholesome as I deem it for the mind to apricate in the shelter of epistolary confidence…”Of interest, as well as the fact that it is an example of American usage, is that it is being used figuratively, rather than in the straightforwardly literal sense that Aubrey used it.

Although apricate normally takes the grammatical form of an intransitive verb, it started to be used as a transitive verb in the 1850s with the sense of exposing something to the sun. For those budding authors whose taste is to write something saucy, apricate may offer an interesting variant to the tried and tested clichés as this relatively modern usage from Andre Aciman’s novel, Call Me By Your Name published in 2007, shows; “I was also biting into that part of his body that must have been fairer than the rest because it never apricated.”

But perhaps Ray and James Halliwell-Phillipps were right, the latter condemning the word to obscurity in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words in 1847. It never recovered. A shame really. Surely some enterprising purveyor of sun tan lotions could launch a brand called Aprication, the application of which would provide all your sun protection needs. Perhaps I should just apricate in the glory of bringing the word to your attention.