How many times in my life must I look up desultory? Why won't its meaning stick? Whenever I come upon it, I must guess anew at the sense, using seat-of-the-pants etymology. Desultory seems to contain "sultry." "Slut" chimes in, too. The suffix suggests "cursory." "Sultry," "slut," "cursory" — I know I'm in negative territory, whatever the exact meaning. With a sigh, I reach for the dictionary. Ah, yes: "jumping from one thing to another; disconnected." That's settled, I tell myself. But unless some helpful mnemonic emerges — say, a children's bestseller titled The Desultory Kangaroo — I know that this word and I are destined for another lexicographic showdown.

Why can't I remember what pusillanimous means? Because the word makes me think of pugnacious and fusillade, both at the other end of the semantic continuum from "cowardly," its true meaning. Querulousness must be the state people are in when they query and are tremulous. But I find, repeatedly, that to be querulous is to be "peevish" or "grumbling." Truculent sounds like "stubborn" to me. But it means "fierce" or "scathing" or — here we go again — "pugnacious."

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I know that the adjective lapidary has to do with rocks. I know this from lapis lazuli even though I have never seen one. Lapidary also means "precise" with reference to stone work. By extension, it has come to denote precision and refinement in general. But lapidary plods heavily on the page, no more refined than a dromedary.

A valetudinarian sounds like a good thing to be — perhaps third in class rank after valedictorian and salutatorian. But no: "a sickly person chronically concerned with his or her health." I withdraw my congratulations.

Such words are like the faux amis that tempt English speakers to translate the French demander incorrectly as "demand" instead of "ask." They are like the faux frères of Spy magazine's "Separated at Birth?" feature: no, Walter Cronkite is not Captain Kangaroo's twin. Since these words are not relatives with words we already know, let's call them "irrelatives."

Some irrelatives, rather than leading one into error, simply sit on the page and reveal nothing. Tenebrous stares at me, unblinking. Fibrous comes from fiber — this I know. Scabrous comes from scab. Tenebrous, which means "dark and gloomy," comes from nothing. And what is a blandishment anyway? It's "a flattering remark meant to persuade." The verb blandish ("to coax by flattery; cajole") should help us here, but it doesn't because nobody uses it.

Since almost all sound–meaning correspondences are arbitrary, why do I single out irrelatives for complaint? If I can remember what cup means without relying on relatives in the dictionary, why can't I remember what desultory means? Because desultory is a big word. Psycholinguists famously divide language acquisition into pre- and postpuberty periods. Before puberty we learn a language speedily and unconsciously; after puberty, we learn second languages through laborious memorization. Puberty is likewise a cruel gatekeeper for the ongoing acquisition of native vocabulary. Most big words are postpubescent. I don't remember learning cup. I do remember learning, or failing to learn, lapidary, tenebrous, and valetudinarian. I need help in learning big words, and that help usually takes the form of roots and derivatives that I already know. But irrelatives have no kin in my lexicon — at best. At worst, they have apparent kin that aren't kin at all.

Accost was once everybody's irrelative. How do I know this? Because its meaning changed. As recently as fifty years ago, dictionaries defined accost thus: "to approach and speak to first." This neutral sense was displaced by the meaning "to approach and speak to aggressively." Many contaminants must have caused the change: accuse, attack, assault, and caustic. Accost was doomed. It just doesn't sound friendly.

Similarly, people didn't want peruse to mean what it originally meant, "to read carefully." Dictionaries gradually admitted a second, less rigorous meaning, "to read." The third college edition of Webster's New World Dictionary (1988) acknowledged popular usage still further — "loosely, to read in a casual or leisurely way" — and the recent fourth edition dropped the usage warning "loosely" from this definition. My explanation for this mass loose behavior: peruse sounds like browse and rhymes with cruise.

Internecine, a dully reliable modifier of warfare, once meant "bloody." The inter added a meaning: "involving conflict within a group." Reticent, formerly denoting only a reluctance to speak, is now defined in some dictionaries as "reluctant" or "hesitant," its similarity to those two words probably causing the change. In this century, dictionaries have finally allowed jejune, an obnoxious irrelative if ever there was one, to mean what people want it to mean, "childish," a sense that may drive out its eternally elusive older meanings, "lacking nutritive value; dull."

Bemused might be on its way somewhere new. It's almost an irrelative for me, but I just barely manage to remember that it means "confused," not "amused." I am able to do so despite the fact that the word almost always occurs in a context of amusement, suggesting an emerging popular meaning of "humorously or pleasantly puzzled." Thus nowadays one will find "Frank was bemused by Francine's limerick," but not "The homicide detectives were bemused by the pattern of stab wounds."

I consider irrelatives the bad boys of English. As noted, they are bad in that they do not stay put in memory but run away from home for extended periods and return as strangers — bad candidates for acquisition, in other words. But I submit that they are also bad to use. They do not convey meaning forcefully. Which works better — "It was a dark and gloomy night" or "It was a tenebrous night"? Even for those who know what it means, tenebrous has little power because it lacks supporting relatives echoing over years of past use. Tenebrous is a thesaurus word in the worst sense: it is simply big.

Irrelatives lack not only force; they lack clarity. If someone tells me, "Your novel was jejune," is the old meaning intended or the emerging one? Was the novel dull, or was it childish? If you really want to play with my mind, you can even say, "Your novel wasn't jejune, but it was jejune."

The irrelatives I have cited involve badness in another sense. Of the fourteen given here, all but two are negative. (The exceptions are peruse — in any of its several senses — and lapidary, which, if memory serves, means "precise.") I have solicited examples of pesky vocabulary from friends and colleagues, and the impassioned response from fellow-sufferers has yielded primarily negative words like baleful, enervate, factitious, feckless, invidious, lugubrious, mendacity, meretricious, stentorian, and tendentious.

Why do irrelatives cluster in the negative domain of meaning? Language, like the penal code, seems to busy itself more with documenting where one can go wrong than with shining a light on righteousness. Because we are human, because we would rather condemn evil than praise virtue, we keep our garden of pejoratives well watered. And it's a Roman garden: apparently we feel that Latinate heritage adds authority to a denunciation. How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways, and the language gives us more than we can use, a mob of polysyllabic bullies vying for territory at the overpopulated negative pole of our semantic world.

David Carkeet