By way of exordium, foreword, introduction, preface, prelude, prologue or warm-up comes this attractive yet rarely seen word for the preamble to a book or speech - or better still, perhaps, a long poem. Here, though, it analphabetically heads an alphabetical list of words.
‘Proem’ throws up no images of interest in its primary meaning. The somewhat spectral presence is that of the musician Proem, regarded as an early member of the US IDM scene – that is ‘Intelligent Dance Music’, to sneak in a potential member of the alternative compilation CONA, the Concordance of Nifty Acronyms.
Ablaut
'Ablaut' is a noun describing the alternation in the vowels of related word forms. In English, that is most apparent in the instinctively-followed 'rule of ablaut reduplication' - that if there are two related words and the first has an ‘I’ and the second is either ‘A’ or ‘O’. Thus chit-chat, dilly-dally, clip-clop, flip flop, knick knack, mish-mash, sing-song, ping pong, pitter-patter, riff-raff, tick-tock (or, indeed, TikTok), flim-flam and zig-zag. If there are three words then vowel order goes I, A, O: ding dang dong, bish bash bosh, splish splash splosh.
‘Splish splash splosh’ turns out to be a rather popular title for children’s books. Is that because it follows the rules of reduplication? No doubt ablaut it.
Abscission
Abscission is the natural separation of parts from a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit. The word derives from the Latin abscindere, to abscind or cut way – also the root of ‘scissors’.
So why do leaves fall from trees? The answer lies in the fact that leaves don’t simply fall off or get blown away from deciduous trees, they are actively thrown off by the tree. Shorter, colder days trigger the hormone abscisic acid, which sends a chemical message to every leaf causing ‘abscission’ cells to appear – a thin line of bumpy cells that push the leaf, bit by bit, away from the stem. Any breeze is just accelerating the task. Why dispose of the leaves at all? Because otherwise they will take up water during a comparatively warm spell of winter weather, which will freeze when it gets colder. The leaves will then die, making them useless but with no mechanism to replace them. So the tree will die. Evergreens, on the other hand, have their leaves tightly rolled into needles that resist cold and can conserve water, helped by a waxy coating that reduces evaporation. Such needles resist cold and stay moist, keeping them green throughout the winter.
Abulia
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Where to start for real? One could argue that indecision is itself a decision, in which case abulia, a state of pathological indecisiveness, might be logically impossible. So I had my doubts, but that thought was enough to persuade me to include the word…
Paul Klee is the art master of arrows. These variable pointers form a tentative balance in ‘Schwankendes Gleichgewicht’ (Unstable Equilibrium), 1922.
Agrestal
Cornflowers sound as if they
are named to be agrestal. But couldn’t the word apply usefully to many people,
those who go a little feral as they chafe against the restrictions of their conventional settings?
Agrestal: growing wild in a cultivated field
Altricial
A young animal hatched or
born helpless and requiring significant parental care is termed ‘altricial’,
as opposed to ‘precocial’ species, which are immediately capable of moving
around and feeding themselves. Among birds, for example, there’s a big
difference between altricial songbirds and precocial ducks and chickens. Wikipedia
explains the generic pros and cons: ‘Precocial animals' brains are fully
developed at birth relative to their body size, limiting their knowledge
largely to their instincts but providing them immediate access to their bodies.
However, as adults, their brains do not develop any further, and they memorize
little from birth to death. Altricial animals' brains are comparatively
undeveloped at birth, thus their need for care and protection, but their brains
immediately begin developing at birth and do so independently, adapting to
individual circumstances, and hence as adults, altricial animals attain more
versatile brains than their precocial counterparts, capable of strategic
thought based on experience. Thus altricial species, ultimately, possess
greater potential for skill and adaptability, which is notably a factor in
human developmental success.’ That does leave the question: do songbirds utilise
those advantages in ways that chickens and ducks don’t? Perhaps that’s the key
to learning to sing?
The picture is of a sparrow hatchling.
Amphisbaenian
Ever heard of amphisbaenians? Me neither, until I came across them at the Natural History Museum. They may look like primitive snakes or ‘worm-lizards’ (as they’re sometimes called) but amphisbaenians are a separate group of – mostly legless - subterranean squamates. Their distinctive skin is made up of rings of scales (annuli) that form a tube in which the loosely attached trunk of the body moves, enabling burrowing to be achieved with an accordion-like motion. Amphisbaenians burrow head-first, and different species have different skull-shapes suited to how they go about it: the ‘shovel-heads’ dig by forcing the head forwards and slightly downwards; the ‘spade-heads’ use their sharp-sided noggin to shave off soil from the front of the tunnel in an oscillatory motion; ‘keel-heads’ dig by ramming their laterally compressed heads forwards; and ‘bullet-heads’ (the majority of amphisbaenians) use the head as a battering ram, followed by pushing it in different directions to pack soil. Rudimentary, deeply recessed, eyes allow them to detect light, but little more – yet that is practical enough for their fossorial lifestyle, which depends on using powerful, interlocking teeth to tear chunks out of larger prey. The name is derived from Amphisbaena, a mythical serpent with a head at each end—referencing both the manner in which amphisbaenians’ tails truncate, and their ability to move just as well in reverse as forwards.
The species illustrated is the Tropical Worm Lizard (Amphisbaena spurrelli), one of 200 species in the group.
Ankh
That's Rihanna overdosing on the ankhs. The singular ‘ankh’ is the conventional Anglicisation of the Egyptian noun ꜥnḫ - hieroglyphically rendered as above, and meaning ‘life’.
Amourette
‘Will you marry me, Jason?’
‘The sleek Triumph Amourette Range combines elegance with sophistication to create a must have for every woman's lingerie drawer’ – but not for long, I suppose, for ‘amourette’ is defined as a trifling and ephemeral love affair.
To take a notorious example of amourette action, in 2004, Britney Spears and Jason Alexander - apparently in a state of some intoxication - were married at her instigation. It lasted 55 hours before being annulled on the grounds that Spears ‘lacked understanding of her actions, to the extent that she was incapable of agreeing to the marriage.' Of the various models in Amourette adverts, I’ve chosen the one who looks most like Britney. She’s wearing a 10166797 Triumph Amourette 300 W Bra. It sounds too good to be short-lived: according to Swiss manufacturer Triumph International the bra offers ‘a comfortable and contemporary fit and feel, paired with chic and intricate, feminine styling… The soft semi-sheer lace is both attractive and comfortable. The stunning neckline flatters and accentuates your curves for a delicate everyday lingerie look’. Looks pretty ordinary to me.
Apophatic
This is a word used in a specific religious context: apophatic
knowledge of God is obtained through negating concepts that might be
applied to Him – as opposed to cataphatic theology, which concentrates on God’s
positive attributes. The apophatic approach is often mystical one, concerned
with the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception. The
9th-century theologian John Scotus Erigena provides a flavour,
stating that ‘Literally God is not, because He transcends being’.
It makes me wonder what else might be approached in this way. Starvation, I
suppose, is an apophatic diet. Anyway, not the simplest of concepts to
illustrate pictorially and a direct image search revealed little of interest. I
was, however, attracted to the diagram to explain the ‘negative vector’, which
came up when I looked for an image for ‘define by negation’. It’s a pleasantly simple bit of maths: a
negative vector has the same magnitude as the reference vector but faces the
opposite direction. Some sort of exchange between early and heavenly realms
might be implied.
Apricate
That sleep is actually of two types. 75% is a shallow, almost-waking rest called slow-wave sleep (SWS). Cats doze in a kind of ready position during 15-30 minute catnaps, their senses of smell and hearing in the ‘on’ mode, ready to react instantly. Only 25% is deep REM-reaching sleep, in small periods broken up by dozing. Oh yes… apricate: to sunbathe or bask in the sunshine.
Astacology
The first lesson, I guess, in the study of crayfish is to
observe that they are crustaceans, not fish, but that the word ‘crayfish’ comes
from settlers mishearing the ‘visse’ part of the old French ‘écrevisse’.
Perhaps another common name would be better for the Palinuridae, and an
attractive option is the US dialect term ‘crawdad’ or ‘crawdaddy’. The second lesson might be that crawdaddies
can be surprisingly colourful motherfuckers…
Astacology – the investigation and analysis of crayfish
Aventail
Has the time come, as Covid masking retreats, for the return
of the aventail, out of fashion for 600 years? It does, after all, cover pretty
much the negative of a medical mask: what better to celebrate on the catwalk when we get clear of using those?
An aventail is a flexible curtain of mail attached to the skull of a helmet that extends to cover the throat, neck and shoulders. Aventails were most commonly seen on bascinets in the 14th century and served as a replacement for a complete mail hood. By the dawn of the 15th century, the plate-armoured neck guard of the Great Bascinet replaced the aventail.
Barbicels
This is what ratites (qv) lack. In most birds, the larger
feathers consist of a shaft (rachis) bearing
branches (barbs)
which bear smaller branches (barbules). The
smaller branches themselves bear tiny hook-bearing barbicels, which
interlock with the barbules of an adjacent barb. Down has no barbicels, resulting
in fluffy feathers which provide insulation. But in flightless birds the wing
feathers have also evolved to be fluffy and ornate rather than tightly
interlocking to support flight. That, in turn, is the basis for the commercial
appeal of ostrich feathers… It does mean, though, that even if ostriches had the wing
span needed to enable them to fly – probably up to ten metres rather than the two metres they currently sport – and the ability to flap them adequately, they
still couldn’t fly. No wonder they gave up.
Beteem
Wd we stell enderstend eech ether ef the enly vewel were ‘e’? Eesy-peesy, es es here beteemed.
My guess is that the only word people might have trouble with above is one in which no substitute ‘e’s are involved: 'to beteem' is to accord / vouchsafe / allow.
Blepharoplasty
‘Before and after’ shots of blepharoplasty – surgical repair of eyelids – tend to be whole face comparisons. I rather like comparing the same eye before and after, but with the ‘after’ shot flipped to make a reasonably coherent face that has a comparison built in. Of course, it looks a bit odd, but that’s plastic surgery for you!
Bocage
In ceramics, bocage works are sylvan scenes, i.e. featuring woodland behind figures or animals. English and continental porcelain figures of the eighteenth century often had trees and leaves, both as a colourful ornamental backdrop and to support the figures during kiln firing. By the 19th century, trees were added more for their ornamental appeal than practical advantage. Peak production in that mode was from 1815 to 1845.
The example here is Staffordshire pottery from 1820, featuring
a courting couple under the title ‘Persuasion’. The female figure looks coy as
her potential husband proffers a gold ring. Her dog observes expectantly.
Bolus
Bolus’s batting style was more block than blast, more grit than elegance. After retiring, he was a regular on cricket’s after-dinner circuit, and always started with the same line: ’For those of you who saw me bat, let me apologise.’ Gum wouldn’t have turned him into a swashbuckling attacker, but does actually aid performance at the margins? Aside from the imitation of famous players, six reasons have been cited for the cricket habit. It helps players stay calm, by providing a simple mechanical stress reliever; can contain a sugar-based energy boost; indirectly encourages players to remain hydrated – because gum makes you salivate more than usual, making you thirstier than usual, making you drink more; helps the whole body ‘get into a rhythm’; improves reflexes - chewing gum helps increase brain activity, so messages are sent to different body parts quicker; helps players remain focused by keeping the mind occupied on an easy task which stops them switching off – most relevantly while fielding in slow-moving matches. The Ancient Romans might have chewed gums of some sort – the habit goes back well before gums were first manufactured in the 1840’s – but they didn’t, of course, play cricket. Romans’ primary sporting use of the bolus was harpastum, a keep-ball game of territorial possession.
Breviloquence
Nice word.
Breviloquence: brevity of speech. The image shows
South Korean actor So Ji-sub, who has gained a reputation for short speeches at
award ceremonies - he has only ever used the two words: ‘thank you’. I say two words: some might argue it is just
the one. Properly speaking, though, ‘thank you’ as a verb phrase is two words,
and ‘thankyou’ is either an adjective (‘a thankyou note’ or a noun ‘he sent the
flowers as a thankyou’.
Bulla
I’ve had one, but without the language to call it anything more specific than a blister. Actually, though, a vesicle is a circumscribed elevation of skin of 0.5 cm or more in diameter containing a liquid, and a bulla is the same thing but over 0.5cm – it’s just a size thing. Actually, I didn't measure it, so maybe I've only had a vesicle. As for what the illustration shows, it depends I guess on how big your screen is. Either way, this is a modest example: it's easy enough to find extreme skins problems online, if that's your thing.
Caecilian
Rather as amphisbaenians (qv) are the least-known reptiles,
the caecilians (Latin for ‘blind ones’ – say ‘seh-SILL-yens’) are the
least-known amphibians, even though the 200 species of Apoda constitute one of just three living groups - alongside Anura (frogs and toads) and Urodela
(salamanders and newts). They look pretty much like amphisbaenians, too:
legless and vermiform, somewhere between snake and worm. Many are born with
short, blunt teeth, used peel off the outer layer of the mother’s thick skin –
which doubles in thickness prior to birth - for food. Up against the matriphagy
(qv) of young pseudoscorpions, dermatotrophy seems a sensible compromise. That aside,
they spend their time under ground or water in lifestyles requiring minimal
vision and attracting minimal attention.
Calescent
When I came across ‘calescent’ in Claire-Louise Bennett’s 2021 novel ‘checkout 19’, I didn’t know it. But I predict the word will take off, describing as it most economically does the condition of the world during global warming.
Calescent: increasing in heat.
The picture shows a geothermal power plant in Iceland: a more benign form of
calesence – indeed, a sustainable source of energy, the maximisation of which
could help to offset temperature rises.
Cannula
I won’t claim not to have heard this word before time in hospital made it part of my day-to-day, but I tended to confuse it with ‘catheter’ and wasn’t sure how to spell it. The Latin origin is key to that: it means ‘little reed’, and is a tube inserted into a vein for delivery of fluids. When you have both wrists so decorated they are the consistently Latinate ‘cannulae’. The tricky bits then are sleep and movement. I’ve found that, when the fluids are being pumped in, the intravenous (IV) delivery mechanisms set off an alarm at any suspicion of the wrong movement, so waking me: sleeping without moving either arm inappropriately is quite a challenge. The IV stand is on wheels and can be pulled along easily enough for short trips to the loo. Long distances are awkward, though, and stairs are another matter: Southampton General Hospital’s lobby notices state that the lifts are ‘for staff and visitors only’, leaving patients to use the stairs – though I decided this could be safely ignored if my stand and I wished to pop down to the paper shop.
In fact the words are close: both 'cannula' and 'catheter' can
be defined as 'a flexible tube inserted into the body to administer or withdraw
fluids'. But in general practice ‘cannula’ is the word used when this is to
enable fluids to be fed into the blood, whereas catheters are used to drain
fluid out; and the cannula is almost always in the arm, whereas most catheters
are inserted into the bladder to remove urine. The
illustration is of a typical mobile IV unit.
Chape
The chape of a buckle is the part where it is
attached to an object like a belt or a shoe. Attachment to enable
function is of course vital in many spheres, from IT interfaces to means of
communication to plugging in machinery - the criticality of chapes!
Chechia
Until recently, if you’d asked me what the hat on the left
was called, I would probably have said ‘a fez’. And that, revealing a
reprehensibly Western cultural bias, would have been because Tommy Cooper was
known for wearing something similar - though I may, if pressed, have recalled that
such hats have a long administrative and military history in the Near East.
However the fez - on the right in the above pairing - is rigid and cylindrical
as well as peakless and usually red with a black tassel attached to
the top. The chechia – which varies in colour according to country,
but is traditionally red in Tunisia - is contrastingly flexible, as well as
being flatter.
Chirm
There does seem to be a shared spirit between children and birds, so it’s nice to find a word that makes the connection.
Chirm (noun): a din, especially from (a) the blended singing of many birds or (b) the noise of many children chattering (OED).
Chifforobe
This item of furniture does what its etymology implies: a portmanteau
of ‘chiffonier’ (a moveable low cupboard with a sideboard top) and ‘wardrobe’. I
favour this image because the leafy plant atop the chifforobe looks like a
candidate for making a chiffonade (finely
shredded greens, often as a garnish for soup), which might indeed be what the
smaller pot contains if we press further into fantasy. So that’s three consecutive
words in the Oxford English Dictionary ticked off: chiffonier – chiffonade – chifforobe!
It would be nice to move on to the next: 'chignon' is another nice word (for a mass of hair
worm at the back of the head) but I’m not sure how to tie it in…
Chrematistic
Online searches for ‘wealth’ tend to yield images of
banknotes. But does the gaining of wealth still involve the acquisition of
cash? Maybe not: only 14% of payments were made that way by May 2024, when the
Bank of England issued the first notes featuring Charles III. That was some 20
months after he became king, and then with new notes only introduced when the
old ones – there are some 5bn in circulation - wear out. As usual since 2016,
the notes are polymer plastic (longer-lasting than paper). The delay allowed
for development of the notably crownless design, and nine months testing to ensure
that the security features worked, and that the notes did not interfere with
the operation of ATMs. £20 notes were not produced from 1943 (the Gold Standard
having been abandoned) to 1973: £20 then
was equivalent to £300 now, so the perception that the highest value current
note of £50 is a high denomination is something of an illusion. Cash is not as
chrematistic as it was.
Chrematistic: of or pertaining to the creation of wealth
Circumnutation
Can plants think? Those who hold that they can are likely to cite circumnutation – the ability to wind around a central axis during growth to reach more favourable environmental conditions – as one strand of evidence. Paco Calvi, in ‘Planta Sapoiens: Unmasking plant intelligence’ (2023) suggests that the movements required are flexible and goal-directed, consistent with a – non-neural – form of consciousness.
Charles Darwin made the first detailed analysis of
circumnutation in ‘The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants’ in the Journal
of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, 1865 – six years on from ‘On
The Origin of Species’. The illustration
is of squash tendrils.
Cockatrice
I should have been aware of the cockatrice, as Shakespeare’s Juliet
mentions its ‘death-darting
eye’ shortly after asking ‘Hath Romeo slain himself?’ It’s a two-legged
dragon with a cock’s head, with the ability to kill people simply by looking at
them. The best way to see off this mythical creature? Put it in front of a mirror…
Compenetration
Compersion
Constation
I came across this in Henry James’ subtly satirical 1879
novella ‘Daisy Miller’, in which he gives the word to the inner monologue of Daisy’s
admirer, writing of ‘the soft impartiality of her constations, as Winterbourne would have termed them’. They are
certified statements or findings, Daisy being unconventionally free for the
time in putting hers forward. None of which, really, explains why an online search
for the word’s image throws up this endearing cartoon of a man unpicking a
knotty problem, perhaps in his own thread-brain. Though one can say that Winterbourne failed to unpick the
knotty problems of exactly what he thought of Daisy and how he should act
towards her, before her untimely demise…
This attractively buttery mammiform example is from the Salisbury Museum: I came across the word there, rather than via a dictionary flick-through. It was found in 1953 but is undated: being from the local Verwood Pottery makes it likely to be 19th century.
Cremello / Perlino
Base coat Single cream Double cream
Chestnut Palomino Cremello
Bay Buckskin Perlino
Black Smoky black Smoky cream
Croodle / Groodle
‘Croodle’ is a nice word I came upon at the start of Anthony
Mortimer’s translation of Ronsard’s most famous poem:
When you are old, croodled beside the fire,
Spinning by candlelight, you’ll sing, and say,
Still marvelling, ‘Ronsard wrote that for me
Back in the days when I was young and fair’.
'Croodle', then: to huddle together. Compare cuddle, snuggle, canoodle. But an image search for ‘croodle’ comes up – mostly – with dogs, namely the hybrid, popularised in the 1990’s, of Golden Retriever and Poodle. That’s known as a ‘Groodle’ in Australia, and a ‘Golden Doodle’ in the US and Britain. Because the Groodle has two very different parent breeds, it seems, ‘traits like size, weight, and coat type are not as predictable as with purebred dogs. That said, well-bred Groodles tend to be smart, happy, friendly dogs who are eager to please and quick to learn.’ So the chosen image is, I’d say, a Groodle croodle.
Pierre de Ronsard ‘Sonnets Pour Helene Book II: XLIII’, 1578
Culm
Does the availability of a word affect what you look at? I think it can. I don't recall ever taking much notice of the jointed stems of grasses and sedges, but now that I know that such a stem is one of the meanings of ‘culm’…
The photograph is of the jointed goatgrass (Aegilops cylindrica), which must be the essence of culm.
Customiable
It might be just a missing 's' slip, but when I saw
'customiable', my new word antennae were alerted.
However, I can find no evidence that it exists. The word's chances of entering
the lexicon are probably slim: 'customisable' and 'bespoke' cover the territory
adequately. Besides, if it does become a word, it will lose what I like about
it: that it could be the result of treating 'customisable' as customisable...
Not an Internet search image in this case, but my snap from an escalator passing over the Yi Fang drinks counter in Bond Street underground’s shopping centre, 2022 (the counter was removed in 2023).
Daut
Not a daughter, familiarly and economically addressed, but a Scots-derived term for petting. So you might well daut your daught...
The image came with the indication that each year since 2008 the third Monday of July is ‘Global Hug Your Kids Day’… Daut On!
Demijohn
You can buy demijohns, like most things, on Amazon: they’re glass
containers. But I came across the word first in one of Emily Dickinson’s more surprising
poems, No. 159 in the collected edition of 1,775:
A little bread – a
crust – a crumb –
A little trust – a demijohn –
Can keep the soul
alive –
That made me think a demijohn was a pretty small measure of
something. Maybe the meaning has shifted since 1860, but according to Wikipedia
‘a demijohn, also known as a carboy, is a rigid container with a typical
capacity of 4 to 60 litres. They are primarily used for transporting liquids,
often water or chemicals. They are also used for in-home fermentation of beverages,
often beer or wine.’ So that’s quite a lot of trust…
That, though, isn’t the surprising part of Poem 159. That’s the apparent directness of the conclusion:
A sailor's business is the shore!
A soldier's - balls! Who asketh more,
Must seek the
neighboring life!
Demulcent
Diastema
Diastema is a gap between your
teeth. This can happen between any of your teeth, but is most noticeable when
the gap is between your upper front teeth. That ‘midline diastema’ is a frequent
part of the normal development of children’s teeth
- at 6-8 about half of children have such a gap. While it normally closes
with time, some 5% of adults retain the gap, typically inheriting the look.
Whether diastema is attractive, or should be closed for cosmetic reasons, is a
matter of taste - but I would suggest that 5% is enough to be ‘normal’ but few
enough to be ‘distinctive’, which sound a statistically good place to be.
That is my own midline diastema:
my father had it, my children have it too…
Dilatant /
Pseudoplastic / Rheopectic / Thixotropic
So far as changes in viscosity goes, there are a rather extravagant five types of fluid, distinguished by how they react to the ‘shear stress’ applied by, for example, shaking them. Plenty are Newtonian: viscosity remains constant whatever agitation is applied – water, for example, or alcohol. On the other hand, you have:
- Dilatant: viscosity increases immediately
when shear stress is applied, then the fluid returns to the original state
immediately when that stops. Quicksand and putty are examples.
- Pseudoplastic: viscosity decreases immediately
when shear stress is applied, then the fluid returns to the original state
immediately when that stops. Ketchup, blood.
- Rheopectic: viscosity increases over
time when shear stress is applied, then the fluid returns over time to its
original state if that stops. Printer inks, cream.
- Thixotropic: viscosity decreases
over time when shear stress is applied, then the fluid returns over time
to its original state if that stops. Cosmetic, paints.
Nice that tomato ketchup and real blood share pseudoplasticity, as
if to assist the theatrical conviction of substitution. And this strikes me as
fertile territory for analogies. A top sports player, for example, will be
thixotropic: the more stress is applied, the more fluently they will respond, rising
to the biggest moments – whereas weaker players will seize up under pressure
and play worse. Effectively, they are rheopectic.
Dodkin
Earthite
A rather attractive and potentially useful term for us
Earth-dwellers, first used over 200 years ago by the Irish poet and satirist Eaton
Barrett (1786–1820), but yet to catch on much - the oddly diminutive ‘earthling’
is heard more often.
The illustration is of Yinka Shonibare MBE’s ‘The Townley
Venus’, 2017, typical of the
Anglo-Nigerian artist’s work in wrapping a figure in patterns associated with
African fabrics and replacing its head with a globe to indicate a whole world rather
than Eurocentric approach. Perhaps there’s something there of how an earthite,
rather than a citizen of any particular nation, ought to look.
Ecchymosis
This is not such a cool look as it may appear… This is a patient with circular ecchymotic patches on his back. A bruise is skin discoloration caused by a blow, impact, or suction. Ecchymosis can appear similar, but it is caused by bleeding underneath the skin, in this case following a car accident: such leaking of blood from blood vessels into the subcutaneous tissue that underlies the skin is most commonly caused by blunt force trauma leading to the rupture of capillaries.
Echor
‘Echor’ means ‘encircling mountains’, a setting deserving of
its own word. Whether it can count as an English usage is debatable, however. It
is originally – maybe only – available in Sindarin, the language of the Sindar,
the Elves of Teleri lineage who chose to stay behind during
the Great Journey to Aman before the First Age – all as
imagined in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’.
If we allow the word, then the image shows what may be
Europe’s finest echor-location. Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, is on a
lake surrounded by nine mountains (though it’s known as 'the city between the
seven mountains', channelling the good fortune associated with seven as a
number, but leaving it unclear which are the seven mountains in question).
Phage
It’s one thing not to have heard of a life form, another to find that it’s the most populous on the planet! The world’s human population is currently 8 bn, so not quite 1010, which is 10 bn. More than enough, perhaps, but there are estimated to be 1031 phages, almost unimaginably more than us. Indeed, more than the population of all other life forms combined.
Endoparasite
An endoparasite lives, as tapeworms
most famously do, inside its host. The most bizarre is probably the tongue-eating
louse, Cymothoa exigua, from the woodlouse family, the isopods. It enters a fish’s
mouth through its gills, then uses tiny claws to sever the blood vessels of its
tongue, causing it to atrophy so that only a stub remains. The louse attaches
its fourteen legs to the base, and takes over: it’s a similar size, and can do
the work required, as fish tongues are not muscular, and have the fairly
limited role of fixing food in place. The
louse feeds on its host’s blood and mucus, weakening it somewhat, but not
enough to stop it living a normal life with a replacement tongue.
The tongue-eating louse is the only known organ-replacing
endopararsite - from the Latin ‘endo’, within, as opposed to ectoparasites from
‘ecto’, without. Cymothoa exigua reproduces sexually inside its hosts, and is
also unusual in being a protoandrous hermaphrodite: tongue-eating lice start life
as males, but transform into females once they reach about 1 cm in length. Protandry
(there’s another word!) is where male maturity precedes female, the most
widespread example being how the male reproductive organs (stamens) of a flower
mature before the female ones (carpels), thereby ensuring that
self-fertilization does not occur.
Entheogen
Entheogen is a fairly recent neologism, coined in 1979 from the
Ancient Greek, éntheos – ‘full of the god, inspired, possessed’ - and genésthai
– ‘to come into being’. Thus, entheogens are psychoactive substances that
induce alterations in perception such that one experiences feelings of
inspiration, often in a religious or spiritual context. The word was invented
on the grounds that ‘hallucinogen’ was inappropriate owing to its
etymological relationship to words relating to delirium and insanity, and ‘psychedelic’ was
too strongly associated with 1960s pop culture. Carl A. P. Ruck, an
academic involved in the word’s invention, stated in the Journal
of Psychedelic Drugs that ‘in a strict sense, only those
vision-producing drugs that can be shown to have figured in shamanic or
religious rites would be designated entheogens, but in a looser sense, the term
could also be applied to other drugs, both natural and artificial, that induce
alterations of consciousness similar to those documented for ritual ingestion
of traditional entheogens.’
I came across the word as the title for Louise Giovanelli’s
painting ‘Entheogen’, 2023, which naturally enough makes a good
illustration of the term. Is the painting enough to transport the viewer shown, one wonders...?
Epistrophe
Where anaphora is the rhetorical device of repeating words for effect at the beginning of a sentence or clause, epistrophe is such repetition at later in the sentence. Thus ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’ (Charles Dickens: Tale of Two Cities’) as opposed to ‘Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning Death / Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning Death / Those who sit in the stye of contentment, meaning Death…’ (T.S. Eliot: ‘Marina’). ‘Epistrophe’ is the more interesting word, being derived from the Ancient Greek for ‘turning back’, and being adopted by Plato to stand for the need to turn back from the false and empty values of the outer world towards the enlightenment provided by the inner self.
And the image? Those are the male (left) and female (right)
of Epistrophe grossulariae, a brightly banded hoverfly which is one of the one of
the world’s 6,000+ known species – there are so many full studies waiting to be
made!
One of the commoner words I found I
didn’t know has been hiding in plain sight for many years as the name of tennis
star Chris Evert: its several meanings include to turn a structure outwards. Something
often turned the wrong way out is the toilet roll (in case you’re in any doubt, the
patent drawing submitted by Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York from
1891 shows the correct alignment). All of which leaves just one matter for
investigation: does Evert evert her rolls?
Fizzgiggious / Flamdoodle
Balderdash, gibberish, claptrap, blether, hogwash, baloney,
guff, eyewash, piffle, gobbledygook, hooey, tripe, drivel, poppycock, bollocks,
bilge, bull, bunk…
I like the odd word for nonsense, but flamdoodle may be my favourite. That’s in the dictionary, but ‘fizzgiggious’ isn’t, being a nonsense word rather than a word for nonsense. It comes from Edward Lear’s ‘Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures’, first published in 1872:
The fizzgiggious Fish,
who always walked about upon Stilts,
because he had no legs.
Perhaps ‘confounding’ would make sense as a synonym for ‘fizzgiggious’.
Perhaps ‘fizz’ would make sense as a synonym for ‘nonsense’. Perhaps it already
is one.
Floordrobe
At the margins of mainstream dictionaries is this light-hearted
word for the minimum effort teen-favoured storage solution for clothes: simply
drop them on the floor. The danger, I suppose, is that the labour of finding
the right item swells in response, and there is no net saving of time. Moreover,
I have come across the simultaneous presence of wardrobe and floordrobe:
certainly, something must have gone wrong there. And yet, while the default
expectation must be for disorganisation, the well-managed floordrobe may, as
shown, have some easy-view merit, though there is the matter of hoovering to
take into account…
Foggage
Can cows eat fog? Apparently so, fog being the term for long grass and other plants left standing in a pasture for winter grazing.
The less familiar word ‘Foggage’ is defined as ‘the right to pasture cattle on fog’. As a winter feeding system, foggage is becoming recognised as having environmental benefits compared with using silage.
Fucoid
Seaweed is on the up as a food, though it remains rare as clothing outside of the mermaid community. The main point to make about the
12,000 known species is that, despite relying on photosynthesis, they are algae
not plants. Consequently, they have no leaves, stems, or roots to transport
water or nutrients: rather, each cell develops what it needs directly from the
seawater around it. Nutrition aside, algae – covering plankton as well –
produces a majority
Fucoid – having the qualities of seaweed
Gabion
A gabion (from Italian gabbione, ‘big
cage’) is a cage, cylinder or box filled with rocks, concrete, rubble
or sometimes sand and soil for use in civil engineering, road building, landscaping
and military applications. I rather like, in passing, the American term for
rubble: ‘riprap’.
Gimp
This neat little word has acquired three meanings. First, an
ornamental material for trimming dresses (17th century onwards). Second, a
crippled leg, or person so handicapped, perhaps combining ‘limp’ with ‘gammy’
(1920’s onwards). Third, as in a ‘gimp suit’, which covers the body completely
(1970’s gay underground scene onwards). But you can’t make a gimp suit out of
gimp - PVC, latex, rubber and spandex are the preferred materials, being
stretchy enough to fit tightly. So that more recent use probably derives from the
way such suits handicapped the user (alongside other restraints) for purposes
of sexual domination. That usage reached a mainstream of sorts via the inclusion
of ‘The Gimp’ as a leather-encased character in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’
(1994). That may, in turn, have echoed the nickname of Martin Snyder (1893–1981),
a Jewish-American gangster commonly known as ‘Moe the Gimp’.
The image shows ‘The
Gimp Man of Essex’, an anonymous resident of Colchester who has become well-known
locally over the past decade for wandering about in a latex gimp suit. Interviewed by The Independent in 2022, he
explained that ‘The Essex Gimp is my alter ego; my downtime; my chance to be
someone else for a short bit of time… People might think of it as weird, but
I’m not doing any harm. I’m not going out naked. I’m fully covered, no matter
what other people’s perception of those clothes are.’
Glabella
Glabella — the flat area of bone between the eyebrows - a term I can find used only in the cosmetic surgery industry.
Griffonage
This
turns out to be just one of many attractively-named medieval weapons based on the principle of
fixing something heavy or sharp to the end of a pole, the better to apply
enough force from a reasonably safe distance to trouble an armoured foe on
horseback – something you couldn’t do with a straightforward sword or axe. Telling polearms one from another is a
somewhat specialist task, but maybe there’s potential to play all these shapes
into a cutting edge design of wallpaper or clothing…
No less a source than The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook (Revised) defines seven main classes of weapon, which I summarise as follows:
Bardiche: an elongated battle axe.
Bec de corbin: has a pick or beak is to punch through plate, a hammer side and a short blade to finish things off.
Fauchard: a long, inward curving blade mounted on a shaft
Glaive: simply a single-edged blade mounted on a shaft.
Guisarme: an elaborately curved heavy blade, probably originating from peasants putting a pruning hook onto a spear shaft.
Glaive-guisarme: adds a hook to the back of the glaive’s blade.
Halberd: a combination weapon of large, angled axe blade tapering to a long spear point or awl pike, with a hook on the back for attacking armor or dismounting riders.
Guling
If a bolster is a narrow pillow or cushion designed
for back or arm support, if not purely decorative, then the Southeast Asian
equivalent is more definite in shape and more specific to sleep. Hence the
terms gối ôm (Vietnamese: 'hugging pillow') monkang (Thai: 'side pillow')
and guling (Indonesian: 'roll pillow') as well as such nicknames as ‘hotdog
pillow’, for the sausage shape, and ‘Dutch wife’, for the companionable aspect –
a term which has also been used for a sex doll…
Hackling
Hexapla
What is the hexaplanation for this? A hexapla is a sixfold text in parallel columns, most often used to show alternate translations of the bible. These columns are in the Francis Quadrangle at the University of Missouri in Columbia – they are the only remaining part of an Academic Hall that burned down in 1892. So the hexapla nation in question is the United States.
Hiaqua
What can I buy with this? Something, surely? It’s a hiaqua - a necklace of large dentalium shells, formerly used as money by natives of the North Pacific coasts of America.
In this late 19th century necklace, columns of dentalium shells alternate with colourful beads and buffalo hide spacers. Dentalium is a large genus of tooth shells or tusk shells, marine scaphopod molluscs in the family Dentaliidae. Peoples of the Northwest Pacific Coast would trade dentalium into the Great Plains, Great Basin, Central Canada, Northern Plateau and Alaska for other items including many foods, decorative materials, dyes, hides, macaw feathers from Central America, and turquoise from the American Southwest.
Holloway
The images are of Holloway Road, London; and of a holloway in
Brittany (where it would be ‘un creux’) as photographed by Jean-Francois
Gornet.
Humectation
I admit it: I’m in the recalcitrant 65% of men over-60 who don’t use a facial moisturising product, as opposed to the 65% of men in their 20’s and 30’s who do. The trend is clear, and I guess women are pushing towards 100%. What am I missing out on? Humectation would:
· - Help keep my skin hydrated and refreshed
· - Put less pressure on my glands to keep my skin healthy
· - Improve my skin’s chemical balance, reducing the chances of
redness or acne
· - Give my face a firmer look, reducing the appearance of wrinkles.
All this for an investment of two minutes a day. Maybe I’ll
persuade myself yet…
Humectation - the action
of moistening / condition of being moist
Hyperaemic
The only way is up... At the more erudite margins of the adult film genre – a
friend of mine was telling me – those due to receive don’t gasp excitedly
‘You’re so hard!’ but ‘You’re hyperaemic! Your corpora cavernosa must be unusually full!’
Hyperaemia: the presence of more than the normal amount of blood in a part of the body. Corpora cavernosa: the two masses of erectile tissue forming the bulk of the penis (and the clitoris)
Hysteron proteron
This seems to come only as a two-word component: the hysteron proteron (from the Greek: ὕστερον πρότερον, hýsteron próteron, ‘later earlier’) is a rhetorical device, a form of hyperbaton, which describes general rearrangements of the sentence. It occurs when the first key word of the idea refers to something that happens temporally later than the second key word, the idea being to call attention to the more important idea by placing it first. ‘I’ll murder you, then demand an apology’. An example of hysteron proteron encountered in everyday life is the common reference to putting on one's ‘shoes and socks’, rather than ‘socks and shoes’.
A potentially handy device of which to be aware. I arrived at the word by a maximimally obscure route, hence the image. It’s the shop sign for ‘Project Orange’ at Clapham Junction, London. What, I wondered, did the accidentally-formed word ‘Proetorne’ mean? Nothing that I could find - the closest I could get was ‘Proteron’. This image is also unique in being included in both 'Matters of Words' and my 'New Enquiries' photopoems (for 2024).
Hypoxic
I’d be worried if sleeping at the bottom of a pile of
walruses, not just that I might be squashed – an adult male can weigh up to two
tonnes, which is certainly a load of bull – but also that I could have problems
breathing. At least I’d be out in the open: conditions at the bottom of a not unusual pile
of fifty mole-rats could get even more hypoxic, deep in the burrow. I’m not sure there’s a word for it (‘univelocital’?),
but walruses can swim and run – on all fours with their flippers – at about the
same speed of 10km per hour. That, surprisingly, is equivalent to an average
human’s fast running speed. Less surprisingly, it’s quicker than we can swim: 3 km per hour being typical.
Hypoxic: having too little oxygen
Innascibility
God is the exemplar of innascibility - and, one could argue, the only such being. But one can look at the term more broadly. It is often said that entrepreneurs / geniuses / criminals / champions etc (insert to taste) are not born but made. George Bernard Shaw even claimed that ‘Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination’, though if there’s any role in life for which birth seems pivotal, it’s that of monarch. Moreover, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’, according to Simone de Beauvoir. She may not have had physical transitioning between sexes in mind, but there’s that too…
Innascibility: the attribute of being independent of birth. Image from a website tracking ‘before’ and ‘after’ male to female transitions.
Intercalation
Irreption
One of my favourite art films is Navid Nuur’s 'When Doubt Turns into Destiny' (1993 - 2011), a cat and mouse surveillance video in which the artist attempts to evade the security lights installed in Berlin’s alleyways and courtyards by moving extremely cautiously, as if performing a slow-motion version of himself. When he fails – and the lights do ‘discover’ him – he friezes his position. It’s funny, but not altogether fool – as that ingeniously illustrates his position as an artist: he continuously finds himself moving between two states, a before-and-after, a cause-and-effect, a dark and light. It is he who is causing a change, a rupture, a sudden shift in the order of things, by trying to be slower than the light, in order to be faster - smarter - than it. Ten years after encountering that film, I’ve (finally!) come across the perfect description for what Nuur was doing: attempting irreption. Irreption is the act of creeping in, of entering by stealth or avoidance. And yes, it would make a good theme for a show - with Nuur at its centre, of course.
Irrreption (from the Latin repere, creep in) is I suppose a kind of anti-eruption (from the Latin rupere, burst forth). The image is a still from the 31 minutes of 'When Doubt Turns into Destiny'.
Jacinthe
‘What colour is that hyacinth?’ If it’s ‘a moderate orange
that is yellower and stronger than honeydew’, then according to the
Merriam-Webster dictionary it is ‘jacinthe’. Given that ‘orange’ is a word with
notoriously few rhymes, that could be a boon to formal poets, though I can’t
recall them using it. Anyway, orange
hyacinths are unusual, so here’s the alliterative alternative of ‘Janet’s
Jacinthe Jewel-Tomato’, awaiting the right versifier of vegetable fruits to put
it on a plinth.
Confusion at the
margins… If it’s a French name, then ‘Jacinthe’ is pronounced ‘Ja-sant’, rather
undermining the hyacinth link. And ‘jacinth’ is a precious stone, typically the
violet blue most typical of hyacinths, and actually used in the C19th as an
alternative name for the flower…
Jaup
When Jackson Pollock worked primarily in brown, which wasn’t so often, the word ‘jaup’ might suit: ‘a splash or spatter, especially of dirty water’. It’s a word used mostly in Scotland, but then Pollock’s father LeRoy Pollock - born McCoy – did have Scottish-Irish lineage.
This is Pollock’s ‘Number 13A: Arabesque’, 1948
Jill
‘Faith’, ‘Frank’ and ‘Fern’ are effing obvious enough, but one
of the more obscure cases in which a common name also has a meaning is 'Jill'. ‘To
jill’ is to move a boat idly around. Online jilling led me to this Baltic screenshot from
a site displaying current marine traffic based on AIS (Automated Information
System) data. The symbol colours indicates ship types, e.g. passenger
vessels are blue, cargo vessels green, tankers red. They’re probably not jilling,
but those that are could be represented similarly.
Kakistocracy
Kakistocracy, from the Greek words, ‘kakistos’ (worst) and ‘kratos’ (rule) is government by the worst people. Perhaps TIME magazine was commenting on its ubiquity and common characteristics when producing this 2018 cover image of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin merging into each other.
Kenspeckle
Who’s the most famous person in the history of the world? Almost certainly Jesus, and his image - known through many paintings - is kenspeckle to match. Oddly, though, there is little evidence of what he really looked like. If Jesus were to return, it’s perfectly possible that he wouldn’t be widely recognised, wouldn't prove kenspeckle at all.
Kenspeckle (adjective): easily recognisable; conspicuous. The illustrations are first, the classic western art representation of Jesus, in this case from a copy of da Vinci's The Last Supper attributed to Giapietrino and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio in 1515-20. And, second, a computerised reconstruction of Jesus's likely appearance as informed by British forensic experts and Israeli archaeologists' analysis of evidence including Semite skulls.
Kerning
The modification of the spaces between characters. Sometimes you need to take care, e.g. not to turn ‘Therapist’ into ‘The rapist’ by wide spacing. The substantial identifying word for the headquarters of UNISON on Euston Road, London, is more of a missed opportunity. Here was a chance for a Tory to re-orient it through physical movement into a less united 'U NI S ON' or some such cunning kerning.
Laparoscopy
The cancer journey I’m on currently has a jargon of its own. Next up (as of February 2023) is a laparoscopy – whereby the doctor looks inside the abdomen with a laparoscope, a thin, flexible tube with a light and a small video camera on the end. Normally the laparoscope is inserted through the belly button, which provides the shortest distance from the skin to the inside of the abdominal cavity, and allows the incision inside the button, especially if – like mine – it is concave. The term can be traced to the Greek lapara – flank - though it’s hard to think of the belly button as on the flank.
Lovat
Whether or not you have a passion for tweed, lovat is as
close to love as you can get, at least in a dictionary.
Liger / tigon
Their ranges don’t overlap, so there’s no chance in the wild of lions mating with tigers. Yet it can be brought about in captivity. You might expect a liger (offspring of a lion and tigress) to be rather similar to a tigon (offspring of a tiger and a lioness), but it’s not entirely so. The tigon is smaller than the liger, because female lions are quite a bit smaller than female tigers, even though male lions are of similar size to male tigers. To put it another way, male lions are up to 35% heavier than females, whereas male tigers are only 15% bigger than females.
Lignify
To lignify is to make or become woody. Sean Landers illustrates that wittily through his alter ego character ‘Plank Boy’ – painted to resemble woodgrain, sometimes sculpted in bronze with the same surface effect, but never I think actually made of wood. Here's he caught in what could be the self-faking process...
The illustration is Sean Landers: ‘Plank Boy (Pygmalion)’, 2019 - Oil
on linen, 210 x 150 cm
Lunker
Pass the salt… This – landed with rod and reel 10 miles off the Norwegian island of Soroya in 2013 – is the biggest cod ever caught: 47 kilograms and almost as long as its captor, German fisherman Michael Eisele. That would do 200 normal portions of fish and chips, making it a definite lunker.
Lunker: exceptionally large example of animal species, especially fish
Lunular
An obvious word, with a little thought, but a nice one. And
what could be less like the moon, lunularity apart, than a red hot chilli
pepper? Is that, by the way, a red-hot chilli-pepper, or a red hot-chilli
pepper? Either way, most peppers range from 100 (a sweet bell pepper) to
350,000 Scoville Heat Units, but exceptional levels of up to 3,000,000 SHUs are
possible. A pepper spray for defence purposes is likely to be 2,000,000 SHUs+. Figures aren't available for the moon, but few cheeses have any SHUs at all.
Matriphagy
There are some 3,300 different pseudoscorpions: tiny arachnids – a millimetre, rather than a centimetre, being a typical length - with pincer-like pedipalps that resemble those of scorpions. The mothering instinct seems particularly strong in them, as if insufficient food is available to feed her young, the mother pseudoscorpion will stand still to invite the young to feed… on her. ‘They focus on the joints, where the exoskeleton is thinnest’, according to Joanna Bagniewska’s grisly account in ‘The Modern Bestiary’, ‘and literally suck her dry. When she is just an empty shell, she is cast aside, and the young nymphs, energised by the meal, venture out to hunt cooperatively.’ That is matriphagy.
Mease
Mease is a rare enough word that an image search throws it up primarily as an American surname, mostly borne by long-haired women and bearded men. Here are Kurt, Alma, Philip, Tonya; Dailisa, Paul, Leslie, Edward; Jon, Sarah, Darrell, Julie; Jessica, Quentin, Anna and John Mease. Names apart, a mease is a unit of 500 herrings, though I saw no evidence of fishmongery in what information the net provides on this not-all-that-measly sample – albeit, if they were herrings, the 16 of them would make up only 3% of a mease.
Masseter
Meldrop
‘Meldrop’ doesn’t get in every dictionary, but I like the
1934 Merriam-Webster definition: ‘a pendent drop, as of mucus at the nose, or
of dew’. Yours may well be mucus, mine is always dew. It seems to come from Old
Scots in the 15th century, deriving from ‘mél’, a snaffle bit, leading to ‘mél-dropi’,
the foam from a horse's mouth from mouthing the bit.
Mirlygoes
‘Mirlygoes’ is one of the many rare words of Scots origin used
by Hugh MacDiarmid in the long poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at The Thistle’ (1926). Lines 2,371-2,376 (!) read:
My quarrel wi' th' owre sonsy rose,
That roond about its devotees
A fair fat cast o' aureole throws
That blinds them in its mirlygoes,
To the necessity o' foes.
That takes something like the view that the English bathe so contentedly in a circle of their own light that its dizzying effect stops them seeing that they will always have enemies. Accordingly, I searched for ‘dizzy thistle’ and came up with the ‘Dizzy Thistle Dress’ made by Rodebjer. Absolutely the garment to wear while reading the epic: I guess MacDairmid’s book is in the handbag, though I worried a little that the bag, and hence the book inside it, seems to have been stolen after the first shot of the three.
'Mirlygoes' - dizzyness
Mnemokinesis
It must be the dream of every dictator: if only they could control memories reliably, suppressing the real and inserting the false to achieve a seamless influence beyond the practical scope of cruder weapons such as censorship and repression…
As of 2020, 20% of families were headed by a single mother,
double the rate in 1960. Factors in the rise include including decreased social
stigma associated with divorce, a higher number of mothers leaving unhealthy
relationships, and more opportunities for single mothers to work
remuneratively. But it’s tough, so the mutual support, built-in childcare and
rental sharing advantages of single mothers living together are attractive.
Hence the mommune, a communal arrangement of mothers, has become prevalent
enough to justify a coinage.
Monodonts
The narwhal is generally cited as the obvious example of a one-toothed animal, but I’m not so sure. True, they are known for the single sword-like spiral tusk, a dental development which protrudes from their heads. Yet consider: both males and females are born with two small teeth embedded in their skulls, not one. Only in males does the front left tooth normally grow into a spiral tusk up to 10 feet long, so the description does little for the vast majority of females, though 3% of them do develop a (small) tusk. Moreover, 1 in 500 males develop a second tusk from the other tooth. Monodonts? It seems a superficial claim.
Mononym
A mononym is a name composed of only one word. An individual who is so known is mononymous. That tends to require fame, making mononymity the very opposite of anonymity. Getting known that way is a good sign of career success for musicians in particular, as per such as Adele, Beyoncé, Bono, Cher, Dido, Donovan, Drake, Eminem, Fish, Liberace, Lorde, Lulu, Madonna, Morrissey, Nico, Pink, Rihanna, Sade, Slash and Sting. On the other hand Elvis wasn’t mononymous, even though the one name was plenty, because ‘Presley’ remained in play. In contrast, nothing is added – indeed, confusion could be caused in many cases – if those twenty are expanded to Adele Adkins, Beyoncé Knowles, Paul Hewson, Cherilyn Sarkisian, Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong, Donovan Leitch, Aubrey Drake Graham, Marshall Bruce Mathers III, Derek William Dick, Władziu Valentino Liberace, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie, Madonna Louise Ciccone, Steven Patrick Morrissey, Christa Päffgen, Alecia Moore, Robyn Rihanna Fenty, Helen Folasade Adu, Saul Hudson and Gordon Sumner.
I feel there’s an extra attraction to the monosyllabic
monomym – shall we term it the monomononym? – so my illustration is of the six in
my list who so qualify: Lorde, Cher, Pink, Slash, Fish and Sting. I see I forget Prince and Suggs, and no doubt many more... Anyway, perhaps Cher is the Queen of the Monomononym, as hers is not a stage name but her real name contracted, which makes it harder to achieve unique recognition. She's also, so far as I know, the only one of my twenty to have legally changed her name to her mononym.
Mukbang
From
hallyu, the rise of South Korean
culture in the 21st century, comes the bizarre phenomenon of mukbang - an online broadcast or
uploaded video of a host preparing and - primarily – consuming food, the
associated chomping and slurping noises being a big part of it. The difference from comparable western
programmes is the emphasis on the eating rather than the cooking. I watch
neither, but at least I see the logic of a programme telling you how to make a
meal you would not otherwise have been able to make. Do we need to learn how to
eat? I can’t see why, but the phenomenon has spread worldwide. Anyway, I was
the 17,241,359th – and probably most baffled – viewer of the mukbang posted by
Sulgi, a.k.a. 설기양. Her ASMR MUKBANG, a 25 minute fire spicy noodles party (Cream Carbonara, Cheese, Black bean, ROSE
Tteokbokki) is most notable for how she swallows three boiled eggs by way of
warm-up to guard her stomach against the spiciness to come…
Mumchance
The somewhat archaic ‘mumchance’ indicates a person who has
nothing to say – or at any rate is silent. It’s also the title of this painting
by Aaron Smith, who describes his work as ‘the belle époque on acid’. The
matchingly-bewhiskered American artist collects photographs of Victorian and Edwardian
era men, attracted to their combination of spectacularly bearded faces and
distinguished attire with stiff poses and serious expressions that ‘belie an
existential vulnerability’. According to Smith’s website his work ‘has found
support from a convergence of interrelated subcultures including Neo-Dandyism
and Bear Culture, as well as Beard and Mustache Enthusiasts. The artist shares
a desire to revel in the exaggeration of masculinity's archetypes, mining past
forms of male identity in an attempt to free them of any heteronormative
constraints’. The subject may be dumb, then, but his depiction does say something.
Aaron Smith: ‘Mumchance’, 2013 – oil on panel, 40 x 36
inches
Nath
Hindu tradition dictates that on the wedding night, the bride wears a nose chain – or nath – which is hooked by a chain to either the earring or hair. That brings good fortune by showing respect and devotion to Parvati, considered the Goddess of marriage. Maharashtra women have traditionally tended to wear the most elaborate naths, normally on the left side of the nose. The word hasn’t reached the OED yet, but it does include ‘nathless’, which doesn’t mean ‘lacking a nose ring’ but something similar to ‘nevertheless’.
Nychthemeron
‘Where can we live but days?’ asked Philip Larkin, rather famously.
One answer would be ‘nychthemerons’. Not so quite catchy, I grant, which may be
why we still use the ambiguous ‘day’ to refer to a 24 hour period, when we mean a day and night, say 08.00 on Tuesday to 08.00 on Wednesday.
The photos are the maximal light contrast points of a nychthemeron,
as seen in Singapore, the latter taken during the 15-minute laser show that lights
up the unique ship-like rooftop of the Marina Bay Sands hotel every
evening. The 5-star hotel has 2,500 rooms, a shopping mall with faux-canals and
Italian gondola rides, Singapore’s largest ice-skating rink, two nightclubs, a
host of restaurants, and one of the world’s most expensive casinos. The most
striking feature, though, is what looks like a cruise ship balancing
precariously across the top of the three towers: it’s a 340m long sky park,
holding a 150 m ‘infinity swimming pool’.
Oliprance
Oliprance precedes precipitation? Ostentation's anterior to a descent? It’s hard not to feel pleased with oneself for having so many words on tap, but maybe I should stick to pride, coming before a fall.
An online search will indicate that there are far more images of women looking in mirrors than of men doing the same. And that the women tend to be sitting, the men standing - often while fiddling with ties. The stereotyping implication is that a man might be expected to ask ‘what does this look like?’ but not ‘what do I look like?’. ‘Oliprance’ is pride or vanity, according to the OED.
Omnivert / Ambivert
Echo lived on Mount Kithairon. Zeus was attracted to her, but Hera, his wife and Queen of the Gods, followed him trying to catch them together. Echo would engage Hera in long-winded conversations, enabling Zeus to make his escape. Realising what was going on, Hera cursed Echo to only be able to repeat the last words that another person just said. According to Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses', she then pursued the self-absorbed Narcissus, who fell in love with his own beauty as reflected in a pool and was transformed into a flower. Unable to tell him of her feelings, Echo faded away, so all that was left was her voice repeating the words of passers-by. Echo was popular as a solo subject in the Victorian-Edwardian era: here are the versions of George Frederick Watts (1846), Talbot Hughes (1900), Robert Payton Reid (1906), Alexandre Cabane (1874)and Edward Reginald Frampton (c 1915). For Oreads in bulk, the go-to work is French: William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s titillating ‘Les Oréades’ (1902).
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Oscular
Oscular: pertaining to kissing
Osmoregulation
When we say someone drinks like a fish, what sort of fish do
we have in mind? Saltwater fish do indeed need to drink to survive, but fresh
water fish don’t. In freshwater, the inside of the fish has a higher salt concentration
(1%) than the surrounding environment (0%). Water moves into the fish by
osmosis, passively, through the gills and the skin and the stomach. Fish have
to eliminate all this excess water by producing large volumes of dilute urine.
In saltwater, the environment is saltier (3%), so the fish loses water
passively, and has to drink. The excess salt is excreted primarily in highly
concentrated urine.
That leaves the question of how a salmon manages, given that it lives in both salt and fresh water at different times. As you’d expect, it drinks copiously in the sea, but not at all in rivers. And the urine function varies with the environment. In addition, salmon have specialised gills that enable them to transport both salt against the concentration gradients, pumping salt out of the salmon’s blood into salt water and out of the fresh water into the salmon’s blood – the opposite of what osmosis would otherwise bring about (as that process seeks to equalise the concentrations in different liquids coming together). It’s fair to say, then, that salmon are masters of osmoregulation.
Osmosis: the passage of a liquid through a membrane from a
less concentrated solution to a more concentrated one. Osmoregulation: the
maintenance of constant osmotic pressure in the fluids of an organism by the
control of water and salt concentrations.
Paraph
One of history’s best-known – and most value-generative – signatures is that of Pablo Picasso. The question is: does the underline count as a paraph, or is the term reserved for more elaborate squiggles? The underline itself exploits the absence of a lower-case g,j,p,q or y in Picasso’s name – not a particularly rare feature, though Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Paul Klee - to take three of the 20th century’s other greatest artists - didn’t exploit that shared lexicological characteristic in a comparable way.
Paraph: a flourish after a signature
Pentomino
Alan Partridge may be the only comedian with a word in waiting should he be murdered for real, rather than just dying on the stage. More seriously, though, what are the ethics of shooting partridge, now that foxes are protected? According to the League Against Cruel Sports, over 50m game birds are released annually in the UK, many of them imported from intensive rearing abroad, with no welfare standards applied to how they are raised or transported. And then up to 40% are wounded, rather than killed outright: many are then left to die slowly when they are not retrieved by people or dogs. So my picture shows one of the luckier partridges…
Perdricide: killing partridges, especially for sport. Partridge: one of those words with a plurality of plurals.
Perigee
There’s a curious point of asymmetry in the words associated
with the orbit of satellites. They follow an
elliptical path with the earth not in the exact centre of the orbital pattern. When
a satellite is at its furthest point from the earth, it is at the apogee of
the orbit. When a satellite is at its closest point to the earth, it is at the
perigee of the orbit. ‘Apogee’ is a fairly common word in everyday non-astronomical speech, being the highest development or climax of a phenomenon. ‘Perigee’ is
much rarer, having picked up no general usage to cover a low or primitive
point. I wonder why not?
Anyway, the primary body for observing the contrast is the
moon. In 2021, for example, the moon’s mean distance from earth was 384,400 km. Its
closest perigee was at 356,794 km and its farthest apogee at 406,512 km. That’s
a difference of some 50,000 km. It means that a full moon at perigee-syzygy, to
use the technical term for a ‘supermoon’, will appear roughly 14% larger in
diameter than the average moon. It will also appear some 14% brighter (the
moon's surface luminance remains the same, but because it is closer
to the earth the illuminance increases). Compare with the apogee, and the
differences roughly double.
The top image shows the comparative appearance of the moon from the earth at the points explained in the diagram.
Pinguescence
Plastron
This plastron is on the underside of a turtle. The term ‘plastron’ has also been applied to human body armour.
Plumicorn
Birds and people hear pretty similarly, even though birds don’t
have an external ear structure. Rather, their ear entrances are covered by
auricular coverts, circles of soft loose-webbed feathers. Many owls, you might counter,
do have external ears. However, these are just tufts of feathers: they have no
connection to the skeletal structure of the ear and aren’t used to direct sound
to its opening. Their true purpose is uncertain, but is likely to include camouflage,
courtship, and communication, including to signal aggression to other owls. The
technical term for such tufts is plumicorns (say 'plume-i-corn'), from the Latin for
‘feather-horn’.
Pictured is the Long-Eared Owl (Asio otus), the common name of which is likely to compound any confusion about whether the plumicorns are true ears.
Praeteria
What’s the opposite of nostalgia? You could see that as
looking forward hopefully rather than pining for the past. Perhaps that’s ‘optimism’
or ‘futurism’. But I mean ‘what’s the opposite view of the past?’ To regret it
perhaps, and blame it for what’s gone wrong. But is there a word for that? My
wife and I brainstormed the question using the roots of ‘nostalgia’ as a starting
point. The OED gives that as a 17th century compound of the Greek νόστος (nóstos),
the Homeric term for ‘homecoming’, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning ‘sorrow’: in current usage that has come to stand for a sentimental longing for of a period now gone - implying a more golden than sorrowful longing for the past. To express something like ‘I regret the past’
as an antonym of ‘nostalgia’ might be μετανιώνω για το παρελθόν (metanióno gia
to parelthón), but Latin seems more promising: ‘Paenitet me praeterita’, which might
yield the edited compound: ‘praeteria’, echoing 'nostalgia' a little. So there we have it: ‘Praeteria’, regret
for the past, a potential word I now propose, likely to become increasingly useful as the
effects of the industrial revolution come home to roost…
The image negates a classic of Japanese landscape nostalgia:
Kawase Hasui’s ‘April: Bamboo Forest, Tama River’, 1952.
Peen
The end of a hammer opposite the face is known
as its peen. That often takes a claw shape, useful for levering out
mal-hammered nails. But ball-peen hammers are also common. There is something
of the penile glans about them, suggesting a peenis, perhaps, but is it such a
useful hammer shape? According to
Wikipedia ‘The peening face is useful for
rounding off edges of metal pins and fasteners, such as rivets. The ball
face of the hammer can also be used to make gaskets for mating
surfaces. A suitable gasket material is held over the surface where a
corresponding gasket is desired, and the operator will lightly tap around the
edges of the mating surface to perforate the gasket material’. They don’t sound
like operations I’m likely to carry out soon…
Phage
A bacteriophage, also known informally as a phage is a virus that infects and replicates within bacteria and archaea. They have medical potential as a means of attacking bacteria. In particular, antibiotic-resistant superbugs cause a large number of deaths around the world each year, but effective new antibiotics are thin on the ground - so bacteria-eating phage viruses could be the answer.
Pica
Pica (say PIE-kuh) is a feeding disorder in which someone beyond the exploratory toddler stage feels compelled to eat non-food substances that have no nutritional value, such as paper, soap, paint, hair, stones, crayons, chalk or ice.
Not a joking matter, but these attractive ‘crayon rocks’ might tick two
boxes for some…
Ptarmical
Ptarmical: causing sneezing
Proteose
Here’s the OED… ‘Proteose: a polypeptide produced by a
partial proteolysis’. Hard not to be impressed by an obscure p-word defined by
reference to another two obscure p-words (and one common one). ‘Polypeptide’
being ‘an organic polymer consisting of a large number of amino acid residues
bonded together in a chain’, while ‘Proteolysis’ is the splitting of molecules
by the action of enzynes. So it’s a certain type of water-soluble compound in
chemistry.
More specifically, Proteose
peptone – as illustrated - is a highly
nutritious peptone used in microbiology to cultivate bacteria and fungi
that have high nutritional requirements.
Pyxidium: a seed capsule opening by transverse dehiscense (OED)
Quotity
I think not. Whereas
these seventeen syllables
make up a haiku.
‘Quotity’ is a certain number of individuals etc, a nice contrast to the less specific nature of a quantity. A haiku, at least under western conventions, consists of the inviolable quotity of 17 syllables arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. The image is of the Korean band Seventeen, taken in 2021. It has thirteen members, potentially undermining its status as a quotity equivalent to a haiku. There is an explanation: ‘Seventeen’ stands for ‘13 members + 3 units + 1 team’, representing the 13 individual members from 3 different units (hip-hop, vocal, and performance) who all come together to form the one K-pop group. Still, I'm not sure this Seventeen is a quotity. It may be, of course, that the question refers to itself, not to the band, in which case I'd say that the number of words / syllables / letters in 'Is this a quotity?' is too arbitrary a matter to make it a satisfying example - though it does contain seventeen characters, if we're including the spaces.
Ratite
Flightless birds – or ratites – are a group: penguins
are a separate matter, but kiwis and the former dodo are related to emu and
ostrich, not to other birds of their size. Ostrich eggs are big: typically 1.6
litres, they take around 90 minutes to hard boil and make a more-than-substantial omelette, as above. They’re small, though, up against the eggs of the
Madagascan Aepyornis family of ‘elephant
birds’, which had eggs with up to nine litres of content. One theory for their
extinction by 1800 is that sailors ate the eggs, sealing the birds’ fate even
though the three metre high adults weren’t easy to hunt.
Ravelin / Tenaillon
The jargon of fortresses is
extensive: to cite caponier, casemate, cavalier, citadel, contrescarpe, cordon
and countergard is merely to seize on some ‘c’s. Ravelins are
triangular fortifications located just outside the castle. They’re numbered
1-7 in the diagram of the Castell de Sant Ferran in Figueres, Spain – the
largest bastion fort in Europe, constructed 1753-92, and so extensive it has
names for each ravelin, the highlighted 7 being the Ravelin of Rosario. The
ravelins are in front of the curtain walls (29 in the diagram) and bastions
(9, 11 and 30). The countergards, to return to the ‘c’s above, are 17 and 18. The
outer edges of the ravelin are configured to divide an assault force, and guns
in the ravelin can fire upon the attacking troops as they approach the curtain
wall. The ravelin also impedes besiegers from using their artillery to batter a
breach. True, I was aware of ravelins: the word that led me to them in a random
flick through the OED was the more obscure ‘tenaillon’: a work constructed
on each side of a ravelin to increase its strength, procure additional ground
beyond the ditch, or cover the shoulders of the bastions. And that, I suspect,
is what the Castell de Sant Ferran lacks. Perhaps they were part of the plans,
not all of which were ever built.
Recure
Here’s an illogical word. If ‘cure’ means to make better, shouldn’t ‘recure’ mean to make better again, presumably after a second bout of the same illness? It doesn’t: OED gives it as just a synonym of ‘cure’, derived from ‘recover’ rather than ‘re-cure’. No wonder it’s pretty much re-dundant. Except that ‘Re-Cure’ is an American tribute band, formed in 2014, playing the songs of The Cure, their name given an extra dimension by the existence of that apparently useless word ‘recure’.
The image is not of The Cure’s Robert Smith, but of Re-Cure’s
vocalist, Tim.
Rhinocasus
OK, I made this one up. Rhinotomy is mutilation,
usually amputation, of the nose. It was a means of judicial
punishment throughout the world, particularly for sexual transgressions, but in
the case of adultery often applied only to women. Nasty business. It is to be
distinguished from A rhinectomy, which is the surgical removal of part –
usually – of a nose for more positive, medical, reasons such as getting rid of
cancer. Either way, I’d sooner see it applied to statues, and that is rather
common in ancient examples. Maybe a third word is required for that: 'rhinocasus',
perhaps. That combines ‘rhino’ – pertaining to the nose – with ‘casus’ – Latin
for accident.
Rhyparography
An odd word, as it is defined as both ‘the depiction of
mean, unworthy, or sordid subjects’, and ‘the painting of genre or still-life
pictures’. Even allowing that still life and genre pictures had, in classical
times, lower status than portrait, landscape and especially history painting, that
seems somewhat contradictory. Yet maybe
not: Rembrandt is generally considered the greatest etcher ever, and the
potentially sordid subject of beggars, as well as the somewhat minor subject of
a shell, are comparably invested with dignity and importance here in two of his
finest prints.
‘The Shell’, 1650, is the only still life among Rembrandt van Rijn’s 300 etchings. There are many beggars, though, often cast in biblical roles. Of ‘Beggar Seated on a Bank’, 1630, Princeton University’s catalogue says: ‘In this free and wiry etching, Rembrandt lends his own features to a seated vagabond with ragged cloak and scraggly beard, who stretches out his hand to beg as he snarls at us. Unique among Rembrandt’s many exercises in role-playing, this self-identification with the down-and-out has been recently interpreted as a humorous response to the challenge of being a struggling artist who is reduced to begging for recognition from wealthy patrons.’
Rhytiphilia
The sexual parts must be the most likely candidates for agastopia, the fascination for a particular part of the human body. Foot fetishism - podophilia - is said to be the most common form of it for otherwise non-sexual body parts. I’m guessing that the glabella (qv) is among the least frequently fetishised parts. That said, the somewhat broader rhytiphilia is a thing: taking a particular interest in the patterns of facial wrinkles. I wonder whether WH Auden’s famous ‘wedding cake left out in the rain’ look appeals to rhytiphiliacs. David Hockney’s line on him was: ‘if that's his face, imagine his scrotum!’ As for why Auden developed such a geological visage by his fifties, Richard Davenport-Hines explains, in his biography, that the poet (1907-73) suffered from Touraine-Solente-Gole syndrome ‘in which the skin of the forehead, face, scalp, hands and feet becomes thick and furrowed and peripheral periostitis in the bones reduces the patient's capacity for activity. There was no therapy for the syndrome, which does not affect either life expectancy or mental status, but which accounted for Auden's striking appearance of grave, lined melancholy.’
Riggy
There’s no shortage of definitions for ‘rig’ – the OED
offers ten, including the equipage on a horse-drawn vehicle – but not the more
specialised horse meaning, which is the only one which seems to lead to
regular adjectival use, at least among equestrians. A gelding is a castrated
stallion, which ideally means both testicles are removed. Most strictly defined,
a rig is a stallion which is castrated, but is found – as some 10-15% are - to
be a cryptorchid, meaning one of his testes has failed to drop into the scrotum.
The male hormone testosterone is produced by the testicles, whether they are in
their normal position or lurking somewhere inside the horse’s body. Unless the
internal testicle can be found and removed by a cryptorchidectomy, rigs are
likely to continue to display masculine behavioural characteristics, such as
trying to cover in-season mares, herd mares, fight with other geldings or
behave aggressively in general. Yet some fully castrated geldings still behave
like stallions even after their supply of testosterone abates, likely due to brain changes occurring much earlier in their development: they are said to
be ‘riggy’.
I didn’t land on the word ‘riggy’ in a dictionary: my horse-owning wife used it… It seems to me it might usefully be extended to cover the many human cases of people reverting to prior behaviour after they have taken action – promises, training, rehab etc – intended to take them beyond it.
Riparian
‘Riparian’ isn’t an everyday word in the same way as
‘terrestrial’ ‘aerial’ or ‘aquatic’. That last can be split between ‘marine’,
‘riverine’ and ‘lacustrian’, the terms for river and lake dwellers being seen
fairly rarely, too. Likewise ‘fossorial’ – living underground, though there you
have ‘subterranean’ as well.
Riparian – living in the fringe habitats bordering freshwater ecosystems: the otter is the archetypal riparian. That’s the North American River Otter (Lontra Canadensis).
Roscid
It’s the particular richness of English that there are
multiple words for many things - typically from Latin and Anglo Saxon roots.
There’s nothing wrong with the word ‘dewy’ but it’s nice that there is an
obscure alternative: ‘roscid’. Whether you can visually distinguish a
dewed-upon leaf from a rained-upon leaf is another matter but either way I like
this kind of image – in this case, a roscid picture of my own.
One might also ask: is there an equivalent word - more cause-specific then 'wet' - for 'rained-upon'? Perhaps English isn't always so rich...
Scapulimancy
Scapulimancy strikes me as implausible, even if you’re forecasting the prices or health of cattle.
In Ancient China oracle bones were used for divination: if an ox scapula was used, that was ‘scapulimancy’. Questions were carved onto the bone using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied with a metal rod until the bone or shell cracked: the diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks to answer the questions, and add the prognostication to what was written on the bone.
Scrod
Why call a young cod a codling when the tastier word ‘scrod’ is available?
Scrod: a small cod or haddock. In the wholesale fish business, scrod is the smallest weight category of the major whitefish.
Sible
I mistyped ‘single’ in a Gmail and was surprised to see that ‘sible’ wasn’t flagged as a spelling error – as I would have expected even if I’d meant ‘sibyl’ (a woman of antiquity reputed to possess powers of prophecy). So what does it mean? It doesn’t make the OED, and a search on Google itself comes up with two interesting but unpersuasive reasons to add it to future editions: an acronym for ‘Sheffield Institute of Biotechnological Law and Ethics’ or a slangy abbreviation of ‘sex bible’, as used to select the position of the day, for example. A visual search yields images of Sible Heddingham, a village in Essex with a population of 4,000. It looks a nice enough place, and includes the striking building illustrated. So I think I’ll take it that Sible Heddingham is the reason that Google’s mail service accepts the word.
Slee
This may be a chance to make art: the nematic phases of liquid crystal – in which the molecules are oriented in parallel but not arranged in well-defined planes – could be rendered in a crystalline liquid to make an abstract painting that enacts its molecular process. Or one could use a smetic patterning: 'smetic' denotes a state of a liquid crystal in which the molecules are oriented in parallel and arranged in well-defined planes.
Note: this is Figure 1 from the 2021 paper ‘Meta-stable nematic pre-ordering in smectic liquid crystalline phase transitions’ by Nasser Mohieddin Abukhdeir and Alejandro D. Rey, Department of Chemical Engineering, McGill University, Montreal. It shows ‘a schematic of a growing liquid crystalline front summarizing the phenomena of interest: nematic (orientational) and smectic-A (lamellar) liquid crystalline ordering and interfacial splitting. The orientationally/translationally-order smectic-A mesophase is on the left (blue), orientationally-ordered nematic mesophase is in the center (green), and the isotropic liquid (no orientational or translational order) is on the right (red).’
Smirr
The Inuit famously – if, it is sometimes said, mythically – have 50 words for snow. Climatic logic would suggest that the British should have 50 words for rain. And maybe we have… Consider ‘bange’ (long-term hovering dampness), ‘clarty’ (really wet), ‘dibble’ (slow droplets), ‘dreich’ (gloomy and wet), ‘dimpsey’ (low cloud and fine rain), ‘letty’ (enough to make outdoor work difficult) and ‘plothering’ (heavy rain). Another nice one is ‘smirr’ (or ‘smir’ or ‘smur’) – for the light end of drizzle. And it has a literary connection via a well-known Scots dialect poem. Here’s a verse incorporating the eponymous refrain of George Campbell Hay’s ‘The Smoky Smirr o Rain’ (1948):
The hills aroond war silent wi the mist alang the
braes.
The woods war derk an’ quiet wi dewy, glintin’
sprays.
The thrushes didna raise for me, as I gaed by
alane,
but a wee, wae cheep at passin’ in the smoky smirr
o rain.
Why does rain fall in less-than-fully-formed drops? Water droplets in clouds initially form on microscopic airborne particles, or aerosols. Updrafts are plumes of warm air rising from the solar-heated Earth. As the droplets float within clouds, they continue to grow until the updrafts can't hold them up any longer. If the updrafts are weak, droplets fall out of the clouds as drizzle, before they have the opportunity to grow into full-sized raindrops. This, incidentally, helps explain the preponderance of smirr over the ocean, where updrafts are weaker.
Snotter
Is this mere snotter? Or doesn't it matter that I’d never heard of a simple word with five meanings?
Probably not, as there’s not a lot more to say…
Snotter: something of no importance / a length of rope with an eye spliced in each end / a fitting which holds the heel of a sprit close to the mast / to breathe heavily / to snivel
Solifluction
If I’d done A-level Geography, I guess this would have been routine – but I didn’t. Solifluction is the gradual movement of soil down a slope due to freeze-thaw cycles. It's a common process in cold regions, like the Arctic and Alps, where it contributes to sediment transport. It’s through solifluction that slow-moving arctic soils form patterns that, from a distance, resemble those found in viscous fluids, where competition between viscous and cohesive forces drives a suite of common instabilities in thin films. Why so? The downhill flow, rather than showing a broad sheet of evenly sliding material, instead forms finger-like ‘lobes’ of soil reaching out ahead of the main sheet as it moves, due to competition between gravity and cohesion or the 'stickiness' of soil grains . According to scientists ‘periodically frozen soil—a temporally evolving mixture of granular material, fluid, and ice—is one of the most complex natural materials found on planetary surfaces…These patterns form due to a combination of frost heave, in which segregation ice growth lofts soil upward, and gelifluction, a slow flow-like relaxation of partially saturated soil once it thaws in the summer… The study of this effect is especially important as we measure landscape response to climate change and aim to understand the storage and release of permafrost carbon in arctic landscapes. As we see permafrost thaw across the arctic, we will need to be able to predict and mitigate arctic slope instabilities.’
Rachel C. Glade et al, Arctic soil patterns analogous to fluid instabilities, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021) utilises quantitative connections with fluid and granular mechanics to better understand solifluction processes and patterns.
Spork
It’s pretty obvious what this is, and easy to conclude that ‘spork’
would be a good term for it - ‘foroon’ just wouldn’t have the same immediacy.
So the only real question when this implement arrived with my salad was: is ‘spork’
already a word? And it seems so: Merriam-Webster, for example, gives ‘a
multipurpose eating utensil that combines the bowl of a spoon with the tines of
a fork’. There seem to be two types, though: those with tines on the bowl, and
those with bowl and tines at opposite ends, as here. Perhaps, to improve
referential precision, one of the options should take on the faroon name after
all…
Soffit
I want to say that soffits are that part of a house’s roof in the term guidance above which I could not previously have named. But actually they're not really separate: both soffits and fascia are considered a part of the siding and installed by a siding contractor. Anyway, the point of the soffit is to allow airflow into the rafters and keep moisture away, so reducing the chance of mould, while also keeping pests out of the rafters. Having said which - and maybe this is a bungalow matter - our own roof (below) seems to be ‘all soffit and no fascia’, or at least, the fascia are pretty fully covered by the gutters, the hosting of which is, prima facie, the prime fascia function.
Speluncar
‘Speluncar (adjective)
- from the Latin spelunca,
cave: of, pertaining to, or resembling a cave; of the nature of a cave’ – OED.
Succiduous
Is the most succidious image ever? Adam and Eve stand
beneath a tree of almost ridiculously ripe apples, the only question being
whether they will fall before the fruit does. Whether this is an
appropriate moral myth is another matter. As John Gray has asked: ‘Why would a
benign God deny any knowledge of good and evil to the creatures it had created and
then, when they acquired such knowledge, condemn them to a life of misery? If
this God was omniscient, it knew in advance that they would breach the
prohibition. The first humans, on the other hand, were too innocent to
understand the punishment that God threatened; they knew nothing of death or
labour, by which they would be cursed when they were expelled from the garden.
A God that devised and enacted such a cruel drama would be a capricious tyrant,
wreaking senseless suffering on the world it had created.’ It doesn’t amount to
a justification, but I like Martin Luther’s rather surprising 16th century answer
to the question of why Adam took and ate the fruit (as cited in Stephen
Greenblatt’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve’, 2017): ‘He could scarcely
have put it into words, but if compelled, he might have said: an eternity in
this condition is unendurable. I hate the contemplation of the One who made me.
I hate the overwhelming debt of gratitude. I hate God.’
Succiduous: ready to
fall. This is the Courtauld’s ‘Adam and Eve’, 1526, by Lucas Cranach the Elder,
one of 50 versions of the subject made by Cranach and his workshop. As the
gallery explains: ‘Having bitten the fruit, Eve hands it to Adam. Although
Lucas Cranach has represented him hesitant and seemingly bewildered, Adam will
soon also taste it and the couple will be banished in punishment. Cranach’s
carefully observed rendering of the peaceful animals creates a sense of
serenity, soon to be lost. The placid lion and the lamb, on either side of the
tree, will become natural enemies… However, the theme of redemption is also
included. The vine, laden with grapes and spiralling up the tree, counters the
serpent above. Wine is a traditional symbol of the blood shed by Christ, who
will absolve humanity with his Crucifixion.’ John Gray was writing in the New
Statesman, Sept 2017.
Sudoral
Sweat has no odour, provided you don’t allow it to come into
contact with your skin, when it will interact with bacteria. Therein lies the problem: how to eliminate the bacteria or else deflect the sweat - produced by your
three million-or-so sweat glands - away from the skin? Perhaps antiperspirant is
a simpler solution.
Sudoral: of or relating to sweat.
Tamandua
The tamandua is a semi-arboreal, nocturnal South American
anteater, partial to a few thousand ants or termites daily. They carry a
defence spray four times stronger than a skunk’s. They have no teeth, relying
instead on a powerful gizzard – a specialised stomach constructed of thick
muscular walls for grinding up food. So they’re not uninteresting, but mostly I’m
struck by how cute they are, considering they don’t make any appearances in
children’s books, so far as I’ve seen. Tammy the Tamandua will be centre stage if
I ever get around to writing for the pre-school years.
The genus Tamandua has two species: the southern tamandua (T. tetradactyla) and the northern tamandua (T. mexicana). Tammy, as illustrated, will be a southern tamandua.
Tchick
A verb so onomatopoeic its primary meaning in the OED is ‘to make a sound by pressing part of the tongue against the palate and withdrawing it with suction’, though such clucking is also ‘a command to urge on a horse’. Here’s the ultimate romantic horse-urging scenario: a bride riding a handsome grey along the beach (courtesy of Matthew Rycraft Wedding Photography: I’m sure my wife would have fancied such a bridal shot had the opportunity arisen).
Theorbo
The visually striking theorbo is a lute with an extended neck (on which bass
strings additional to a conventional lute are added) and a second pegbox (enabling
it to be tuned by turning the pegs). Not the easiest instrument to take on the Underground, its repertoire comes primarily from the Baroque (c. 1600–1750), either to play basso continuo accompaniment parts or as a solo
instrument.
Theophany
This alluring painting, which seems to deal in a language just
out of reach, is ‘Theophany’, 2023, from Richard Kenton Webb’s ‘Manifesto of
Painting’ series. Given that ‘theophany’
is ‘a visible manifestation to humankind of God’, it could
be that what look a little like streams of rain in this constructed landscape are
more in the way of manna or something equally miraculous. The striking colour
scheme can be read according to Kenton’s personal ‘grammar of colour’,
according to which ‘Yellow is about thought’, and ‘Green is about
wisdom and teaching a philosophy of painting’. Perhaps what comes from above is, in this case, the creative impulse.
Thigmotropic
This couple certainly look to be on the engaged side of 'thigmotropism': the movement of an organism in response to a stimulus, in particular the habit of turning towards or away from a physical contact.
Thurification
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I remember… Forty years ago you could walk into the office of a manager who smoked and hardly see for the thurification, not to mention the odour. I didn’t much mind, but I suppose I would now.
Thurification: to perfume by burning, most typically a shrine via a censer, but why not a quotidian room with smoke, in the days when that was allowed?
Tiddlypush
As ‘Thingummy’ is to objects, so the somewhat improbable ‘Tiddlypush’ is for people: a word
substituted for the name of a person the speaker doesn’t know or has forgotten.
Tierce
Heraldry
is a historic discipline with a rich vocabulary all of its own. The
illustration shows the formations ‘tierced per pairle’, ‘tierced per pairle
reversed’, ‘‘tierced per pale’ and ‘tierced per fesse’ in gules, argent and
azure.
Tiswas
On the one hand ‘tiswas’ is a state of anxiety, confusion or
excitement, traceable to the 1930’s: the OED suggests that the word is a fanciful
enlargement of ‘Tizz’. On the other hand, Tiswas was an ITV-produced
British children’s TV series of 308 episodes running on Saturdays during 1974-82,
the content of which might well leave participants ‘all of a tiswas’. Yet the
title was said to be an acronym of ‘Today Is Saturday: Watch And Smile’. Coincidence?
I suspect the acronym was tailored to fit the word.
TV's Tiswas saw the emergence of soon-to-be-well-known figures, such
as Lenny Henry, Chris Tarrant and Jim Davidson. Popular features tended to be messy,
stemming from the visits of the ‘Phantom Flan Flinger’ and the confinement of
the child audience in a cage, where they were periodically doused in water. The
photo shows ‘The Four Bucketeers’ - Chris Tarrant, Sally James, Bob Carolgees
and John Gorman - in wetting action.
Tittynope
Tittynope: a small quantity of anything remaining. On a plate, I’d say, not quite enough to count as ‘left-overs’. The bonus image goes beyond the plate to show the - probably unhealthily fatty - tittynopes on card resulting from consumption of Pret a Manger's 'Classic Cheese Toastie' ('mature cheddar cheese, mozzarella & Italian cheese with spring onions and a dollop of our tangy English mustard mayo').
Trepid
A rather neatly unusual word, in that its negation - 'intrepid' - is very common, as is the noun form ‘trepidation’, but I’ve never seen the root word used: ‘trepid’ - fearful or apprehensive. Put it into an image search, though, and the top twenty results are all of staircases. Are people more frightened of falling down stairs than of the many other traumas that might afflict them? No, it turns out that ‘trepid’ is the Estonian for ‘stairs’. Those results come from Estonian companies who make rather attractive wooden flights, perfect for a tumble.
Triskelion / Triskeles
/ Vexillology
Two flags of islands feature a triskelion, or triskeles, of three bent legs joined together at a central point. It derives from the triple spiral used by many ancient civilisations, the swastika being another form. The term comes from its Ancient Greek origins - 'triskelḗs' means ‘three-legged’. The association with Sicily goes back to the 4th century: the flag combines it with the head of Medusa and three wheat ears, representing the fertility of the land. The triskeles is said to represent the three capes of the island - Pelorus, Pachynus and Lilybæum - and the colours the regions of Palermo (red) and Corleone (yellow). The Isle of Man’s triskeles became the local flag in 1313, but it was standardised only in 1966 - armoured but sparser, and with curiously similar colouring. It’s worth flagging up in passing, to make another triple, that ‘vexillology’ is the study of flags.
With slight artistic license, I have edited the Manx flag into the Sicilian shape.
Tsavorite
Tsavorite is a variety of the garnet group species grossular, a calcium-aluminium garnet with the formula Ca3Al2(SiO4)3.That’s named after the gooseberry, botanically grossularia, as several types have a green coloration, provided in tsavolite by trace amounts of vanadium or chromium.
Tuzzy-muzzy
Ubiety
The condition of being in a definite place. One might
suggest that Roger Federer enjoyed the ubiety when on Wimbledon’s Centre Court,
having won a record eight singles titles there (in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
and 2017). The image is from the last of those.
Ubiquarian
Nor is that the only interesting variant on the Latin roots of ubi (place) and ubique (everywhere). There's also ubriction (the condition of being in a certain place), ubicity (whereabouts), Ubiquitism (the doctrine of the omnipresence of Christ's body) and...
Ubiquious
It’s hardly here, there and everywhere - it’s not even a
common spelling mistake. Yet ‘ubiquious’ is listed by the OED as a valid alternate
spelling of the more ubiquitous ‘ubiquitous’.
That,
as Beatles fanatics will presumably know, is the 1967 Portuguese issue on Parlophone of the 7” Vinyl, 7" 45 RPM EP in Mono.
The love song, written by Paul in 1965 with Jane Asher in mind, was
cited by Lennon in 1980 as his favourite by McCartney.
Not so many abbreviations are honoured in the Oxford English Dictionary, but both ‘ump’ and ‘umps’ are listed as proper words for an umpire, especially in baseball. That leaves two questions… Why don’t cricketers ever refer to ‘the ump’, the more so when ‘ref’ (also in the OED) is a frequent abbreviation for the referee in British football parlance? And when a decision goes against them, are baseball players said to get the ‘ump with the ump’? Actually a third question now occurs to me: why do some sports have umps, and other refs? What’s the diff?
Ultracrepidarian
For some reason – perhaps I look a bit too ‘normal’, appearances
can be deceptive – wherever I go in the world I tend to be asked for directions.
Surprisingly often, the answer is as simple as ‘you’re there already’ or ‘the
railway station is that way’, but when you don’t know, there is the slight
temptation to look good and earn gratitude by making something up: after all,
there’s no come-back and you might be right anyway. That would be the
ultracrepidarian approach in one of its purer but less common settings.
Ultracrepidarian: a person
who offers opinions that extend beyond their knowledge.
Uranophobia
Does this picture scare you? There are so many obscure phobias we ought to have one in this list... Uranophobia is the fear of Heaven, derived from the Greek for heaven, Uranos. That would seem on the face of it to be one of the least rational phobias, right up there with fear of pleasure (hedonophobia) or happiness (cherophobia) – though I suppose anything is worrying if you have phobophobia (fear of phobias). Stigiophobia (fear of Hell) seems much more on point – sufficiently so that I’m glad I don’t believe in the afterlife either way.
Vamplate
One of those things one would have suspected there
was a word for had one thought about it, and another illustration of just how much
dictionary content can be traced to military history – see below and also 'aventail', 'guisarme' and 'tierce'. Could be handy for metaphorical use, were anyone going to understand you.
Vamplate: conical hand defence affixed to a lance. This doubly-depicted 16th century Italian steel example is in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. It's part of an unusually large armour garniture for the tilt - a tournament fought on horseback between two opponents armed with lances and separated by a lengthwise barrier. The full set includes helmet and vambraces (arm defences), buffe (chin defence), second breastplate, manifer (reinforced left gauntlet), trellised targe (shield), reinforce covering the left half of the torso and left shoulder (mezzo sovrapetto) and a larger elbow defense (soprabracciale). The decoration consisting of etched bands containing trophies of arms and musical instruments was a popular design at the time.
Vandyke
‘Vandyke’ is available as either a noun, describing the type of beard-moustache hybrid typically seen in paintings by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), or as a verb, meaning to take a zig-zag course consistent with the ins and outs of such elaborate facial hair. As such, it is surely the ideal name for a Belgian detective, who wears a Vandyke beard - both a moustache and a goatee with all hair on the cheeks shaved - and follows convoluted cases wherever they take him as he wends his way to a solution. There is, in contrast, no link between the name ‘Hercule Poirot’, his spectacular waxed moustache and his manner of solving crimes.
In his ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower’ (1633), van Dyck points to himself while holding up for display the gold chain recently presented to him by his patron, Charles I; with the other he gestures toward a large sunflower: Van Dyck represents himself as the ideal courtier, whose devotion to his monarch is likened to the flower’s natural inclination to follow the path of the sun… There have been different Anglicised spellings of Antoon van Dyck over the years, and it’s the one with an ‘e’ which has entered the lexicon.Varanian
Monitor lizards have interesting qualities, perhaps most
evident in the biggest of them, the komodo dragon. They never blink, of course; can reproduce asexually; and can eat 80% of their body weight in one sitting.
What distinguishes them most, though, is a fast metabolism and high aerobic
capacity, more like the typical mammal than the typical reptile. That explains
their muscularity, which also enables them to run at 12 mph for surprising
distances, given their somewhat lumbering build.
Varanian: characteristic of monitor lizards, the genus Varanidae
Wabbit
There’s nothing leporine about this word, a Scots term for ‘exhausted or somewhat unwell’. But that’s a tempting Loony Tunes picture…
Wamus
She’s wearing one: a belted jacket in cardigan-style. Will the wamus warm us, too?
Warding
Whelve
Whelve is an interesting word since its old English origins have it meaning to turn (as a dish or vessel) upside down usually to cover something, and more modern definitions have it meaning to bury deeply or hide something. The meanings relate to each other, since both end up hiding something.
The illustration is
from the 1820 book of children’s verses ‘The World turned upside down’, printed
in York by James Kendrew:
The world turn'd upside down;
A tree and castle in the air,
A man walk on his crown.'
This is the frontispiece: most of the illustrations show animals engaging in human activities.
Warrigal
What was I saying, that warrigals couldn’t drag me away? Well, maybe these could, provided that they moved on from each other.
‘Warrigal’ is an Australian term for a wild or untamed horse.
Yarborough
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This a bridge term: a thirteen card hand with no card higher than nine. Not so helpful to receive, but how likely is that? The numbers are impressive, driven by the starting point in the apparently straightforward business arranging a single deck of 52 cards. The factorial of 52, written as ‘52!, comes from starting with all the cards in one pile, randomly select one cards to be in position 1, one of the remaining 51 to be in position 2 and so on. Hence, the possible arrangements are 52 * 51 * 50 * ... * 3 * 2 * 1. That comes out at 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 - a big enough number that, if you counted it out at one second intervals, it would take you some three billion years. Matters get more manageable if restricted to possible hands of bridge (i.e. combinations of 13 cards from the 52 card pack). The formula for that is 52! / 3! (52-13) ! that leads to 635,013,559,600 possible hands, of which 347,373,600 are yarboroughs. So your chances of a yarborough are 635,013,559,600 / 347,373,600, or one in 1,828. It won’t happen too often, but I guess a regular player is likely to get a yarborough at some point. Not so some possibilities. There are, to take the contrasting example, only four possible hands with the maximum of 37 points (the four aces, four kings, four queens and one of the four jacks). So the chance getting one is 635,013,559,600 / 4, or 1 in 158,753,389,900. Don’t bet on it!
There is also a village of Yarborough in Lincolnshire. I haven’t been there, but imagine that the roads are all very short, no house being numbered higher than nine.
Yelm
Yelm: a bundle of combed straw for thatching. There are
some 35,000 thatched properties in England, just 0.15% of the 25m dwellings. So
having one makes you agreeably distinctive, and perhaps there should be more. Fire is no more likely than with
other roofs if the right care is taken. That aside there are pro and cons:
Pro: Water reed, the most durable thatch, has a lifespan of 55 to 65 years; thatch is naturally insulating, so it will keep your house cool in summer and warm in winter; thatch is environmentally-friendly and sustainable; it can be shaped into soft forms not likely to be available in other roofing materials: it is light and doesn’t need the heavy support structures that other roofing materials require, so reducing building costs.
Con: installing thatch is labour intensive, and so expensive; it needs an annual professional inspection to check its condition; regular maintenance is essential, else leaks may occur; safety precautions are required - you need to cut down overhanging branches so that the thatch doesn’t hold onto moisture, install a lightning rod to disperse lightning strikes and a spark resistor for your chimney, and apply treatments to deter pests.
Yuzu
How pleasant to be gifted a word, as when a friend supplied a jar from her own production of yuzu marmalade. That led me to check on the origin of the fruit. The notably aromatic yuzu (Citrus junos) is believed to have originated in central China as a hybrid of the mangshanyeju subspecies of mandarin orange (left above) and the ichang papeda (right above). Though rarely eaten as a fruit, yuzu is a common ingredient in Japanese cuisine, where the aromatic zest and the juice are used much in the same way that lemons are used elsewhere. And it proves perfect for marmalade.
I think of marmalade as the archetypal breakfast item, although it had a long
history before its 19th century adoption in Scotland - and then the rest of
Britain - as a breakfast spread. One could add, moreover, that the classic marmalade
– essentially a citrus jelly with peel retained – seems to be dropping out of
fashion: one rarely sees it in Europe, but even here it isn’t rare these days to
find only non-citrus jams offered to spread on the toast in hotel breakfast
buffets.
Zabra
A zabra is not necessarily a typo (or ‘mis-stripe-o’!?): for
‘zebra’: it may refer genuinely to a midsized Iberian sailing vessel used to
carry goods by sea in the 13th-16th centuries. My image, though it is a boat, is a visual
typo of sorts, as it is a Zebra. Not Equus
quagga , but a boat of that
name, created by Parisian industrial designer and engineer Dimitri Bez. Its
main selling points are the minimalist style and an electric motor, making it environmentally friendly
compared with other powered boats, and attractively quiet. I guess the zabra was also quiet and
non-polluting, so perhaps we haven’t made so much progress.
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