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 of the world’s oxygen supplies. What, the fucoid? Yes, we should be
grateful...
Fucoid – having the qualities of seaweed
Gabion
If dumbbells aren’t quite enough for you, allow me to recommend a
gabion basket. Perhaps you could fill one with dumbbells, though I can find no photographic
evidence that anyone has done that yet.
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’.
Gaof
In mining, a ‘goaf’ is the space left behind in a mine
after mineral extraction, or the loose debris left in those old workings. The detection
and correct handling of goafs is a complex matter, and the diagram comes from a
paper considering how best to tackle them. The painting is what introduced me
to the word: ‘Goaf Works I’, 2024, by Francesca Simon, whose work infects
geometric abstraction with echoes of the landscape and the manmade additions to
it – largely inspired her daily walks on the North Yorkshire Moors.
Gelastic
Some words carry
baggage… It seems logical to have a word to mean ‘provoking or pertaining to laughter’,
but none of the derivatives of ‘laugh’ itself quite seem to fit: ‘laughsome’ is
close, but archaic. ‘Comedic’ will work in some contexts, but really refers to
what is likely to cause laughter, rather than directly to the laughter itself.
‘Risible’ can mean ‘associated with laughter’, hence the ‘risible muscles’ in
the mouth – but it is mainly used with negative connotations equivalent to
‘ludicrous’ or ‘laughable’, and that gets in the way. All in all, then,
‘gelastic’ could be a handy word. The problem is that it seems to be used
primarily in the context of a ‘gelastic seizure’, causing
uncontrolled laughing or giggling even in the absence of joy or happiness. Hardly
a laughing matter, the more so as the main underlying adult causes are a tumour
near the hypothalamus or a lesion in the frontal or parietal lobes. In children it’s more likely to be due to over-secretion of
gonadotropin-releasing and luteinizing hormones, often associated with growth
problems and emotional issues.
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
It makes sense that, the more you worry about the lines between and over your eyes, the more likely they are to be prominent. That makes the glabella the site of the rather poignant injustice that those who care least about a problem are the least likely to be afflicted by it, at least insofar as ageing is their worry.
Glabella — the flat area of bone between the eyebrows - a term I can find used only in the cosmetic surgery industry.
Griffonage
There’s a distinction to me made between griffonage – illegible
handwriting in the manner of the classic doctor’s prescription – and asemic
writing, which takes on the form of writing but never sets out to have any semantic
content. The way to treat the former, I suggest, is to treat it as the latter:
relax into its aesthetic properties and pragmatic effects without allowing the lack of meaning to become
a frustration.
Guisarme
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…
Gyrus / Sulcus
The brain’s outer surface is full
of folds and grooves that give it a wrinkled appearance. These folds aren’t
random. They’re made up of gyri (ridges) and sulci (grooves), and
they play a crucial role in how our brains are organized and function. This
pattern of folds increases the brain’s surface area, packing in more neurons
without increasing the brain’s size. The more surface area, the greater the
brain’s ability to process complex information. And the folding of the brain
allows a large cortex to fit into the limited space of the skull. This is vital
for higher-level functions like reasoning, memory, and language. Understanding
the structures of the gyri and sulci helps map out different brain regions and
link them to specific functions like movement, memory, and language. That’s a
whole complex subject into which one could dive, but I actually came across the
word ‘sulcus’ metaphorically. Georgina
Starr’s bizarrely compelling book ‘The Discreet Dash’ describes its lead
character leaning back on the ‘soft sulcus of her bed’. That doesn’t sound to
me quite how a bed is likely to look, but let’s pass that by, too.
The images are of the brain, a giant silk moth, and the first time I
came across the writing in ‘The Discreet Dash’ - through a staged performance
of the work in progress at the Frieze art fair in 2017. Silk moths play a large
part in the novel, in particular an invented species – I believe – from the
family Saturniidae, which contains the giant silk moths. Starr’s ‘Oraxxia
Saturniid’ seems to merge a moth with a spider character from the gaming world. It is also, or was thought to be, extinct. Anyway, it turns out that ingesting the eggs can provide hallucinogenic experiences triggering inter-species communication. There are, incidentally, far more moths than you might suppose in the silk moth
family: more than 12,000 in the Bombycoidea superfamily of Lepidoptera,
of which 2,300 are in the Saturniidae. So maybe Oraxxia really is one of them,
but hard to track down. As for the giant silk moths themselves, they are
notable for having no tongue and no digestive tract: the adults cannot eat,
they just mate and then die within a few days once their energy runs out. No
existentialist agonising over purpose for them! Is that enough of my most
obscurely convoluted set of word connections?
Hackling
Hackles are raised often enough – normally metaphorically,
rather than by literal reference to the hairs or feathers that erect along an
animal’s back when it is angry or alarmed. But what is ‘hackling’? That brings
us into the vocabulary of flax. The fibres you need for making linen are located
between the skin and the inner woody core – the shive - of the flax stems. Hackling is the act of combing flax with a
hackle, of taking unretted flax, freshly broken and scutched, and turning it
into fine fibre ready to spin. You toss the ends of the flax onto the hackle
and draw it through.
The illustrations are of a rooster with its hackles up - can that be termed 'hackling'? - and of the act of hackling flax.
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 name ‘Holloway’ is fairly common: the 501st most
frequent in the UK, with 13,000 bearing it currently (for context: Smith = 550,000,
Jones = 425,000) and I’d always assumed that the well-known Holloway Road in
Islington was named after a local dignitary. In fact, it’s the other way
around: a ‘holloway’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘hola weg’, meaning sunken
road (or ‘hollow way’), its profile lowered by perpetual passage - erosion by
human feet, horses, cartwheels and cattle driven alongside, combined with water
then flowing through. Holloway Road, now thoroughly tamed, was once the main drovers’ route from the
north to Smithfield market. The name originates from those living near such timeworn
tracks.
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 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
Intercalation in timekeeping is the insertion of
a leap day, week, or month into some calendar years to make
the calendar follow the seasons or moon phases. So can you explain in full the rule currently used to
make up for the solar year having 365.24 days, rather than the 365 whole days required by a calendar year? Yes, under the Gregorian calendar - adopted by
Britain in 175 CE - this is adjusted for by adding a leap day (or ‘intercalary
day’) every four years. But 1900 wasn’t a leap year, and nor will 2100 be. Why so?
Years divisible by 100 but not by 400 are exempted in order to improve accuracy.
Thus, only one in four ‘century years’ are leap years, 2000 being somewhat
unusual in that it was one. I guess if it hadn't been, I'd already have been aware of that intercalatory detail.
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 freezes 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 'UN IS ON' or some such cunning kerning.
Knoppers
I recently came
across the word ‘knoppers’ twice – and I didn’t know it either time!
First up a
knopper is an oak gall, as I learned in the context of a black ink made from
knoppers having had a long art history. Those galls are distortions to acorns,
caused by the tiny (2-3mm) gall wasp Andricus
quercuscalicis, which lays its eggs in the developing acorns of oak trees. The
gall looks like a crumpled or ridged cap on the acorn, prevents the acorn from
maturing properly. That impacts on the supply of acorns for wildlife
consumption, but that impact is not severe, and it doesn’t threaten the health
of the trees involved (the gall wasp has a complex life cycle involving two species:
one generation develops on pedunculate oak acorns, while the alternate
generation develops on the catkins of Turkey oaks.
The English word ‘knopper’ derives from the German 'Knoppe', meaning ‘a knob’
or ‘a swelling’. That relates to my second encounter, in a
supermarket. 'Knoppers’ is a confectionary snack, launched in Germany in 1983
by August Storck, and now becoming popular in the UK. It consists of crisp
baked wafers, creamy milk filling, hazelnut crème, and crunchy roasted hazelnut
pieces. It isn’t especially knob-like, so the thinking behind the brand name
remains opaque.
I guess that leaves just two questions. Can you eat oak galls? I wouldn’t
advise it, as their high tannic acid content makes them taste very bitter and
astringent, potentially causing mild stomach upset or constipation, and they
contain insect larvae. Even if you are a tannin-resistant acorn-guzzling
pig, those knoppers are best avoided. And can you make a worthwhile ink out of
the confectionary snack? It seems unlikely…
Knurling
That's an antique silver thimble showing off its knurling: the
indentations that allow for a better grip than would be provided by the
original smooth surface, generally applied by using one or more very hard
rollers that contain the reverse of the pattern to be imposed. It's not just thimbles: tool handles, knobs, and barbell grips are among the other strong candidates for knurling.As for 'thimble', I like the story that’s it’s
a derived form ‘thumb-ball’ as the original description of its protective role.
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.
Lovat: a tweed of muted green colour. Pictured is the The Kinloch Anderson Day Kilt Jacket in Green Lovat Tweed – ‘shorter than a trouser jacket but not as short as the Coatee evening jacket. It has a double vent at the back and can be worn open or fastened at the top button. There are two Staghorn effect buttons on the jacket and one on each cuff.’ The image was almost of a flower: Oxford English Dictionary goes from the umbellifer 'lovage' to 'lovat' and on to 'love'.
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.
Lunular:
crescent-shaped
Mahlstick
A mahlstick is a lightweight rod with a padded, soft leather or
cork ball on one end, used by painters to steady their hand while working on
detailed, high-precision areas without touching wet paint. It rests on the edge
of the easel or canvas, enabling better control. The word derives from the German and Dutch Malstock or maalstok 'painting
stick', from malen 'to paint'. The mahlstick often appears as part of
the painter's equipment in pre-20th century paintings of artists: here I have stuck
with the subset of female painters – all three having gained increasing
recognition in recent years.
Those
are self-portraits with mahlsticks by Michaelina Wautier (1649) Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
(1785) and Sofonisba Anguissola (c 1557)
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
Any model worthy of
the profession needs good masseters, they being both the
muscles for opening and closing the mouth for optimal pouting, and a key
element in establishing the right cheek line. Here’s Yael Selbia, an Israeli voted top in the 2020 TC Candler 100 Most
Beautiful Faces of the Year awards, which has been running since 1990, though
it was news to me in 2022… Yael (born 2001) slipped to 6th in 2021, perhaps because she was by then serving in the Israeli Air Force, but has been near the top every year since 2017. Those must be good masseters, then.
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:
And let me pit in guid set terms
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…
Mnemokinesis - control of memories
Mommune
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’.
Nidicolous
Not quite ridiculous, no. An avian term…
Nidifigous birds’ hatchlings are born after feathers
have grown on them, and leave the nest shortly after hatching. Those nests are minimal.
The yellow-wattled lapwing, for example, emerges ready to walk away from the
pebbles among which it was camouflaged as an egg.
Nidicolous birds’ hatchlings are born without feathers, and remain
in the nest for a time after hatching. Those nests are well-constructed. The
robin is typical enough.
'Nidiculous' is a handy word, but how different is it from 'altricial'? I have generously included both...
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. A nychthemeron is a 24 hour period that can start at any time, not just midnight.
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’.
Oblate
Not the most obscure word, I concede, but far from common,
and I like how it has two very distinct, etymologically unrelated, meanings:
-
as an adjective: of a spheroid, that it is
flattened at the poles (just like the Earth - its equatorial diameter
is some 0.3% larger than its polar diameter). From the Latin oblatus (from ob- ‘inversely’
+ -latus ‘carried’).
-
as a noun: a person who is dedicated to a religious
life, but has not yet taken full monastic vows. So, for example, if
in the 15th century parents wished their daughter to become a nun, she was
likely to join an order well before she reached the qualifying age of 16 for
taking the vows. From the medieval Latin oblatus, past participle of Latin offerre ‘to offer’.
It seems unlikely that any religious oblates are to be found
at the earth’s poles, so hopes of combining the two turn on the question: do
oblates wear anything oblate? The coif seems the most plausible candidate, that
is the white cotton cap within a nun’s headpiece. It goes along with a bandeau to secure it, a white wimple (to cover
the neck and cheeks) and guimpe (to cover the chest – now that I chance upon
it, that’s a word I don’t recall
coming across before). Normally the
coif, oblate of not, is covered by the veil, helpfully removed in the images
above.
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
Two words for the price of one… Everyone’s
aware of the binary contrast of introvert and extrovert, but what about those
who fit easily into neither? They can be classified as omniverts or ambiverts.
Omniverts are inconsistent types who can be introvert or extrovert, depending
on the situation they’re in. Ambiverts score towards the middle of the range on
a consistent basis, exhibiting a balance of introvert and extrovert traits.
Oread
An Oread is a mountain nymph, Echo
being the best known. Yet the Oreads are just one class of the minor goddesses
from Greek myth who – handily for many a classical artist – take the form of
attractive young women. So just how many
types of nymph are there? Some are classified by the company they keep, or
their role: Bacchae (or Maenads, or Thyiades) are the wild, orgiastic companions
of Dionysus; Lampades are the torch-bearing nymphs of the underworld...
Most are linked – surprisingly specifically - to the environments they inhabit
as spirits of nature: Alseids are the nymphs of groves; Anthusae of flowers; Aurae
of cooling breezes; Bucolae of rustic places; Crenaeae of wells and
fountains; Dryads of trees and forests; Epimelides of highland
pasture; Haliae of the sea, sands
and rocky shores; Heleionomae of fresh-water marshes and wetlands;
Leimenides of water meadows; Limnatides
of lakes; Meliae of honey, bees and honeydew; Nephelae of the clouds; Pegaeae of
springs; Potameides of the rivers… I dare say there are others. Now the
term ‘nymph’, applied to a woman, tends to shade into two extensions. Nabakov coined
‘nymphette’ in Lolita (1955) to refer to ‘maidens between the age limits of
nine and fourteen… who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times
older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic’. Or
else there’s nymphomaniac or the slangy ‘nympho’ – which doesn’t seem too
justified looking at the totality of nymphs: perhaps ‘Bacchaemaniac’ would have
been a better term.
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).
Oscular
Owners kiss their pets all the time, but I find that a bit creepy. Is it just me, or is this a boundary in human-animal relations, in recognising the agency / rights of the non-human, that will be redrawn at some stage?
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.
Ossicones
What do you call the horns on a giraffe? Well, not horns: they are ossicones, the small, fur-covered protuberances found only in the superfamily Giraffoidea, the still-living members of which are the giraffe and the okapi. And, unlike giraffes (see 'oscular', just above), female okapis do not have ossicones, they only have hair whorls. Ossicones consist of a highly vascularized and innervated bone core covered with similarly vascularized and innervated skin. Males use them, like antlers or horns, in mating-related combat.
Easy question, then: which is the female okapi? And if you need to distinguish a giraffe from an okapi, the former’s blunter ossicones are something of a giveaway.
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
Into the world of recreational mathematics… a pentomino is one of the twelve distinct planar shapes that can be formed by joining five identical squares by their edges. That doesn’t count reflections and rotations as separate (which would bring it to a less easily managed 63). A standard pentomino puzzle is to tile a rectangular box with the pentominoes, i.e. cover it without overlap and without gaps. Each of the 12 pentominoes has an area of 5 unit squares, so the box must have an area of 60 units. Some sizes are easier than others: the 6×10 case has 2,339 solutions, the 5×12 box has 1,010 solutions, the 4×15 box has 368 solutions, and the 3×20 box has just two solutions. The illustration is one of the many 6 x 10 box solutions, simply because I find it the most visually attractive. Perhaps there’s scope for an artist to use the pentomino puzzle as the basis for a series of abstract paintings?
Perdricide
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
Where is the worst place to store fat? Probably the heart. But the
question may be academic: so far as I know, there’s no way to control the
geography of pinguescence – the process of becoming fat.
Plastron
We could all do with an emotional plastron to cover our vulnerabilities.
This plastron is on the underside of a turtle. The term ‘plastron’ has also been applied to human body armour.
Platen
A platen is the large, rubber-coated cylindrical roller
inside the carriage of a typewriter. It holds paper as typebars strike it,
providing a firm but cushioned surface for clear, even impressions. The rubber
layer absorbs the strikes of the metal keys without damaging them. and makes
sure that prints are clear.
Platen is also – being where I found it – the last word of
Matthew Francis’ wonderful evocation of the typewriter, from the perspective of
2018. Wait for it!
Typewriter
One day I’ll fetch the Smith Corona from the cupboard,
set it on the desk and unclasp its blue plastic shell
to expose the nakedness of its baby-grand workings.
Remember the punch and peck words had in those days,
the strain of Q in the little finger, the type head
leaning out on its stalk from its semicircular roost,
the angelus ting that marked the end of a line
the slap of the silver lever that jerked time forward,
the shift key that tilted the world on its fulcrum,
the grey formalities hedged by tabs and margins
that turned language into geometry, the braille
of the other side of the page under the fingertips?
What was struck here could never be unstruck,
in spite of backspacing and xs, packets of Tipp–Ex paper
and the vial of Snopake, its screw-cap gritted shut.
Not used to taking ourselves so seriously, we prodded
at the ampersand tangled in its nest, the curly brackets
aiming their bows in opposite directions.
Switch on the anglepoise lamp; outside the window
it’s carbon-paper dark. There’s ribbonsmudge on your fingers
and a new sheet of foolscap rolled into place on the platen.
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. Not because you wish you hadn't taken certain actions - that's 'remorse' or 'penitence' - but for the fact that the past happened at an impersonal level. 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. 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: 'I regret the past' would be ‘Paenitet me praeterita’. That 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, 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’. It's on theme to get mating in, I suppose, but they don’t sound
like operations I’m likely to carry out as often as yanking a nail…
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.
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 pebbles' might tick two
boxes for some…
Ptarmical
What is ptarmical? Pepper, most obviously. Or anything
infectious that needs clearing from your nostrils. Or possibly some emotional
states. Even sunlight in some people, the condition known as photosneezia. Nor
is sneezing restricted to homo sapiens: most animals do it, and the pairing
here is with Camelus dromedaries.
Ptarmical: causing sneezing
Proteose
Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary… ‘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 couple of common ones). Might this be the most heavily alliterated definition in the OED? ‘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.
Pteridomania
Two things are nice about the term for fern
fever. First, the specific historical context: it arose from the Victorian craze for ferns
– collecting them from around the world, building ferneries to hold them, using them as a motif in decorative arts and beyond… Second, the
origin of the word as a literary coinage by Charles Kingsley in his 1855
book ‘Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore’: ‘Your daughters, perhaps,
have been seized with the prevailing 'Pteridomania' ... and wrangling over
unpronounceable names of species’. He derived the term from ‘Pteridophytes’ and ‘mania’,
the former being plants that reproduce by means of spores, rather than flowers and seeds:
ferns, horsetails and mosses…
The pteridomaniacal
peak – around 1845-1890 – largely coincided with William Morris’s production of
wallpaper from the 1860’s onward, so it’s curious that ferns don’t feature much
in his designs. Hence my illustration is of a modern wallpaper somewhat inspired
by the Morris manner.
Pyxidium
You’re a seed pod. What to do? One answer is: nothing - assume that birds or animals will rip into you at some point and release your seeds. Else you can release the seeds through small pores, poppy-style, so that the motion caused by the wind shakes them out - as if you were a pepper pot. If neither suits, you need to split. That’s called dehiscence, and can be pretty explosive: the sandbox tree can fling seeds up to 100 metres. Where to split? Maybe along the septa - like the foxglove; or along the locules – like the iris. Or you can pop your top off, like the lid from a box. If that circumscissile opening is your choice, you’re a pyxidium: on a eucalyptus, perhaps, or on the illustrated scarlet pimpernel Anagallis arvensis – in which case, if you don’t mind me saying, you’re one of the most beautiful pods.
Pyxidium: a seed capsule opening by transverse dehiscense (OED)
Quotity
Is this a qoutity?
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 the not-all-that-authentic 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 or a football team. 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 No, 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 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. Historically, it has been 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 happen to statues, and that is a rather
common occurrence 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 pony-owning
wife uses 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, no internet involved, it's 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...
Rybička
That’s actually a Czech word, translatable as ‘Little Fish’, but importable into English in its original form a small pocket knife with the handle shaped as a fish, which became particularly popularity during the forty years of Communist rule (1948-89) . This one is the 5.5 cm blade Mikov 130-NZn-1, manufactured in Mikulášovice. Such folding knifes are frequently used in mushroom picking, something of a national sport and favoured family activity in the Czech Republic. I suppose mushroom-shaped knives would be more thematic, but not as practical…
I came across the word as the title of one of Czech
artist Anna Ruth’s alluring paintings at Brooke
Benington Gallery in 2025. It’s also a Polish surname, Natalia Rybicka, for
example, being a well-known actress – but knives don’t come into that: ‘ryba’
is Polish for fish, and the suffix ‘icka’ is a common feminine form used in
Polish surnames. 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.
Serac
A serac is a block or column of glacial ice, often formed by
intersecting crevasses on a glacier.
Commonly house-sized or larger, they are dangerous to mountaineers,
since they may topple with little warning. The word is derived from the Swiss cheese sérac,
a whey-based, soft and creamy by-product of hard cheese production.
I can see the
resemblance. Perhaps there’s an etymological case for developing an ice-cream,
to be known as serac2. There are precedents: cheesecake ice-cream
would hardly count, but cottage cheese ice-cream is a thing, and Queso is a
Filipino ice cream flavour prepared using cheddar cheese.
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.
Simurgh
Here are two modern interpretations of the Simurgh, a
fantastical bird from Persian myth that’s effectively the Eastern equivalent of
the Phoenix – like which, it can set itself alight yet return to life. The Simurgh
is a bit of a shape-shifter, as early descriptions are of a peacock with a
lion's body or paws and a dog's head, but it later took on a more birdlike
guise with sharp teeth and beautiful plumage. The name conjoins two Persian
words: ‘Si’ is thirty, ‘murgh’ is bird, hence the multiple colours and the
story that it consists of thirty united birds. Consistent with that, the
Simurgh is big and strong enough to fly with several pendant elephants dangling…
In the 12th-century
allegorical Sufi poem by Farid ud-Din Attar, the birds of the world gather in
search of a king. The Hoopoe, the wisest among them, suggests they seek the
legendary Simurgh. The birds embark on an arduous journey, representing the
spiritual path of Sufism, passing through
seven valleys of trials. Most perish along the way: only thirty reach the Simurgh's
dwelling place on Mount Qaf,
the legendary mountain that marks the edge of the world. There, they look into a lake and
see only their own reflection. They realise that
they – the thirty birds – are the Simurgh, are what they seek: the
majesty of the divine is a reflection of their own unified selves, and the individual self dissolves into the universal ‘oneness’
of existence.
Slee
Is ‘slee’ a word, outside of the self-refuting pre-dawn thought: ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to get back to slee…’? No, the dictionary passes sleekly enough from ‘sledge’ to ‘sleech’. So let me propose it: ‘a half-formed thought’. It is, however, Dutch for a sleigh. Never mind sheep: next time I can’t drop off, I’m going to imagine the slide-past of an infinite cavalcade of polar bears.
Smectic
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 these are, and easy to conclude that ‘spork’
would be a good term for them - ‘foroon’ just wouldn’t have the same immediacy.
So the only real question when this implement on the right 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 are two types, though: those with tines on the bowl, as left, and
those with bowl and tines at opposite ends, as I received. 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
The Son Doong cave in Vietnam was discovered only
in 1991. At some 9km in length, 200m in width and 150m in height,
it is the largest currently
known cave in the world and possibly the most spectacularly speluncar site. Towering stalactites form around a river running
through a space so large it forms its own clouds. It contains unique animal species
and rare ‘cave pearls’ - small balls of
mineral deposits which form when water laden with minerals dripping from the ceiling
falls too quickly to form a stalagmite.
‘Speluncar (adjective)
- from the Latin spelunca,
cave: of, pertaining to, or resembling a cave; of the nature of a cave’ – OED.
Stillomancy
Ithell Colquhoun (1906-88) experimented with many automatic
methods of making art: decalcomania, entoptic graphomania, parsemage, fumage
and stillomancy, for example. That last, initially developed by the Romanian
surrealist, Dolfi Trost, involved dropping ink or paint to produce a blot on
paper or canvas that is then folded down the middle, producing a symmetry about
the axis of the fold. A fancy term, perhaps, for the basis of the Rorschach
ink blot test. In 1971 Colquhoun used stillomancy to produce a number of drawings
evoking the spirit of various trees, which she offered ‘to the White Goddess at
a time when wasteful technology is threatening the plant life (and with it all
the organic life) of earth and the waters.' ‘Dryad: Vine’, with its inventive mixture
of arboreal, mammalian and avian associations, breaks down the conventional,
scientific, boundaries of nature and emphasises its essential unity as a living
force.
Struthious
Given that ‘Struthious’ means ‘of, or pertaining to, the
ostrich’, and the most famous ostrich behaviour is ‘burying one’s head in the sand’,
the adjective has come to be applied to people who blithely ignore problems.
Yet the supposed origin in ratite behaviour is just a popular myth. That’s no
surprise, as ostriches are well set up to defend themselves rather than hope
danger will go away if they can’t see it. They’re up to nine feet tall with powerful
legs, are likely to weigh over 20 stone - and pack a kick made ferocious by
that stature. My image, then, is just a digital construction in support of the
legend…
'Ratite', incidentally, also gets an entry. I guess that makes me a little struthious, in the more literal way.
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).
Teg
Cornelia Baltes favours short words as the enigmatic titles of her paintings and – in the case of ‘Teg’, 2025 – prints. She brings a humorous angle to pop going minimal on the edge between figurative reduction and abstraction. It turns out, though I’m not sure it reads across to the image despite the similar colour scheme, that the nicely economical word ‘teg’ is a sheep in its second year - perhaps more commonly referred to as a hogget. The other image shows a Herdwick teg. Those age indicators also decide what sheep meat is called: up to 11 months it’s lamb; 11-24 months is hogget; over 24 months is mutton.
Sheep farming has its own vocabulary, of course. For example a slink is a very young lamb, whereas a gummer is a sheep so old that it has lost all of its teeth. A chilver is a female lamb. Tupping is mating. A wether is a castrated male – one which cannot tup. One that can leads to eaning: the act of a chilver giving birth. I also like greasy – a sheep shearer; raddle – coloured pigment used to mark sheep; and rooing – removing the fleece by hand-plucking.'Teg' also led me to 'Tig' - see somewhat further on...
Tegestologist
Nothing to with the sheep above... This word, from the Latin ‘teges’, mat, is the term for collectors
of beer mats. A humble hobby, I’d say, and there seem to be no tales comparable
to say stamps or coins of high prices being paid for them. Like any collection,
though, they can get numerous: the Austrian tegestologist Leo Pisker claims to
have 150,000 different beer mats from 192 countries. Beer mats protect the table or
bar on which they are placed by absorbing any condensation emanating from the
glass. High quality beer mats are made of pulp board the best can absorb 300%
of their own weight in moisture. That's not quite enough to lure me into the hobby,
but I don’t drink much beer…
Theorbo
The visually striking theorbo is a lute with an extended neck (on which bass
strings additional to those on 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 looks 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 through 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.
I regard theophony as a nice concept, but also a redundant one: as no gods exist, how can they manifest themselves? I wonder if there is a word for that? I'm tempted by the term 'c∅ncept', sneaking '∅', the philosophical notation for an empty set, into the category. Might 'perfection' and 'infinity' be other examples, albeit operating somewhat differently?
Thigmotropic
Are we compatibly thigmotropic? If I move to draw you into a kiss, will you melt into my arms - or pull away?
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
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
'Tierce' is unusual among rare words in being one syllable carrying multiple
meanings: a 35 gallon cask; a band of soldiers; a sequence of three playing
cards of the same suit; a parrying position in fencing; an organ stop giving
particular tones; a heraldic charge with a three-fold division.
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.
Tig
Attracted to ‘Teg’, as above, I wondered whether there is a
complete vowel set of like words. ‘Tag’, ‘Tog’ (clothing) and ‘Tug’ aren’t in
doubt, but what about ‘Tig’? It means ‘a light of playful touch’ – nice word.
An image search, though, calls up welding gloves that hardly seem
likely to facilitate that sort of tig. A second meaning is in play: TIG is the
acronym for Tungsten Inert Gas, as used in welding. Yet it is feasible to effect a tig with
TIG gloves, for they are designed to enable ‘the delicate tasks associated with
precision welding’. The illustrated ESAB TIG gloves, for example, are said to ‘include
premium-grade goatskin or sheepskin on the glove hand which is essential to
maintaining fine dexterity while maximizing protection’. It would be harder to
tig with MIG (Metal Inert Gas) welding gloves, as they need to be more robust
and heat-resistant due to the higher temperatures involved.
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
What meal is most likely to generate aesthetic tittynopes? Probably not the cheese sandwich with tomato and pickle I’ve used here. That said, there are – surprisingly - licensable images of food scraps on several online sites. They’re no more spectacular: I might as well use my own modest repast.
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
Not only had I not heard of Tsavolite, I was shamefully ignorant of the various types of garnet illustrated below, providing a whole litany of new words. Tsavolite, discovered in Kenya and Tanzania only in 1967, is named in honour of Tsavo East National Park.
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
Is this O’Keeffe’s tuzzy-muzzy? Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) vehemently denied any vulval / vaginal intent in such works as The Blue Flower, 1918. Yet few have accepted that, leading to her co-option to Freudian and feminist causes alike. Randall Griffin, in Phaidon’s book on her, suggests that ‘O'Keeffe's aim was to distinguish herself from her contemporary male artists by producing paintings that would seem both audaciously sexual and innately feminine’. Moreover, Lisa L. Moore has argued that her flowers should be seen as part of a lesbian tradition, since evidence suggests that O'Keeffe had several affairs with women. So perhaps 'tuzzy-muzzy' is the word for what she paints. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘1. A bunch of flowers’ and ‘2. The female genitals’.
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
The fifty years from 1970 might prove to an unrepeatable golden age for ubiquarians: people who go everywhere. That was the era of affordable worldwide air travel. Previously it was too expensive to be available to more than a few, afterwards it may be that – even once the effects of the pandemic have worked through – long-term cost issues and global warming concerns return us to the times when only the rich can travel extensively. 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.
Ump
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.
Underyawn
I would define this
as ‘a wide space beneath an overhead structure or feature’, i.e. a yawning absence
below, the opposite of an overhang. That seems straightforward enough, and it’s
a nice word. Yet despite appearing in Edward Thomas’s fairly well-known 1915
poem ‘The Path’, it hasn’t yet made the Oxford English Dictionary:
…the eye
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
And underyawns it, and the path that looks
As if it led on…
Did Thomas invent
the word? Some kudos to him if did, the more so as his reputation is for
reanimating common words rather than coining neologisms, for using words that,
as in his rhymed free verse ‘Words’, are ‘light as dreams, / Tough as oak, / Precious
as gold, / As poppies and corn, / Or an old cloak… / Strange and sweet, / Equally,
/ And familiar, / To the eye…’
The road in ‘The Path’ was Stoner Hill Road, a
regular passage of Thomas’s, and the main route between Petersfield and Alton
in Hampshire. The photograph above was taken from that road.
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
Who’d have thought that so many specialist terms were
applicable to a simple key? The one that strikes me as a word not seen in other
contexts is ‘warding’ as a noun. My source, The Art of Lock
Picking, sounds dubious - though it does advise, who knows how sincerely, ‘Only
pick locks that you personally own or have explicit permission from the owner
to pick’, making it sound like a hobby akin to solving Rubik's Cube. The guide explains that ‘the lock's warding is essentially the
shape or formation of the keyway, and this shape protrudes through the entirety
of the lock. Keys are manufactured to fit their lock's exact warding shape.’ The
word ‘ward’ seems to be commoner in this context, e.g. the Encyclopaedia Britannica
states that ‘The Romans invented wards - i.e. Projections around the keyhole,
inside the lock, which prevent the key from being rotated unless the flat face
of the key (its bit) has slots cut in it in such a fashion that the projections
pass through the slots.’ But ‘ward’ is a very common noun, and one with copious uses – the OED gives 18 different meanings for it!
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:
‘Here you may see what's very rare,
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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