November 2007 Archives
freerice.com: sastruga; parhelion (sun-dog, paraselene, moon dog); rampike (rampick);
fauteuil (piedmont); caracole; lucarne; gosport
(slipstream, tandem)
Eponyms once again: Tommy Atkins; jerrican; BVDs; jaegers;
Haussmannize; guyot; Mickey Finn; horsmandering
Book: The Sea: haulm;
cackhanded; strangury; lour; etiolate; apotropaic; unctuous
About face: sclera; sinciput (spalpeen); nares; edentate; tragus; saccade; philtrum
freerice.com
This
week’s words come the vocabulary-quiz site recently-created site
I found it just recently, and hope that you vocabulary-lovers will it enjoy as
much as I do.
I
use its quiz format to present words from that quiz. (By the way, they are all
words that I missed.) Answers follow.
sastruga – 1. absolution 2. wind-formed snow ridge 3. peace
4. chit-chat
parhelion – 1. landholder
2. sundog 3. fireworks 4. exaggeration
rampike – 1. eyeglass 2.
custodian 3. standing dead tree 4. quicksilver
fauteuil – 1. armchair 2.
toy 3. deluge 4. rendezvous
caracole – 1. irritate 2.
half-turn 3. relieve 4. trim
lucarne – 1. coward 2. dormer
window 3. stubbornness 4. fondness
gosport – 1. brute 2. speaking
tube 3. yesteryear 4. goof
sastruga – (plural sastrugi) a long wavelike ridge
of snow, formed by the wind, found on the polar plains
[Russian
dialectal zastruga: za beyond + struga deep place into
which one may fall]
The
scene is in
People
have died a dozen feet from shelter,
Idiot.
You’ve killed yourself.
Think!
Dully, he noticed the sastruga, the small drift he
had tripped over. The sastrugi's tops had been torn off
and hurled into the stormy air but the icier underlayment still existed, slowly
being abraded by the wind. He’d walked over them every day and watched their
wavelike pattern …. Which way did they run? He tried to focus his mind …
Yes. Yes! He remembered. Perpendicular to his path. And lower, smaller,
in the lee of the dome. He could read them like sailors read the water,
perhaps.
He struggled back up, desperate now. He hadn’t much time. He was seizing
up like the Tin Woodsman.
– William Dietrich, Dark Winter
parhelion – a bright spot in the sky, often in pairs on either
side of the sun, thus forming a "triple sun". Caused by atmospheric
ice crystals.
Shakespeare
describes a parhelion in English history, just before the the Battle of
Mortimer's Cross, 1461, in the Wars of the Roses. Edward (soon to be King
Edward IV; shown in blue) speaks to Richard (green).
Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns?
Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;
/ Not separated with the racking clouds, / But sever'd in a pale clear-shining
sky. ... / In this the heaven figures some event.
'Tis wondrous strange, the like yet never
heard of.
– King Henry VI, Part iii; Act 2, Scene 1
This
was a real event. "On the morning of the battle, no less than three suns
were seen to rise in the West behind the Yorkist army. This caused some dismay
among its soldiers. We now know this phenomenon as "parhelion'
… Edward [not yet 18 years old!] went down on his knees to give thanks to God
for this sign that the Holy Trinity … were coming to the aid of the Yorkist
cause. Although not noticeably superstitious himself, he understood the fears
of his men, and chose this method to reassure them. After the battle, he
adopted the sun and its rays as one of his emblems." (Michael Miller, Wars of
the Roses)
A
parhelion is also called a sun-dog. (The same phenomenon with the
moon is called a paraselene or moon dog.)
The sun shone again with a frosty light and
huge sundogs stood guard on each side of it. And it was cold!
– Laura Ingalls Wilder, The First Four
Years (Little House)
rampike – a standing dead tree or tree stump, esp. one killed by
fire
[rampick
– (of a tree or bough) partly decayed or dead; bare of leaves or twigs (obs.
except dial.)]
The trail … is ragged and steep in places as
it corkscrews down the northeast slope of
– John Zilly, Kissing the Trail:
Northwest and Central Oregon Mountain Bike Trails
fauteuil – an upholstered armchair, usually with
open sides
The long train was on the last leg of its
journey from Moscow to Krasnodor … In one of its "soft" cushioned
cars reserved for Soviet officials, a plant specialist, bored with watching the
flat countryside, still only partly recovered in 1950 from the Nazi ravages of
the "Great Patriotic War" [checked his specimens. Then] he sat back
in his fauteuil to admire the approach of the Caucasian piedmont.
– Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, The
Secret Life of Plants
Bonus Word:
piedmont – land lying or formed at the base of mountains (also
adj. Etymologically, it means mountain-foot.]
caracole, caracol – a half turn to right or left performed by
a horse and rider (verb: to perform same)
Interesting
etymology. The word comes from Spanish caracol, snail, through French.
Obsolete senses in English include 'a spiral shell' and 'a spiral staircase'.
Our
quote appropriately deals with writer’s block, from which I’ve been suffering,
and makes a nice figurative use.
Orlando, who had just dipped her pen in the
ink, … was much annoyed to be impeded by a blot, which spread and meandered
around her pen. … She dipped it again. The blot increased. She tried to go on
with what she was saying; no words came. Next she began to decorate the blot
with wings and whiskers, till it became a round-headed monster, something
between a bat and a wombat. But as for writing poetry with Basket and
Bartholomew in the room, it was impossible. No sooner had she said 'Impossible'
than, to her astonishment and alarm, the pen began to curve and caracole
with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was written in the neatest
sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verses she had ever read in her
life.
– Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
lucarne – a dormer window (OED says it includes any other
window cut into a roof)
Each
day, rather than settle on any old quote, I try to find an interesting or
amusing one. But with the more-obscure words, it’s not always easy!
Shottesbrooke
[church] was erected in 1337 … . Legend has it that [the] mason, pleased with
his work, climbed the spire with a bottle, became drunk and fell to his death.
The fine needle spire, its pure lines touched only by discreet lucarnes
at the base, surely merited a mild intoxication if not a violent death.
– Simon Jenkins and Paul Barker,
gosport – (in old airplanes with front-and-back [‘tandem’]
cockpits) a flexible tube for speaking from front to back cockpit
[after
Gosport, a port in southeast
Bonus words:
slipstream – the airflow driven backward by an airplane’s
propeller or jet
tandem – one behind the other (as bicycle-riders, carriage-horses, or
airplane cockpits)
[a
pun on Latin tandem ‘at length’, which refers to a length of time.]
Two
quotes (ellipses omitted) illustrate the practice.
The PT-19 Primary Trainer was monoplane with
two open cockpits in tandem. It had no radio, so one-way
communication between the cockpits was provided by a gosport,
a long flexible tube that ran from the instructor's cockpit to the student's.
In terms of audio fidelity, this device left something to be desired,
especially with a nervous student who was uncertain what the instructor wanted.
Short-tempered instructors were known to vent their frustration by sticking the
mouthpiece of the gosport out into the slipstream.
What happened inside of the poor student had to be experienced to be fully
appreciated.
– Robert J. Goebel, Mustang Ace: Memoirs
of a P-51 Fighter Pilot
Al sat in the front cockpit. He shouted at
me through the gosport, a simple rubber tube about half an
inch in diameter that ran between the cockpits. In the rear cockpit, the tube divided
into two branches, one for each earflap of my cloth helmet. It was a one-way
communication system: He yelled into the cone and I tried to figure out what he
was saying. When I knew what he said, I nodded my head; he could see me in his
rearview mirror. He called it his profanity strainer, but the strainer worked
only when I was doing things right. When I really screwed up, he stuck the cone
into the slipstream to wake me up.
– Norman J. Fortier, An Ace of the
Eighth: An American Fighter Pilot's Air War in
Eponyms once again
Our
theme this week will be eponyms, that is, words from the name of a real or
fictional character. I confess the theme was chosen partly to accommodate an
oddball eponym I found, which will end the week!
Tommy Atkins – a British soldier
[May 1940:] [T]here was an impressive
consistency of organisation and spirit in the British Expeditionary Force. The
regulars had mobilised with Tommy Atkins’s traditional and
cheerful indifference to the identity of the King’s enemies – or allies (“going
to fight them bloody
– John Keegan, The Second World War
Books
of record-forms, issued to British officers of early 1800s, included helpful
filled-in samples. These samples often used “Thomas Atkins” as a hypothetical
soldier, typically a private; a “John Doe”. In 1883 the name slipped into
popular usage, and soon after was spread by Kipling’s use.
jerrican – a flat-sided five-gallon container, usually metal,
for petrol, water, etc.
Origin: In WWII a “Jerry” was a German, especially a German soldier.
“The Germans had a very efficient five-gallon petrol can. The Eighth Army
captured some of the cans. They were sent back to
Our
quote honors Norman Mailer, who passed away yesterday.
Every day a ration detail of three men would
trudge over to the hill on which the adjacent platoon of A Company was
bivouacked, and return with a box of 10-in-1 rations and two five-gallon jerricans
of water. The trip was always uneventful and the men did not dislike it, for
the monotony of the morning was broken and it gave them a chance to talk to
someone other than the men in their squad.
– Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
Appropriately,
we have a pair of underwear. Underwear eponyms, that is!
BVDs – men’s and boys’ underwear (originally, long underwear); a
tradename
(almost
never seen in the singular, BVD)
[from
initials of Bradley, Vorhees & Day,
the firm that made them.]
jaegers – woolen underwear; a trade name (among other unrelated
meanings)
[The
cloth was originally made by Dr. [Gustav] Jaeger's Sanitary Woollen System Co.
Ltd.]
Brits,
is this term still in use?
When did it become cool for guys to wear
their jeans around their knees, exposing their BVDs?
–
HENRY: What happened was this, I put them on
and then I took them off again and then I put them on again and then I took
them again off and then I took them on again and then I –
HENRY: I don’t know.
– Samuel Beckett, Embers
Today’s
eponym comes from Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann,
who administered a massive remodeling of much of Paris, 1853-1870, including
reconfiguring the streets, creating green spaces, and building water and
sanitary systems.
Haussmannize – to open out, widen, and straighten streets, and
generally rebuild, after the fashion in which Haussmann rebuilt
OED's
definition (above) is the only one I’ve found, and makes it seem like a good
thing. Others would disagree, for neighborhoods and their histories are
destroyed. OED quotes an 1880s author saying, “These Attilas … of modern
society …are rapidly achieving the Hausmannisation … of every mediæval city of
Europe,” and, “
A
modern-day quote:
The face of
– Mark Lamster, Architecture and Film
Note:
‘Haussmannization,’ though a rare word, is a good deal more common than
‘Haussmannize’.
guyot – a flat-topped submarine mountain
[named
by
As the sonar image grew crisper, he could
make out a maze of gigantic seamounts and flat-topped guyots on the
floor below. Deep canyons and troughs wound around these towering mounts. It
reminded Jack of the
– James Rollins, Deep Fathom
A
review of Du Barry Was a Lady, in Ken Bloom and Frank Vlastnik, Broadway
Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time:
Louis Biore is infatuated with the club’s
sexy singer, May Daly, … but he accidentally drinks the ”Mickey Finn”
that he had planned to give May’s boyfriend. Louis passes out, dreaming that he
is King Louis XV of
Mickey Finn – an alcoholic drink that has been deliberately
adulterated with a strong sedative or purgative
[‘Mickey’
Finn, a
Note: This is from OED, with its first cite in 1928. But apparently
there had been a successful revue called "Mickey Finn" in the
previous decade, and before that a series of "Mickey Finn Tales" by
an Ernest Jarrold. I’ve found it as far back as 1918, and this quote, though
not the earliest, explains it well.
Ten
– Journal Six O'Clock (
Today’s
very-obscure word would be quite useful. But is it a word at all?
horsmandering – the act of a public official writing a books about
his/her experience in office
[from
the name of an 18th-century American judge who was one of the first public
servants to use his records of a public experience as the basis of a
full-length book]
I
took this word from a thick 2004 word-book, which seems to have taken it almost
verbatim from a 1952 word-book. And that in turn probably got it from a
1909 journal that comments on horsmandering as an interesting new word:
The books have been multiplying ever since
the end of the war; and now we have the word— "horsmandering."
When a public official vacates his high office and then sits down to write the
story of his trust and how he fulfilled it, that is horsemandering.
–
But
I can’t find it in any dictionary, or in any particular usages. Query whether
this is a real word, or just a case of one word-compiler copying from another
at half-century intervals. Copying has been known to happen! 
"The Sea"
A reader wrote, “Hi, Wordcrafter. I'm just finishing a
novel called The Sea by John Banville-- suggested by a book club member
because the setting is the Irish seaside village she grew up in. Besides being
a beautifully crafted and moving novel, it is the first I've read in years
where I need a dictionary at hand! I've started circling the words he uses that
I've never seen before. Should I pass my list along to you for one of your vocabulary
weeks?” And I replied, “Laughing! Please do so ASAP; I'm suffering
writer's block looking for a theme!”
Ginny,
thank you for sharing your enthusiasm. We’ll start our “Sea” theme with an
earthy word from Old English, a word I'd never heard of. Brits, is it more
familiar on your side of the pond?
haulm – 1. a stalk or stem 2. the stalks or stems of
peas, beans, or potatoes collectively
The thought occurs and at once there I am,
in shirt-sleeves and concertina trousers, stumbling sweat-stained behind the
mower, grass-haulms in my mouth and the flies buzzing about my
head.
Today,
a word whose sound that makes me smile.
cackhanded –
OED
speculates that it may come from cack, which means ‘excrement’ and, like
the usual four-letter word for excrement, can be used as either a noun or a
verb.
In fact it is a field no longer but a dreary
holiday estate packed higgledy-piggledy with what are bound to be jerrybuilt
bungalows, designed I suspect by the same cackhanded line-drawer
who was responsible for the eyesores at the bottom of the garden here.
Since
we’ve just now had a word rooted in “excrement,” today's word may be an
appropriate follow-up. How embarrassing it can be when your room lacks private
plumbing facilities.
strangury – a condition of slow, painful urination, caused by
muscular spasms of the “plumbing”
[ultimately
from Greek for ‘drop, trickle’ (or ‘drop squeezed out') + ‘urine’]
How
inimical to our theme of “The Sea”!
There goes the Colonel, creeping back to his
room. That was a long session in the lav. Strangury, nice
word. Mine is the one bedroom in the house which is, as Miss Vavasour puts it
with a demure little moue, en suite.
lour – (of the sky) to look dark and threatening (noun: such
an appearance)
[Also,
unconnected with sky: a scowl; to scowl]
There was open land to my right, flat and
undistinguished with not a house or hovel in sight, and to my left a deep line
of darkly louring trees bordering the road.
Today’s
word ties into our recent word ‘haulm’. Author Banville uses it figuratively,
which is much more interesting.
… the genteelly outmoded atmosphere that
pervaded my dream of what was to come. The precise images I entertained of
myself as a grown-up were imbued with that etiolated,
world-weary elegance, that infirm poise, which I associated with the world
between the wars. [ellipses omitted]
etiolate – to cause to appear pale and sickly; also, to
make weak by stunting the development of.
[from
the meaning in botany: to make (a plant) pale by preventing exposure to
sunlight]
[from
Norman French étieuler, to grow into haulm]
apotropaic – intended to ward off evil (an apotropaic
amulet)
This
strikes me as a very useful word, but I’d never heard of it.
Our
quote concerns a cancer-sufferer who has been referred to a specialist.
The consultant’s name was Mr. Todd. This can
only be considered a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate. It could
have been worse. There is a name De’Ath, with that fancy medial capital and apotropaic
apostrophe which fool no one.
Note:
Sweeney Todd is a fictional barber who murdered his victims by cutting
their throats with a straight razor.
unctuous – excessively flattering or ingratiating
[Think
‘oily’. It comes form Latin for ‘to anoint’, as in the rite of extreme unction.]
He bowed to me, beaming, hands clasped into
fists before his chest in an excessive, operatic gesture. … His look was unctuous
yet in some way minatory. Perhaps I had been expected to tip him also.
About face
This
week’s theme-title is a pun. We’ll be talking about words related to parts of
the face.
sclera – the white of the eyeball
For the family visit, she … she moisturized
her skin, and at the last minute, she put Visine in her eyes until the sclera
were parchment white. Only her little grand-daughter … had noticed.
– Jacqueline Sheehan, Lost & Found
We
get this from the Greek for ‘hard’, which in turn goes back their term for
Greek for ‘to dry up, parch’. More body-words, from the same ‘hard’ and ‘dry’
roots, are skeleton and arteriosclerosis, ‘hardening of the
arteries’ and sclerosis, the more general term for ‘abnormal hardening
of tissues’.
I
mention this last because it has a much more interesting figurative use, to
mean “rigidity, excessive resistance to change”. It’s been used to refer to
theater (old-fashioned and sclerotic), transportation (the traffic
[gets] more sclerotic), and governments (sclerotic tax laws). And
here’s a spin-off coined (apparently by German economist Herbert Giersch) in
the 1980s:
…
– New York Times, April 9, 1986
Here’s a famous sinciput:
sinciput – the forehead (also, the upper half of the
skull)
[From
Latin, meaning ‘semi-head’. A truly obscure word for the same thing is bregma.
Compare occiput – the back of the skull.]
A fortunate accident happened to me when I
was a very little boy. A good-hearted old Irish nurse took me up one day by the
heels, when I was making more noise than was necessary, and swinging me round
two or three times, d-----d my eyes for “a skreeking little spalpeen,”
and then knocked my head into a cocked hat against the bedpost. A bump arose at
once on my sinciput …
– Edgar Allen Poe, The Business Man
(excepted)
Bonus word:
spalpeen – Irish dialect: rascal; scamp
nares – nostrils
Illustrated
by two quotes with unusual perspectives. In the first, a fish insults a swan.
In the second, we consider how the Invisible Man’s innards work.
“Look,” said the Wart, “it is the poor swan with the deformed leg. It
can only paddle with one leg, and the other side of it is hunched.
“Nonsense,” said the swan snappily, putting its head into the water rand
giving them a frown with its black nares. “Swans like to
rest in this position, and you can keep your keep your fishy sympathy to
yourself, so there.” It continued to glare at them from up above, … until they
were out of sight.
– T. H. White, The Once and Future King
After he had done eating, … the Invisible
Man demanded a cigar. … It was strange to see him smoking; his mouth, and
throat, pharynx and nares, became visible as a sort of
whirling smoke cast.
– H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man
edentate – toothless
[also
refers to certain mammals, such as armadillos, that are toothless or nearly so]
Speaking of teeth: There have never been
dentists on Santa Rosalia or any of the other human colonies in the
– Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos
(Would
it be unkind to mention that the species homo sapiens is a good deal
less than a million years old?)
It's
noisy, and to block out the noise you stick your finger in your ear, palm
forward. Your fingerpad presses against a stiff flap of cartilage. Who'd have
thought that it had a name? This is not an easy word to work into a
conversation!
tragus – the bump of cartilage in front of the ear-hole
[from
Greek for "male goat", supposedly so named for the tuft of hair which
grows there]
… the man with the cell phone repeated it
with harried precision, his free index finger applied to the tragus
of his other ear, keeping out the noise of the crowd …
– Liam Durcan, Garcia's Heart
Dictionaries
conflict on today’s word. AHD has it as a horse-word (a sudden, violent check
of a horse, by drawing the reins suddenly), but to Merriam Webster it pertains
to the eyes. Neither mentions the other’s sense. For our theme, we focus on the
eyes.
saccade – a brief, rapid eye-movement from one position of rest to
another, either voluntary (as in reading) or involuntary
[His father lies, barely alive:] I sit down
next to my father on his cot. I take his hand in mine and put it on the crown
of my head. My father’s eye makes quick birdlike saccades up and
down.
– Adam Davies, Goodbye Lemon
(ellipses omitted)
Beep! A new [email] message had just arrived. The
sender’s address was -- My God … He opened the message, and his eyes
flew all over it in mad saccades, trying to absorb it as a
gestalt. And then, his pulse racing, he re-read it carefully, from top to
bottom.
– Robert J. Sawyer, Rollback
OED
reveals why those two dictionaries conflict. A saccade is that eye-movement or,
more generally, any “jerk or jerky movement” – whether “horsy” or not. Here’s
an example of that broader sense:
I felt the corners of my mouth saccade.
Hell, he had a gun. He could take whatever he wanted.
– Leo L. Sullivan, Life
This
week quite a few readers have written asking me, “Are you going to do my
favorite body-word?” Every one of them had the same favorite, and it’s one of
my favorites too. How curious; I wonder why so many of us like it.
philtrum – the vertical groove from the base of the nose to the
upper lip
[from
Greek philein "to love; to kiss"]
Even when he was clean-shaven, a five
o'clock shadow stippled his face, especially on the philtrum
between nose and mouth.
– Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper's Wife
A friend of ours is a paramedic. When one of
her patients is about to faint, she pinches the patient's philtrum
– the fleshy part between the upper lip and nose. That prevents the faint from
happening.
– Joan Wilen and