Weird Words

I feel like the Golden Dustman of "Our Mutual Friend", sifting through the jumbled detritus of the dictionary, with an eye for the oddly shaped, shiny item. In my haphazard searches, I have stumbled across a few remarkable words and phrases. Sometimes the simple fact that there is a word for something is surprising; or the word may suggest that it has a certain meaning while meaning something entirely different; in other cases, the etymology of the word is amusing.

• Ablegate - here's a word of deceptive form that I ran across on 10 July 1999 - it's not the opposite of "Cripplegate", but rather a variety of papal ambassador! The correct way to analyze this word is as ab-legate, where the ab- is the Latin prefix indicating from and -legate is an emissary.
• Ack Emma - is a British slang term for "a.m." as in ante meridian. The phrase derives from a British signalman's letter code, in which Ack stood for A and so on. This is also where the word Ack Ack for anti-aircraft (AA) fire comes from, as well as the origin of the companion term Pip Emma (see P G Wodehouse, somewhere). Now that we know three letters of the code, where's the rest?... (08 September 2000:) Well, I just ran across the phrase Tock Emma for "trench mortar", another phrase that originates in the same code, so we're 4 down and 22 to go.
• Acrolith - you can get some of the meaning of this word from its form; here acro- should be taken to mean extreme rather than high while -lith refers to stone. An acrolith is a statue in which only the extremities (head, hands, and feet) are made of stone, while the other parts are made much more cheaply, of wood, which is then hidden by clever painting or the use of drapery. It is actually common in archaelogical digs to discover a head, hands and feet of a statue, and no "innards"; this is not because of some bizarre underground creature that devours statuary, but rather the age-old human practice of cheapness!
• Aftermath can be derived from after mowth, and refers to the second crop of grass or grain that comes up after mowing.
• Annie Oakley - a free pass or complimentary ticket. Our research department was momentarily unable to explain how the sharpshooter of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and "Annie Get Your Gun" became associated with this idea! But then we discovered the connection: one of Annie Oakley's tricks was to toss a playing card in the air and shoot out the spots. The result was similar to a complimentary ticket, which was typically punched so that it could not be resold. Now there's an odd train of thought!
• Anthrax is related to anthracite, the word for hard coal. Both come from a Greek word meaning "coal". This relationship can be explained by the most remarkable symptom of a cutaneous anthrax infection: the formation of a hard black cyst in the skin, suggesting a pellet of coal.
• Baily's Beads - are bright spots of light that appear around the rim of the solar disk just before an eclipse. The spots are roughly the same size, and look like a string of pearls. Baily was a British astronomer [1774-1844].
• Barmecide - no, this is not murder via the frothy effluvia of beer making. It is the name of a Persian vizier who supposedly put on a banquet for a beggar. At the banquet, costly, but empty, dishes were brought out, and an elaborate ritual feast was mimed, but the poor beggar got no actual food. I don't know yet where this story comes from, though I somehow remember running across it as a child. I have to presume it's from the Arabian Nights;
• Bissextile - neither a swinger, nor someone who's 66 years old, this instead refers to leap years. But it really is saying "two sixes". The explanation is, that back in the really good old days of Roman times, the calendar year ended with February rather than December. When an extra day was required every fourth year, the 24th of February occurred twice. The 24th of February happened to be the "sixth calends of March", that is, the sixth day before the calends (first) of March. (This is back when February had 30 days, but that's ANOTHER story). So a leap year was one which had two sixth calends of March. The more I read about calendars, the more bizarre and haphazard the whole business seems.

• Blue moon - I don't know why a blue moon is blue, although a factitious folk etymology would be easy to contrive, but the common definition of a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. This only happens occasionally, and occurs because if the moon is full on one of the first few days of the month, there's just enough time for it to go through all its phases, and become full again before the month is out. This doesn't happen that often, just...once in a blue moon.

  The New York Times Sunday Magazine of 31 January 1999 claims that the specific use of the term "blue moon" to mean a month with two full moons was only coined in the early 1980's, by an unidentified NPR commentator!

  The most recent riposte in the controversy showed up in the New York Times on 1 April 1999 (presumably not a hoax!). This claims that in fact the first occurrence was in a 1946 article in Sky and Telescope, which in turn relied on a mistaken reading of a 1937 Maine Farmer's Almanac. Apparently, the Almanac used the term "blue moon" when four full moons occurred in a season, defined as one of the periods between an equinox and a solstice (you know, technical winter, spring, summer and fall). Moreover, when four moons occurred in a season, it was the third moon that was called blue; this was because the Almanac had traditional names for the first, second, and last moons occurring in any quarter. An article correcting this error is supposed to have been printed in the March 1999 issue of Sky and Telescope.

  The bird's eye lowdown on the caper is that, in fact, if you go with the older definition, 1999 does not have any blue moons, and the next one occurs in February 2000. As they say, everything you know is wrong!

• Brummagem - was neither the best friend of Beau Brummel, nor a native of Brobdinag, nor the wife of Pantagruel. This word, which means a cheap, tacky, poorly made item, is a corruption of the name "Birmingham", from which, supposedly, a great quantity of such trifles came at one time. This recalls the words Bedlam, which derived from the slurred name of the "Bethlehem" asylum, maudlin, which was a slurred version of "Magdalene", and stepony, a sweet beverage made of lemon and raisins, associated with the Stepney district of London.
• Chiasm - information from the left and right eyes goes back to the visual cortex along thick optic nerves. About halfway along this path, the nerves meet, and seem to cross. Actually, some of the nerve bundles on the left go left, and some right; the eyes are actually exchanging some information. This crossing area is called the optic chiasm, and oddly enough, the word derives from the X-shape of the Greek letter chi. Chiasm or chiasmus was originally used for a sort of inversion in literature, such as "He left Egypt; Egypt was left by her;" and "Never let a kiss fool you or a fool kiss you".
• Deodand - it doesn't make you smell good, except maybe in God's eyes. A deodand is an item of property that has been directly instrumental in the death of a person. It is therefore forfeited to the king or state, and then used in some pious purpose.
• Dermagraphia - literally meaning "skin writing", which you might think involved parchment, say. Oh, no. The sister of a friend of mine came home from a reception with terrible itching on her back. Her husband tried to relieve it by rubbing her back, but got concerned at how red and irritated it looked, and sent her to the doctor. The doctor asked about her symptoms, then laughed and traced her name across her stomach. Within seconds, her name was traced out in angry red raised letters on her skin. "You've been eating seafood, and you're allergic to it!" he said. "Your skin has a primitive immune response which has been excited, and any pressure on the skin will cause it to swell up with histamines."
• Dord - means "density" said the dictionary. It was a mistake. What was meant was "D or d means density", but somehow the spaces got omitted and a new word was briefly coined, not that anyone was likely to have used it. I finally spotted this mistake with my own eyes on 06 May 1999, in Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition (a big old tattered unabridged dictionary lying around in the ISU Mathematics Office). This is an example of a ghost word. Another example is foupe, which appears in Samuel Johnson's dictionary, because he mistook an old-fashioned long s for an f in an old spelling of soup.
• The Eleventh Hour means "very late" or "at the last possible moment". The phrase is actually used in a parable of Jesus in the New Testament, where workers who came at the eleventh hour were paid as much as those who had worked all day. Presumably, the measurement of time was different in Biblical times, but the suggestion is that the day time was divided into twelve hours, ending at sundown. In any case, the phrase is liable to raise the puzzling question of "why not the twelfth hour?" There is an annoying ambiguity that means it's not clear whether there's a zeroth hour or a twelfth hour in the day; what do you call the time from noon to one? The first hour, surely. But then 1 to 2 is the second hour, and 11 to 12 is the TWELFTH hour. This is the same peculiar detail that gives us a 20th century full of years beginning with 19's. And don't get me started on the year zero or not. My feeling there is that year numbering was all done retroactively, and fictitiously, so whether Dionysius Exiguus could count to zero or not doesn't concern me one bit.
• Endorse - which means to "authorize" or "approve" or "recommend", comes to us from old English, via old French, from Latin. The minute you realize that it's a "meaningful" word, you realize that it means "on the back"and that we still "endorse" a check by signing it on the "dorsal" or back side.
• Futhark is the name of the runic alphabet, you know, those vertical bars with little diagonal shoots here and there that you find so often carved into rocks in Minnesota. But I just found out that the alphabet gets its name from its first six letters: "f", "u", "th", "a", "r" and "c". Why can't they name their alphabet more sensibly, like ours?
• Galactagogue - here's a word with a pleasant rhythm, a surprising definition, and a reasonable etymology. I really just ran across this word while leafing through a dictionary on 09 June 1999. It means any substance that promotes the production of milk. This might include the hormone shots given to mothers of premature babies, as well as the stuff they use to make cows go into hyperdrive. By the way, the fact that this word sounds like galaxy is no accident. Just think of the fact that our galaxy is named "The Milky Way".
• Greek Calends is a sort of joke that comes from Latin, and is an indirect way of saying "never", since, unlike the Latin calendar, the Greek calendar had no calends. As Wimpy says, "I'll gladly pay you on the Greek Calends for a hamburger today."
• The Innominate Bone is the official name of the two bones that make up the pelvic basin - and of course, the name means the "unnamed" bone. This is a step up in self contradiction, beyond unmentionables and the indescribable.
• Murdrum was a fine paid under Norman law by the hundred (a local community) if a person was slain and the slayer was not produced. The fine could be avoided if the kinsfolk of the murdered man came forward and proved that he was of English birth, rather than Franco-Norman. (Presumably, the other members of the community would put heavy pressure on the family to do this and avoid the fine!) This plea was called presentment of Englishry!
• Morton's Fork refers to a sort of logical wordplay or paradox equivalent to "damned if you do, damned if you don't". John Morton was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Henry VII. In those days, an Archbishop was literally a landlord, and had to come up with his income by taxing his tenants. Morton was particularly relentless in requiring everyone to pay, rich or poor. His argument was that if you were rich, you were already spending plenty of money, and hence could spare some for his taxes; if your were poor, then you were holding onto your money, so you must have some to pay him. With this two-pronged argument, he was able to catch everyone. Back in those days, forks, if they were used at all, had two prongs. And so such an argument has come to be known as Morton's Fork.
• Namba - sometimes a definition is too funny for it even to matter whether it is true. I got this from the New York Times, and it wasn't April Fool's Day. Supposedly, namba is the Japanese traditional style of walking, namely, the right arm and leg swing forward together, then the left arm and leg. Why this should be preferred one cannot imagine. The story claimed that horses used in ritual archery were also trained in namba. For training these horses, it was necessary to tie a wooden board to both right legs, and another to both left, so that the legs had to be moved together. How a horse could possibly move in such a manner without collapse is beyond my imagination. Of course, you don't have to be Japanese or ancient to nambulate! I managed to get Michael Lambert and Elvira Prologo to nambulate with me down the hallway. It was quite a sight.
• Nasturtium is a flower with a sharp smell, and its name comes from two Latin words that together mean Nose Twister!
• Paxwax means a neck ligament. The original Old English word was apparently faxwax, with fax meaning "hair" and wax having the meaning "grow". This in turn suggests that the word fairfax means "fair-haired", and if I was more sure of my old roots, I'd venture a guess as to the meaning of colfax, and ask for your help with carfax.
• Plutonium most commonly refers to a radioactive chemical element, named for a Greek god, as were Uranium and Neptunium. Pluto was the god of the underworld, which meant he was associated with grottoes, caves, mines, minerals and buried treasure. But more importantly, the god of the underworld was the god of the afterworld. If you wanted to beseech Pluto, you could go to Eleusis, home of the Eleusynian Mysteries, and there enter the Plutonium, regarded as an entrance to the underworld.
• Protocol means customary rituals or formal requirements. The word has its root in the Greek protokollon, which was originally the first leaf of a manuscript that contained notes describing its contents or purpose. The word proto means "first", of course, but kollon has relatives in the words "collagen", "collodion", and "colloid", where it means "glue". The protocol was actually the first page, which was glued onto the front of the manuscript
• Quidnunc means a busybody or gossip. The words quid nunc mean what now? in Latin, and are presumably the equivalent of today's tsup?. By the way, quiddity is lamely defined as whatness.
• Rovescio is a musical notation meaning to play in reverse or contrary direction. I'm not quite sure what is meant by that. The reason I include this word is that it is defined in my big dictionary as follows:

  Rovescio: a rovescio.

  Now what do you do? I was convinced I had found a classic recursively useless definition or CRUD, until I realized that perhaps this was an Italian phrase, a rovescio, and was able to find the real definition! By the way, my dictionary defines all the cardinal and ordinal numbers up to 100. I ran across definitions for "eighty-third: the eigthy-third item in a sequence...", and that sort of bunk.
• Skimmington is an old custom in rural Britain, in which the people form a mock parade to ridicule a nagging wife or an unfaithful husband. One hopes such dear customs are kept alive... over there.
• Solmization is the use of a set of syllables to denote the tones of a musical scale. Such scales include the Great Scale, the Guidonian Syllables (Ut/Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La), the Fixed and Movable Do Systems, the Sol-Fa Syllables (Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do).
• Spasmodical is a journal which comes out "spasmodically", in contrast to the more well-behaved "periodicals". A spasmodical is the bane of librarians, who must bear witness as the last dog-eared issue turns yellow and tattered on the "current" shelf beside all the spanking fresh issues of the periodicals. This usage was reported to me by Meg Geroch.
• Tawdry is something cheap, squalid or demeaning. It comes from Saint Audrey (or Ethelreda!), who died of a throat tumor, which she blamed on the fact that she wore fancy necklaces when younger. In some kind of odd tribute to her, cheaply-made lace collars were sold at the Saint Audrey's Fair. They were so poorly made that the slurred tawdry became a synonym for shoddy, tatty items.

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