pogonotrophy

A precious word for a deprecated grooming choice. Few now are the men who grow beards; facial hair is no trophy, and its grower may be thought a pogue. Along with these echoes, there is the thought of the unsophisticated cartoon character Pogo and the bucolic backwater of the Poconos. The medically minded will think of atrophy and hypertrophy, no prize either of them. The four pilgarlic o‘s, so like glabrous domes, give no hint of the hairiness hiding within. But if a man neglect his razor for one day, he has already commenced this process, which takes about as long to look good as the word does. The word, oftenest used with a wink, says as much about the speaker as about the subject and, if words were priced, would come in above the cost of a barber shave. It was grown by those ace beard-wearers the ancient Greeks; it uses their words for beard and growth – not the word for award, however prized their beards may have been.