Monthly Archives: November 2009

willy-nilly

Posted on November 10, 2009 | 3 comments

I knew Willy Nally. He like to dally. First he saw Sally, then Elly, then Milly… Although he was a nihilist, he could annul denial when he list. But when he met Nelly, well, will he, nill he, he was stunned silly as jelly; she was up his alley. Whoa, Nally! No more free Willy! His desultory polyamory was annulled, and, nolens volens, he was collared, his will newly woolly. He could no more gaily bully every Sheila, willy-nilly; Nelly knew him fully and would not fall in folly. No shilly-shally dilly-dally hem and haw; she had him, willy-nilly.

Does that seem silly? Do you wonder why, in that weave of words, I used willy-nilly twice? Well, you tell me: what do you use willy-nilly to mean? If you are like many, you see it as meaning “here and there, desultorily, haphazardly.” But that is a sense founded on its sound – the back-and-forth of it, like shilly-shally, which is flush with wishy-washy (note the vowel alternation: high-low, as we see in tick-tock, ping-pong, pitter-patter, frick and frack, and so on). Nill was once a word: the negative of will, which was itself not merely an auxiliary but a full expression of intention. From will he, nill he or will I, nill I we got willy-nilly: as Oxford puts it, “nolens volens,” videlicet, “whether wanting it or not.” Fans of Shakespeare will recall Petruchio’s avowal in The Taming of the Shrew: “Will you, nill you, I will marry you.”

So while we use its high vowels and liquids to tell of situational liquidity, it is originally a liquid or irrelevant will that it spells. (Can you see the teeth of the w give way to the bent back of the n?) Essentially, it tells you to forestall your sally and come and parley.

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Why “fetuses”?

Posted on November 9, 2009 | 5 comments

A colleague asked why it was that dictionaries seemed to prefer fetuses rather than, say, fœtii, to follow the same rule (she said) as octopus, rather than the “stupid sounding” octopuses.

Well, first of all, the plural of an -us ending is -i, not -ii; the Latinate plural of octopus is octopi, not octopii. Only words that end in -ius pluralize to -ii.

Second, octopi is not really any more correct than octopuses. Octopus was a loan word in Latin and is a loan word in English, and in each case the language has applied its own inflection ending for the plural. The original is Greek octopous (“eight” + “foot”) and the plural of that is octopodes, though those who insist on saying octopodes in English conveniently forget that we don’t say octopous for the singular.

In regard to œ versus e, in many words we have gotten from Latin, the digraph has been simplified in North American English, but that’s hardly the first spelling change ever enacted on Latin loans, and efforts to retain Latin etymology (or resurrect it) have had a lot to do with the poor match between spelling and pronunciation in English. In this case, however, fetus is the more etymologically correct spelling; fœtus is an error – a misconjecture. The original Latin is fetus with a long e.

Anyway, feti is used, but rarely. Fetuses is used commonly because, after all, we’re speaking English, and we more often than not conform loan words to English morphological patterns rather than keeping them in the morphology of the source language. (Quick, what’s the plural of sauna? And why do you say that? Also, why does nobody object that the alcohol and the albatross are redundant, since the al in the source means “the”? Answer: they’re ours now [evil laugh].) I suspect that the fact that feti would sound like “feet eye” has some little something to do with the preference in this case – we don’t always like to confuse ourselves. At any rate, dictionaries document usage. They can have some prescriptive effect, but their main function is to tell people what educated people use a word to mean and how they spell and inflect it. So the usage comes first. Even Noah Webster, when he made a number of spelling reforms in his dictionary, used only spellings that had already been used in real life. (And not all of his changes stuck, either.)

Latinate plurals serve nicely as a sign of desire to sound erudite, and they keep the language nice and difficult the way we like it, but they do have practical limits, beyond which they become rather funny. I seem to recall some humorous prose or verse referring to travelling on omnibi and so forth. (-ibus, by the way, is an inflectional ending of its own and not -ib plus -us, so -ibi is no kind of Latin).

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crass

Posted on November 9, 2009 | 1 comment

Have you seen the movie Spartacus? The arch-villain of the piece, played by Laurence Olivier, is Marcus Licinius Crassus. Like Spartacus, he was a real person. In fact, he was a good friend of Julius Caesar. He was a powerful general, but also a very, very rich businessman – so rich, it’s almost a wonder people don’t say rich as Crassus rather than rich as Croesus. His wealth equated to about $170 billion in modern terms. He was known for his avarice, but he was mainly a savvy businessman with a knack for buying things that were undervalued. He got many properties at fire sale prices – literally: if your building was on fire, he would offer to buy it on the spot – for a price that took into consideration its current state, of course – and if you sold, he would immediately bring in his private fire brigade to sort things out. But he was also a genial glad-hander, someone who greeted everyone by name in the street. Unfortunately for him, he felt his life wasn’t complete without a great military victory. Well, he got a defeat instead, in the course of which his life attained completion – or conclusion, anyway.

So is this the sort of guy you would call “fatty”? Well, if his father was Publius Licinius “Rich Dude” Fatty, then, yeah, you would call this guy Marcus Licinius Fatty (also given the nickname “Rich Dude” – well, in Latin, Dives.) You see, crassus is Latin for “fat” – think of gras, its modern French descendant. And why not? If you eat food that’s fatty you call it rich, no?

And whatever you may think of Crassus and his behaviour, and his type, however crass you may find him (and, for that matter, however Monty-Pythonish his name may seem), he didn’t actually inspire the word crass. It came straight from the common Latin. It also mean “solid” and “thick” in Latin, you see. So it was an easy borrowing into English for it to mean “gross, stupid, dense, unrefined.”

But does the word fit its meaning? It’s not a dull or heavy-sounding word; the stop and fricative are voiceless. But it’s capable of communicating a certain crudity nonetheless, from craw to ass. Francophones may think of cracher, “spit”; English echoes include crash and all those grabbing, tooth-grinding, growling words such as crap, crank, cramp, crack, crab… but note that there is also craft and, for that matter, class and grass. This word could have kept better company and it would have fit in. Still, its crash and its blaring brass seem to match the bad manners and the blatant avarice. After all, the words it most commonly modifies include commercialism and materialism.

And all of us who are just out looking for opportunities to get more money – like anyone would, because who doesn’t want more money? – well, wouldn’t we, when confronted with our cupidity, look up, surprised, and say, “Crass? Us?” Yes, mark us so; we’re thick as thieves.

 

I thank Roberto De Vido for suggesting crass and Crassus.

 

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myriad

Posted on November 8, 2009 | 6 comments

Herewith, to mark the ten thousandth view of Sesquiotica, I present an epistolary correspondence between Ion Orzabal and Muriel Wan.

IO:
Muriel, I wan to woo you.

MW:
There are wan ways to do that. Wan, my name, one of the old hundred Chinese surnames, means “ten thousand.” So it is one hundred times the hundred. Square me away with some poetry.

IO:
You, Wan, are Han (Chinese); I am Basque. May I bask in your glory? Muriel, for you I will make merry with a myriad of means – myriad being “ten thousand” but rooting in the Greek murios, “countless.” Any Tennyson? Let’s try this:

Sweet is every sound,
Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet;
Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
and murmuring of innumerable bees.

MW:
You have connected! You speak of innumerable bees and moaning birds, surely the source of the countless many things – in Chinese, wan wu: the “ten thousand things.” Everything. As often mentioned in the Tao Te Ching – let me quote the translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English:

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

and

The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.

I do like the water images. After all, Muriel comes from Scots Gaelic Muireall, “bright sea.”

IO:
If water is music to your ears, I can Handel it. But then let me Aeschylate matters. Who stole the fire from the gods and put them in your eyes? Why, Prometheus, of course, and he is bound to be relevant. He is quoted speaking of the “Myriad laughter of the ocean waves.” A cheat, though, I declare: the original Greek is pontion te kumaton anérithmon gelasma, no murios in sight until lines later (where it is murieté)… Here is David Grene’s translation of the lines:

Bright lights, swift-winged winds, springs of the rivers, numberless
laughter of the sea’s waves, earth, mother of all, and the all-seeing
circle of the sun: I call upon you to see what I, a God, suffer
at the hands of Gods –
see with what kind of torture
worn down I shall wrestle ten thousand
years of time –

And indeed, Muriel, I wrestle a myriad of yearning tortures for you. Let me, IO, quote Io from Prometheus Bound, stung by the gadfly, goaded by Argos, the ten-thousand-eyed (muriópon) herdsman. In Greek, “Io, io, popoi! Poi de m’agousi téleplagtoi planai.” In English, “O, O, O, Where are you bringing me, my far-wandering wanderings?” Do my wanderings take me back? Do I strive pointlessly?

MW:
Ah, earth, the mother of all, again. You have named it! But there it is: you begin from the myth and you take it to the myriad in the moment, an instance of hierophany – Mircea Eliade’s “eternal return.” We create the sacred space when we connect with the myth, and the time now becomes the time of the myth for the moment. In every countless moment we may return. But again I am jonesing for the tao:

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.

IO:
Ah, all is wan and wan is one. I know another eternal return: the idea that, given an infinite amount of time, all arrangements of matter in the universe will recur. But I eternally return to you, Ion after eons. Will you yield?

MW:
And the universe, too, returns, from big bang to big crunch, every breath a myriad of eons. But is this yield you desire the yield of a cookie recipe? I hope it is not a mere yield of a myriad. Myriad matches miscellaneously: ways, problems, forms, details, issues. Do you make merry or do you make as to marry? I do not marry ad hoc; Muriel does not marry all who ask. Wan will have but one.

IO:
Well, when all is Wan, Wan is all. I will be a rock and will not roll. If you wish a stairway to heaven, let us physically manifest the sacred. But let me speak of what I believe; I will shout and let it all out, my tears and fears. You speak of Mircea Eliade, and I hope my words are not Greek to you; I seek no Iliad, and I wish theodicy, not the Odyssey. Have mercy. Let my hierophany be Coleridge’s “Hymn to the Earth”:

Say, mysterious Earth! O say, great mother and goddess,
Was it not well with thee then, when first thy lap was ungirdled,
Thy lap to the genial Heaven, the day that he woo’d thee and won thee!
Fair was thy blush, the fairest and first of the blushes of morning!
Deep was the shudder, O Earth! the throe of thy self-retention:
Inly thou strovest to flee, and didst seek thyself at thy centre!
Mightier far was the joy of thy sudden resilience; and forthwith
Myriad myriads of lives teem’d forth from the mighty embracement.
Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impell’d by thousand-fold instincts,
Fill’d, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on their channels;
Laugh’d on their shores the hoarse seas; the yearning ocean swell’d upward;
Young life low’d through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing mountains,
Wander’d bleating in valleys, and warbled on blossoming branches.

The myriad myriads – noun and adjective, the universe in verse – will teem forth from our embracement. Let me be the genial Heaven that woo’d and won Wan! The rivers will sing in their channels, and the hoarse seas will laugh – countlessly; the yearning ocean will swell upward.

Oh, let me Marvell at your beauty! To be exact, Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
…
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
…
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
…
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

MW:
Ah, thirty thousand – san man. Mister San Man, you bring me a dream. The wingèd chariot may be your father’s, for you are Ion, son of Apollo, who drives the sun. I hope you will not run. You are myriad-minded, to borrow a word Coleridge applied to Shakespeare: Greek murionous. I am in mind of Bronson Alcott, from “Ion: A Monody”:

Early through field and wood each Spring we sped,
Young Ion leading o’er the reedy pass;
…
For endless Being’s myriad-minded race
Had in his thought their registry and place

But for your harbinger, let me end with a line from Edmund Charles Blunden’s Harbingers:

And wed me with the myriad-minded man.

IO:
Then let us be happily myriad!

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collyrium

Posted on November 6, 2009 | 2 comments

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable relates this tale under the heading “Sight (Far)”:

Zarga, the Arabian heroine of the tribe Jadis, could see at the distance of three days’ journey. Being asked by Hassân the secret of her long sight, she said it was due to the ore of antimony, which she reduced to powder, and applied to her eyes as a collyrium every night.

A collyrium! Well, I suppose it did clear ’em. I wonder if she could see all the way to Illyricum. Who? No, not the Who, though they did record “I Can See for Miles.” Illyricum was the Roman province roughly where Bosnia and Croatia now are. But though that’s a day’s journey now from Arabia, it would then have been somewhat more; she could only have seen it on television (“far-see,” which in German is Fernseh, meaning literally “farsee” and actually TV… but Zarga was Arabian, not Farsi). If she’d had one.

Perhaps she was wanting to see Mary, Queen of Heaven; if she was a Collyridian, she might have. They were a sect of the 4th and 5th centuries known for offering the Virgin little cakes (kollurida).

But where did she get her antimony? Perhaps from her television? It’s used in electrical alloys, after all. But, no, probably from stibnite, which was popularly applied to the eyes in powder form at the time (but was that really all that farsighted of them to do?). That form of antimony was called koh’l, which, with the article al, is the source of our word alcohol – through an obviously winding path of senses passing through alchemy.

But would she apply alcohol to her eyes? Ha! My eye! In this respect the guidance of etymology would force an antinomy with that of sensibility. No, such suggestions are collyrium – mere eyewash. She might as well get her dust from a colliery.

But, now, is collyrium another word for antimony, then? If the antimony is applied to the eyes, it can be. But collyrium can be any of a variety of powders – or liquids. The main is just that they are applied to the eyes, you see. Or, on the other hand, the word can also be used to refer to a cylinder of solid medicine to be stuck in some bodily opening (we don’t mean the mouth). And, from the “eyewash” sense, it can mean “nonsense.”

The word comes, anyway, from the Greek: kollura, referring to a small roll of coarse bread (and the root of kollurida – see above). I don’t quite see how that gets into the eyes, but there it is. The word has a nice lyric flavour to it anyway, with the liquid l‘s and the the look of the llyr. What kind of lyrics? Well, Zarga being Arabian, and being Jadis – and jadis, French for “in the past” – she might well have chosen ruba’i, a quatrain form, collected perhaps in a volume, named by the plural ruba’iyat. And then she could use her fine sight alternately between the book, a jug of wine (or other alcohol), a little cake or roll of bread, and the wilderness – whether Arabia, Illyria, or North Dakota (where you can watch your dog run away for three days). And, of course, her lover, who could recite to her Fitzgerald’s famous translation of Omar Khayyam’s eleventh ruba’i:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

And that’s not just collyrium!

 

I thank my mother, Mary Anna Harbeck, for suggesting this word, which she in turn heard from a friend, Pat Verge, who read it in a Baha’i book.

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caparison

Posted on November 5, 2009 | Leave a comment

Don’t dress up much? Why not put on something really smart, just for the sake of caparison? Oh, come now, try… even if you look so good your significant other won’t let you out without a chaperone.

Caparison is not, I should say, lest there be any doubt, related to comparison. On the other hand, it is related to chaperone. The latter word is also – and with greater historical basis – spelled chaperon; it comes from a French word of the same spelling meaning “hood.” Its sense is one of protection, and it came to its modern usage through application to an older woman who would travel with a younger one to protect her (just think of Maggie Smith’s character Charlotte Bartlett in A Room with a View). But the same hood came to be called caparazon in Spanish and caparação in Portuguese, and so by way of older French caparasson we came to this English term caparison for a cape for a horse. And from that we come to other decorative clothing for other beasts (us included) for special events.

And why shouldn’t it be a word for haute couture? We can see that it has paris at heart. It’s a word for the fancy-dress ball set (and I don’t just mean those ball-ended tassels hanging on the horse’s cape)! If the time to cut a caper is on, or if at the end of the night you wish to cap a risen sun with one last waltz (or tango), what better mode of attire than one expressed by a word perhaps best known today in the works of Shakespeare? It’s an uncommon word for uncommon events, and it so nicely drapes a vowel between each pair of consonants, like a lovely garland. Just do remember not to overdo it – try two-r‘d and you may end up with craparison.

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scrimp

Posted on November 4, 2009 | 3 comments

This word happens to immediately put the song “When I’m Sixty-Four” by the Beatles in my mind: “Every summer we can rent a cottage, in the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear. We shall scrimp and save. Grandchildren on your knee, Vera Chuck and Dave.”

And indeed scrimp and save is one of the most common collocations in which to find this word. It is also commonly used with on plus a noun phrase – here’s a real live example: “For the most satisfying results, don’t scrimp on the olive oil or the salt.” This example also shows the other thing that shows up often with scrimp: n’t – scrimp is frequently preceded by a negative auxiliary, inevitably in contraction: don’t scrimp, shouldn’t scrimp, doesn’t scrimp, can’t scrimp.

The word is a bit of a shrimp, really, which is appropriate given that shrimp is a closely related word (and one that was used to describe small creatures and people generally for some time before being applied specifically to the cocktail-party crustacean, which has given us that entertaining oxymoron of entertaining, jumbo shrimp). Scrimp, for its part, has origins with Germanic words relating to shrivelling, wrinkling, etc. It hit English as a verb, adjective, and adverb in the 18th century; a noun version came into use in the 19th century. These days we scrimp on all but the verb. It’s as though we’ve crimped the outflow of the others.

Scrimp also avails itself of a notable phonaestheme, the scr onset. Scr often goes with words that involve roughness and/or constriction (scrabble, scrape, scree, scraggly, scrap, scratch, scruffy, scrofula, scrub, scrunch) but also shows up with many words of writing (scrawl, screed, script, scribble, scribe, scripture, scrivener, scroll – several of these trace to the same Latin root). There are some others that have different meanings but may still bear the aesthetic influence of association with the preceding lists: scream, screech, screen, scrim, scrutinize, scry, scram, screw, scrimshaw, scrod, scrotum, scrounge, scruple… and quite a few more.

The imp rime has less of a clear effect: limp, blimp, pimp, shrimp, gimp, wimp. I leave it to the reader to taste the associations, but they are not overall positive.

Serve this word in a variety of levels of text, all but the most formal and most informal, but mostly focused on practicalities.

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budgerigar

Posted on November 3, 2009 | 2 comments

This is a long word, but still can have a stubby sound because of all the voiced stops and affricates. It is as though it refers to a pudgy budget bird owned by Dagmar from Castlegar, who plays guitar and didgeridoo (Dagmar, not the budgerigar; you could probably lodge a budgerigar in a didgeridoo with the aid of a cudgel, but you might have to fudge it, depending on the age of the budgerigar and the bore of the didgeridoo). In fact, its object is a rather resplendent avian, bred in a variety of designer colours for the discerning owner, preferably one whose neighbours are deaf as posts. (Have you heard the screech of a parakeet? It’s not discreet.)

To me, this word has a particularly British air, probably because I’m only used to hearing Brits use the full forms; North Americans in general seem to stick with the short form, budgie, and my guess is that many or even most budgie-sayers are unaware of the long form. But although its pronunciation can involve a primus paeon (an accented beat followed by three unaccented beats), a particularly British pattern (North Americans tend to stick in an extra stress somewhere so they don’t have to tumble out three unstressed syllables as though falling down stairs; in this word, the extra goes at the end, making it a choriamb, like the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), the word itself is undeniably Australian. As is the bird – for the last five million years, living in some rather inhospitable places. (As it still does, if you count cages in cramped living rooms.)

The Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary, two of the best sources for etymology, have a bit of a disagreement about the exact origin of this word, however. Oxford says flatly that it comes from the “Port Jackson dialect” of “Native Australian” (which is as broad a term as “European”), from budgeri “good” (itself an Aussie English slang word too) and gar “cockatoo” (though it’s not a cockatoo, it’s a parakeet). AHD declares that it’s an altered form of the Kamilaroi word gijirrigaa. If budgeri was already common slang for “good” at the time, it is easy enough to imagine how it could have been swapped in. (Note the competing transliterations – old-style dg and new-style j.)

So why not just say budgie? Well, many do. But it’s not as fun, is it? And if this all seems perhaps wantonly prolix, consider that it is still shorter than the vocabulary of some budgerigars, which (the males especially) can be taught to imitate human speech: the largest vocabulary of any bird, according to Guinness, belonged to a budgerigar named Puck, which could say 1728 different words, whereas this note has but 482. This loquacious, stentorian, sesquipedalian bird ought to be a mascot of word tasting… except I really hate loud shrieks.

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polyphloisboian

Posted on November 2, 2009 | 1 comment

Dang, this word looks like a letter-form depiction of something rolling down a hill loudly and messily. You get the rolling sense from the o o o spaced through it (and from that roly-poly opening), and the flailing ascenders, descenders, and dots bring to mind the various bits sailing in the air from some one-person yard sale careering down a slope – or from some two-person cartoon-style dust-up (I remember once in school seeing two kids in a ball of a fight ejected abruptly from a classroom – turned out onto the hallway floor, nothing but jeans, feet, and fists all ascuffle). It even has the sound of flapping and bouncing.

I’m put in mind, too, of the great fall at the beginning of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, expressed as “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!” (I’ve kept Joyce’s hyphenation points to facilitate line breaking, though really the word is not hyphenated per se). Which in turn reminds me of the noise that alerted me to the fact that the clothes rail in the bedroom closet in our new apartment had not been anchored well in the wall (due to the drywall being right up against the concrete outside wall), and would no longer be enduring the weight of the various jackets, pants, shirts, and dresses we had lately laden it with, nor, for that matter, of anything else ever again. And the resultant heap of fabric and metal looked, come to think of it, a little like this word.

But the pftjschute of a rack of clothes hardly begins to illustrate this word. Think of how it sounds: like an Australian saying “Polly flies by an’…” Well, and what? If Polly is a parakeet or budgerigar, then probably Polly flies by an’ makes a lot of noise. With all the other Pollys out there.

But this word, the historical persistence of which we have Homer to thank for, was in the first place used to refer to the sound of the sea. Wot, that soothing rush of waves? Hmm. Turn up your stereo a bit. On a windy day, that rush becomes a roar, or many roars or much roaring. Phloisbos was Greek for “roar,” anyway, and Homer liked to refer to poluphloisboios thalasses, the “loud-roaring sea.”

In more recent times, however, when used at all, this word has typically been applied – with a humorous stiltedness – to people and their utterances. One may speak of polyphloisboian football hooligans (though I think I’ll be the first on the web to do so), or of polyphloisboian critics, or of some prolix polyphloisboian stentor, which, I must say, aside from being stilted is a touch redundant. Or one could use the word in a court proceeding; many lawyers and judges, it seems, enjoy tossing in obscure words and references, and I find this in the 2003 decision record of a US Department of Labor complaint: “The CO who conducted the inspection opined that the crane’s alarm might not be able to be heard in the polyphloisboian conditions within the warehouse.”

One may also, if Greek isn’t good enough without having been passed through Latin, spell this word poylphlœsbœan, and that forces a pronunciation on it that rhymes with “lesbian” and can make euphonious pairs with thespian and similar words. And if you want the word to seem to screech (perhaps to screech the brakes or to career uncontrollably), you can use the nonce-formation (attested only once in the OED but still in it) polyphloisboiic. If the object roars not just loudly but the loudest, you may call it, using another humorous nonce-word (this one from Thackeray), polyphloisboiotatotic. But my favourite in this line (and one that is still in use) is the massive portmanteau word polyphloisboisterous, which surely describes many a bar on a busy night – including the ones down the block from the island of calm in the sky where I write this.

I thank Elaine Phillips for bringing this word to my attention; she in turn passed it on from her friend Craig Withers.

 

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aelbaroate

Posted on November 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

“Well, my boy, you’ve certainly got me blind on this one.” Arthur Watkins held up the slip of paper on which I had written the word for the table. The other five seated around the table – Ravi Ramakrishnan, Raoul Carter, Ross Ewage (the noted vulgarian), my old friend Philippe Entrecote, and Jess Long – seemed to be in agreement.

But that was good. Because this was a blind word tasting. The idea is that you start with a word you don’t know and see what taste it has without prior knowledge of its semantics or usage patterns, and then the host gradually gives more information. This is a difficult thing to do with a crowd of top-level word tasters: find a word they don’t know.

I almost felt guilty about this one I had given them. Almost.

On the slip of paper was written aelbaroate.

“That word’s a real ***********,” Ross said. “It’s got me up the ********* with sandpaper.” (Sorry, but this has to get through those pervasive antiperversion filters.)

“This isn’t a game of ‘guess,'” I said. “You know that. Tell me what you get from it as you see it.”

“It seems,” Ravi said, “to be like a word for some name of some demon.”

“Like Adalbaoth,” said Raoul. “Except it’s not capitalized.”

“Demons need investors?” Ravi said disingenuously. He knew well enough that the point was that demons’ names are proper nouns, and I hadn’t written Aelbaroate with a capital A.

“It reminds me of some biochemical names,” Raoul said. “The chelates or salts. Like furoate.”

“It has nice echoes of labor or lobar,” Jess said. “As in logophiles’ labours lost. Or perhaps boreal. If it’s a demon, it’s the one responsible for frosty days in hell.” She had a little half-smile.

“I like the mellifluous vowels,” said Ravi, “with the liquids. It has a certain Spanishness to its feel, too, if you were to say the ae as a plain e.”

“I find that opening ae interesting,” Philippe said. “It suggests it may be from Latin. Is it also spelled with just an e?”

“Yes,” I said, “as a matter of fact I found more than 400 hits on Google with the spelling e-l-b-a-r-o-a-t-e.”

“Same word?” Arthur asked.

“Yes, indeed,” I said. Jess was looking at the paper with the word on it. The corner of her mouth turned up a bit more and one eyebrow arched.

“I’d like to know where you found this one,” Arthur said.

“I got it from my friend Alan,” I replied. “He used it in an email message.”

“But is it a word? Do people use it?” Arthur persisted.

“Define use. Define people,” I said. “What people actually use floccinaucinihilipilificate? And how do they actually use it?”

“I’m getting close to using it right here,” Raoul muttered, meaning the long word just mentioned, which refers to an act of estimating something as worthless.

“You’re being as slippery as a ******* ****,” Ross said. (Those filters again. You know.) “Use it in a sentence.”

“I’d aelbaroate if I could,” I said. “But the matter is very aelbaroate.”

Jess leaned back and grinned.

“A verb and an adjective,” Philippe said. “So the ate ending really is the morpheme ate, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, “used for forming a verb of conversion or result, and used in place of a past tense form for the adjectival version.”

Arthur, Philippe, Ravi, and Raoul looked at me with are-you-for real expressions. “Somehow,” said Philippe, “I’ve gotten this far in this life without knowing this word.”

Ross rolled his eyes. Jess was doing her best Cheshire cat.

“Jess,” Ravi said. “Is there something you would like to share with the class?”

“Gentlemen,” Jess said, “you have been the victims of an elaborate hoax.” Then, to given them an extra chance at understanding, she said again, slowly, “Elaborate.”

“It doesn’t seem so elaborate to – oh,” Philippe said. I knew for sure he had twigged when he said, “No fair using typographical errors.”

Ravi had also caught on. He wagged his finger. “Especially ones that are not even proper typos. This word has an extra a, three instead of the two in elaborate.”

“Consider it a Hallowe’en costume,” I said. “I wanted to give you a fresh experience of tasting form purely for form. It caught my eye, Alan’s typo. But we could always decide to give it a meaning and use it as such. I’m sure that some of the fake meanings in Douglas Adams’s The Meaning of Liff have passed into semi-common usage.”

“Still and all,” Arthur said, “it’s not just ectrick.”

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