A bit over a year ago I went on a Twitter rant about censorship. Then I made an image of the entire text so I had it in one place and tweeted that. Today Daniel Trujillo asked me about it. I found I hadn’t ever posted it here. So I dug it up. Here it is; you may have to click on the link to see the image. Maybe later I’ll convert it to real text rather than an image.
Say youâre writing a text for an introductory course, something just to make sure students are prepared for higher education in the subject. You want to use a diction proper to the level, right? Maybe some eidetic imagery? You wouldnât want to prop up your vocabulary with opaque sesquipedalian escapees from an encyclopaedia. Thatâs not the proper way to do it. Might make you look like a professor, but wonât make you look like a pro at preparatory communication.
But every so often youâll get a text, or at least an opening section, that will declare itself propaedeutic. âThis course is propaedeutic for the more advanced study,â perhaps â or, as a noun, as in John Maynard Keynesâs General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, âWe can pass from this simplified propaedeutic to the problems of the real world.â Simplified except for what you call it.
Itâs a word for those who consider teaching to be a bit infra dig; they want to be paedagogical. This is a serious course of study youâre embarking on, as witness the lexically luxuriant luminary who will be Virgil to your Dante (and remember, Dante went through Hell first before getting to Heaven). Switch on your academic propeller beanie; this is just the warm-up act.
Itâs an impressive and almost balanced-looking word, propaedeutic. The paed could rotate 180 degrees and look much the same â in fact, write it with the digraph, pĂŠd, and it would look the same. You could spin it like a propeller, and in fact âpropaedeuticâ sounds a bit like an old prop plane starting up. The p at the very start of propaedeutic would do well to be matched with another d at the end to make the whole word spin, but we just get c, which is literally 1 short of d, so we miss the stem â preparation not finished, I guess.
Up to today, this word would call forth four things for me:
Joss Ackland, British actor, male, whoâs been in a gazillion things but who I remember best from the 1987 movie White Mischief, a murder mystery based on a true happening among a particularly debauched set of people in colonial Kenya, the true story of which was recounted (among other things) in the fascinating book The Bolter.
Joss Stone, British singer, female.
Joss Whedon, American director, screenwriter, and actor, male.
Joss sticks, a kind of incense.
Joss Ackland and Joss Whedon have in common that they are males, and actors. Joss Ackland and Joss Stone have in common that they are British and their names are both short for Jocelyn, which, like Vivian and Marion, used to be commonly borne by men. (Joss Whedon is Joseph.) They all have their spots in the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) pantheon, whether or not you would call any of them idols.
But then there are those joss sticks. I was never sure why they were called joss sticks. I was never in a position to look it up when the question occurred to me. The word just seems jaunty and maybe a bit exotic, in an Anglicized way. Was joss a word for something mystical? Was it borrowed from something to do with, say, horsemanship, or a sport like jousting or some kind of tossing, or something more functional? Or was it one of the ingredients?
Then, today, I was reading Rudyard Kiplingâs Plain Tales from the Hills, an early collection of short stories, in an Oxford edition replete with explanatory notes. I read the story titled âThe Gate of the Hundred Sorrows,â which is about an opium den in Lahore run by a Chinese expatriate. I read this: âIn one corner used to stand Fung-Tchingâs Joss â almost as ugly as Fung-Tching â and there were always sticks burning under his nose; but you never smelt âem when the pipes were going thick.â
There was no explanatory note. Apparently Oxford assumed all the readers would know what a joss was. Or else they were just relying on their figuring it out from context â the Joss gets a further passage about it from which it is easy to tell that it is a statue.
A statue of what? A Chinese deity, as it happens.
Joss is a Chinese word? It most certainly is not. I have yet to encounter a dialect of Chinese in which that is a plausible word phonologically; although there are many more dialects than I have met, word-final /s/ is quite out of play in the ones Iâve seen.
No, joss is a word from Chinese Pidgin English, a language used for trade in south China, with simple syntax based on Chinese and with words largely taken from English and other European tradersâ languages and modified to fit Chinese phonotactics more or less. The word pidgin, for instance, comes from the word business.
The word joss is, as I mentioned, a word for a Chinese deity (or similar) or statue thereof. You may know that deity comes from the Latin word deus. Also from deus came Portuguese deos (thatâs an old form). From Portuguese deos came Javanese dejos, which was used for Chinese religious statues. From dejos came Chinese Pidgin joss. And joss stuck, in English as well.
Joss sticks still. Well, joss sticks still sell, anyway, and burn, more often in home incense holders than in front of statues of deities. Joss isnât a word youâre likely to see applied directly to a Chinese statue in ordinary usage now. But you do see it on some members of the IMDB pantheon. And now you can take it as emblematic of how some word forms burn down like incense, in sense and in form.
This was once a word of the future, the bright, clear, future, full of shine, as emblematic for many years as its near-doppelganger cell phone was more recently. It names a smooth, glassy, pliable, diaphanous film made from the same general sort of thing as paper is: cellulose. Itâs a smooth, slippery word, not a stop in it, just the /s/ and /f/ voiceless fricatives, the /l/ liquid and /n/ nasal, and three vowels, one or two of which are diphthongs. Itâs a word that can bespeak silly fun or a subtle, profane phallocentricity, depending on what â or whom â itâs wrapping.
For me, cellophane will always call forth Plastic. It will call forth lower-case plastic, of course, because we often call it plastic wrap, though there are many kinds of things weâll call that and cellophane is only one (cling wrap is another â not the same thing). But it will call forth upper-case Plastic too: Plastic Bertrand, the ultimate invented plastic pop idol from Belgium, presented shrink-wrapped for public consumption, complete with his first smash hit, âĂa plane pour moiâ:
Transparency is a hallmark characteristic of cellophane. In fact, itâs in the name: cello from cellulose â the plant product from which it is made â and phane, from the Greek ÏαΜ root meaning âcome to light, showâ, which we see in words such as diaphanous (the French inventor of cellophane had the French word diaphane âtransparentâ in mind) and epiphany.
So cellophane, which seems so artificial, is nonetheless made from organic matter (so are oil and gas, mind you: organic matter decayed and changed over millions of years). And the word cellophane, which seemed so modern even in the 1960s and â70s, came into existence in 1912, with the product it names. Sometimes plastic things seem realer than real. And sometimes something is so transparent you donât even notice it.
Plastic Bertrand has mounted a bit of a comeback recently. Hereâs a video of him singing his top hit a few years ago:
Does he sound like the same guy as in the first recording? I mean, heâs older and all that, of course. But still. Now listen to this 2010 version by a different guy, Lou Deprijck.
Doesn’t that sound a bit more like the original?
Go find every TV performance by the young Plastic Bertrand and youâll realize quickly theyâre all lip-syncs to the studio version. If you happen to have a copy of Plastic Bertrandâs greatest hits album, as my brother did (I was listening to his copy), you may think at some point how itâs odd that his voice in the songs recorded at live concerts is a bit different. Or you may think nothing of it because you know studios do things with voices.
Such as use one personâs voice and another personâs face.
When Plastic Bertrand â real name Roger Allen François Jouret â was hired by a producer to be a start and sing songs the producer had written, the song âĂa plane pour moiâ had already been recorded â with the producer and songwriter, one Lou Deprijck, on vocals. In fact, all four of Plasticâs first albums were with Deprijckâs voice. Plastic was a great face and a lively performer. But Deprijck didnât even want him singing on the albums. He was a cellophane puppet.
This fact came to light quite recently. In fact, Jouret only admitted the truth of it in 2010.
And I read it and I said, âHuh.â And then I said, âOf course.â
Is nothing sacred? Well, maybe not nothing. But sometimes things arenât just profane. Theyâre cellophane.
For one thing, I never knew what it meant. But when youâre young, you hear plenty of words that you donât know the meanings of and you treat them as lexical units and assume they must mean something.
For another thing, itâs not so much a word as a magical entity that, as you pursue it, breaks into many, flaking off phantoms here and there, and you have to try to follow and find the word at the bottom â the one that, in reality flaked off all those phantoms as it headed towards you, and the word you started with was really one of the phantom endpoints. It is a one that contains a many, and it is one of many that lead to one. And what it leads to is not octozumba. Except in my version.
Itâs also associated with a gesture. Or a set of gestures. Or nothing. Depending on who youâre asking. But always, always, always, it is associated with a song. How the song goes varies a little, mind youâŠ
Letâs start where it started for me.
When I was in the early years of primary school, we lived in Exshaw, Alberta, a small town with a large cement plant set at the entrance to the Rockies and not too far west from the Morley Stoney Indian Reserve. My father worked on the reserve while my mother taught â at the time, at Exshaw School, but afterward at the reserve school. In Exshaw, my childhood experiences took place with playmates and friends and classmates and with my brother. My brother, Reggie, unlike me, belonged to Cub Scouts. Where he learned interesting things.
One of the things he learned was a song. Well, he learned more than one, but Iâm talking about this one. I also remember a gesture, which actually goes with a different song about junior birdmen: you make goggles by making thumb-and-forefinger rings and then putting them over your eyes with your hands upside-down, palms against forehead. This had nothing to do with octozumba but I always remember it with octozumba. Somehow the gesture seems octozumba-ish, perhaps because ocular.
Octozumba came from a song that I remember quite clearly:
Octozumba zumba zumba, octozumba zumba zay
Octozumba zumba zumba, octozumba zumba zay
Hold âem down, you mighty warriors,
Hold âem down, you mighty chiefs
[repeat senselessly]
Clearly this song had something to do with Indians: warriors, chiefs, you know. The music sounded sort of like the music associated with Indians in western movies (you know, with cowboys). What was octozumba? I think I was too young to think âocto = 8,â but I recognized the octo, like in octopus. And zumba was maybe something like Montezuma or something.
Anyway, it had the air of the secret knowledge passed from one young boy to another. Reggie had learned this at Cub Scouts, and it was a new thing I was learning that seemed to have been passed down as special information. It was a thing. It meant a thing. It was a thing you did. Add it to the ever-growing list of Things.
Fast-forward four decades. Iâm sitting in Toronto and I wonder whether someone has YouTubed this song or what. I start trying to find it.
To begin with, I find a site with some warm-ups for improv performers. It has the word(s) as ay kazimba. I also find a site with some Girl Scout songs. It has the word as akamazuma, and gives not âmighty warriorsâ but âZulu warriorsââŠ!
More digging follows. Itâs a Boy Scouts song. Itâs an army song. Itâs a rugby song. Itâs a drinking song. It was used during the Boer war. It supported the Zulus. No, it taunted them. It wasnât Zulus, it was Swazis. The words are âHold âem down,â âTake them down,â âHaul âem down,â âGet âem down,â âSee him dance,â âHold him back,â âSee him thereâ⊠The gestures are a complicated series of touching the leg and/or arm of the persons on either side; no, theyâre a dance; no, itâs drinking; no, itâs hauling down your pants; no, itâs⊠what gestures?
Marais didnât write it, though; he just wrote it down. It probably does date from the Boer War era, if not earlier. Among the people who fought in the Boer War (and lived in South Africa throughout that period, with contact with the Zulus) was Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts.
I will leave you to consider what the evolution of octozumba â I should say ai kama zimba â demonstrates about the nature and causes of change in languages and culture.
It is late now. I shall have to continue my hunt for the true meaning later⊠although I already know the meaning of octozumba. Itâs all that Iâve just told you.
Let us now amble in the beam of that most lambent of sauri, lambeosaurus: a large lizard, nearly 10 metres from bouche to back end, with a coxcombâs crest â in fact, a headpiece something like a hatchet, or a cartoonistâs rendition of the hairdo of the later Elvis. It had short forearms, and in consequence may have sometimes crouched forward like a kitten playfully preparing to pounce. A gigantic, squamous, green kitten with a beak and a bony bouffant.
The lambeosaurus seems to provoke ardent loyalty. As has been proclaimed on reddit, âwe feel that the Lambeosaurus is clearly the best dinosaur, and that no better dinosaurs have existed or will exist in the future.â With a hollow crest that its sinuses actually ran through and that may have been a sound amplifier too (and perhaps an opener for very large bottles), and with eating practices that would not displease a Buddhist monk, how could it not be?
Witness further this video, âExtinct Dinosaurs: The Lambeosaurus,â with âSmackdownâ by Blue Stahli for a soundtrack. What is not to enthuse over? (I must confess I can hardly wait for the series on dinosaurs that are not extinct, as the title implies there must be.)
A lack of embalmed specimens has proven something of a problem in labeling this amiable thunder lizard. Paleontologists, having only the jigsaw puzzles of broken bones to piece specimens together, at first took as different species what are now thought to be just different ages and sexes of the beast. It does have more than one species, but not as many as first believed.
Do you wonder where the name comes from? It is named after Lawrence Lambe, a pioneering paleontologist. As the Wikipedia article tells us (note the thrilling attempts at stylistic variation in the sentences!), âIn 1902, he described Canada’s first dinosaur finds, various species of Monoclonius. He described Centrosaurus in 1904. Euoplocephalus was named by him, in 1910. In 1913, he named Styracosaurus. He was responsible for naming Chasmosaurus and Gorgosaurus, in 1914 and Eoceratops in 1915. In 1917, he created the genus Edmontosaurus. In 1919 came Panoplosaurus. He also discovered and named the hadrosaurid Gryposaurus.â This passage is like a paleontological nerdgasm in a house of mirrors.
Did you notice that lambeosaurus is not named above? Lambe did not name a saurus after himself. He did study the materials that were ultimately put together to be called Lambeosaurus lambei, but it was not all assembled before Lambe disassembled in 1919. The beastie was named after him in 1923 by William Parks following its full recreation.
I do not know for sure, but I strongly suspect Lambe was pronounced like lamb. Notwithstanding this, in lambeosaurus the be is pronounced: âlam bee o sor us.â We may hold Lambe blameless in this. He did not finish the assembly. It was only once the parts were put together that this extra syllable came to be.
We all know what a thimble is. Itâs a little metal cuplike thing, best known for being little and cuplike. It is most useful as an image for expressing ridiculously small amounts of fluids such as liquor, coffee, and common sense. Itâs a Tom Thumb tumbler.
Thimbles are also sometimes collected by people â they have been made in a variety of outrageously cute and decorative forms, some really quite scenic and fine, and consequently quite expensive at auction.
The word thimble is also useful for making puns; in particular, thimble-minded suggests itself readily, though you probably wonât get to use it too often. It also has a taste of nimble (thimble-fingered?) and humble (thimblebrag?) and of course symbol (sex thimble?).
Many people know that thimbles typically have a pitted surface reminiscent of that of golf balls. Most people, if they have seen a thimble in person, happened on it in their motherâs or grandmotherâs sewing kit. Or, of course, in their Monopoly game.
But did you know that thimbles are actually used for something?
For many years of my childhood I had exactly no idea what the point of a thimble was. I just knew it was a thing used somehow for sewing, and it was shaped like a cup but you couldnât set it with the open end up because the other end was curved. Then, one day in my adolescence, I set to sewing some small fix. I found that it really freaking hurt to have to keep pushing the needle through the thick parts of the cloth with my fingertip. The back end of a needle may not be the point, but itâs still pretty acute. And somehow the light just dawned. I knew a thimble could fit over a finger. I suddenly realized why you would want to have a thimble on your finger. Huh.
Look, I learned a lot about cooking from my mother, but I generally had little interest in sewing and never really asked her to show me how, beyond the simplest things. (From my father I learned about photography, in case youâre wondering.)
Sewing was a stereotypically distaff activity for centuries â distaff itself, which means âof or relating to womenâ, is a metonymic use of the name of an implement used in spinning flax into thread â and so the sewing kit and its bits, notably thimbles, could be assumed associated with the lady of the house. A thimble was a small, dainty, ostensibly useful gift. Hence the collectible thing. Even princesses and queens would give and receive them on occasion. Usually ones quite inappropriate for actual use, of course.
And where did we get this word? Old English ĂŸymel, from ĂŸuma âthumbâ plus the suffix el, which we also see in, for instance, handle. A handle is an implement used by and fitted to the hand; a thimble is an implement used by and fitted to the thumb. Or finger, if you prefer. Or, of course, used for its merely thymbolic value.
Aina, reading The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott, found this passage: âAt the rim of the stage an elegant young man stood beside the piano, one arm laid along it while he sang. A small squirrelly fellow played for him, very flourishingly as to the notes but no folderol in his face.â
She wrote down folderol for future finding. Or, of course, for asking me.
Iâm not sure when and where I first saw folderol, but it might have been MAD magazine. Perhaps in a satirical song about bureaucrats or politicians. The context made its sense clear enough: blather, bunk, mumbo jumbo, foofaraw, perhaps fiddle-faddle or taradiddles. The usual dictionary definition is in the line of âfoolish nonsenseâ. It gave me an image of bloated bumf and bombast filling file folders full or unreeling from a roll. It sounds vaguely like Latin in the muffled drawl of some peruked barrister, or perhaps legislative terminology as dismissively flaunted by a Foggy Bottom functionary. The usage by Endicott extends it to ânonsense, tomfoolery, fillerâ in nonverbal senses as well.
But it is fitting and ironic that both Aina and I saw it first in a context of singing. The word comes from musical filler, in the same vein as fa-la-la-la-la, ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, hi-diddle-diddle, and so on. So first it was literally just a thing you sang in place of meaningful words.
Interestingly, though, the next meaning it had was not the predominant current meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary gives it as âa gewgaw, trifle; a flimsy thingâ, with citations starting from the early 1800s, sometimes spelling it with hyphens: fal-de-ral. So, given its fluttery ornamental nature, you could say that this bit of folderol is a lexical falderal. Or this bit of falderal is a lexical folderol.
Yes, it has two spellings, and the one with aâs seems to be the earlier. Amusingly, while the OED gives both forms in the head but falderal first, and the Collins English Dictionary calls folderol a variant of falderal, Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary call falderal a variant of folderol. Itâs a bit reminiscent of the bureaucratic redirection loops that often come with folderol. Or falderal. Anyway, if you happen to fall into the halls wherein falderal reigns above all, you may want to take a faldstool (or anyway a folding stool); youâll be there for a while.
My latest article for The Week is on a word that many of you will not recognize as legitimate. And yet I predict that it will ultimately be standard English. I am talking about thats as a relative possessive, as in the title above. (Do not be misled by the ambiguous title of the article on theweek.com, which I did not write, or the theme image, which I did not see in advance of publication. This article has nothing to do with the contraction thatâs for that is or that has.)
Itâs the start of winter and the end of the year. Weâre in the heart of the holiday season, halfway through the twelve days of Christmas. A party is in the offing. There was one a week ago, and those who celebrate Epiphany (or, better, Twelfth Night) will have one in a week, but right now itâs time for New Yearâs. Time to get wound up to wind up the year, whether it was a winner or loser, and to wander forth from the waning hours of this year to the fresh wonders of the next. Iâll wyndre myself: Iâll put on my smart new watch â a winder â and a winsome tie, and a jacket to match, and Iâll wend my way to merry-making with my wife or perhaps just wine and dine her at home.
Isnât that a pleasant word, wyndre? A shiny little trinket for your lexis to carry into the new year. It appears to be made from a blend of parts, perhaps new and dry â one thing the year will be, and another it most likely wonât be. Itâs a verb for getting decked out: wyndre yourself, wyndre your face, wyndre your clothing. Wyndre the halls!
Such a quaint and curious little word, isnât it? With those accordion folds at the beginning, that y for a vowel, that re ending⊠this word has surely been passed down to us from an earlier version of English.
Well, passed down or found in an ancient curio store or dusty attic trunk. Or, to be more exact, the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Oxford English Dictionary is like a Christmas tree or curio shelf that has been in place for a very long time collecting ornaments, trinkets, geegaws, knick-knacks, tchotchkes. The approach to its contents has varied a little over the years, too, as have the resources it has had to draw on. Today there are squillions of words of content available from all over the world. But in its original edition it had to rely on the available printed literature from the course of centuries, and the efforts of individuals, including such as the prodigious W.C. Minor, who did all his work from his room at Broadmoor Asylum, where he had plenty of time (and where, as his mental state deteriorated, he ultimately divested himself of his family decorations⊠if you know what I mean).
A result of this is that the OED has, along with all its other treasures, some particularly rare and curious gems sparkling off mostly hidden in nooks. Words marked with obelisks as obsolete. Word that were found in centuries-old books. Perhaps found only once. For example, someone â I donât know if it was W.C. Minor â looked in the Romaunt of the Rose, a translation by Chaucer in the 1360s of an older French work, and saw this: âFetys she wasâŠ; No wyntred browis had she Ne popped hir for it neded nought To wyndre hir or to peynte hir ought.â And then he wrote up the entry for wyndre, verb, obsolete, rare, transitive, âTo trim, deck, or embellish (oneself, the brows, etc.).â Its source: Old French guingnier, guignier, etc., âto deck, trick out.â
Thatâs its only citation in the OED. Six hundred fifty years ago. Still there, winking at you from the shadows.
Well, what the heck. Pull it out of the old jewel box and wear it. Just for tonight. And maybe peek at it fondly now and again over the course of the coming year.
Sesquiotica 
