Dictionary Moment: Rhopalic

Words beginning with "rh" occupy six pages in the SOED.  There are more than I expected, and some of them are rather fascinating.  They mostly come from Greek words, of course.  The Greek rhopalos was a club or tapered cudgel.  This primitive weapon has lent its name to the "marginal sensory structures in various jellyfish," and an Indian aphid.  Not to mention a literary device.

Literarily, rhophalic describes a passage "in which each word contains one syllable more than the word immediately preceding it." 

I recently attempted a poem based on the Fibonacci sequence, where the number of syllables per line increase quickly.  (Interestingly, the number sequence itself has poetic origins.)  Five-syllable lines are easy for me, but eight and thirteen were tough.  Increasing syllables in each word, though, that's pretty challenging. 

• I'm writing sentences multiplying syllabically.

• Walk softly, carrying knuckle-dusters empoweringly.

• Peach apple banana chirimoya marionberry macadamia-nut

Three or four syllables are plenty for most words in English, even the interesting ones.  Sure, " supercalifragilisticexpialidocious*" would be a wonderful climax, but what thirteen-syllable word could precede it?  I find myself relying on hyphenated terms and tenuous adverbs.  (Good thing I'm not a member of Writers Against Adding Any Adverbs.)  Perhaps rhophalicism is easier in agglutinative tongues like German.  And prosody does not always require complete sentences.

Can you wax rhophalic?  Give me your best shot.



*In the OED since 1986!  Look here for origin and meaning.

Dictionary Moment: Snallygaster

The word "snallygaster" caught my eye as I flipped through the SOED the other day.  It looked like a fun word to say, but the definition really got my attention: "a mythical monster supposedly found in Maryland."

Maryland?  I had to learn more.  Wikipedia reports that the snallygaster was reputed to be a dragon-like blood-sucking monster, terrorizing Catoctin Mountain.

I was born and raised in Maryland, and went camping on Catoctin Mountain.  When we got lost on a hike there, my friends and I focussed our giggling concern on running afoul of security at Camp David.  No one ever warned us about the local dragon.  No, years later and a continent away, I learn about it from a foreign dictionary.  I feel safe, but cheated.  Clearly, I'm going to have to do some more research on the snallygaster.

Do you know your local monster?

Dictionary Moment: Fitch

We are grateful for words.  We exercised this gratitude after our Thanksgiving feast by playing Huggermugger, a game that presents a variety of vocabulary challenges.  On one of Scoot's turns, he was to list ten words rhyming with "itch."  Following our advice to go through the alphabet, he said "ditch, fitch..."  We all discounted the one beginning with F, and he went on.  But Dandelionslayer pulled out the red Webster's dictionary, and looked it up, just in case. 

It turns out that fitch is, indeed, a noun.  It means, "the fur or pelt of the polecat." 

You know, skunk fur.  A fashion statement for sure.  But what, then, is an abercrombie?

Dictionary Moment: Jibe

While the little boys were occupied with not cleaning their room the other night, we decided to introduce the older ones to the joys of Scrabble.  Actually, I was surprised that they had not played previously.  It must have to something do with having little ones in the house.  Anyway, due to the boys' inexperience, the opportunities at hand , and lucky combinations of letters in my draws, I was stomping everyone soundly.  Until Scoot landed JIBE with the J on a double letter score and the E on a triple word score.  63 points.  Yikes!

We all knew it was a word, of course, but only had a vague idea of the definition.  So we consulted the red Webster's, our official game dictionary, and found three definitions:

1:  to shift a fore-and-aft sail suddenly and forcibly from one side to the other

2:  gibe, or taunt

Both of these definitions were familiar, probably relating to the Pirates game the guys like to play.  But then

3:  to be in accord, agree, as in "that doesn't jibe with what I know"

Wait.  I thought that was "jive."  So we looked across the page, and found that jive means

1:  swing music or dancing

2:  deceptive or foolish talk, jargon

3:  to tease

Nothing about agreement.  So, next time you're at the dance hall, where people change direction with the wind and engage in foolish talk, and you hear someone say, "That doesn't jive!", you can smugly answer, "It certainly does not.  Neither does it jibe." 

Dictionary Moment: Floccinaucinihilipilification

After looking up "duff," which the Caterpillar found in a fire safety pamphlet, I flipped randomly to the F section of the SOED and found this vaguely related word.  Duff, in the context, means "decaying vegetable matter covering forest ground," but more generally denotes "something worthless."  "Floccinaucinihilipilification" caught my attention by being a very long word (29 letters and four Latin roots), right in the middle of the page.  And it means "the action or habit of estimating as worthless."

It sounds like a bad habit to me.  When you are tempted to dismiss something as duff, consider it carefully.  Do you want to be guilty of floccinaucinihilipilification?  Let us value people as children of God, the world around us as His creation, and the new year before us as full of opportunity.  Not, of course, that everything has equal worth.  When we meet items or habits which are not of worth to us, let us replace them with that which is more edifying. 

Seize the year!

Dictionary Moment: Epizeuxis

Epizeuxis is a rhetorical technique in which a word is repeated emphatically or vehemently.  I ran across this term in the SOED several months ago, but didn't quite know what to do with it.  It has come back to me, though, in this election season.  After all, who uses rhetoric more than politicians?  I haven't been to any rallies where this might occur, but the multitude of campaign signs on the roadside strikes me as visual epizeuxis.  Please, get out there and vote for someone who will clean up the government, so someone else can clean up the signs.

In our domestic setting, epizeuxis often involves words like "no" and "get up" and "let's go."  What words do you repeat emphatically?  Are you persuasive?

Dictionary Moment: Geoduck

Geoduck: "an edible clam of the Pacific coast that weighs as much as five pounds." 

I believe I have seen this word, and its definition, previously.  But I never gave it much thought, until Scoot's class gave their musical tour of Washington last week.  To represent a nearby town on the Hood Canal, they sang "The Geoduck Song," a lively pattering tune about harvesting the things.  What sent me to the dictionary was the pronunciation: "gooey duck." 

The SOED, replete as it may be with words only obscurely connected to the English language, is silent on geoducks.  So I turned to the good old red Webster's.  It confirmed Scoot's pronunciation, and revealed that the word comes from Chinook Jargon, the local mishmash of native and European tongues.  It also strengthens my theory that whoever wrote these words down wasn't a phoneticist.  There's a town around here named Puyallup, which I would assume to be pronounced "poo-yall-up."  But no, it is "pyoo-al-up."  Poulsbo, on the other hand, should be pronounced "paulz-bo."  The O was a misprint.

The moral of the story:  When you launch a great Voyage of Discovery, send along a linguist and a spellchecker.  Or at least a big shovel, if you dig geoducks.

Dictionary Moment: Lyart

Lyart is an obsolete adjective, listed in the SOED, with two applications.  For horses, it means "spotted with white or grey."  For humans, it is simpler.  "Of hair: grey."
This is not a term we'll use around the house much, since I didn't personally serve in the Navy, and Dandelionslayer doesn't want to talk about the Navy's effect on his pileous pigmentation.  But someday, I'll need an elegant term like lyart to describe me on my driver's license.  When I do, I'd better take the dictionary along.

Dictionary Moment: Horripilant

I love dictionaries.  I can never look up just one word, unless I really concentrate.  One word leads to another.  I often get lost in vocabulary before I find the answer to my first question.  Dandelionslayer shares this love of language with me.  Early in our marriage we purchased a copy of the 1979 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, with the red cover, from Deseret Industries for $.75.  Considering use per cost, this is undoubtably the best bargain we've bought.  We still use the red dictionary, when we can find it.  It is not so red anymore, and hides among the other books.  But more recently, Dandelionslayer invested in the 2002 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which contains even more treasures.  The two-volume format dampens my wanderings, but does not discourage me completely.

I found today's treasure last week, while checking my spelling of "hors d'oeuvres" (I was almost right).  On the same page, I found the adjective "horripilant," which describes things which cause "horripilation," which means . . . goose bumps. 

Trying to think of an example sentence, I've realized that horripilation is a sensation which I do not often experience.  I live a pretty calm life.  But now I am almost looking forward to the next time, so I can say, "Ooo, that is so horripilant!"

What gives you horripilation?