Easter Sunday 12 April 2009 (ii)

I like curious words, and/or curious definitions. It was my friend Hazel who first alerted me to the word ‘mallemaroking’ as defined in Chambers dictionary. It is a curious word and has a curious definition. Mallemaroking: the carousing of seamen in icebound ships.

The first words of mine I ever saw in print came in a letter I wrote to The Listener (younger readers will need to Google here).  I can’t remember now what kicked it off but over a period of a few weeks various correspondents wrote in with examples of words that it would be difficult to imagine ever find much currency. My favourite was a Spanish word (I think this came in response to my own contribution of mallemaroking) which means to kill a cockerel by throwing oranges at it. I wish now I had kept a memo of that word.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day doing the Guardian Easter Crossword (by the master, Araucaria; I completed it, I’m pleased to brag, around 1am) – I would say, yesterday I spent most of the day idling away doing the Guardian Easter Crossword, but to me it felt like important work. Anyway, while flipping through the dictionary (eventually I found the word I needed – etourdi, meaning frivolous) I happened upon dromophobia, a fear of crossing the road, and teichopsia, temporary partial blindness with optical illusions, accompanying migraine. Araucaria also got me to canthus (or as he required, the plural canthi) the corner of the eyelid.

Anyway, here are a few other curious words I’ve collected over the years. Anyone care to add to them?

A
is for

Accipitrine: pertaining to hawks

Accloy: to lame with a horseshoe nail

Acronychally: under cover of darkness

Agelast: one who does not laugh

Agrise: to terrify

Angekkok: defined in Chambers Dictionary as an Eskimo conjuror; today we might say Inuit shaman.

Anthelion: a phantom sun appearing at the same height as and opposite to the sun

Apocatastasis: the final restitution of all things at the appearance of the Messiah – the final conversion and salvation of all created beings, the devil and his angels not excepted

Aporia: a professed doubt of what to choose

Aposita: an aversion to food, from Greek apo, away; and sitos, bread

Augury: the flight of an eagle, particularly as a prediction of future events

C
is for

Caliology: the science of birds’ nests

Callipygous: possessing beautiful buttocks

Carking: causing anxiety

Cerumen: earwax

Consider: to look at attentively, from con sidere, with the stars, perhaps originally a term of augury

Crithomancy: divination through consideration of the dough of cakes

D
is for

Decussate: to cross in the form of an X

Despumate: removal of froth

Desquamation: removal of scales

Dolichocephallic: long-faced

E
is for
Enatiodromia: the changing of something into its opposite. In Jung, the process by which the superabundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite; the equivalent of the principle of equilibrium in the natural world

F
is for

Familist: member of old sect which holds that religion consists in love not faith

G
is for

Gumple-foisted: sulky (Scots)

H
is for

Hidrotic: apt to perspire

I
is for

Ideopraxist: one who is impelled to carry out an idea

Inoperculate: without a lid

Interdigitation: the locking of fingers together

K
is for

Kairos: going through time and finding yourself in eternity

L
is for

Lambent: moving about as if lightly touched

Latrate: to bark like a dog

Leer: the land known to sheep. [In the UK during the last bout of foot and mouth disease, when whole populations of sheep were destroyed, it was feared that many leers would never be recovered. The knowledge, it seems, is passed on culturally among sheep rather than genetically.]

Longanimity: forebearance

M
is for

Mallemaroking: the carousing of seamen in icebound ships

Mawther: a great awkward girl

Mohock: one of a band of aristocratic ruffians of early 19th-century London

Myomancy: divination through consideration of the movement of mice

N
is for

Nemo: nobody

Notonectal: swimming on the back

Nullipara: a woman who has never given birth

O
is for

Ostracise. In Greek the word is ostraikos meaning oyster shells.  [The last librarian at the great library at Alexandria was named Theon. His daughter Hypatia, a Platonist, mathematician, astronomer and high priestess of Isis was murdered, flayed with oyster shells, by a gang of Christian monks in AD 415. She was 45 years old.] The Greeks also used the word as a name for roofing tiles, because of their resemblance to oyster shells. They had a system by which citizens might be expelled by the casting of votes. The votes were made by marking such a tile, hence to ostracise.

P
is for

Pantology: universal knowledge

Pantophobia: morbid fear of everything

Polliwog: a sailor who has not crossed the equator

Q
is for

Quadrivium, literally where four roads meet, a crossroads. In medieval times the four subjects music, astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry.

R
is for

Ridgel, ridgil: a male animal with only one testicle in position or remaining

S
is for

Sardonic: sardonion, a plant of Sardinia which was said to screw up the face of the eater

Serendipity: the faculty of making happy chance finds [Serendip, a former name of Sri Lanka. Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in 1754 from the title of his fairy-tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’ whose heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.’

Shellback: a sailor who has crossed the equator

Sim(p)kin: Urdu corruption of champagne

Syssitia: the ancient Spartan custom of eating the chief meal together in public

Syzygy: the period of new or full moon

Spatilomancy: divination by investigation of animal excrement

T
is for

Thelemite: a monk of Rabelais’s imaginary abbey of Théleme, an order whose rule was ‘Do as you like’

Thenar: the area around the base of the thumb

Thistadeckophobia: fear of the number 13

Tityre-tu: a member of a 17th-century fraternity of aristocratic hooligans. [Opening words of Virgil’s first eclogue, Tityre-tu, ‘Tityrus, thou (lying under the spreading beech)’, conjectured to indicate the class that had beech trees and the leisure to lie under them.]

Toliban: Persian word for turban, and from which we derive the word tulip

Trivium, literally ‘where three roads meet.’ [It is at a place where three roads meet that Oedipus unknowingly kills his father.] In medieval times the three subjects grammar, rhetoric and logic were collectively named the trivium. From trivium comes the word trivial.
Together the trivium and quadrivium make up the seven liberal arts.

U
is for

Uberous: yielding abundance of milk

Uberly: full of bounteous kindness; the milk of human kindness. From the Latin uber, udder, fruitfulness