Oubliette

An oubliette is a secret dungeon with only an opening in the ceiling.  It was for the prisoners that the state wanted to put away permanently where they could be “forgotten.”  That is were the name comes from; oubliette is French for “forgotten place.”

One of my favorite Flickr photographers remembered this word to me with her photo that could be found here.  Thank you Sarah Schloo for the reference.

Her photograph, made from a photo from Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary (not an oubliette), made me think of the word as a figurative expression.  In all of us, there is a forgotten place.  It is where we  put away the thinks we have done that cannot be reconciled, the people we have hurt and the mistakes we have made.  It is the Struwwelpeter, who lies under the floorboards.  There is, it seems, an oubliette to the soul.

Zoetrope

I’m back from vacation and refreshed.

Today’s word is a 19th-century toy consisting of a cylinder with a series of pictures of an object in motion on the inside.  The cylinder is lined with slits and spun so that when you peak through, the images form a stop motion video.  Here is a diagram of a zoetrope.  Here is a D.J. mix featuring some zoetrope action.

Vacation, all I ever wanted…

After taking yesterday off for Columbus Day and treating a sick wife while working, I am taking the week off from blogging.  I’ll return next Monday.  Please, my few faithful readers, come back.

Snack

I picked up my daughter from daycare and found a note in her cubby asking us to cut her carrots into smaller pieces if we were going to send them as a snack.  Coincidentally, the note was written on the back of a tear-off word-of-the-day calendar, and the word for that day was snack.

A snack as a morsel of food (or to eat such a morsel), it turns out, is only one of the many meanings for the word.  Its more common meaning was the snap or bite of a dog (possibly a form of onomatopoeia).  This lead to the meaning as we know it (imagine a dog chomping away on a found morsel).  It could also be used as a snarky comment, from the same derivation.

Amazingly, there were several other definitions in the O.E.D. A snack is also a type of ship as well as a dried fungus that could be used as kindling.  It can also be used as an adverb or adjective: “There is no need to be snack and nasty about it” or “She answered me chastly an snack.”

I can never look at the word the same way again.

Corvine

One of my favorite words from Tony Kushner’s Angels In America.  Prior, the antagonist, after he has been visited by an angel, is described as corvine in appearance, that is, crow-like.

Adjectives used to describe animal-like appearances or behaviors are wonderfully useful and sound far more poetic than saying, let’s say, crow-like.  Aside from corvine, here is a shortlist of the names I have come across:

bovine (cow), feline (cat), canine (dog), ovine (sheep), porcine (pig), lupine (wolf), murine (mouse), equine (horse), leporine (rabbit), vulpine (fox), ursine (bear), taurine (bull), cervine (deer), elapine (viper), caprine (goat), ranine (frog), vespine (wasp), anserine (goose).

The last of which I only came across because a high school coach referred to the gait of a friend of mine as anserine.  Amazing, the high school I went to when the coaches are using words like anserine.

If there are others that you know of, please leave a comment here.

Perspicacious

I came across this word in an article by Faiz Ahmed in the Monthly Review from August.  He refers to the Caribbean states having developed a perspicacious outlook by joining ALBA.  It is a formal word for someone having a perceptive insight and understanding of things.  It comes from the Latin word for “seeing clearly,” perspicax.

Lexiconical Gap

Another phrase from the Frenemy episode of NPR’s This American Life.  A lexiconical gap is the name given to an absence of a necessary word in a language.  Linguistics suggests that if two words ever become fully synonymous, both in their literal and semantic meetings, one word will disappear.  It is a free marketplace of ideas philosophy.  However, the inverse doesn’t seem to be true.  Just because a word is needed, doesn’t mean it will appear.

The best example offered is that in our English we have a word for a child who lost his parents (an orphan), a woman who lost her spouse (a widow), but we have no word for a parent who lost a child.  This is a lexiconical gap.

Frenemy

NPR’s This American Life did an episode about frenemies not too long ago.  In one act, they discussed the history of the word with Erin McKean of Wordnik.  Amazingly, this seemingly modern internetty  word was first recorded back in 1953 when Walter Winchell joked “Howz about calling the Russians our Frienemies?”  The term didn’t show up again of note until 1977 and then again faded into disuse for another fifteen years.

The turning point for the word: It’s twenty-first century use in Sex and the City. Now the word is here to stay.

P.S. The link to the episode of This American Life is here.

Argy-Bargy

A wonderful British-ism meaning a noisy row.  I most recently heard the word when an announcer for the English Premier League used it to refer to kerfuffle on the pitch between a few players.  According to the O.A.D., the word is of Scottish origins, originating as a slang rhyming pair for the word “argue.”

Of course, it is a word I was familiar with for some time.  In 1980, the band Squeeze released their third album under this name.  Possibly, it was their best album, starting with the songs “Pulling Muscles (From the Shell)” and “Another Nail For My Heart.”

Cedilla

How does one Google an accent mark when one doesn’t know it’s name.  Try putting in “little squiggly below a c” and see how far it gets you.  When I began writing yesterday’s post on soupçon, this was exactly the issue I faced.  So what does this mean? According to the O.E.D. it was a mark derived from the letter z used in French, Portuguese, and formerly Spanish.  It is used to soften the c in front of vowels that would often call for a hard sound.

Although the Spanish no longer use it, it seems to be a Spanish word.  It comes from zedilla, as in a little zeda (the letter z).

It is also used in Turkish, but don’t ask me how.