A selection of April and May’s lexical offerings – I’ll pretend combining the two was a stylistic choice rather than an accidental necessity, as I forgot about April …
April
7th – HAIR OF THE DOG – turns out this one is decidedly literal! A shorted version of ‘a hair of the dog that bit you’ harking back to the medieval belief that once bitten by a dog, you could only be cured with a poultice containing one hair from the same animal. The entry also mention the delightful ‘wamble-cropped‘ as a synonym of ‘hangover’.
10th – COMET – one specific phrase springs to my mind considering the origins of this word – “it’s very Greek” (Julie Walters, Mamma Mia, 2008). It comes from ‘komētēs’, meaning ‘long-haired star’. As Dent points out , much of our astral vocabulary can be traced back to the language – with ‘asteroid’ indicating ‘star-like’ and ‘meteor’ originating from the word for ‘lofty’. Other little facts I liked from this entry were ‘astronauts’ as ‘star sailors’ and an asterisk as hte diminutive ‘little star’.
11th – ANTHOLOGY – a collection of flowers, used metaphorically to refer to various ‘flowers’ of verse/poetry in one volume.
15th – CONTRAFIBULARITY – insincere congratulations (literally invented by TV series Blackadder!)
19th – GHETTO – featured on this day in memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. It has two possible origins; the first ‘getto’, the Italian translation of iron foundry, as this was the area Venice’s Jewish population were banished to in 1516. The second possibility is ‘borghetto’, meaning ‘little suburb’.
23rd – BARDOLATRY – overzealous admiration of Shakespeare …
24th – GHOST – included for the pettiness! Apparently, this was originally spelled ‘gost’ but Flemish print workers added an ‘h’ because they didn’t like how it looked on paper.
27th – PANDEMONIUM – the capital city of Hell in Paradise Lost. Tickles me slightly that Milton thought devils would comply with human geographical convention.
May
4th – JEDI – for reasons obvious hopefully that are …
7th – WHITE ELEPHANT – any task or endeavour that it considerably more effort than it is worth! This entry includes the anecdote that the King of Siam used to gift an elephant to courtiers who had upset him; the animals were so expensive to care for that bankruptcy was a guarantee. Strangely, this exact fact features in my current read, The Firework Maker’s Daughter!
9th – HUGGER-MUGGER – to do something secretively. An example of what linguists call a reduplicated compound, like one of my preferred phrases, higgledy-piggledy.
15th – VOLCANO – another one rooted in mythology, this time Roman. Named after the god Vulcan, associated with fire.
22nd – ABSQUATULATE – to leave abruptly. Apparently in the 1800s, there was a literal trend in America for making up stupid words – this fad also gave us ‘discombobulate’ and ‘skedaddle’, so can’t have been all that bad.
23rd – PICNIC – another gloriously petty one – my favourites. For IT departments, PICNIC as an acronym indicates ‘problem in chair, not in computer’ or rather, that the person asking for their technical expertise is a moron …
26th – COCKNEY – maybe this is commonly knowledge and I haven’t been paying attention but there is something poetically lovely in the idea you are only a true Cockney if born within earshot of the St Mary-le-Bow church bells.
27th – FUCK – naturally. I get the impression Susie really enjoyed writing this one 😂. Unsurprisingly known to linguists as one of the most versatile words in the English language.
Bookishly Abroad 