Adiabatic

Meaning: not involving the transfer of heat, or im-pass-able to heat. An adiabatic process is one in which no heat is exchanged. It's related to the First Law of Thermodynamics and consequently various other sciencey things, including weather. 

Logofascination: 2. I'm still on a science-word kick. If I have made any sense of what I've read*, the weather part kicks in where you have changes in temperature caused by changes in atmospheric pressure, as opposed to changes in temperature because heat has been added or removed (e.g. by a desert wind or an Antarctic wind, both of which you will get in an average Melbourne day).  Etymologically, it's from the Greek for "not to be passed through".

In the wild: Reading up on names of winds; wind-words are one of my special logofascinatorial sub-categories. The adiabatic process is influential in both a Foehn wind and a Katabatic wind.

Usefulness: 5, unless you can wangle it convincingly into a conversation with a scientist, or meteorologist. I am tempted to stretch it to my bedroom: an adiabatic chamber, impassable to heat.



*amateur translation here; let me know if it's not quite right. 

Attosecond

Meaning: One quintillionth* of one second; a nanosecond is a mere billionth of a second.

Logofascination: 2. I find the specificity of science words fascinating (though see below re: quintillion); yoctosecond and zeptosecond sound rather like someone made them up. I suspect whoever got to pick the prefixes for those ones went looking for the interesting sounds. In this case, atto- is from the Danish for 18.

In the wild: In a gorgeous Nautilus piece on the speed of photography - apparently we're getting close to attosecond exposures.

Usefulness: 2. When a nanosecond is just too long: "I will be with you in an attosecond."



*to a certain value of quintillion. It's like billions - it depends who you ask.

Repulgue

Meaning: It seems to be both the crimped hem on a pastry and the pattern crimped into it. It's from Argentinian Spanish, since the repulgue lets you know what's inside your empanada.

Logofascination: 2, for the 'word for everything' factor. Of course, English has words for it; rather than hemming (repulgar, the source for repulgue) we have fluting* and crimping. Where repulgue goes a step further is that it has become a specific noun; repulgar is hemming of fabrics and of pastry, repulgue is the pastry hem.

In the wild: In the lovely-looking Argentinian Street Food, launched in Melbourne today on a sea of Malbec with a fleet of empanadas.

Or maybe just three. Braiding for the beef, lines for the leek-and-Roquefort.
No repulgue for chorizo, perhaps because you could see the filling?

Usefulness: 4, unless eating empanadas (coming soon to a food truck near you) or pasty/ies. Of course, you do now have another 'did you know there's a word for..?'.



* On fluting, I am rather fascinated that a slightly obscure architectural term has been preserved in a very specific cooking term, not to mention back-formed into the verb 'to flute'.

Bandolier

Meaning: Ammunition belt, although originally it meant anything worn across the shoulder 'scarfe wise'. This leaves the hands free, hence - presumably - the popularity with mountaineers and rifleers.

Ottoman Bandolier: I'd like one. 

Logofascination: 2. Etymologically it's 'little band*'; a word that has wandered through German, Italian, Spanish and into English via French (but sometimes straight from Spanish). Its meaning shifted to ammunition container quite quickly, perhaps not surprising in 17th century Europe.

In the wild: Hardly wild, but we're still in the Viennese museum of Arms and Armour. I discovered that the gorgeous bag I was coveting was, in fact, a bandolier and have been meaning to look up the etymology ever since.

Usefulness: 3. More useful is Cotgrave's bandouillier, one who wears anything 'scarfe wise'. I do this a lot.



*not related to bandit, which is someone who is banned. 

Chamfron

Meaning: a horse's head-armour, or as Cotgrave has it:

the front-stall, head-peece, or forehead-piece, of a barbed horse. 

Bonus word: a horse's armour is bard(ing), although no-one's quite sure why. This has since extended to the practice of wrapping bacon around poultry when roasting; good to see a useful word so deliciously recycled.

Logofascination: 2. Partly due to the 'there's a word for everything' factor, and partly because of the wide and wild variety of the spelling. I had it written down as chanfron, and Wikipedia has chanpron, but ngrams finds that chamfron is most popular (using the word popular quite loosely) and the OED only gives us chamfron or chamfrain.

In the wild: The Viennese museum of Arms and Armour, back in 2011. I told you I hoard words; I thought it was time to get onto my back-catalogue. It also turns up in Cotgrave, who I do recommend browsing.

Usefulness: 4, unless you're writing historical fiction, or touring an armoury museum.

Hook turn

Meaning: a counter-intuitive driving manoeuvre in which you turn across oncoming traffic from what feels like the wrong side of the road; in effect you join the traffic stream perpendicular to yours. Video here.

Logofascination: 4. It's a turn that looks like a hook. This word was only saved from a really boring 5 rating by functioning as a semi-shibboleth for Melbournians, and the ANDC taking so long to add it.  It's not in the Australian National Dictionary yet, but we've had electric trams (why Melbourne needs hook turns) since 1908.

In the wild: An ANDC post on the just-released seventh edition of The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary mentions some new additions, and it turns out that 'hook turn' has entered those august pages (and that I have a first edition; for some reason most people didn't think that was as cool as I did).  I'm sure the ANDC have done a better job of defining it.

Usefulness: 2. Declaiming the simplicity of the hook turn is one of the signs of a local Melbournian. You can avoid hook turns by going the long way around the block (which I did for some time) but running late in heavy traffic helps overcome any hesitations. It feels like you're crossing the streams, but after the first time they're straightforward. (No, really...)

Autarky

Meaning: self-sufficiency; the k is a subtle signal that this is in the economic sense, as there is also autarchy, or self-rule, which is from entirely different origins.

Logofascination: 1.  Greek origins, spiky consonants and the possibility of political or theological confusion; what's not to like? The OED citations include these gems:

• 1635,   H. Valentine: "It may as well stand upon its bottome, and boast an Autarchie, and selfe sufficiencie."
• 1957,   T. S. Eliot: "A general autarky in culture simply will not work: the hope of perpetuating the culture of any country lies in communication with others."

In the wild: A pretty boring post on the apparent withdrawal to nationalism (note to markets: it doesn't work). I'm interested in economics and the free market, and I still skimmed it; that chap needs an editor to send it back asking for more jokes.

Usefulness: 2. "Want a drink / dinner / lift home?" "Nah, I'm an autarky tonight, thanks." "If the various attempts at Communism - in which I include France - have taught us anything, it is that autarky does. not. work. You may have your decorative farms on rolling hillsides, but you pay the price in riots in the quais and queues in the patisseries."

Boustrophedon

Meaning: "turning as an ox in plowing"; writing which alternates left-to-right, right-to-left, left-to-right, right-to-left, etc, etc.

Logofascination: 1. Bous- is cow (which is why Bosphorus and Oxford are, etymologically, the same place), and -strophe is turning (which is why an apostrophe takes the place of something that has been turned away.)

In the wild: Antony Green is Australia's premier psephologist*, and it's the casual use of words like 'boustrophedon' that keep him that way. (Update: boustrophedon turned up in Stan Carey's review of Shady Characters.)

Usefulness: 2. My mother used to complain of us wandering about like Brown's cows; perhaps if she'd complained of our Boustrophedonitis we'd have paid more attention.


*one of the few good things about elections; political writers love dragging this word out. 

Heterotopia

Meaning: "places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions." Wikipedia helpfully continues: "neither here nor there." It's not in the OED yet, probably because Foucalt is totes post-modern. We all know that's dead, but aren't quite sure what to call this bit yet, so best not take him too seriously*.

Logofascination: 2 (Other-place is not that interesting etymologically, but gets points for not being in the OED.  This word is not merely in books, it's in book titles, and they haven't noticed?)

In the wild: a piece on the romance and pragmatism of the under-appreciated jetbridge. If you're a travel tragic, you'll also want to read Geoff Lemon on airports (and jetbridges) as ritual magic, or maybe even an old piece of mine on airports as liminal spaces. Yes, I wish I'd come up with heterotopia and the idea of flying as sacrament too. 

Usefulness: 2 (Discuss: airports and shopping centres should have enough otherness to make you dissociate from realities like your bank balance, but not enough to induce psychosis.)


*in my spare room, a BA just disintegrated.

-----
If there are any of you still playing along at home, I've dusted off the cobwebs and am intending to try out some new posting formats.

I consider my Six Degrees theorem well and truly proven, but I still hoard words and would like to share them with you. I also hoard links to long-form pieces, so there'll be a bit of that snuck in along the way. Finally, my secret goal (less secret now, I suppose) of compiling an Urquhartian concordance also still exists; I'd like to try and bring you a word a week. The promise of a blogger is worth its weight in posts, so we shall see how that goes. If any of you aren't robots, (or my mother) I really would like to know what you think. (Although mum's feedback is always good too.)

Live from Cromarty

In the midst of the all the not-blogging I've been doing lately, there's been a bit of travel, and I've had the great joy of spending today in Cromarty.  I'm staying in Ardyne House; from my bedroom window I can see the Sutors (headlands), which feature in Sir Thomas' encomium of Cromarty and its Firth:

I have, or at least had, before I was sequestred, a certain harbour or bay, in goodness equal to the best in the world ... promontaries on each side, vulgarly called Souters ...  ten thousand ships together may within it ride in the greatest tempest that is as in a calm; 

The Souters from Ardyne House

Sir Thomas wasn't exaggerating (well, not as much as usual): Cromarty Firth is very large. Over time it has held various Navy ships, and still holds several oil-rigs in various states of (dis)repair. Cromarty has had several booms (hemp, herring, oil), but never quite reached what Sir Thomas claimed he could do:

By which means, the foresaid town of Cromarty, for so it is called, in a very short space, would have easily become the richest of any within threescore miles thereof; 

Here are a few photos from around the village (a lovely spot in its own right); I'll eventually put together a definitive guide for the Sir Thomas pilgrimage.

Ekskybalauron engraving at the Stables

Sir Thomas in the Cromarty timeline

Sir Thomas in the Urquhart family tree,
displayed in the East Church

Common on graves in Cromarty; experts say they're symbols of death
and nothing to do with pirates, but I have my doubts...

Hircocervus

Meaning: as the OED says "A fabulous creature, half goat, half stag." They are of course using fabulous meaning 'out of fable' but I like the ambiguity.

Usefulness: 2 (Perhaps as an insult? Unless you happen to be haunting the halls of Winchester College, of course.)

Logofascination: 2 (The name is from the Latin for billy-goat and stag; another name is the tragelaph, from the Greek for the same creatures.  The genus to which Kudu belong are called Tragelaphus for this reason.)

In the wild: Michael Quinion found it in Umberto Eco, and has written it up here, and as mentioned in both that and the Wikipedia article, the hircocervus comes to us via philosophy. Plato introduced it as an example* and Aristotle takes it further; if you have the brain-power you can read up on the goat-stag in philosophy here.  It also makes a brief appearance in my favourite passage of The Horologicon; the hircocervus is one of the midnight creatures who gather around.

Hoghenhine

Meaning: a house-guest who stays three nights or more; in times past, after the third night the host had the same legal responsibility for them as for any other member of their household.

Usefulness: 1 (I've had house-guests* almost every day this year, and they all stayed at least three nights. I wish I'd known I could have called them hoghenhines.)

Logofascination: 1 (Etymologically, it's a bastardisation of Middle English aȝen hine or oȝen hine - own servant.  There is something appealing in the notion that ancient laws held that three nights was enough to know someone. In a few word books, it has jumped from the legal responsibility for a guest - as for one of your household - to popular definitions like 'one of the family', or 'a member of one's family'.)

In the wild: Mrs Byrne lists it as agenhina, "a guest at an inn who, after having stayed for three nights, was considered one of the family". Karl Hagen does rather a good job of correcting this, although he fails to locate the source of her reference to an inn. Here we turn to historymike who quotes more of the original source than the OED does; The Country Justice says that agenhina "is used in ancient Saxon Laws for him that cometh to an Inne guest-wise".  To give Mrs Byrne her due, she traced her words to original sources wherever possible, and considering she worked on her dictionary during the 1950s and 1960s while touring as a concert pianist, I think she can be forgiven. I do wonder at Eric McKean's "a member of one's family" (Weird and Wonderful Words, 2002), although it is qualified with "chiefly in legal contexts". Even the OED adds "a member of a household; a dependant" to the definition, the semi-colons suggesting additional meanings. There are no citations for these, though, and certainly none for its use to denote a member of one's family. It seems to be one of those words whose usefulness and potential for expanded meanings appeals more to lexicographers than to the populace.

Lacunose

Meaning: having many gaps or hiatuses; used particularly of manuscripts.

Usefulness: 1 (If one were, say, attempting to describe an unexplained gap in blog posts, or a particularly patchy period of posting.)

Logofascination: 1 (Lacuna, meaning a gap in a manuscript - and a number of other things - is from the Latin lacūna, the diminutive of lacus, lake. From lacus we also get lagoon, originally used of pools of water around Venice - Captain Cook was the first to apply it to tropical destinations.)

In the wild: In my apology for being so terribly lacunose? Mind you, I make no rash promises of reformation, but I shall attempt to warn you of any looming lacunae. No lagoons were involved in this one, sadly.

Irredentist

Meaning: with a lower-case i, someone who advocates seizing territory back* from another nation or state. With a capital, a member of a 19th century Italian political party which advocated the annexation of Italian-speaking districts from surrounding nations.

Usefulness: 2 (Slightly abstruse, but you'll get points from the politically inclined. Could be useful if you were interviewing Diego Marani, who likes to discuss the attempts of nation-states to co-opt language as identity and/or delineator of borders, and the way that the EU is - possibly - undoing that. Podcast here, or interview here. He's also attempted a universal language, albeit a Euro-centric one.)

Logofascination: 2 (From the Italian for 'unredeemed', as in 'unredeemed Italy'.)

In the wild: A Washington Post blogpost on the issues with a study that supposedly mapped 'racial tolerance'.

Vocitated

Meaning: named or called.

Usefulness: 2 (It strikes me as a satisfyingly annoying way to ask someone's name "And what are you vocitated, old chap?" or introduce yourself: "I am occasionally vocitated as The Antipodean.")

Logofascination: 1 (The English version was invented by Sir Thomas, who is the sole citation in the OED.)

In the wild: Occasionally; someone's already taken it as a Twitter handle, worse luck.

Stentoriphonically

Meaning: loudly; as if through a speaking-trumpet, or stentorophonic horn.

Usefulness: 2 (It's a bit of a mouthful, but useful if you're after something elaborate. Stentorophonic horn is rather useful as a more interesting name for hearing aids.)

Logofascination: 1 (In 1671 Sir Samuel Morland - academic, diplomat, spy, inventor and mathematician* - claims to have invented what we would call a megaphone, but he called the stentorophonic horn. Stentoriphonically appears in G&P Le Tiers-Livre in 1693, but Sir Thomas had died in 1660; this may be one of Motteux's sneaking in. Sir Thomas might well have made an allusion to Stentor, mythical source for this and stentorian, but the suffix -phonic is not quite right.**)

In the wild: No.

Mezentian

Meaning: resembling Mezentius, an Etruscan king exiled for cruelty (according to Virgil, anyway).

Usefulness: 1 ("An early meeting the day after a long weekend? A Mezentian idea!")

Logofascination: 1 (The OED has three citations between 1798 and 1874. The next is 1992, from Iain Banks' Crow Road. Between Iain and Iain M. Banks, the late, lamented author has 136 citations in the OED, a number of them to do with whisky. Sadly, my favourite of his books, Transition,  seems to have been lexicographically neglected by the OED. If you're interested, the list of the words with Iain / Iain M. Banks citations is at the end of the post.)

In the wild: Crow Road: "It did occur to me he could have driven the bike himself with the body lashed to his back looking like a pillion. It's a bit Mezentian, but possible."

Myki

Meaning: Old Norse for cow dung. No, really. See also here.

Usefulness: 1. (Google tells me that there was a bit of press about this when the system first came out, but no-one told me.)

Logofascination: 1 (Etymologically related to muck and midden.  Mainly of interest to those of us residing in Melbourne; myki is our public transport ticketing system. Its problems are so notorious that there's a hashtag: #mykifail. I suppose it provides the rest of you with a usefully obscure word for cow dung; "This report is sheer myki!")

In the wild: Of all places, I found it in a post on Lancashire dialect. I'm trying to figure out where loomster comes from.

Degrees: 3

Connections: myki - muck - manurers (It's been a while since we had a word this far removed; I think this is because Sir Thomas used Scottish vernacular rather than English - muck and midden - and the influences are different.)

Which is used in: Logopandecteision. To over-simplify, Sir Thomas is arguing that you can verify how ancient his heritage is by considering that of his tenants:

both historie and the most authentick tradition we have, avoucheth the first labourers and manurers of the land to have come along with my ancestors Beltistos, Nomostor, and Lutork, and for their good service done, especially to the last of those three, received leases thereupon in the quality of yeomans, who were so well pleased with what they got that after they had most contentedly spent the best of their age, when decrepit years did summon them to pay their last due to nature, they bequeathed unto their children the hereditarie obedience they did owe their master, to whom they left their blessing and best wishes 

Manure originally just meant cultivate, but of course manuring is one of the chief activities of cultivation, particularly before modern fertilizers. 

Penitissim

Meaning: Innermost.

Usefulness: 2 (Could lead to some confusion if used carefully, which Rabelais might have been counting on.)

Logofascination: 1 (Originating in Pantagruel, this is probably a Rabelaisian coinage, although it's from a common enough Latin root, penitus. The OED has Sir Thomas' Ekskybalauron as the sole citation, since it is the main English source. I can't help but wonder if it's in the OED to help explicate Rabelais, much as most of Cotgrave exists for that purpose.

The really fascinating thing about this word, though, is that Ekskybalauron was published before Sir Thomas' Rabelais translation - they are only a year apart, but this suggests that he was already working on the translation, and had thought about how to Anglicise this passage.)

In the wild: Besides the piece on neologism I linked to recently, it's also cited in a rather useful dissection of the original.

Orthovestia

Meaning: right dressing, right fitting, right looking: the pressure to wear what fits and flatters, whether literally, socially, culturally, fashionably or ideologically.

Usefulness: 1 (So useful I really don't know how we've got by without it. "I know I'm buying into orthovestia, but, seriously, tights are not pants!" "I don't think he's behind the times; I think your orthovestia can't look past his lack of a checked shirt.")

Logofascination: 1 (It's brand spanking new! And I know I might sound a bit over enthusiastic or - heaven forbid - ironic, but I really, truly think this is a word we can use. Also it is built from the Greek ortho-, meaning correct or proper, and the Latin vestir, meaning to "dress, clothe, attire, wear, adorn, bedeck, embellish, disguise, cover up, make clothes for" and a good Greek / Latin hybrid is worth its weight in gold, however it is dressed up.)

In the wild: No, because Mel Campbell only just invented it.