Impignoration - Random Word Find

As long as you have a mobile device with an Internet connection handy, you're never without a dictionary. Can't remember if you should use callous or callow in the sentence you're jotting while on the go? Just look it up! This is wonderful technology. But, to impersonate an old fart Luddite for a moment, we're losing something valuable in the exchange of paging through a paper dictionary for looking up words online. We lose the possibility of stumbling across interesting words along the path to finding the word we went searching for.

If you're not sure of the spelling of a word you're typing into Dictionary.com, you simply get a "no results found" message. If you're unsure of the spelling while paging through a hardback dictionary, you're bound to get pleasantly distracted along the way by intriguing or exotic words that call out like so many carnival barkers, enticing you to step off your path for a moment to see something strange and new.

Impignoration got me tonight as I leafed through the OED en route to check the meaning of impolitic. The word beckoned from the top left corner of the page on which my destination lay, it's all-caps, bold font virtually jumping off the page to grab the attention of the random passer-by. Of course I had to stop to look. Impignoration is "the action or fact of impignorating," a verb which means "to place in pawn; to pledge, pawn, or mortgage." It's a "chiefly Scottish" term, the dictionary notes.

Ok, so maybe this isn't a term I'm going to add to my routine usage anytime soon, even with the ongoing mortgage crisis still coming up occasionally as a topic of conversation. But it was fun to take a brief side trip along the way to the definition I needed and discover an interesting new term. I could indeed have found impignoration in Dictionary.com. But only if I'd purposefully gone looking for it.

Decrepit - Creaking Along

I like Reggie from Chesterfield, Va., a 6-foot-5-inch, Lincoln Town Car-driving gent who called in this past weekend on Car Talk, the automotive-themed radio program on NPR. It wasn't Reggie's jovial voice punctuated by a slight Southern twang or that he's gotten a highly commendable 432,000 miles out of his 1995 Town Car. No, it was his use of decrepit.

Reggie called the show to mull aloud whether to take advantage of the "Cash for Clunkers" program or keep the car and its lifetime warranty on a complete engine replacement, labor charges included. One disadvantage to ditching the car would be finding a comparably roomy vehicle for his expansive frame. As he put it, his commute to work covers 65 miles each way and "within an hour I have to be able to stretch my left leg out because I'm old and decrepit and it cramps up really bad."

Reggie could have called his body worn-out, run-down or beat-up; he could have described himself as rickety or infirm, done-in or burned-out. But decrepit is a mighty fine term. Its Latin root crepāre means "to crack, creak, or rattle," according to the OED. Decrepit describes the state of being worn out or infirm because of age, long use, or neglect.

The term's noun form is quite a hoot, too: decrepitude. It sounds like being worn out but with conviction. It conveys more than a little creaky or shaky; it sounds like a roof ready to collapse in on itself if just one more splat of bird poop lands on it.

Maybe decrepit would be a more applicable descriptive for a car with more than 400,000 miles on its odometer. But Reggie clearly was attached to the old vehicle, praising the smooth ride it delivered compared to a more contemporary Navigator. When connected to age or long use, decrepit can sometimes convey a sense of endearment.

The Velveteen Rabbit eventually became decrepit with age and play in the classic children's book. But as the Skin Horse told him, "Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Rachitis & Pellagra - Scourges of the Past

Through literature, authors bequeath to us not just ideas but also sights, sounds, tastes and smells from the past. And wonderful heirloom words. My pal Claudette has been vicariously experiencing the flavors and milieu of the Great Depression by reading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. She shared this sentence, which sent her to the dictionary more than once:

The granaries were full and the children of the poor grew up rachitic, and the pustules of pellagra swelled on their sides.

Rachitic -- there's a lulu of a word! I wasn't even sure how to pronounce it let alone define it. Thank goodness it's a word consigned for the most part to historical narratives here in the U.S. because it means "related to or having rickets." Rachitis, a Greek word referring to inflammation of the spine, is the medical term for the condition, which entails softening of the bones due to a vitamin D or calcium deficiency, usually as a result of malnutrition. The disease manifests in weak, bowlegged or misshapen limbs. (Rachitic is pronounced "rah-kit-ick" by the way.)

Pustules of pellagra certainly induces a wince; even if you're not sure what pellagra is, anything involving pus can't be pleasant. Pellagra turns out to be the term for a wasting disease associated with niacin (vitamin B3) deficiency, which is characterized by skin roughening and lesions as well as diarrhea and dementia. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?

Diseases associated with malnutrition and carrying archaic sounding monikers like rickets and pellagra seem like historical artifacts in this era and nation of plenty. Yes, there are still people in America who suffer these scourges, some because they're poor, some because they're addicted to drugs or alcohol, some for other reasons. But even among those struggling to make ends meet, such conditions are no longer the norm. In fact, we've traded diseases of dearth for diseases of plenty.

Obesity now looms as America's greatest health threat, sending rates of heart disease and diabetes to alarming levels. Medical professionals no longer refer to "juvenile" and "adult-onset" diabetes. Now it's "type 1" and "type 2" diabetes given that so many teens were developing the adult form, mostly as a result of their weight.

Will future novels that chronicle American society describe obese children laboring to breathe as they cross a schoolyard flanked by unused playground equipment, an abundance of cheap, high-calorie chips, snack cakes, fries, and sugary sodas surrounding them in vending machines, fast-food restaurants and cafeterias? Is it any less a wince-inducing scene?

Gallimaufric - Jumbled With Flair

I've been gobsmacked by a new word. Deep into John McPhee's The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, the author hit me with gallimaufric. My eyeballs tripped over this vocabulary stumbling stone and tumbled into the gutter of white space between the lines. Here's the exact reference:

His ambitions and interests were, as they developed, gallimaufric. He invented, among other things, the combination lock.... He invented the wickless oil lamp. He invented a kitchen range for anthracite. As mayor, and also president of the board of health, he designed and built the Perth Ambroy sewer. In barracks constructed by the English Army in the eighteenth century he established workrooms for the manufacture of his inventions, which also included a fumigator, a forging press, a velocipede, a machine to crack nuts.

You get the idea.

Gallimaufric is the adjectival form of gallimaufry, meaning "a confused jumble or a medley of things," according to the New Oxford American Dictionary. Per various dictionaries, it refers to "a jumble or hodgepodge;" "a hash or ragout;" "mishmash or melange." (Incidentally, hodgepodge is an alteration of a Middle English term hochepot, meaning a stew. All these references to food are making me hungry!)

Unless you're a gourmand or Parisian expatriate, perhaps hodgepodge, medley, or jumble are more straightforward terms than gallimaufry. But what then would be the adjectival form? Hodgepodgy? Medleous? Jumbled would work, but it's kind of prosaic. Gallimaufric: now there's a word with panache! (Once you know what it means, that is.)

Callow & Callous - Bald & Hard

Some words are like red Jelly Belly beans. You pick one out thinking it's a particular flavor, like cherry, but then you realize you just bit into a cinnamon instead. Likewise, it's easy to mistake words that sound similar but have totally different meanings.

Take callow and callous. Callow means "inexperienced, immature;" it's also frequently used to mean "gullible, naive." Callous means "displaying an insensitive, unsympathetic or cruel attitude."

People who believe rumors that current proposals for health care reform include having government officials force end-of-life decisions on people are callow.

People who think it's no big deal that millions of Americans go without any health insurance so long as they have theirs are callous.

Interestingly, these words have distinct roots as well. Callow derives from the Old English term calu meaning "bald," and probably came from the Latin term for bald, calvus. The word originally referred to an unfledged (hence bald) bird and was eventually extended to any immature thing. Callous comes from the Latin callosus and ultimately callum meaning "hard skin." The term shouldn't be confused with callus, the word for a hardened spot of skin, like you might have on the balls of your feet if you have a job that keeps you hopping all day.

Propinquity - A Close Look at a $10 Word

John McPhee employs some interesting terminology in his intriguingly titled book, The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. Speaking of Olcott, the test pilot tapped to fly, or at least attempt to fly, a prototype airship -- an "aerobody" as its zealous lead backer William Miller dubbed it -- McPhee wrote:

Why Miller hired him to test the 26 was in part the result of propinquity. Olcott's daylight work was at Aeronautical Research Associates of Princeton, Inc., in Princeton Junction, and a couple of rooms above a bank on Nassau Street in Princeton happened to be the home and only offices of Aeron Corporation.

Propinquity is an interesting word choice. You can make reasonably good assumptions about its meaning from the context if it acts as stumbling stone along your reading path. The term simply means "nearness."

According to the OED, the nearness indicated by the term may refer to spatial closeness, temporal closeness, blood relation or kinship, or similarity in nature, belief, or disposition. But all nearness, just the same.

So why propinquity, this $10 word? Why not proximity, an equally multisyllabic term with deep roots in good ol' Latin? Or, to be as direct as possible, why not simply nearness?

Perhaps in the early '70s when McPhee was penning Pumpkin Seed, propinquity was not quite so arcane a term. Perhaps for McPhee it is one of those preferred terms that many a writer cherishes, like a particularly fine tigereye marble, brought out on rare occasions. Or maybe it's just one of many terms that an accomplished wordsmith knows and uses to convey an idea without any particular intent to be fancy.

And convey McPhee certainly does. He is a magician with words, conjuring graphic images out of ink marks on plain paper. Take his description of an auto mechanic's tool:

Fitzpatrick got out a pair of gooseneck pliers that could have removed a tooth from the Statue of Liberty.

Or his description of the mechanic wielding those pliers:

Fitzpatrick was in his forties -- a short man, around five feet eight. His face was weather-lined, handsome, tough, and sad. There was a sense of grandeur in it, and a sense of ironic humor. His hair was dark and graying, and neatly combed. His body looked hard. He had a muscular, projecting chest. His stomach and abdomen were as flat as two pieces of sidewalk. He had the appearance of a small weight lifter, a German-shepherd owner, an old lifeguard. He was smoking the stub of a thin cigar.

The storyteller who writes in vivid pictures like this, who spins out page after compelling page on a topic as mundane as oranges, who can convince readers with zero interest in aerodynamics that perhaps the world gave up too soon on dirigibles, that storyteller is bound to control a vast vocabulary as myriad as the Pantone shades available to a graphic artist.

Propinquity, proximity, contiguity, vicinity, adjacency, nearness, closeness…

Excoriate - A Tough Scrape

Michael Chabon's collection of essays, Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, contains this wonderful vocabulary aside about literary criticism:

"To be excoriated, by the way, literally means 'to have one's skin removed'; it's the heavy-duty version of exfoliated."

Suddenly, pumice stones and gritty facial scrubs sound as soft and gentle as dust bunnies.

This literal meaning is borne out by the term's Latin roots: ex meaning "out of" or "from" plus corium for "skin" or "hide," according to the New Oxford American Dictionary. The OED's definitions for excoriate are, essentially, to strip or peel off, as in a skin or hide; to remove a surface or lining by corrosion or abrasion. In other words, to flay or disintegrate.

My childhood reading included its share of pirate stories -- always good fodder for adventure with a touch of villainy and gore. But it wasn't until I ran my hands over the serrated surface of a barnacle-encrusted piece of wood during a beach trip that I truly appreciated the horrors of keelhauling, the practice of dragging a sailor along the underside of the ship, combining the flaying of flesh with the terror of drowning.

As a metaphor for criticism, excoriation is therefore truly the most severe form. Such is the price of fame, I guess, since any writer or any public figure of a certain level of renown faces the potential of being excoriated by his or her critics.

Perhaps those of us who labor in obscurity have the consolation of facing no more than an occasional mild abrasion. However, the vast open ocean of the Web has brought out the pirates, judging by some of the anonymous comments I see posted on many a blog or online article, even some that are pretty obscure. And some of these comments make keelhauling seem like a mere buffing with a loofah by comparison.

Besmirch - Curses, Soiled Again!

I did it to her again. Finding our cat Ripley curled into a circle of dozing kitty fluffiness on the comforter, I couldn't resist pressing my cheek against her fur while rubbing her fuzzy head. Which she tolerated for about 1 minute before hopping up and stalking to the far corner of the bed where, after casting a baleful glance in my direction, she commenced meticulously washing. Look at that, I said to Mark; her body language almost shrieked, "you have besmirched my lovely coat!"

The prim sound of besmirch aptly fit Ripley's huffy attitude. Sully, however, would have been an equally good choice. Besmirch literally means to soil or discolor as with dirt or soot, as in to drag one's dirty feet or fingers over a surface, leaving behind tracks and smudges of filth. Although the OED is vague on the etymology of besmirch, the word could be a derivation of besmear given that the tome offers besmire as an obsolete form. The ultimate root of besmear is the Old English term smeoru or smeru for ointment or grease. That's definitely smeary stuff!

But the more frequent use of besmirch is metaphorical, as in to dim something's luster, to damage or dishonor someone's reputation. "The candidate's attack ads aimed to besmirch his opponent's stance as a fiscal conservative."

Certainly, my petting in no way tarnished the luster of Ripley's fur or her reputation as a gorgeous feline. Though in her mind, I'd clearly defiled her pelt.

Sully, likewise, means to blemish something's cleanliness or luster, to taint or contaminate. And it also can be used to indicate the marring of the purity of something, such as a reputation. "Her drunken bouts sullied her good name in the community." Sully derives from a French term souiller meaning simply, to soil.

So, there you go: Two fun terms for times when soil or tarnish simply aren't sufficient.