Nominal - A Little Normal

During Sunday night's landing of Space Shuttle Endeavor, which Mark was watching on his laptop, I caught a command from the CapCom in Houston to the shuttle crew to do a "nominal chute deploy." "Nominal?" I asked. "I would think they'd want full deployment of their parachutes upon landing." "Nominal means normal," Mark said. "No, it means little or less than the full amount," I countered. After a bit of back and forth on the term's meaning, I went to the arbiter of word matters, the dictionary (in this instance the Oxford New American Dictionary loaded on our Mac) and quoted:

nominal
1. (of a role or status) existing in name only: Thailand retained nominal independence under Japanese military occupation. • of, relating to, or consisting of names. • Grammar relating to, headed by, or having the function of a noun.
2. (of a price or amount of money) very small; far below the real value or cost: some firms charge only a nominal fee for the service.
3. (of a quantity or dimension, esp. of manufactured articles) stated or expressed but not necessarily corresponding exactly to the real value: legislation allowed variation around the nominal weight (that printed on each packet). • Economics (of a rate or other figure) expressed in terms of a certain amount, without making allowance for changes in real value over time: the nominal exchange rate.
4. informal (chiefly in the context of space travel) functioning normally or acceptably.

As so often happens, we were both right and our understanding of the term rested on the context within which we were most familiar with it. To a space geek like Mark, NASA staffers' use of the term made perfect sense whereas it sounded bizarre to me. Mark found some information suggesting that NASA's use of the term is borrowed from the term's usage in statistics. "Mission control-types are looking for unusual readings, so readings within an expected, or nominal, range are normal," he noted. This Wikipedia article on the term's various usage contexts provides further insights.

Fortunately, the shuttle experienced a nominal, full deployment of its chutes during its Sunday night landing, completing a safe and successful mission.

Pogonology & Hirsute - A Wild Hair

There's an ologist for everything under the sun. This morning, a Washington Post article on the waning popularity of mustaches and beards in India enlightened me to the term for the study of facial hair: pogonology. The feature cited commentary from pogonologist Richard McCallum, author of Hair India: A Guide to the Bizarre Beards and Magnificent Mustaches of Hindustan. Now, that's a book to display prominently on your coffee table.


Reading the Post feature about the dwindling of the "facial foliage" that has long distinguished Indian men -- to the extent that someone could create a coffee table book about it -- brought to mind a particularly choice term that didn't find its way into the piece: hirsute. I just like this word. Hirsute is a fun and funky term for "hairy." More specifically, it connotes being covered with hair. Pronounced "her-suit," it sounds vaguely similar to ursine, the Latin term for bear, a creature sporting a great, shaggy pelt. But all good qualities aside, it's a true ten-dollar term. You can see why there aren't many hair restoration product ads proclaiming to "return you to your full hirsute glory in just two weeks!"


Speaking of hair and India, I remember how perplexed I was staring at the saffron-robed men I encountered for the first time in my life in Boston Commons during a vacation many years ago. The sight of their shaved heads was entirely antithetical to the image I'd formed upon hearing my father point out the "hairy krishnas" -- at least that's how my callow teenage brain interpreted the moniker.

Refulgent -- I Gotta Wear Shades

Mining Simon Mawer's novel The Glass Room for vocabularic gems is proving a most enriching experience. Today, I came across refulgent in this passage describing the the installation of the glass panes forming the eponymous room of the book's title:

It had become a palace of light, light bouncing off the chrome pillars, light refulgent on the walls, light glistening on the dew in the garden, light reverberating from the glass. It was as though they stood inside a crystal of salt.

Refulgent, according to the Kindle's built-in dictionary, means "shining brightly." The OED says a bit more expansively, "shining with, or reflecting, a brilliant light; radiant, resplendent, gleaming."

Mawer uses the term in this instance to describe the effect of the newly erected glass space, or glass room, as the couple for whom this modernistic house is being built experience it for the first time.

But this isn't the first instance Mawer uses the term in the novel. My eyes skipped over the first usage in an earlier passage when pregnant Liesel, the female half of the couple, is submitting to her friend's efforts to divine the gender of her unborn baby via an old wives' trick (the novel is set pre-ultrasound) of suspending her wedding ring by a string over her belly and watching its movements:

'It's a girl.' The turning is obvious now, incontrovertible, a description of a perfect female circle over the smooth and refulgent dome of Liesel's belly.

Nor is it the term's the last usage in the novel. Mawer applies it once more to Liesel in a passage where he describes her as she "now appears fantastic, a shining refulgent creature."

I'm tempted to take issue with the redundancy of shining. However, I'm more intrigued by the parallels that the author seems to be drawing between the woman and the unparalleled and resplendent house she occupies, a unique structure built exclusively for her and her family. I'm not far enough along in the novel to draw conclusions about the relationship between the character of the house and the character of the woman. However, this strikes me as a good example of how authors can suggest deeper meanings even by something as seemingly simple as their word choice.

Glaucous -- Vocabulary from The Glass Room

In between snow shoveling, pounding ice out of the gutter downspouts, and chipping away at ice dams on the roof, I've begun reading Simon Mawer's novel, The Glass Room. It's clearly a book full of vocabulary gems, which I'll make a point to mine along the way. My first fun find: glaucous.

The term means, according to the dictionary in the Kindle on which I'm reading the novel:
1. of a dull grayish-green or blue color.
2. covered with a powdery bloom like that on grapes.

The word's ultimate root is the Greek glaukos meaning "bluish-green" or "bluish-gray." This root is shared by glaucoma, the medical term for a gradual loss of sight due to increased pressure on the eyeball, which can be marked by a gray-green haze in the pupil.

Usage of glaucous in the novel is in reference to a model of a pavilion that the modernist architect Ranier von Abt has designed and is now showing off to his new acquaintances and perhaps potential clients:

The colours of the model were those that von Abt had extolled in their voyage down from Saint Mark's: ethereal white, glaucous pearl, glistening chrome.

It sounds cold but lovely to me.

Surfeit -- Let It Snow? Let It No!

Dear Mother Nature, thank you for your enthusiastic response to my husband's wistful comments lo these past few years about the dearth of snow to mark the winter season, but really, enough is enough. There's a hill of snow in front of our house created from our efforts to shovel a 20-inch deep blanket off our car and driveway, and now we hear forecasts of another 5 to 10 inches that may fall in a couple of days. Thanks, dear lady, but no thanks. We are suffering a surfeit of the white stuff.

I'm afraid that the evidence outside our windows suggests you may not be familiar with the meaning of surfeit, so permit me to share with you this definition from the venerable OED: "1. Excess, superfluity; excessive amount or supply of something." The tome also offers: "An excessive indulgence," and "Disgust arising from excess; nausea, satiety." Not to seem too ungrateful, but it's that last definition that really resonates at the moment.

Oh, sure, come the dog days of August, as I stand in a sweltering Metro train car with beads of sweat slithering down the backs of my legs, I'll think back longingly to plowing through snow up to my kneecaps this winter. But, dear Mother Nature, we're surfeited. Satiated. Done with all that. So that next round of snow on Tuesday? I hear Vancouver is experiencing a deficiency.