Etymological glossers unite!

Another out-of-the park guest post by pitch-hitting Gleaner Karen L. Mulder.

When I was but a small child, my family moved from New York to Melbourne, as did my accent. Before I left Australia, I was told that I had mastered  Stryne. “Stryne?” I queried; “Wot is Stryne?” Turns out it's Australian, as opposed to ‘Murcan English (best exemplified by the murmurations of George Dubya Bush). ‘Murcan has all sorts of its own contractions, possibly promoted by the pragmatism of Americans, who tend to always be in a hurry to get somewhere and do something. Howdjya, for example, as in ‘howdja do it?’, or thingydobob, as in ‘hey, can you hand me the … thingydobob?’ (also synonymous with doohickey or watchamacallit.)  If you or a member of your circle are samplers of ‘Murcan, do I have a tome for you!

It’s a small and frankly absurd little book with the kind of ridiculously elongated subtitle you tend to see on British treatises about furniture design or philosophy from the 18th century. Ahhh, but every word counts. The Whatchamacallit:Those Everyday Objects You Just Can’t Name (And Things You Think You KnowAbout, But Don’t) takes you from achenes (pronounced a-keens) to zucchetto in about 200 pages. Is it essential? No. Not even to Scrabble fans. Is it fun? Absolutely. It is also top-shelf reading material for your loo. A word, incidentally, that I theorize came from the lieux d’Anglais, the English place (said with a French sneer)—or in other words, the eponymous invention of a plumber named Thomas Crapper. Others say that the water closet or WC was at some point always numbered “100” (which I find hard to believe in multistoried buildings), and this became “loo” in Anglo-Saxon English. Every word has its stories, and that’s the poop on this one.

Cary Grant had quite the philtrum.

Two self-proclaimed wordsmiths with publishing credentials—books about the Metropolitan Museum, global etiquette, bits for the Sunday Times, and so on—were having lunch one day when one of them managed to deposit a dollop of gravy on his…well it was his…what IS that space between the lip and the nose? That was all it took for authors Danny Danziger and Mark McCrum to gather their list of more than 100 unusual words, once they daubed the sauce off their … philtrum. Now really, shouldn’t you know this term, since a competent martial artist can apparently slay you simply by tapping that area in just the right way?

Pip pip hooray!

Perhaps not, but if you like words, it’s simply fun to idle through these pages and end up knowing how an aglet (the bit that keeps a shoelace from unraveling) differs from a zarf (the holder for a glass without a handle). While the jacket notes jingoistically promise that you will “always know the right word for things” by virtue of reading this book, that would only hold true if you need to know the precise nomenclature for the little pips on a strawberry (achenes) or the velveteen skullcaps that top the heads of Roman Catholic clerics (zucchetto). The authors avoided specialized jargon (otherwise, they could have just written another type of dictionary, right?), but culled their shortlist from a long list of everyday items, like phloem bundles (the stringy thingamabobs on bananas) that may not be in common usage.

Hold on to your zucchetto!

Unlike other word books, from Simon Winchester’s masterful story about the daft American who provided many of the first entries for the Oxford English Dictionary (The Professor and the Madman, 1998), to comedian Rich Hall’s fanciful Sniglets genre (about made up words that should be in the dictionary, such as “doork—a person who pushes on a door marked ‘pull’”), The Watchamacallit gives a few paragraphs of anecdotal and etymological gloss to each word. Some will be predictable, depending on our personal aptitudes and professions, but many are surprising. And in the end, as the authors remind us, virtually everything eventually reverts to a watchmacallit—so strike before the interrobang goes off (?!). 

Feel free to share your favorite miswordings, wordlinesses, and untoword etymological gems with us!

Art and architectural historian Karen L. Mulder loves to diddle around with words and has been known to read the OED just for fun.

Further fascinating word lore: By Hook or Crook: A Journey in Search of English and Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.