Showing posts from category: World history,
What’s in a Text?: Intentional and Affective Fallacies and the Logical Fallacy of Arguments from Silence
Exegesis: Relegating the author IN literary and artistic aesthetics the intentional fallacy occurs when readers or viewers use factors outside the text or visual work (such as biographical information) to evaluate its merits, rather than ignoring these “external” factors and relying solely on the textual or visual evidence of the novel, play, poem, painting, etc. to assess the work in question (what’s actually in the text and nothing outside). This key precept of the New Criticism school declares that a poem (or other work of art) does not belong to its author, it is (as stated by the term’s originators WK Wimsatt and MC Beardsley) “detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it”1⃞. Authorial intention is a non-consideration in the assessment of the work. The text or work has an objective status and its meaning belongs solely to the reading or viewing public. The reader’s task in literature, advocates of New Criticism assert, is to eschew subjective or personal aspects such as the lives and psychology of authors and literary history and focus entirely on close reading and explication of the text (A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 1981), edited by M.H. Abrams).
The intentional fallacy doctrine has a corollary in the affective fallacy which adheres to the same principles. Wimsatt and Beardsley affirmed that evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader, is an erroneous way of approaching the task. Giving rein to the emotions a work of art evokes in you, negates an appreciation of “the (work’s) inherent qualities and craftsmanship” that an objective analysis permits (Prince Kumar, ‘Understand Affective Fallacy from Example’, LitforIndia, 23-Dec-2023, www.litforindia.com).
Semantic autonomy, Intentionalism, Anti-intentionalism: The intentional and affective fallacies as prescriptive “rules” of hermeneutics held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s, however this is not to say that there was no pushback from scholarly dissenters. Proponents (primarily American) of what is called “Reader-response theory” reject the claims of New Criticism of this prescribed mode of interpreting and critiquing a work of literature. Some of these objected to the fallacy’s nothing outside the text rigidity for constricting exploration of all possibilities of a work’s meanings. Critic Norman Holland frames it in a psychoanalytical context, the reader, he affirms, will react to a literary text with the same psychological responses he or she brings to events in their daily lives, ie, “the immediate goal of interpretation is to fulfil (one’s) psychological needs and desires” (‘Psychological Reader-response Theory’, Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism (2016), www.literariness.org). Theorist ED Hirsch in his “Objective Interpretation” essay also took issue with the expositors of the intentional fallacy thesis, arguing that on the contrary authorial intent (intentionalism) was integral to a full understanding of the work…the only meaning that is permanent and valid is that of the author in question, the reader should confine him or herself to interpreting what the author is trying to say (E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation, 1967) .
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A quite different kind of fallacious argument is the argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio). This arises when a conclusion or inference is drawn based on an absence of statements in historical documents and source materials…the argument seeks not to challenge or rebut specific things an author includes in a book or document, but is critical of the author for something they should have said but didn’t! The most common instances of the argument from silence in practice relate to biblical debates and controversies, but a contemporary classic example of a non-theological, historical nature, one generating considerable heated discourse, concerns the 13th century merchant and explorer Marco Polo and the famous book of his travels in the East.
Medieval world travelogue guru?: Known by various names including Description of the World (Divisament du monde), Book of the Marvels of the World, Il libro di Marco Polo detto il Milione, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, or simply The Travels of Marco Polo, the book is one of the most celebrated tomes in the annals of literature dealing with the experiences of travellers to distant and unknown lands. The story, told and retold in numerous languages over centuries, presents Marco and his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo embarking on an epic road trip along the Silk Road to the court of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Beijing). The book recounts Marco’s travels in Cathay (North China) and Manji (South China), among other Eastern lands. The consensus among most historians is that Signor Polo, despite a tendency to exaggerate and embellish the tales of his travels2⃞, did nonetheless journey to China as he claimed in the book. The publication of Did Marco Polo Go to China? by Frances Wood in 1995 controversially swam against this tide. Wood infers serious doubts about Polo’s achievements, suggesting that despite his being away from his native Italy for the best part of a quarter-of-a-century, he never reached his intended destination China. According to Wood, he got only as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea where he accumulated all of his information on Chinese society and other Asian lands (his source material for the “Travels”) from picking the brains of visiting Persian merchants.
Doubting “Marco’s millions”: What made Wood so convinced that Marco Polo never visited China? Firstly, there is the book’s puzzling itinerary, it proceeds in a disjointed, incoherent fashion, is not uniformly chronological, has some odd detours and gets some geographical place names in China wrong. Then, while acknowledging The Travels of Marco Polo contains references to porcelain (from Fujian province), coal, rice-wine, paper currency and other items, Wood hones in on the fact that the Venetian traveller failed to mention certain other quintessentially Chinese things—namely the Great Wall of China, tea, chopsticks, cormorant fishing and the practice of foot-binding—in the pages of his “Travels’. Wood also picks up on Polo’s failure to learn Chinese during his sojourn in the Middle Kingdom. Allied to these omissions was the absence of Polo’s3⃞ name in any official Chinese document of the period, which Wood believed, further incriminated Marco as the perpetrator of a fraud.
Wood herself is perpetrating a pattern of reasoning which is problematic by recourse to an argument from silence. As Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2010) (ISBN0-415-96219-6Routledge pp. 64–65) note, “arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray.” Academic critics have been quick to pinpoint the shortcomings and misconceptions in Wood’s argument. There are, they counter, manifestly valid reasons why Polo would not refer to the Great Wall, for one, it was largely not there in the period of his residency in China! The impressive edifice of the Great Wall as we think of it was primarily a product of the Ming Dynasty (from 1368, three-quarters of a century after the Polos’ stay)…what there was of the not-so-Great Wall prior to that was a much more modest, unprepossessing sight (“a discontinuous series of derelict, pounded earth ramparts”) (‘F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go To China?’, A Critical Appraisal byI. de Rachewiltz, http://openresearch–repository.anu.edu.au). With the matter of the Chinese penchant for tea-drinking, perhaps Polo didn’t think the topic simply sufficiently noteworthy to rate a mention4⃞. The question of the omission of foot-binding, chopsticks and Polo’s linguistic ignorance of Chinese in the travelogue can all be accounted for. China and the royal court was under Mongol control (Yuan Dynasty) in Marco’s time, accordingly Polo moved in those circles, tending not to mix with the (Han) Chinese population. and so lacked the motivation (or opportunity) to learn Chinese. Likewise, he wouldn’t have encountered many upper class Chinese women in their homes, this was the strata of society that practiced female foot-binding, not the Mongols. Again, with chopsticks, not a utensil of choice for the Mongols who Polo tended to fraternise with (Morgan, D. O. (1996). Marco Polo in China-Or Not [Review of Did Marco Polo Go to China?, by F. Wood]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6(2), 221–225. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25183182). As for “the Travels’” silence on fishing with cormorants, the activity was not a widespread phenomena in China during the Yuan era, confined to the remoter areas of Sichuan Province (‘Cormorant Fishing in China’, Sally Guo, China Travel (Upd. 04-April-2021), www.chinatravel.com).
Filtered Marco Polo – Rustichello et al: And there’s another line of thought when considerating the book’s glaring omissions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies that Frances Wood doesn’t seem to have factored into her thesis…The Travels of Marco Polo, the published book we read today, is a different beast in form and content to the original article from the late 1290s. In fact the original manuscript which Polo dictated to his amanuensis, an imaginative romance writer Rustichello de Pisa —who had licence to inject his own theatrical flourishes and flavour into Marco’s original story—was lost early on, so “the Travels” have gone on an untraceable and interminable journey through “dozens of translations of translations, none of which are necessarily accurate” (‘The Travels of Marco Polo: The True Story of a 14th-Century Bestseller’, Anna Bressanin, BBC, 09-Jan-2024, www.bbc.com). Of the 54 extant manuscripts (out of around 150 distinct copies in all languages), no two copies are entirely alike with “improvements” and edits made by each copyist and translator. We should also remember that Marco was in prison, relying on his memory to recount a multitude of events and experiences, some of which stretched back over 20 years, hardly surprising then if readers have to contend with the recollections of a not entirely reliable narrator (‘Marco Polo’s book on China omits tea, chopsticks, bound feet’, Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post, 04-Oct-2020, www.amp.scmp.com).
Heavily redacted archives: The issue of Polo’s claim to have been an official in Kublai Khan’s service—and in particular governor of Yangzhou—was seized on by Dr Wood who pointed out that Marco’s name does not appear in any historical official Chinese archives. Rather than being necessarily proof of Marco fabricating a presence in China as Wood assumes, other factors may explain the discrepancy…no other Italian merchants known to have visited medieval China are mentioned in any Chinese sources, even the Papal envoy to the Great Khan’s court, Giovanni de Marignolli, doesn’t rate a mention (‘Marco Polo was not a swindler. He really did go to China’, Science News, 16-Apr-2012, www.sciencedaily.com). Another factor germane to this is the fact that the Ming (Han) Dynasty that succeeded the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty initiated the practice of erasing the records of earlier non-Han officials (Morgan).
One particularly vocal critic of Did Marco Polo Go To China?, Sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel from the University of Tübingen, produced a research paper demonstrating that Marco’s descriptions of currency, salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly in China were of a standard of accuracy and uniqueness of detail5⃞, that produces a very high level of proof that Polo had to have been in China, close to the wheels of power, to be privy to such comprehensive knowledge (www.sciencedaily.com).
The “logical fallacy of weak induction”: Frances Wood’s iconoclastic book was certainly an attention-grabber, both for medieval scholars and Sinologists and for the general public, causing a furore upon its publication in 1995 and spawning several TV documentaries. China and the world of the Great Khan is a central tenet of the Marco Polo story, making it unthinkable to most scholars, almost a sacrilege, to suggest that the legendary Venetian traveller never set foot in the Middle Kingdom! The weight of the counter-argument unleashed against Wood’s thesis throws a spotlight on the hazards of trying to “treat the absence of evidence as evidence itself”, as Steven Lewis summarises the fallacious nature of the argument from silence (‘The Argument from Silence”, Steven Lewis, SES, www.ses.edu).
Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo go to China? (1995, Secker & Warburg, London)
1⃞ Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 ‘Intentional Fallacy’ essay to some extent has its antecedents in the earlier debate between CS Lewis and EMW Tillyard, published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), in which Lewis argued that an author’s own personality and biography has negligible to zero impact on the literary text, while Tillyard enunciated the contrary position: that an author’s own imagination and story can have an indelible influence on a work of literature
2⃞ and there had been doubters even in Marco’s time and later about some of his more wilder and fantastic claims, earning him the epithet Il Milione or “the Millions”) (aka “Marchus Paulo Millioni”). Wood’s particular slant on Polo’s book follows the lead of earlier German Mongolists
3⃞ who had claimed to have been an emissary in the emperor’s service
4⃞ Wood herself concedes that Rustichello may have edited out references to tea on the grounds of it being “of no interest to the general public”
5⃞ and corroborated by Chinese documents
“N” & “O” Words from Left Field II: Redux. A Supplement to the Logolept’s Diet
<word meaning and root formation>
Nanocephalous: having an abnormally small head [Gk. nânos (“small”) + -cephal (“head”) + -ous]
Nasute: having an acute or sensitive sense of smell; having a long snout [from L. nāsus (“nose”) + -ūtus]
Naupathia: sea-sickness [Gk. naus (“ship”) + -pathos (“suffering”)]
Necromorphous: feigning death to deter an aggressor [from Gk. necro (“death”) + –morphe (“form”)]
Nefandous: unspeakable; unutterable [from L. ne- (“not”) + –fandus, ➨ –fārī (“to speak”)]
Neoteny: an indefinite prolongation of the period of immaturity, with the retention of infantile or juvenile qualities, into adulthood [from Gk. néos “young” + -o--O- + -teínein (“to stretch”; “extend”) + -y]
Nepheligenous: producing clouds of smoke [from Gk. nephélē, (“cloud”) + -genous (“producing). Coined by OW Holmes]
Neopotation: prodigality; extravagance; squandering one’s money on riotous living (OU)
Nidifugous: leaving the nest while still young [L. nīdus (“nest”) + –fugiō (“I flee”; “escape”) + -ous]
Nikhedonia: the pleasure and satisfaction derived from the anticipation of success [nik(?) poss. from Nike, Greek god of victory + Gk. –hedonikos (“pleasure”)]
Nimiety: excess; extravagance; surfeit [from L. nimius (“excessive”)]
Nocent: harmful [from L. nocens (“to harm”)]
Noctivagant: wandering by night [from L. nocti- (“night”) + –vagari (“to wander”)] 🌃
Noisome: noxious; smelly; nasty [from MidEng. noy (“annoyance”) + -some, (“characterised by a specified thing,”)]
Nonfeasance: failure to perform some action which ought to have been performed [L. non- + Eng. -feasance (“doing”; “execution”)]
Nostrificate: to accept as one’s own; to grant recognition to a degree (or other formal qualification) from a foreign university (or other registered educational institution) [from L. noster (“our”) + -cate]
Noyade: mass execution by drowning (esp in revolutionary France in Nantes, 1793-94) [from L. necare (“kill without using a weapon”) (nonce word)]
Nugacity: triviality; futility; drollery (cf. nugatory: of no value; trifling; pointless) [from L. nugacitas (“trifling”)]
Nullibiety: the state of being nowhere [from L. nūllus (“none”; “no”; “not any”) + –ibī (“there”) + -ety] (cf. Nullibist: one who denies that the soul exists in physical space)
Numen: pertaining to numina; awe-inspiring; supernatural) [L. nuō + –men (“a nodding with the head”; “command”; “will”)]
Nummamorous: money-loving (cf. Nummary: pertaining to coin) (OU) 💴 🪙
Numinous: divine; spiritual” [from L. nūmen]
Nuncheon: a noon drink [from MidEng. nonshench, noneschench, nonechenche (“slight refreshment, usually taken in the afternoon”) from L. nōnus] 🍷
Nutation: the act of nodding the head, esp habitually or constantly; a periodic variation in the inclination of the axis of a rotating object [from L. nūtātiō (“nodding”), from nūtō (“I nod”)]
Nycterent: someone who hunts by night [from Gk. nyct (“night”) + -ent] (cf. Nyctitropic: turning in a certain direction at night) (cf. Nyctalopia: night-blindness)
Nympholepsy: a passionate longing for something unattainable [from Gk mythology: nymphóleptos (“possessed by nymphs”)]
Key: OU = origin unknown
<word meaning and root formation>
Obsidional or Obsidionary: pertaining to a siege [from L. obsidiō (“siege”; “blockade”)]
Obsolagnium: waning sexual desire due to age [from L. ob- (“against”) + lagnium (“desire”)]
Obtund: to blunt, dull or deaden [from L. obtundere (“to dull”, “deaden”, “deafen”)]
Oculogyric: eye-rolling; rotation of the eyes [from L. oculo- (“eye”) + –gyric, from Gk. -gurus (“circle”)]
Oligophagos: eating only a few particular kinds of food [from Gk. olig (“few”) + –phagos (“eating”)]
Ollapod: pharmacist; (Orig. a country apothecary [name of a character in George Colman the Younger‘s comedy The Poor Gentleman (1801)]
Ombrophilous: capable of withstanding heavy and continuous rain [from Gk. ómbros (“rain”) + –philous (“love”)]
Omniety: the state or condition of being all [from L. omnis (“all”) + -iety]
Oneirataxia: inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality [Gk. oneiros (“dream” + –taxis (“arrangement”)]
Onomasticon: an ordered list of names (Orig. a gazetteer of historical and contemporary 4th-century place names in Palestine and Transjordan compiled by Eusebius) [Gk. onomastikós, (“belonging to names”), from onomázō, (“I name”)]
Onychophagia: nail-biting [from Gk. onych (“claw”) + -phagos].
Ophelimity: the ability to please another; economic satisfaction [from Gk. ōphélimos, (“helpful”)]
Opisthenar: back of the hand [from Gk. opistho- (“behind”; “back”) + –thenar (“palm of the hand”)] 🤚
Opsablepria: inability to look someone in the eye (OU) 👁️
Orarian: dweller by the seaside; relating to the seaside [from L. ōrārius (“coasting”; “along the coast”) + -an]
Orthostatic: relating to standing upright; straight posture [Gk. orth (“right angle”; “perpendicular”) + –statikós (“to make stand”)] (cf. Orthobiosis: a hygienic and moral lifestyle)
Osophagist: a fastidious eater [Gk. (?) + –phagos]
Otiose: serving no useful purpose; leisurely (cf. Otiant: idle or resting [from L. otium (“leisure”)]
Ozostomia: evil-smelling breath [from Gk ozóstom(os) (“having bad breath”)]
Key: OU = origin unknown
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd “R” Words
“R” is the 18th letter of the modern Latin Alphabet. It corresponds to the ancient Semitic resh and is perhaps derived from an earlier hieroglyph representing a human head. From the Egyptian symbol the letter evolved into a triangular flag shape and then to a rounded “P” under Greek influence, before the descending, angled stroke of “R” was added in the 3rd century BC, giving the letter the form we recognise today. The standard English pronunciation is ar. R-words can be fun and surprising – “r” is the letter of the dictionary we turn to when we decide to open the dictionary at random! Or they can be positive and uplifting – why else would we describe a day that signifies a special significance or opportunity to us as a “red-letter day”?
<Word> <Meaning> <Derivation>
Rabelaisian: coarsely humorous; bawdy; ribald [after Francois Rabelais, (16th cent. French writer and satirist]
Rabulous: vile; scurrilous [L. origin unknown]
Rackrent: excessive rent [from “the rack” – medieval torture device (Irish/Brit.)]
Ragabash: an idle, ragged person [origin unknown]
Raisonneur: a personage in a play or book embodying an author’s viewpoint [Fr. raison (“reason”) + –eur]
Ragmatical: turbulent; riotous [origin unknown]
Rampallion: scoundrel; ruffian; villain [of unknown origin, appears in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 uttered by Falstaff]
Rampasture: a room in which several unmarried men live, usually in a boarding house or inn [conjunction of “ram” + “pasture”, early (20th.]
Ranarium: a place where frogs are kept, usually for breeding 🐸 [L. rāna (“frog”) + –arium, -arias] (cf. Raniform: frog-like)
Rancescent: becoming rancid [L. rancescens (“turning rancid or sour”)]
Rand: border; edge; margin; a long rocky ridge [OldEng. rand (“a place at the border or edge”)]
Rantipole: wild; disorderly [Eng. “rant”, from Dutch ranten, randen (“to talk nonsense, rave”) + -y + -L. pālus (“stake, pale, prop, stay”)]
Rarissima: extremely rare books, manuscripts or prints [from L. rārissima]
Ras: headland; cape [from Amharic. rās (lit. “head”)]
Ratheripe: early ripe [MidEng. rathe “quick”, from OldEng. hræth]
Ratten: to practice sabotage against [MidEng. ratoun (“rat”) + -en]
Razzmatazz : meaningless talk; hype; nonsense [origin unknown, 1890s slang, perhaps a varied rhyming reduplication of “jazz”] 🎵
Rebarbative: causing annoyance; irritation; repellant [L. barba (“beard”) + -ive]
Rebus: picture puzzle representing a word (a combination of a picture and an individual letter prompts a particular word) [from L. res (“thing”)]
Reciprocornous: (Zool.) having horns that turn backward and then forward (like a ram’s) [L. poss. from re- (“back”), prō(“forwards”) and -que (“and”)╰┈➤ (“back and forth”) + -ous]
Recondite: out of the way; little known or obscure; difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend [L. from recondere, [“to conceal”)]
Recreant: craven; cowardly; false; apostate [L. re- + credere (“to believe”)]
Rectigrade: moving or proceeding in a straight line or course [L. rectus (“straight”) + -gradus (“step”)]
Rectopathic: one who is easily hurt emotionally [L. rectus + –pathic (“suffering”)]
Recumbent: lying down; representing a person (or effigy) lying down [L. re– (“back”; “again”) + -cumbere, “to lie down”]
Recumbentibus: a knockout blow, either verbal or physical [L. recumbent-, recumbens + -ibus (?)] 🥊
Resipiscent: (Literary) acknowledgment that one has been mistaken; to learn from experience and have one’s sanity restored; a change of mind or heart (often prompting a return to a sane, sound, or correct view or position) [LateLat. resipiscere (“to recover one’s senses”; from L. “sapere (“to know”)]
Redact: edit for publication, esp censoring or obscuring part of a text for legal or national security reasons [L. redigō (“to lead back, collect, prepare, reduce to a certain state”)] (cf. Redactophobe: someone who has a fear of editing or editors)
Remontado: a person who lives in the forest or mountains and avoids civilisation [Spanish. remontado (“to flee or go back to the mountains”)]
Rend: tear or rent apart; rip into pieces (cf. Riven: split or tear apart violently [From Middle English. renden, from Old English. rendan (“to rend”; “tear”; “cut”; “lacerate”; “cut down”), from Proto-West Germanic (h)randijan (“to tear”), of uncertain origin]
Rhinophonia: extreme nasal sound in one’s voice [L. rhino- + Gk. rhis, rhin (“nose”) + –lalia, (“talking”)]
Rittmaster: captain of a troop of horse (cavalry) [part. transltn. of German rittmeister, from ritt (“troop of horsemen”) from reiten (“to ride”), from Old High German rītan + -meister (“master”)]
Rixatrix: a scolding or quarrelsome woman; a common scold [L. rixārī (“to quarrel”) + –trix (Latinate fem. agent noun)]
Rupicoline: rock-dwelling [rupi, rupes- (“a rock”) + Eng. -colous, -coline] (cf. Rupellary: rocky) 🪨
Rurigenous: one who has been born in the country [L. rus, ruris (“the country”) + –genere, –gignere (“to bring forth”; “to be born”)]
Rusticate: go, live in the country for a time; live a rustic life [L. rūsticor (“live in the countryside”)] (cf. Rusticity: rustic manner; simplicity; rudeness)
Ruth: (also Ruthful) a feeling of pity, distress or grief [Hebrew. Ruth (“friend” or “companion”) Biblical figure (Old Testament)]
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd “Q” Words
“Q”, (pronounced cue), is the 17th letter of the alphabet. The letter is from the Phoenician equivalent of Hebrew koph, qoph, which was used for the deeper and more guttural of the two “k” sounds in Semitic. The letter existed in early Greek (where there was no such distinction), and called koppa, but it was little used and not alphabetized; it mainly served as a sign of number (90). Correspondingly, the root base of English Q-words is uniformly Latin and characterised by the total absence of Greek prefixes and suffixes, which is in sharp contrast to other letters. The form of the letter “Q” could have been based on the eye of a needle, a knot, or even a monkey with its tail hanging down… /q/ is a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in many European languages. One view is that the form of the letter “Q” is even more ancient: it could have originated from Egyptian hieroglyphics. And “Q”, like “M” before it, is of course a character in the never-ending James Bond franchise.
<Word> <Meaning> <Derivation>
Qua: in the capacity of [Latin. qua “which way”; “as”. From qui (“who”)]
Quab: something unfinished or immature (origin unknown)
Quacksalver: one who falsely pretends to knowledge of medicine
Quadragenarian: someone aged between 40 and [L. quadrāgēnī (“40 in each”) + -ārius (“-ary”), from quadrāgintā (“four tens, forty”)]
Quadratary: relating to a square [L. quadrātus from quadrō (quadrat),(“make square”) + -ary] (cf. Quadrate: to make square; to make to agree)
Quadrigamist: someone who has been married four times or is married to four people simultaneously (polygamy?) [L. from quattuor (“four”) + -gam (“married”) + -ist]
Quadriliteral: relating to a word with four letters; a 4-letter word [L. quadri + –littera, –litera (“a letter”)] (cf. Quadrilateral: a four-sided figure)
Quaestuary: seeking money or trying to make money; concerned with profit 💰[L. quaestus , quaerere (“to seek”; “gain”; “ask”) + -arius (“ary”)] (cf. Quomodocunquize: to make money by any means possible)
Quaestor: (Hist.) magistrate; a medieval pardoner (in ancient Rome an official in charge of public revenue and expenditure) [L. quaestor (“investigator”); quaesit (“submit”)]
Qualtagh: first person you meet after leaving the house; first person you meet on New Year’s Day [from Manx. quaaltagh, cognate with Old Irish. com (“co”) + -dál (“meeting”)] 🏠
Qualtrayle: one’s great, great, great grandfather (origin unknown)
Quantophrenia: obsessive reliance on statistics and mathematical results [LateLat. quantitātīvus (“quantity”) + –phrḗn (“mind”) + -ia]
Quantulum: a very small quantity [L. quantus (“how much”) + -lum]
Quaquaversal: facing or bending all ways [L. quaqua versus (“turned wheresoever”)]
Quassation: act of shaking or being shaken [L. quassō (“shake repeatedly or violently”) + -tiō]
Quatch: a word, a sound; squat, plump (Shakespeare) (origin unknown) (cf. Sasquatch: (in Canadian folklore) a hairy beast or manlike monster said to leave huge footprints)
Quarternity: fourness; any set of four things [L. quattuor (“four”) + -ity]
Quean: a lewd woman; hussy; an impudent or badly behaved female of ill-repute [Old English. cwene (from “queen”)]
Querulant: (Psych. & Legal) a person who obsessively feels they have been wronged, particularly about minor cases of action [L. querulus (“complaining”)] (NB: a Querimony is a complaint) (cf. Querent: one who asks a question)
Questmonger: one whose occupation is to conduct inquests [L. quaesta (“tribute”; “tax”; “inquiry”; “search”) + –mangō (“dealer”; “trader”)]
Quickhatch: a woverine [from East Cree (Algonquian language) kwi˙hkwaha˙če˙w]
Quicquidlibet: whatever one pleases; anything whatsoever [L. quic (quis) + -quid (“anything”) + –libet (”it pleases”)]
Quidditch: fictional sport for broomstick-riding mavens in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy book series [NB: the etymology of “quidditch” long predates Harry Potter, poss. derives from Anglo-Saxon cwæō-dīc (“mud-ditch”)]
Quiddity: (also Quidditative) eccentric; quirky; unique essence; (a sort of “x-factor” — whatever makes something the type that it is) [MedLat. quidditat-, -quidditas (“essence”) from L. quid (“what”) neuter of quis (“who”) + -ity]
Quidfather: father-in-law (origin unknown)
Quidnunc: an inquisitive and gossipy person; a person who always wants to know what’s going on (the latest news and gossip) [L. quid nunc (“what now?”)]
Quincaillerie: hardware store [Fr. clincaille, akin to clinquer (“clink”)]
Quindecad: set of fifteen things [L. quīnque (“five”) + –decem (“ten”)]
Quinquagesimal: consisting of 50 days; a 50-day period [MedLat. quinquagesima + -al]
Quisling: a traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying his country; a “puppet” leader propped up by an invading foreign power [after Vidkun Quisling, Norwegian military officer, Nazi Germany’s puppet ruler of Norway during their WWII occupation]
Quisquous: difficult to deal with or settle; perplexing; (of a person) of dubious character (origin unknown)
Quixotic: extravagantly and romantically chivalrous; enunciator of wildly impractical, lofty ideals to the point of being ludicrously out of touch with reality [after Don Quixote, eponymous protagonist of Cervantes’ The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha (publ. 1605)]
Quizzacious: satirical; mocking [Eng. quiz (“to mock”), poss. from L. qui es? (“who are you?” + -acious]
Quodlibertarian: a person who is happy to discuss any subject at pleasure [L. quod libet (lit. “that which is pleasing”) + -arian]
Quoniam: female genitalia; the vulva [from L. quoniam (“since”), prob. educated respelling/euphemism of Old French conin (“coney, rabbit”)]
Quotidian: occurring every day (or every 24 hours); daily; ordinary or mundane [L. quotidie (“every day”); from quot + -dies (“day”)]
Quoz: absurd person or thing [prob. alteration of quiz]
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd “P” Words
A myriad of P’s in this pod
“P” is numerus XVI in the English alphabet letter of sequence. The letter has a special place in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)…the symbol ⟨p⟩ represents a type of consonantal sound used in most spoken languages, the voiceless bilabial plosive or stop (sometimes called the unvoiced labial stop). “P” corresponds to the Semitic pe, perhaps deriving from an earlier sign for “mouth.” The early Greeks renamed this form pi(Π). The rounded shape of the “P”(“p”) is thought to be a Latin borrowing from the ancient Etruscan language. Another feature of the letter p is its use in combination with h in words of Greek origin to denote the unvoiced labiodental spirant expressed in other words by the letter f—e.g., philosophy, phonetics, and graphic (www.britannica.com)
{word} | {definition} | {derivation}
Padrone: (in Italy) an innkeeper; employer, esp one who exploits immigrant workers [It. (“protector”; “owner”) from L. patronus (“patron”)]
Pagophagia: the eating of ice [Gk. pagos (“frost”) + phagō (“to eat”)] 🧊
Palzogony: foreplay; love-play (origin unknown, It. ?)
Pancratic: accomplished all-rounder, good at many sports or games; having a mastery over numerous subjects) [Gk. pankratḗs, “all-powerful”) + -ic]
Pangloss: one who is optimistic regardless of the circumstances [Gk. pan (“all”) + –glossa (“tongue”) from the character “Pangloss”, optimistic tutor in Voltaire’s Candide (1759)] (cf. Panglossian: excessively optimistic; marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds)
Pannapictagraphist: collector of comic books (origin unknown)
Panoply: a collection or assortment of things; an impressive or extensive array [Gk. panoplia (“full suit of armour worn by hoplite warriors in Ancient Greece”) ]
history.co.uk)
Pantagamy: married to everybody: practice of intra-communal marriage of all members to each other in some proto-communistic societies such as in certain Amerindian tribes [Gk. pan + -gam + -ic]
Paraethesia: a prickly feeling one gets when your limbs fall asleep; a sensation of “pins and needles” [L. para- (“alongside”, “irregular”; ie, “disordered”) + -aisthēsis (“perception”; “feeling”)] 📍 🪡
Paralian: a person who lives near the sea [Gk. parálios, (“coastal”; “maritime”)] 🌊
Paralipsis: (also called Apophasis) a rhetorical device whereby the speaker emphasises the point they are trying to make by (calculated) denial…example: “I’m not saying that…“ (assertion). By merely suggesting it, they are inferring that it is in fact the case; the ploy involves drawing attention to some issue by denying that you talking about it [Gk. pará, (“by”; “near”) + -leípō, (“I leave”)]
Paramnesia: (psych.) a disorder prompting someone to recall events that never happened [Gk. par, para (“beside”; “next to”) + -mnesia (“memory”)]
Paranymph: the best man or bridesmaid at a wedding; a ceremonial assistant or coach to the best man/bridesmaid at a wedding [Gk. para- + -nymphē. (“bride”)]
Parapraxis: a memory lapse, a slip of the tongue, usually revealing a hidden thought (“Freudian slip”) 👅 [Gk. para– + –praxís (“doing”)]
Parateresiomaniac: a compulsive voyeur 👁️ 👁️ [Gk. para + -teresio(?) + -maniac]
Parergon: a piece of work that is supplementary to or a by-product of a larger work [Gk. párergos, (“beside the main subject”; “subordinate”; “incidental”)]
Parthenolagnia: the desire to copulate with virgins [ Gk. parthenos (“maiden”; “virgin”) + –lagneía (“sexual intercourse, -lasciviousness”)]
Partialism: (psych.) a sexual fetish with an exclusive focus on a specific part of the body other than genitals [L. pars (“part”) + -ism] (cf. Paraphilia: a form of sexual arousal caused by objects, situations, or targets that are considered atypical or not of the norm)
Pauciloquent: using a few words as possible when speaking [L. paucus (“little”; “few”) + –loqui, loquor (“to speak”)]
Patavinity: the use of local slang expressions or dialects when writing [L. patavinitas, from Patavium (Padua), Italy (birthplace of Livy) + -itas -ity]
Pecunious: possessing buckets of money [L. pecūnia (“money”) + -ious] 💰 💵
Pedotrophy: the art of raising children properly [Gk. paîs, (“child”) –tréphō, (“I congeal”; “thicken”)] 👧 👦🏽
Pentapopemptic: a person who has been divorced five times [Gk. pent, penta + -apo (“off”; “away”) + –pempē (“to send”) + -ic]
Peristerophilist: one who collects pigeons (origin unknown) (-phily: the art of training pigeons)
Pernoctation: someone who stays up all night to work or to party [L. pernoctātus (“having spent the night”) + -iōn (cf. Pernoctator: someone who stays up all night to study) 🎆🌃
Pervulgate: to publish something [L. pervulgo (“to publish”; “to make public”)]
Phagomania: insatiable hunger [Gk. phagós (“eating”) + -mania]
Phanerolagniast: a psychologist who studies human lust [Gk. phaneros (“visible”; “evident”) from phainein (“bring to light”; “cause to appear”; “show”) + –lagnia]
Phillumenist: collector of matchboxes and their labels [Gk. phil- + L. -lumen (“light “) + -ist]
Philodox: one who loves his or her own opinions [Gk. phílo– (“beloved”) + –dóxa (“glory; “opinion”)] (cf. Philoxenist: a person who loves to entertain strangers)
Phosphene: the phenomenon of seeing light without light entering the eye; what occurs when you see ”stars and dots” after rubbing your eyes [Gk. phōs- (“light”) + -phainein (“to show”)] 💡
Phrontifugic: helping to escape from one’s thoughts [Gk. phrēn, (“diaphragm, mind”) + It. -fuga, from Latin, “a running away”; “flight”]
Phrontistery: a place for thinking or study [Gk. phrontis (“thought”; “care”; attention”) + -ery]
Picayune: of little value or significance; petty; a small coin in (18–(19 th. Louisiana with a low monetary value [Occitan. picaioun (“small coin”) from pica (“to jingle”)] 🪙
Pictophile: one who gets sexual gratification from pictorial porn or erotic art [ + -phile]
Pilosism: (also -ity) excessive hairiness [L. pilo- (“hair”) + -ism]
Plangonolist: [origin uncertain, one suggestion: Gk. plangon from plaggon (wax dolls in ancient Greek theatre substituting for female roles(?)) + -ist]
Planiloquent: talking plainly about some subject or other [L. planus (“flat”) + –loqui]
Platypygous: having a broad bottom [Gk. platys” (flat or broad) + -pygous, -pugē (“buttocks”)] (cf. Pygephanous: displaying one’s buttocks)
Pleniloquent: excessive talking; fullness of speech [L. plēnos (“full”) + –loqui]
Pleonasm: using more words than necessary; redundancy of words [Gk. pleōn (“more”) + -asm]
Pogontrophy: the practice of grooming a beard or moustache [Gk. pogon (“beard”) + –trophy (“nourishment”; “growth”)(cf. Pogontomy: cutting or trimming a beard)
Polemologist: student of war [Gk. pólemos (“war; battle”) + -logy]
Politicaster: 2nd-rate or inferior or petty, contemptible politician [polī́tēs (“citizen”; “freeman”) + -aster§] (cf. Poetaster: an inferior poet)
Polyoquent: garrulous; loquacious; discourse on many topics [Gk. poly + -loqui (“speak”)]
Polyphage: someone who eats many kinds of food [Gk. poly + –phage]
Polyphasic: consisting of two or more phases [Gk. poly + -phase + -ic]
Pomiculturalist: fruit-grower [L. pōmum (“fruit tree”; “fruit” + –culture] 🍇 🍈 🍉
Preantepenultimate: fourth from last [L. prae (“before”) + –ante (“preposition and prefix”) + –paene (“almost”) + –ultimus (“last”)]
Pre-meridian: before noon [L. pre + -meridies (“noon”)] 🕚
Presbycusis: loss of hearing due to old age [Gk. presbys, (“old man”), + akousis, (“hearing”) (cf. Presbyopia: loss of sight due to old age)
Preterpluperfect: better than perfect [L. praeter (“past”; “beyond”) + –plūs (“more”) + –quam (“than”) + –perfectus (“achieved”; “finished”; “perfected”) (literally, “more than finished”)]
Pridian: yesterday; previous day [L. prior + -dies (“day”) + -anus (“-an”)]
Proctor: disciplinary officer (university); particular class of senior lawyer [MidEng. procutour (“procurator”; “proctor”)]
Progenitor: ancestor or parent [L. pro- (“forth”) + –gignere (“to beget”)]
Propinquity: physical proximity or similarity between things (like attracts like); close kinship [L. prope (“near”) + -quity]
Prosopolethy: inability to remember a face [Gk. prosōpon (“person”; “face” + -lēpsis (“act of taking hold or receiving”; “acceptance”) + -ia -y]
Protean: ever-changing: versatile; mutable; able to change frequently or easily [Gk. from Proteus, in Greek mythology a sea-god with a tendency to shape-shift)]
Pseudandry: use of a masculine pseudonym by a woman [Gk. pseudēs (“false”) + –andrós (“male”)] (cf. Pseudogyny: use of a feminine pseudonym by a man)
Puellaphilist: (Psych.) one who loves girls (and perhaps sexually desires them) [L. puella (“young girl”) + –phil]
Pulchritudinous: comely; beautiful; dazzling; ideal; a looker [L. pulcher (“beautiful”) + -tūdō (“-ness”)]
Pusillanimous: lacking courage or resolution; timidly cowardly [Latin pusillus (“very small”) (diminutive of pusus (“boy”) + -animus “spirit”)]
Pyknic: being of stocky physique and a rounded body and head; thickset [Gk. puknos (“thick“) + -ic]
Pysmatic: always asking questions and inquiring (origin unknown)
Pythogenic: coming from garbage [Gk. pytho– from pythein (“to cause to rot”) + -genic]
Standout P-word in the ALDOOCDO catalogue of lexical merit: Pernickety: fussy, particular; extensive attention to esp trivial or minor detail (an OCD candidate?) [Scots. pernickety, persnickety, of uncertain origin; (resembles in form per- (“intensifying prefix”) + –nick, but might be derived from particular + -finicky)]
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§ the suffix –aster, whenever it pops up tacked on to the end of some base word is invariably pejorative, meaning something that is inferior, small or shallow
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd”O” Words
ALDOOCDOW reaches one of the key letters in lexicon entries, “O”, the great connector of syllables. The story of “O”, the 15th letter and fourth vowel in the alphabet, is an interesting one. Circular in shape like the number zero, the letter “O” surfaces for the first time in writing systems in the Semitic languages some time around 1,000BC as a consonant (the cognate Arabic letter ayin which possibly evolved earlier from a hieroglyphic sign representing an eye). When it reached the archaic Greeks “O” morphed into the vowel we recognise in English today.
Obeliscolychny: a lighthouse [Gk. obelískos (“obelisk”) + –lukhníon (“lamp-stand”)]
Obelise: to condemn as spurious, doubtful or corrupt [Gk. obelós, (“obelus” – a sharpened stick, spit, or pointed pillar)]
Obequitate: to ride about; to ride aimlessly on a horse 🐎 [L. ob + equito (“to ride”)]
Obganiate: to irritate someone by constantly repeating oneself [It. ostinato (“obstinate”; ”persistent”)]
Oblectation: enjoyment; pleasure; satisfaction [L. oblectare (“to delight”)]
Oblivescence: forgetfulness; forgetting [L. oblīv(īscī) (“to forget”) + (–influenced by -escenc)]
Oblocutor: one who denies or disputes [L. obloqui (“to speak against”) + -or]
Obrogate: to alter the law by passing a new law [L. ob- (“toward; “against”) + rogare (“to ask”, “propose”, “propose a law”)]
Obsidional: of, like or pertaining to a siege [L. obsidēre (“beset”; “besiege”; “hem in”)]
Obsolagnium: waning sexual desire due to age [L. ob- (“in the way”) + –sol (?) + Gk. -lagneía (“sexual predilection”) ]
Obtenebrate: to cast a shadow over; to darken as if by shadowing [L. ob-(“to”; “toward”; “over”) + -tenebrae (“darkness”)] (cf. Obumbrate: to overshadow)
Obvert: to turn; to alter; to change the appearance or seeming of [L. ob- + vertere (“to turn”)]
Occlusion: closing or blocking off of an opening, passage or cavity [L. -ob (“in the way”) + -claudere (“to close or shut”)]
Ochlarchy: mob rule [Gk. ochlo (“mob”) + -archy (“rule”)]
Octamerous: having parts in eights [Gk. okta, okt (“eight”) + -meros (“part”)] (cf. Octan: recurring every eight days)
Octothorp: hash sign/tag (also called number sign or pound sign) #️⃣ [Gk. octō- (“eight”) + (?) –thorpe (“field”; “hamlet”; “small village”)] (Word apparently coined by staff at Bells Telephone Labs, late 1960s)
Odalisque: female slave or concubine in a harem (esp of the Ottoman sultan’s) Fr. from Turk. odalık, (orig.) oda (“room”)]
Odontalgia: toothache 🦷 [Gk. odóus (“tooth”) + –álgos (“pain”)]
Oecist: founder of a colony [Gk. from oîkos house + -istēs (“-ist”). The oíkistēs was the citizen chosen by an ancient Greek polis as the leader of any new colonisation quest
Oecodomic: of, like or pertaining to architecture [(?) Gk. oec (“house”) + L. –dom (“house”) + -ic(?)]
Oenologist: a person who studies wines and winemaking [Gk. oînos (“wine”) + -logia (“study of”)] 🍷
Ogee: a double curve, resembling the letter S (or serpentine shape or sigmoid shape); S-shaped [MidEng ogeus (?)]
Oikofugic: a desire to leave home; an urge to wander or travel [Gk. oîkos (“household”) + L. fugere (“to flee”); coined by psychologist G Stanley Hall, 1904 (cf. Obambulate: (“to wander about”) 🧳 (cf. Oikotropic: the desire to stay put at home)
Oikology: the science of houses and homes, especially in respect of their sanitary conditions [Gk. oîkos + -logy] 🏠
Oikonisus: desire to start a family [Gk. oîkos + -nīsus (“planting one’s feet firmly on the ground”)]
Oleaginous: oily; resembling oil: marked by an offensively ingratiating manner or quality [Gk. elaia (“olive”) + -ous]
Olecranon: a bony prominence at the elbow, on the upper end of the ulna; the tip of the elbow; the funny bone [Gk. ōlenē (“elbow”) + -kranion (“skull”)]
Olent: having a scent; fragrant [L. olere (“to smell”)]
Oligophrenia: feeble–mindedness [Gk. olígos (“few”; “scanty”) + -phrēn, (“diaphragm”; “mind”; “heart”)]
Olio: miscellany; potpourri [L. olla (“cooking pot”)]
Ollamh: (or Ollam) (hist) in ancient Ireland, a man of science or learning, considered equivalent to a university professor [Old Irish ollam (“doctor”)]
Ololygmancy: fortune-telling by the howling of dogs 🐕 [Gk. ololuzō (“howl”) + -manteia (“prophecy”)]
Ombiblous: a person who drinks everything, alcohol/non-alcohol 🍸 [Gk. om (?) + –bibere (“to drink”) coined by HL Mencken]
Ombrophilous: tolerant of large amounts of rainfall [ómbros (“rain”) + -philos (“love”)] 🌧️
Omneity: state of being all; allness [Gk. ómnis (“all”) + -ity]
Omnify: to make large or universal [Gk. ómnis + –fy]
Omniloquent: speaking on all subjects [Gk. ómnis + loqui (“to speak”)]
Omnivert: a personality trait that alternates between introvert and extrovert polarities [L. omnis (“all”) + –versus, -vertere (“invert”)] (cf. Ambivert: similar, but more of a balance between the two extremes)
Omphaloskepia: navel-gazing; the contemplation of one’s navel as an aid to meditation [Gk. omphalós, (“navel”) + sképsis, (“perception”; “reflection”)] (cf. Omphaloslopsychite) 👁️
Omphalos: the navel; a boss; the centre or hub of something [Gk. omphalós (“navel”)]
Onanism: masturbation; gratify oneself through sexual self-stimulation NewLat. onanismus, from Onan, son of Judah (Book of Genesis)]
Oniomania: uncontrollable urge to shop; a retail therapy preoccupation and compulsion [Gk. ṓnios, (“for sale”) + -mania]
Oneirodynia: nightmare; unpleasant or painful dream [Gk. oneiros (“dream”) + -odynē (“pain”)] (cf. Oneirology: the scientific study of dreams)
Onomasiology: study of nomenclature [Gk. onomázō (“I name”) + -logy]
Onomatous: bearing the author’s name [Gk. onomat, onoma (“name”) + -ous]
Ontocyclic: returning to an infantile state or character in old age [Gk. ont + -kuklós (“circular”)]
Ontological: based upon being or existence [Gk. ontós (“existing”; “being”) + –logia (“study”) + -al] (cf. Ontology: (metaphysics) science of pure being; the nature of things)
Onychophagia: practice/habit of biting one’s fingernails [Gk. ónux (“nail”) + –phagos (“eater”)] 💅
Onymous: having a name [back-formed from “anonymous”]
Ophelimity: economic satisfaction; the ability to please another [Gk. ōphelimos “useful”; “helpful”. Coined by Italian polymath Prof Vilfredo Pareto]
Opiniaster: (someone) obstinately attached to their opinion; (obsol.) an opinionated person [MidFr. opinionastre, opiniatre, from L. opinio (“opinion”; “conjecture”) + -aster]
Opisthosomal: of, like or pertaining to the posterior region of the body [New Latin, from opistho– (“back”; “rear”; “behind”) + –soma (“body”)]
Oppidan: an urbanite, a resident of a town, townsman; (formerly) an inhabitant of a university town not a member of the university or a university student residing in the town but not in the college [L. oppidum (“chiefly walled or fortified town”)]
Opsigamy: one who marries late in life [Gk. opsi (“late”) + –gámos (“marriage”)]
Opsimathy: learning or education that occurs late in life [Gk. opsi + –manthanein (“to learn”)]
Opsiproligery: the ability to still have children late in life [Gk. opsi + (?) -proligery(?)]
Opsomaniac: a person with an extreme enthusiasm for a particular food, esp a delicacy [Gk. opson (“rich food”; “delicacy” + -mania] (cf. Opsophagy: the eating of delicacies)
Orarian: coastal; a coast-dweller [L. ōrārius (“ora”, “of or belonging to the coast”)]
Orgulous: proud; haughty [Anglo-Fr. orguillus, from orguil “pride” of Germanic origin]
Ornithoscelidamania: an obsession with dinosaurs 🦖 [Gk. ornís (“bird”) + –celida(?) + -mania]
Orthographer: a person who is skilled in orthography (the conventions of the spelling system of a language); an expert speller [L. orthós (“straight”) + LateLat. -graphus (“grapher”) + -er]
Oryzovorous: rice-eating 🍚 [Gk. óruza (“rice”) + -vorare, -vorax (“devour”)]
Oscular: of, like or pertaining to the mouth or to kissing [L. ōscul(um) kiss”; “mouth”) + -ar]
Ostiary: doorkeeper; doorman; porter 🚪 [L. from ostium (“door”; “mouth of a river”) + -arius (-ary)]
Otiose: lacking use or effect; producing no useful result; idle, reluctant to work or exert oneself [L. ōtiōsus (“idle”), from ōtium (“ease”)]
Outlier: (orig.) a person whose residence and place of business are at a distance; something (someone) that lies outside the main body or entity; person or thing that is atypical within a particular group, class, or category [Eng. (17th. out + -lier (“to lie”)]
Ovine: sheep-like 🐑 [L. ovis (“sheep”) + -ine]
Ovivorous: egg-eating 🥚 [L. ōvum (“egg”) + –vorare (“to devour”)]
Oxyacaesthesia: extreme sharpness of senses [Gk. oxús “sharp”; “pointed”) + -aisthēsis (“sensation”)] (cf. Oxyblepsia: extremely keen sight/ Oxygeusia: extremely keen sense of taste/ Oxyphonia: sharpness or shrillness of voice)/Oxyesthesia: being extremely sensitive to touch)
Ozostomia: bad breath [Gk. ózein (“smell”) + –stóma (“mouth”)]
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd “N” Words
The 14th letter in the alphabet is “N” (pronounced en). It is the sixth” most-common letter in the English alphabet. The written form of “N” (“n”) traces its genesis to Egyptian hieroglyphics and the symbol for snake 𓆓 . N’s etymological ancestors are the Semitic letter Nun and the Greek letter Nu. N-words are especially germane to the compilation of the topic of this blog series – including as they do, nomen (meaning “name”), nomenclature (the devising or choosing of names for things) and nomenclator (lexicon; word-list; one who assigns names).
Nacket: meaning>(hist.) a ball-boy at tennis (16th. ; a pert or smart child; snack; light lunch derivation>[Obsolete Scots nacket(t) “caddie at tennis”, from MidFr naquet “valet”)] 🎾 👦🏽
Naiant: (of a fish or marine creature) swimming horizontally [L. natare (“to swim”)] fish 𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ 𓇼
Nanoid: dwarf-like [Gk. nanos (“dwarf”) + -oid]
Napoo: to destroy; something finished, ruined, inoperative or dead [from Fr. “there is no more”; “it’s over”]
Narcoleptic: a sudden, involuntary deep sleep; pathological drowsiness [Gk. nárkē (“numbness”) + -, –lēpsia, (“seizure”)]
Naskin: prison [origin unknown] ⛓️⛓️
Nassologist: taxidermist [origin unknown]
Nasute: keen-scented; critically discerning; having a big nose [L. nasus (“nose”)] 👃🏽
Natation: the act or art of swimming [L. natare (“to swim”)] (cf. Natatorium: swimming-pool) 🏊♀️
Nates: the buttocks [L. natis (“buttocks”)]
Naucify: to despise; to hold in low esteem [L. naucum (“a trifling thing”)]
Naufrageous: in a state of danger or ruin; threatened [L. naufragium (“a shipwreck”) from navis (“ship”)] (cf. Naufrague: shipwrecked person)
Naumachy: mock sea battle [L. navis (“naval”) + Gk. -makhē (“a battle”; “fight”)]
Naupathia: sea sickness [Gk. naus (“ship”) + -pathos (“suffering”)]
Naupegical: of or relating to shipbuilding [Gk. naus + -pegical(?)]
Nautics: art of navigation [Gk. nautēs (“sailor”) + -ics]
Naviform: boat-shaped [L. navis (“ship”) + -form] ⛵
Neanic: of, like or pertaining to the adolescent period: young [Gk. neanias (“young man”) + -ikos]
Neanimorphism: looking younger than one’s actual age [L. neanias (“young man”) + -morphic (“shape”; “form”)] (cf. Nearomatria: a young mother)
Nebbich: colourless; inconsequential person [Yiddish. nebekh (“so what”; “whatever”; “who cares?”)]
Nebulochaotic: a state of being hazy and confused [L. nebulosus (“mist”) + Gk. -khaos (“abyss”; “that which gapes wide open”; “is vast and empty”)]
Nebulist: artist whose style comprises indistinct lines [L. nebulosus + -ist]
Necrographer: obituary writer (cf. Necrologue: obituary) [Gk. nekrós (“dead body”) + –graphos]
Negaholic: habitually pessimistic [neg (from “negative”) + -aholic]
Nelipot: someone who is walking without shoes; going barefoot [dubious (?) – origin unknown] 👣
Nemophilist: one who loves the woods (cf. Nemoricolous: living in forests and groves [Gk. nemos (“grove”) + -philos (“affection”)] 🌳
Neogamist: newlywed [Gk. néos (“new”; “young”) + -gamy]
Neolagnium: puberty [Gk. néos + ?]
Neoteric: recent in origin; modern [from Gk. néos + -teric(?)]
Nephalism: 💯% abstinence from alcohol [Gk. nēphein (“to be sober”; “drink no wine”) + -ismos]
Nescience: lack of knowledge; [ne- (“not”) + -scire (“to know”)]
Nesiote: living on an island [Gk. (“of islands”)] 🏝️
Nettlesome: irritable; difficult [Old Saxon netila (?) + OE. sum (“one”; “as one, together with”)]
Neutrologistic: expressing neither praise nor disapproval [L. neutralis (“neuter”) + Gk. –logos (“speech”; “word”) + -istic]
Newspaperacious: of a form or style usual in newspapers [coined 1843; first appeared in Fraser’s Magazine]
Nexility: compactness of speech [L. nexus (nectō) (“bind”) + -ity]
Nimrod: a skilful hunter [Hebrew. Nimrōḏ (from hunter-warrior biblical personage in Book of Genesis]
Nippaitaty or Nippitatum: particularly good and strong liquor, esp good good ale [origin unknown] 🍺
Niveous: snowy; white [L. niv, nix (“snow”)] ⛄️
Noctambulist: someone who walks late at night [L. nox, noct (“night”) + –ambulare (“to walk”) + -ist] (cf. Noctivagant: wandering in the night; a night-walker)
Noctidiurnal: comprising one day and one night [L. nocti (“night”) + -dies (“day”) + –urnus (denoting time)]
Noisant: harmful; troublesome; grievous [OF. nuisant (“harmful”; “hurtful”)]
Nomiatrist: a lawyer who specialises in medical cases [Gk. nomos (“law”; “arrangement”) + –iatris (“physician”; “heal or cure”; “treat”; “medical healing”)] ⚖ 🚑 ☤
Nomic: customary; conventional [Gk. nomos (“law”; “custom”) + -ic]
Nomographer: a writer of laws 📝 [Gk. nomos (“law”) + –graphos (“write”; “scribe”)]
Nonage: legal infancy; legal minority; time of immaturity [L. non + -age]
Nonparous: a woman without children; not having given birth [L. non (“not”) + –parus (“bearing”)]
Novenary: based on the number 9 [L. novenus (“nine”) + –arius (“ary”)]
Nosism: use of the Royal “We”; assumption of role of group mouthpiece [L. nos (“we”)]
Nosocomium: (hist. an ancient hospital; hospital (cf. Nosocomial: of, like or pertaining to a hospital) [Gk. nósos (“disease”; “suffering”) + –koméō (“to tend”)] 🏩
Nostrum: medicine of secret composition recommended by its preparer but usually without scientific proof of its effectiveness; a quack medicine or dubious remedy [L. noster (“our” or “ours”)]
Novercaphobia: an irrational fear of one’s step-mother [from L. novus (“new”) + -phobia] (cf. Novercal)
Nudiustertian: relating to the day before yesterday [L. nū̆diū̆stertiānus (“taking place the day before yesterday”) coined by Nathaniel Ward (1647)]
Nullibicity: the state of being nowhere [LateL. nullibi (“nowhere”) (from L. nullus (“null”) + -ibi (“here”; “there”) + -icity] (cf. Nullibiquitous: existing nowhere)
Nullifidian: having no faith or religion; one who is faithless [L. nullus (“null”) + -fides (“faith”) + -an)
Nulliverse: universe devoid or any plan or organising principle [L. nullus + (adapted from) universe. Coined by William James, American philosopher)]
Numinous: arousing spiritual or religious feelings; emotional; mysterious or awe-inspiring [L. numen (“nod of the head”; “divine will”) + -ous]
Numismatist: a person who collects and studies coins and paper currency [L. numisma (“coin”) + -ist] 🪙 💴
Numquid: an inquisitive person [ L. num (“whether”; “if”) + –quid (“something”)]
Nuncius: messenger (“long”; “large”) + –biota (“life”; “living”)] 🏤
Nuncle: to defraud; to deceive; to claim to be one’s uncle” [ME: modification of “mine uncle”]
Nundinal: of, like or pertaining to a fair or market [L. nundinae Nundine (market day every 9 days in Ancient Rome) + -alis -al]
Nurvill (or Nyrvyl): a little man; dwarf [poss. Norw. nurv (?)]
Nutrice: wet nurse; nurse [ L. nūtrīcem (“nurse”)] (cf. Nutricial: relating to nurses) ℝ☤ℕ
Nyctalopia: night-blindness [Gk. nyct- (“night”) + -al(aós) blind + –ōpia-opia] 🌌
Nycterent: a hunter who hunts at night; a nocturnal hunter [Gk. nycti (“night”) + -ent]
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd “M” Words
We arrive at “M”, lucky letter number 13, the midway or median point in the Latin alphabet. “M” is also the Roman numeral for 1,000. The “most powerful letter in the world”, according to those renowned linguistic authorities, BMW car manufacturers! “M”’s etymological antecedents are the Semitic mem and the Ancient Greek mu (M). M-words don’t tend to go in for half-measures, there’s a million of them and they are inclined to span the full gamut of dimensions…from “mini” or “micro” up the scale to “macro” or “maxi”.
Mabsoot: meaning>happy derivation>[Arabic/Urdu: mabsut (“happy”; “content”; “satisfied”; “extendedness”)]
Macarism: a beatitude; taking pleasure in another’s joy [Gk. makários (“happy”) + -ism]
Macaronic: muddled or mixed-up (Macaronic Latin is jumbled-up Latin) [It. maccarone (“dumpling”)]
Macerate: to emaciate (someone who fasts and becomes emaciated is a Macerator) [L. macerare (“soften by steeping and soaking”)]
Macilent: lean; excessively thin [L. macer (“meager”; “poor”)] (cf. Marcidity: “great leanness”)
Macrobiote: long-lived organism [Gk. macros (“long”; “large”) + –biota (“life”; “living”)]
Macrocephalous: having a large head [Gk. macros + -keptos, kephalē (“head”; “headed”) + -ous] (cf. Multicapitate: many-headed)
Macrology: much talk but saying little; redundancy; pleonasm [Gk. macros + logós (“talk”)]
Macropodine: of, like or pertaining to kangaroos [Macropod (“Marsupial family”) + -ine] 🦘
Macroscian: one with a long shadow; an inhabitant of polar regions [Gk. macros + -skia (“shadow”) + -an] 👤
Macrotous: (zool.) having great big ears 👂 [Gk. macros (“long”; “large”) + -ous (“ear”)]
Maculation: the act of spotting or staining [L. macula (“spot”; “stain”)]
Madefy: to moisten or make wet [L. madēre (“to be wet”) + facere (“to make, do”) (cf. Madescent: growing damp; Madid: wet; dank)
Maffick: to celebrate exuberantly and boisterously, esp for a victory [Brit. from the Siege of Mafeking in 2nd Boer War, 1899-1900]
Magnality: a great or wonderful thing; a marvel [L. magnus (“big”; “large”; “great”; “important”)]
Magnicaudate: having a long tail [L. magnus + –cauda (“tail”)]
Magniloquent: speaking in a grand or pompous style [L. magnus + loqui (“to speak”)]
Maidan: open plain; open space near a town [Pers. maidān (“town square”/“field”)]
Maicutician: midwife [origin unknown]
Mainour: stolen goods discovered on a thief’s person or in his or her possession [Old French manœuvre (“manual labour”)]
Malacophonous: soft-voiced; gently spoken [mala(?) + phōnē (“sound”; “voice”)]
Malapert: bold; forward; impudent; saucy [L. male (“badly”) + MidEng. –apert (“insolent”)]
Malfeasance: evil-doing; illegal activities, esp by a public official [L. malus- (“bad”) + -feasance (“doing”; “execution”)]
Malloseismic: suffering from frequent and severe earthquakes [Gk. mallós (?) + -seismic]
Malversation: corruption in office; corrupt administration; misconduct [L. malus (“bad”) + –vertere (“to turn”)]
Mammetry: idolatry; paganism; idols in collective sense [orig. from Arabic. Muhammad]
Mammiferous: having breasts [L. mamma (“a breast”) + Gk. –ferous (“bearing”)]
Mammothrept: spoiled child [Gk. mámmē (“grandmother”) + –tréphō (“to bring up”)]
Manal: relating to the hand [L. manus (“hand”)]
Mandament: a command or order [L. mandare (“to command”)] (cf. Mandative: of, like or pertaining to commands and government and Mandarism: government with a large bureaucracy)
Mandriarch: founder or leader of a monastic order [Gk. mandare(?) + –arch (“rule”)]
Manducate: to chew or eat [L. mandūcarē (“to chew”, “eat”)]
Manège: the art of horsemanship [It. maneggiare (“to control (a horse”;)]
Manochlous: (also Monoculus) one-eyed person [origin unknown]
Manqué: having had unfulfilled ambitions; failing to achieve expectation [L. manco (“having a crippled hand”; “lacking”; “left-handed” Manicism(?))]
Mansuetude: meekness; tameness: sweetness of temper [L. manus (“hand”) + -suescere (“to accustom”)]
Mansworn: perjured [OldEng. mān (“crime”; “guilt”; “sin”; “false oath” + -swerian (“to swear”)]
Mantology: fortune-telling [Gk. mantis (“prophet”) + -o +-logy]
Manuduction: careful guidance; leading by hand [L. manus + –ductio (“action of leading”)]
Mappemond: medieval map of the world [L. mappa (“map”) + -mundi (“world”)]
Maricolous: living in the sea [L. mar (mare) (“sea”; “ocean”) + -cola (“inhabitor”) + -ous] (cf. Marigenous: produced by the sea) 🌊
Maritodespotism: ruthless domination of one spouse by another within a marriage (usually by the husband) [L. marītus (“husband”) + –despótēs (“lord”; “master”; “owner”) +-ism]
Martymachlia: sexual arousal resulting from having others watch a sexual act being performed (a form of paraphilia) [origin unknown]
Mascaron: grotesque, frightening (usually human, sometimes chimeric) face on a door-knocker, originally to supposedly ward off evil spirits [LateLat. mascara (“mask”) + -on]
Maskirovka: (hist.) Soviet use of deception or camouflage as military stratagem [Rus. mácka (“disguise”; “mask”)]
Mattoid: (Psych.) a person displaying eccentric behaviour and mental characteristics that approach the psychotic; someone bordering between sanity and insanity [It. matto (“insane”) + -oid (“likeness or resemblance”)]
Maturescent: becoming mature [L. maturus (“ripe”) + -cent]
Matutinal: of, occurring in or relating to morning [LateLat. matutinalis (Roman goddess of morning — see following entry)]
Matutolagnia: antemeridian (am) sexual desire [L. Mātūta, (Roman goddess of morning or dawn) + Gk. –lagneía (“sexual predilection”)]
Matutolypea: getting up on the wrong side of bed; the state of being in a bad mood and easily annoyed, esp in the morning [L. Mātūta, from Gk. lúpē (“sadness, suffering, affliction”) ]
Mechanolatry: worship of machines [Gk. mēkhanikós (“pertaining to machines or contrivance, mechanic”; “ingenious”; “inventive”) + –latreía (“service”; “worship”)]
Medianic: of, like or pertaining to spiritualists, mediums and prophets (origin unknown)
Medicaster: quack doctor; “charlatan” [L. medicus (“a doctor”; “a physician “; “a surgeon”) + –aster (“little”; “petty”; “partial”; “incomplete”]
Megathermic: surviving only in tropical climates [Gk. mégas (“great”; “large”; “mighty”) + –thermal (“to heat”; “warm”)]
Mehari: a type of fast-running dromedary camel, used for racing or transportation [Arab. mahara, (“to be deft or skillful”)] 🐪
Meliorism: the belief that human progress is a real concept, improvement in the world can be made by human intervention and effort [L. melior (“better”) + -ism]
Melliloquent: speaking harmoniously or sweetly [L. mel, mellis (“honey”) + –loqui (“to speak”)] cf. Mellisonant: pleasing to the ear; sweet-sounding[L. –sonare (“to sound”)]; cf. Mellivorous: honey-eating) 🍯
Melomania: abnormal fondness for music [Gk. mélos (“musical phrase”; “melody”; “song”) + -mania] 🎵 🎶
Mendaciloquence: lying speech [L. mendācitās (“falsehood”) + -loquor (“to speak”)]
Mensal: of, like or pertaining to the dinner-table; monthly, occurring once a month [L. mensis. (“month”)]
Mercedary: a hirer, one who hires staff; pertaining to the giving or receiving of wages [L. mercēdārius (?)]
Meretricious: apparently attractive, esp in a flashy or vulgar way, but having no real value; characteristic of a prostitute [L. meretrīx (“harlot, prostitute”) from mereō (“earn, deserve, merit”) + -trīx (“female agent”)]
Mésalliance: unsuitable marriage; marriage with a socially-inferior partner [Fr. mésallier (“to misally”)]
Mesomorph: person with a compact, muscular build [Gk. mesos (“middle” ) + -morphē (“form”; “shape”)]
Metagnostic: incomprehensible; beyond understanding [Gk. meta (“beyond”) + –gnōstós (“known”)]
Metempirical: beyond the scope of knowledge [Gk. meta (“after” or “beyond”) + –empeirikós “based on observation (of medical treatment”; “experienced”) + -al]
Methomania: morbid craving for alcohol; alcoholism [Gk. méthu, (“wine”) + -mania] (cf. Methysis: drunkenness) 🥃
Métier: profession; occupation; calling; business [OldFr. mistier, mestier (“duty”; “craft”; profession”)]
Metonym: (descriptive) name used instead of the (proper) name, as a substitute because it is close associated with it (eg, the White House for the US Presidential (POTUS) Residence/Office of the Executive [Gk. meta (“among”; “with”; “after”) + –onyma (“name”)]
Metoposcopy: foreign-telling or judgement of character divined by the lines of the forehead [Gk. meto (“measure”) + –scopéō (“examine”; “inspect”)]
Metronym: system of kinship and naming that follows the female line [Gk. mėtēr (“mother”) + -name]
Micropolis: small city [Gk. mikros (“small”) + –polis (“city”)]
Microsomatous: having a small body; small-framed [Gk. mikros + sōma (“body”)] (cf. Macrosomatous) (cf. Mignon: small and dainty)
Mien: air or look; manner; bearing [ME. demean (“ to conduct or behave (oneself) usually in a proper manner”)]
Militaster: soldier without skill or ability; pretender to possess military expertise but lacks actual experience or knowledge. [L. militaris (“of soldiers”; “warlike”) + –aster)]
Milquetoast: very timid; very unassertive person [from character Caspar Milquetoast of the comic strip The Timid Soul (1920s on)…fictional name derived from US dish “milk toast”]
Minatory: threatening; having a menacing quality [L. minari (“to threaten”)]
Mimetic: imitative; of, like or pertaining to mimicry [Gk. mimos (“mime”)]
Minutious: (or Minutiose) paying undue attention to minutiae [L. Latin minutia (“thorough”; “detailed”) + -ous]
Miothermic: of, like or pertaining to temperature condition on earth at the present time [Gk. mi + -therm (“heat”) +-ic] 🔥
Mirabiliary: miracle worker [L. mīrābilis (“wonderful”; “marvelous”)] (cf. Mirabilia: wonders)
Misocainea: hatred of new ideas [Gk. miso (“hatred”; “hater”) + –kainos (“new”; “recent”)]
Misocapnic: an aversion to smoking, tobacco and its smoke [miso- + capno- (kapnós (“smoke”)] 🚭 (cf. Acapnotic: someone who doesn’t smoke; a non-smoker)
Mizmaze: labyrinth; bewilderment [miz + poss. OE. maes (“to confound”; “confuse”)]
Mnemonist: one from whose memory nothing is erased; someone who can memorise long lists of data [ Gk. mnēmē (“memory”; “a remembrance”; “record”) + -ist]
Mofussil: provincial; rural; non-urban regions [Bengali mophośśol (“to divide”; “classify”]
Moiety: each of two parts into which a thing can be divided; a part or portion (esp lesser) [L. medius (“middle”; “half”)]
Moirologist: professional mourner; a hired wailer [Gk. moîra (“fate”) + –lógos (“speech”; “oration”)]
Mollescent: softening; tending to soften [L. mollis (“soft”) + -cent]
Momus: satirist; critic [Gk. Momus (Greek myth. personification of satire and mockery)]
Mongery: the trading or trafficking of some commodity of a specific type (eg, “ironmongery”; “fishmongery”); a person who tries to stir up or spread something usually of a petty or discreditable nature (eg, “scandal-mongery”) [Gk. mánganon (“contrivance”; “means of enchantment”)]
Mononym: a person’s name consisting of the one, single word, typically a first name sans a surname [Gk. monós (“alone”; “only”; “sole”) + -name]
Monopolylogue: dramatic work in which one actor plays many roles [neologism coined from “monologue” Gk. monólogos (“speaking alone”) + –poly (“many”)]
Mopsical: short-sighted; mope-eyed; purblind; (fig.) stupid [origin unknown]
Mouchard: a police spy, esp in a Francophone country; an undercover investigator [Fr. mouche (“a fly”) + -ard] 🪰
Motherlode: (alt. Mother lode) a rich source of something; (geol.) a principal vein of an ore or mineral [L. māter + MidEng –lode (“a burden” (orig. “a way”; “a course”)
Mournival: a set of four things; (arch.) a hand of four (aces, kings, queens, knaves) in card game Gleek [MidFr mornifle (?)]
Mugwump: (hist.) dissident Republicans (1884); one who politically-neutral, aloof or independent of party politics [from Amerindian (Massachusett) “war leader”]
Mulctuary: punishable by a fine [L. mulcta (“fine”)]
Muliebrile: womanly; feminine [L. mulier (“woman”) (cf. Muliebrity: womanhood)
Multanimous: having a many-sided mind [L. multus (“many”) + –animus (“mind”)] (cf. Multeity: manifoldness; very great numerousness)
Multifarious: having great diversity; manifold [L. multi + -farius (“diverse”)]
Multiloquence: talkative; garrulous; using many words [L. multi– + –loquēns (“speaking, talking”)]
Multiparous: (of a woman) having given birth to multiple offspring [L. multi + -parere (“to give birth to”; “bring into being”)]
Multipotent: having the power to do many things [L. multi + -potis, pote (“able”)] (cf. Multivious: offering many different pathways; leading in many directions; and Multivocal: having many meanings]
Mumpsimus: adherence to or persistence in an erroneous use of language out of habit or obstinacy; a person who persists in a mistaken expression or practice [coined erroneously by an illiterate mass-priest in place of the correct Latin term sumpsimus…despite being corrected he stubbornly refused to change his choice of words]
Munificence: magnificent liberality in giving; bestowing great generosity [L. munus (“gift”; “duty”; “service”) + -cence]
Mussitation: murmuring; grumbling [L. mussitāre (“to mutter”)]
Mycterism: sneering; rhetorical sarcasm or irony [Gk. muktērízō, (“I sneer”) + -ism]
Myrmecoid: ant-like, resembling an ant [Gk. -myrmēk (“ants”) + -oeidēs (“oid”) / Myrmex, Gk goddess of ants] 🐜
Myrmidon: a follower or subordinate of a powerful person; one who carries out orders unquestioningly (typically unscrupulous) [Gk. Myrmidon (from Greek myth.) eponymous ancestor of the Myrmidons]
Mysophobic: someone with a pathological fear of contamination and germs; a germophobe; a compulsive hand-washer [Gk. mýsos (“pollution”; “defilement”)] + -phobia] 🦠
Mysteriosophy: system of knowledge concerning secrets and mysteries [L. mustḗrion, (“mystery”) + -sophy (“knowledge or wisdom”)]
Mythogenesis: origin of myths [Gk. mûthos (“myth”) + –génesis (“origin”; “source”; “beginning”)] (cf. Mythoclast: destroyer of myths; Mythopoeic: giving rise to myths)
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Malaxophobia: a morbid fear of seduction, love play or love games (esp in women)[Gk. malax– (?) (cf. Sarmassophobia)
Matronolagnia: an attraction to older women, esp women who have children [L. māter (“mother”) + –lagneía (“lust”)]
Microlipet: someone who gets upset about trivial stuff [micro (“small”) + ME -lippē(?) (“a little bit”(?)]
Misopolemiac: a hater of war and strife [miso (“hatred”) + pólemos (“war”)]
Misoxene: one who hates strangers [miso (“hatred”) + xénos (“stranger”)] (cf. Xenophobe)
Monomath: someone who knows all about a single subject and nothing else [Gk. monós + –máthēma (“that which is learnt”)]
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd “L” Words
“L” is the twelfth letter of the alphabet while doubling as the Roman numeral for 50. The letter “L”’s ancestors can be traced to the Semitic lamedh, which may have derived from an earlier symbol representing an ox goad, and the Greek lambda (λ), itself adopted from the Phoenician letter lamed. In English “L”/“l” represents a voiced alveolar lateral continuant. “L” is for “logomaniacs”, “logolepts”, “logophiles”, “logonik”, call them by whatever label you prefer, the following are some worthy additions to the vocabulary of word aficionados from the unorthodox “L” word department.
Labeorphilist: <meaning> a collector of beer bottles, but also of their accoutrements – brand labels, can openers, books on the topic <derives from>[Gk. origin unknown] (cf. Tegestologist who collects beer mats)
Labiomancy: lip-reading; a form of divination by reading lips [MedLat. labiālis (“pertaining to the lips”) + -manteíā (“divination”)] (cf. Labrose: having large or thick lips)
Laconicum: sauna, specifically a dry sweat room; a room in an ancient Roman baths used for hot-air or a steam bath [L. laconicus from Gk. lakōn (“laconic”)]
Lactiferous: forming or conveying milk [LateLat. lac (“milk”) + –fer (“carrying”; “bearing”)] 🥛
Lacuna: an unfilled space; a gap; a cavity especially in the bone [L. lacus (“lake” & lacuna (“pool”)]]
Laeotropic: turning to the left or anticlockwise [Gk. laiós (“left”) + –tropḗ, (“turn”; “solstice”; “trope”).] (cf. Laevoduction: movement leftwards)
Lagostoma: hare-lip [Gk. lagos, (“hare”) + –stoma, (“mouth”)]”; “emotion”; “therapy”)]
Lairwite: (also Legruita) (hist.) fine paid to the lord of the manor by his villein in instances where the serf’s daughter committed adultery or fornication (in medieval times it was a punishment for sexual misconduct while maintaining the lord’s authority over his female villeins) [origin unknown]
Lambent: flickering; softly radiant; marked by brilliance of expression [L. from lambere (“to lick up”)] (cf. Lucent: glowing; giving off light)
Laodicean: being lax or lukewarm in one’s religious beliefs; indifferent to religion or politics [L. from Laodicea (“a city in Asia Minor”) + -an]
Lapidate: to stone someone to death [L. lapidātus (“to throw stones at”)] 🪨
Lapidicolous: living under a rock (or stone) [L. lapis (“stone”) + -colere (“to inhabit”)]
Latrocination: the act of robbing or pillaging from someone; overcharging people [L. Latrocinium (“highway robbery”)]
Lavacultophilia: the desire to stare at someone in a bathing suit [L. lavere (“to bathe”) + –culto (uncertain) + -philia] 🩱
Lecanoscopy: to hypnotise yourself by staring into a pool of water, eg, in a basin [Gk. lekane “dish-pan” + –scopein (“examine;” “look at”)]
Lector: a lecturer or (academic) reader at university (UK); a reader of lessons in a church service [L. legere (“reader”)] (cf. Letrice: a female reader in church)
Leguleian: like a lawyer; underhand and legalistic; a petty and argumentative lawyer [L. lēguleius (“pettifogger”) from lēx, lēgis (“law”)]
Lethologica: inability to recall a precise word or name for something or someone [Gk. lḗthē (“forgetfulness”) + -lógos “word”]
Levirate: marriage of a widowed woman to her deceased husband’s brother (practiced in particular cultures) [L. levir (“brother-in-law”)]
Lexiphanicism: showing off by using pretentious words or language (in fact what this blog post may be accused of doing!) [Gk. Lexiphanes (a character in the works of Lucian) + -ic]
Libidinist: a lewd or lustful person; oversexed lecher [L. libidinor (“I indulge”) {🔜 “libido”} + -ist] (cf. Donjuanism: (esp of a man) exhibiting compulsive sexual behaviour)
Librocubucularist: someone who likes to read in bed [L. liber (“book”) + cubiculum (“bedroom”), from cubō (“lie down”)] 📕 🛌
Limbate: possessing a border [L. limbatus (“bordered”) + -atus (“-ate”] (🔙 Limbus: border)
Litterateur: professional writer; a person interested in and knowledgeable about literature [L. littera (“letter”; “writing”)] ✍️🪶
Logicaster: a person who is pedantic in argument; a petty logician [Gk. lógos (“speech”; “reason”) + -aster (“little”; “petty”; “partial”; “incomplete”)]
Logodaedalus: artificer in words; one manipulates words with skill or cunning; skilled in coining words [Gk. logos (“word”) + –daidalous (“cunning worker; “skilful”)]
Logomachy: a battle about words; a verbal war [Gk. logos (“word”) + –machesthai (“to fight”)]
Logorrhoea: extreme and overwhelming prolixity; verbal diarrhoea [Gk. logos (“word”) + –rhoe (“to flow”)]
Longanimity: capacity to suffer patiently; forbearance [LateLat. longanimis (“patient”; “forbearing”) + -tās]
Longiloquent: extremely long-winded [L. longus (“long”) + loquent (“talking”)] (cf. Loquacious: characterised by excessive talk; wordy; garrulous)
Lotologist: someone who collects lottery tickets as a hobby [origin unknown]
Lubberland: a mythical paradise reserved for the lazy [poss. from Swed. lubber (“fat lazy fellow” + -land] (cf. Cockaigne: an imaginary land of plenty, supposedly a medieval paradise of extreme luxury, comforts and easy life)
Lucubrator: a person who studies during the night [L. lūcubrō (“work by candlelight”) + -or] 🌃
Lupanarian: pertaining to a brothel [ L. lupanar (“brothel”), from lupa (“prostitute”; literally “she-wolf”), from lupus (“wolf”)](cf. Lupine: pertaining to wolves) 🐺
Lustrum: period of five years; (hist.) a ceremonial purification of the people of Rome undertaken every five years [L. lūstrum (“a purificatory sacrifice”)]
Lychnobite: a person who works at night and sleeps during the day [Gk. lúkhnos (“lamp”) and bíos (“life”)🏮
Lygerastia: a condition of someone who is amorous only when the lights are turned out [Gk. lyge (“twilight”) + –erastes (“lover”)] (cf. Amaurophilia: a preference for having sex blind-folded or in total darkness)
Lysistrataphobia: (path.) a fear that women will subvert men and take over the world [Gk. from Lysistrátē, (“Army Disbander”), 5th cent. BC play by Aristophanes about a woman (Lysistrataphobia) who hatches a plan to have Athenian and Spartan women withhold sexual privileges from their men-folk until the men bring the Peloponnesian War to an end]
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd “K” Words
The letter “K” is derived from the Semitic letter kaph, possibly from an earlier Egyptian hieroglyph for a hand. In Greek it became “kappa”, and in that form passed into the Roman alphabet. In English it generally represents a voiceless velar plosive consonant with the same sound as the “hard” form of “c”, as in kitten. That’s the skinny on how the letter “K” found its way into the English alphabet, now for word nerds here’s a selection of uncommon, archaic, quirky, even strange and weird words which begin with “K”.
Kakistocracy: <meaning>government by the worst, less qualified and most unscrupulous citizens <derived from>[Gk. kákistos, (“worst”) + -cracy]
Kalogram: a monogram which uses the person’s full name [origin unknown)
Kalokagathia: combination of good and beautiful [Gk. kalós kaì agathós (“beautiful and good”)] (cf. Kalopsia: the delusion that things are more beautiful than they really are)
Kareeza: sexual intercourse which avoids climax (a method of coitus reservatus) [It. carezza (“caress”) neologism coined 1896 by US obsterician Alice Stockham]
Katabasis: (myth.) Ancient Greek hero journeying to the underworld; a downward journey; a retreat especially a military one [Gk. katá “”downwards”) + –baínō (“go”)] cf. Anabasis (a going or marching up; esp a military advance (from book by Xenophon)
Katoptronophile: a person aroused by having sex in front of mirrors [Gk. katopron (“mirror”) + –phile] 🪞
Katzenjammer: confusion; uproar; a severe headache due to a hangover [Germ. katze (“cat”) + –jammer (“distress”) (19th. popularised by American cartoon “Katzenjammer Kids”]
Kenodoxy: the love, study or desire of vainglory [Gk. kenos (empty” + -doxy]
Kerdomeletia: an excessive desire for material wealth [Gk. kerdo (“gain”; “profit”) + unknown origin]
Kinesipathy: the practice of treating illness with exercise [Gk. kinēsis (“movement”; “motion”) + -pathy (“suffering”; “emotion”; “therapy”)]
Kirkbuzzer: someone who robs churches [Nth MidEng. Kyrie (“church”) + -buzzer)] ⛪️
Klebenleiben: a pathological reluctance to stop talking about a particular subject [Germ. kleben (“to glue”) ?+ unknown]
Kleptocracy: government by thieves; government by people who exploit their hold on power to steal the country’s resources [Gk. kleptēs (“thieves”) + -cracy]
Korophilia: an attraction to young men or boys [kóros (“boy”; “youth”) + -philia]
Kosmokrator: (also Cosmocrator) the ruler of the world [Gk. kosmo (“world”) + –kratos (“the god and personification of power and strength”)]
Kouros: statue of young Greek nude male [Gk. kouros (“youth”; “boy, esp of noble rank”)]
Kraken: enormous, legendary sea monster (said to have appeared off the coast of Norway) [Norway. krake (“malformed or overgrown, crooked tree”)]
Kritarchy: rule by judges in Ancient Israel [Gk. kritēs (“a judge”)]
Krukolibidious: a person who’s aroused by staring at someone’s crotch [origin unknown]
Ktenology: science of putting people to death [Coined by US psychiatrist and neurologist Leo Alexander, etymology unknown)]
Kurveyor: (South Africa: a trader who transports goods by ox cart); a travelling merchant who sells dry goods from a cart [Dutch. origin unknown)]
Kyle: narrow strait or channel of water between two separate formations of land [Scot. Gaelic. caol (“narrow”; “thin”; “strait”) ]
Kyphorrhinos: humped nose [origin unknown] 👃🏽
Kyriology: (also Kyriolexy) the use of literal or simple, expressions rather than figurative or obscure ones [Gk. kúrios (“literal”) + -logy]
A Logolept’s Diet of Obscure, Obsolete, Curious and Downright Odd “J” Words
The letter “J” (pronounced “Jay”), the 10th letter of the Latin alphabet, has got an interesting history as a Johnny-come-lately “bookend” of sorts…”J” is the English alphabet’s “Hawaii”, the last to achieve letterhood. This 26th and final letter was introduced as a swash, a typographical embellishment for the already existing “I”. Phonetically, the vowel “I” and the consonant “J” used to sound the same and were interchangeable until a clear phonetic distinction between the two was made by an Italian grammarian (GG Trissino) in 1524. When Roman numerals were in their heyday “J” or “j” were used on the end of a sequence of numerals…so for “123”, instead of writing CXXIII, it be could rendered as CXXIIJ. Here’s a scattering of “J” words unlikely that you will find popping up in everyday intercourse.
Jabberwock: nonsense; gibberish [from “Jabberwocky”, dragon-like creature in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871)]
Jactancy: boastfulness; vainglorious boasting [L.jactare (“to throw”; “speak out”; “boast”)]
Janiform: having two faces looking in opposite directions [L. Janus “”Roman god”) + –fōrmis (“having the form of”)]
Janizary: (also Janissary) a follower or supporter; (hist.) member of Ottoman Turkish infantry, (14—(19th. [Turk.Yeni (“new”) + -çeri (“troops”)]
Jargonaut: one who uses excessive jargon [comb. Of “jargon” and Gk. -naut (“sailor”)]
. Jejunator: one who fasts [L. Jejunus (“fasting”) + -ator]
Jejune: dull; insipid; lacking in substance; superficial; naive; simplistic (of writing or ideas) dry and uninteresting [L. Jejunus (“fasting” – ie, being empty in a figurative sense)]
Jentacular: relating to breakfast; specifically to one taken early in the morning or immediately upon getting up [L. from ientō (“to have breakfast “) 🍳
Jeremiad: prolonged complaint; angry or cautioning harangue; lamentation; catalogue of woes [Fr. jérémiade, after Biblical prophet Jeremiah (Old Testament)]
Jesuitical: cunning; equivocating; quibbling [Fr. jsuitique (pertaining to the Jesuits)] (behaviours once attributed to the Jesuits)
Jovialist: a convivial person [L. ioviālis (“relating to the Roman god Jupiter”) + -ist]
Jumboism: admiration for bigness [(19th. circus elephant, Jumbo + -ism]
Jumentous: smelling strongly of horse urine or of some similar beast of burden [L. jumentum (“yoke-beast”)]
Jurisconsult: legal expert [L. jus (jur) (“law”) + consultus (“skilled”)]
Juvenescence: state of growing younger [L. juvenis (“young”) + -cence (?)]
Juvenilia: the works (literary, artistic, musical) of one’s youth (cf. Juvenal: a youth) [L. iuvenīlia (“of or pertaining to youth”)
Strangelove and his Cold Warrior Comrades, Art Imitating Life
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark satire Dr Strangelove is a classic of the genre which comically probes the collective anxieties triggered in the West by the Cold War at its height in the early 1960s. Kubrick hammers home the utter absurdity of the prevailing nuclear standoff between the US and the Soviet Union and the consequential existential threat to the planet from the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and “Doomsday bombs”. The movie’s plot involves the unilateral unleashing of a preemptive strike on Moscow by a deranged US Air Force general and the Pentagon’s shoddy attempts at “management” of the crisis.
Sellers as Dr Strangelove
˚ Kubrick and his film co-writers Terry Southern and Peter George give us three dangerously over-the-top, lunatic fringe characters – two gung-ho hawkish military types, generals Turgidson and Ripper, and the eponymous “Dr Strangelove”𝟙. The central figure in the nuclear nightmare scenario, Dr Strangelove (played by Peter Sellers), is a former German Nazi technocrat turned US strategic weapons expert and scientific advisor to the US president Merkin Muffley (also Sellers). Strangelove is creepily sanguine about the prospect for humanity post-nuclear Holocaust, expanding on his vision of a 100-year plan for survival (for some)…a male elite ensconced in an underground bunker where they can sire a selective breeding program with a plurality of desirable females [‘Dr Strangelove (character)’, Kubrick Wiki, www.kubrick.fandom.com].
Wernher Von Braun (Photo: Mondadori via Getty Images)˚ Strangelove a composite of various personages Though characterised by caricature and satire, the film’s three wildest characters are recognisable among the actual political, military and scientific figures of the day in America. The heavy Middle European accent of Dr Strangelove, his authoritarian-Nazi mannerisms and regular references to “Mein Führer”, has led some observers to conclude that the character was based on German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, instrumental in the Nazis’ V-2 rocket project and after 1945 in the US designing space rockets for NASA (a view given countenance by one of the screenwriters Terry Southern). Others have added émigré Hungarian scientists John von Neumann and Edward Teller as models for Strangelove. Both men worked on the Super-bomb projects (A-Bomb, H-Bomb, C-Bomb) for the US government in the 1940s and 50s, and both were rabidly anti-communist and anti-Russian [P.D. Smith, Doomsday Men (2007)]. Teller in particular shared a number of Strangelove’s traits, eg, volatile nature, Soviet-fixated and obsessed with bombs, possessed of a prosthetic limb. It’s probably a reasonable bet that the there was something of the personality of all three men in Dr Strangelove, but other individuals were also sources of inspiration for the character.
Herman Kahn (Source: Alchetron)˚ A Megadeath influencer from RAND Another real-life figure widely associated with the Strangelove character is Herman Kahn, who was a physicist and military strategist with the RAND Corporation𝟚. Kubrick got the idea of a “Doomsday Machine” from Kahn whose 1960 book On Thermonuclear War posited the possibility of a winnable (sic) nuclear war. Kahn has been described as a “Megadeath Intellectual” with his robust insistence that the dangers of nuclear war were exaggerated (this also accords with the outlier position of General Buck Turgidson – see below)𝟛.
Gen. Jack Ripper (Photo: Columbia Pictures)˚ Military madness Maverick general in the Strategic Air Command Jack D Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden) is gripped by the all-consuming communist conspiracy hysteria. His belief in the loony notion that the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans leads him to initiate a H-Bomb onslaught on the USSR without consulting the Pentagon. Ripper’s wild rhetoric and blustery style has been compared to Robert Welch, the rabid anti-communist founder of the ultra-conservative and reactionary John Birch Society. Ripper’s loopy claim about Soviet water contamination echoes Welch’s baseless anti-fluoridation allegations (‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying’).
Gen. LeMay (Image: Mort Kunstler / Stag)
˚ “Expendable dead” Gen. Buck Turgidson (played by George C Scott) was largely modelled on four-star air force general Curtis LeMay𝟜. Turgidson is an unrepentant war hawk who wants to escalate Ripper’s nuclear attack on the Soviets, justifying it with the outrageous claim that it will result in only “limited” casualties from the ensuing superpower war, which in his estimate equates to 10 to 20 million dead! Like Turgidson LeMay danced to the beat of his own drum, he was well disposed towards a preemptive strike on the Russians and vociferously advocated nuclear strikes on Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on North Vietnam during the Indo-China War.
Gen. Turgidson (Scott) in the War Room (Columbia Pictures)˚ The actions and statements of the clearly psychotic Ripper and morally reprehensible Turgidson convey insights into the level of paranoia gripping the real-life military commanders in the climate of the nuclear arms buildup in the Sixties. [Fred Kaplin, “Truth Stranger than ‘Strangelove‘“, New York Times, 10-Oct-2004, nytimes.com].
Fail Safe (1964)
Footnote: Satirical Dr Strangelove v Serious Fail Safe Intriguingly, at the same time Kubrick was making Dr Strangelove there was a separate film in the works also about an American nuclear attack on the USSR. Fail Safe dealt with the same subject but as a straight-up drama. In this second film about nuclear Armageddon the trigger to the catastrophic event however is not rogue generals but a technical glitch. Strangelove’s equivalent morality-free scientist character in Fail Safe is Professor Groeteschele (played by Walter Matthau) who draws similar comparisons with Herman Kahn.
Hitler and the Nazis, the West’s Continuing Collective Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Your own private Adolph Hitler
SUCH is the fixation in the West with everything Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, the story of the Third Reich’s dramatic rise and fall is just so familiar to everyone that it seems like we all have our own little piece of the megalomaniacal German dictator. Hitler is the most talked about/written about public figure of the 20th century. The obsession with Hitler and the Nazis since the end of the Second World War, now into its eighth decade—in cinema, in television dramas and documentaries, in popular literature, in scholarly dissertations and books from academe, in popular culture, in social media—is not only not abating but on the upsurge if anything🄰.
It seems as if every aspect, every scintilla, of the Nazi regime and every chapter of Hitler’s life, before and after attaining power, has been turned over, sifted through and scrutinised diagnostically to the nth degree. One explanation for the blanket coverage is the sheer volume of available material on the subject. We might not have the personal letters exchanged between the Führer and his mistress Eva Braun and we know that the existence of the Hitler Diaries was an outrageous sham fiction, but the Nazis, unlike other mass misery-inflicting, totalitarian regimes, left behind a plethora of filmic, photographic and written documentary evidence, to enable a compelling picture of the nature of the Third Reich to be pieced together [‘Why are we still fascinated by Hitler?’, John Jewell, Journalism, Media and Culture, 11-Sep-2013, www.jomec.co.uk].
Why does Hitler and Nazism continue to exercise this central role in the thinking of so many people? This question has continued to exercise the minds of international scholars, historians, political scientists, not to mention the average punter, ever since the 1940s.
The fact that the Third Reich remains relevant to our contemporary society—illustrated in a number of ways and forms—is a factor that keeps Hitler and his extreme right cronies in the forefront of peoples’ consciousness. There is the moral objectionableness of the Nazi regime per se. The nature of the regime was horrifically egregious to a degree that is sui generis, and the catastrophic consequence of its rise as a world power, total global war and mass destruction, stands as a lesson and a reminder for all nations of what happens when a hitherto cultured and advanced, democratic nation loses its moral compass and goes madly off the rails .
Hitler and the Nazis were not your ordinary garden variety mass murderers…when you weigh up the mega-scale and severity of the Nazis’ atrocities its hard to escape the conclusion that Hitler personified absolute evil. He and his vilified movement represent a moral abyss. Moreover, Hitler and by association German Nazism is the yardstick by which we measure the very essence of evil! Whenever someone or some institution acts in a brutal manner which we find anathema we tend to reach by reflex for the Nazi card (it might be prompted by something as everyday basic as an encounter with overbearing officialdom or a neighbourhood bully). As Roger Moorhouse put it, these “simple stereotypes (have made the term ‘Nazi’) part of the cultural furniture” [‘Why is the Public so Obsessed with the Nazis?’, Roger Moorhouse, History Today, Vol. 1, Issue 3 (Mar 2020), www.historytoday.com].
We are reminded of the magnitude of the Nazis’ criminality whenever the media outs some elderly individual who is accused of having been a Nazi functionary or collaborator and is (sometimes) brought to trial – the most recent, nonagenarian Oskar Groening, “the bookkeeper of Auschwitz” in 2015. At such times Nazism is thrust back into the spotlight once again (assuming it has ever left it)🄱. Then there’s the raft of large corporations who were associated with and in many instances benefitted from the dominance of the Nazi Party in the Thirties and Forties—household names from the business world such as Hugo Boss, Volkswagen, Porsche, Bayer and Siemens—all still operating profitably today.
Although the German state capitulated in May 1945 and the Nazi empire was completely dismantled, the spirit of Nazism didn’t end with WWII. The postwar era has seen a rebirth of the movement in the form of neo-Nazi groups which sprang up across Europe and beyond🄲. Many of these far-right organisations still operate, espousing racist, antisemitic and anti-immigrant views, including in democratic Germany itself (Alternative for Germany – AfG), their continued existence a reminder that the ashes of an abhorrent past are not entirely extinguished.
Endnote: “The Nazi cinematic universe” Hollywood and European cinema in the postwar era has been awash with Nazi war movies, by far the biggest contributor to the war genre movie. Moviegoers have been assailed with a constant bombardment of films with various Nazi themes and stories…victims of the Holocaust; Allied POWs escaping from Nazi prisons; the Nazis invading Britain, France, Norway, etc; and so – a veritable avalanche of wartime action capers, many borrowing freely from popular fiction to embellish the history with fanciful tales of supposed Nazi plots.
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🄰 a good example pertaining to social media of the Nazi fixation is Godwin’s Law (AKA Godwin’s Rule of Analogies) – it states that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will bring up the subject of Hitler or the Nazis
🄱 this aspect of the Nazi memory does of course have a tangible end-date, given every active participant in WWII war crimes still alive would today need to be nearly 100-years-old or older
🄲 including in Allied countries who had fought against the Third Reich such as US, UK, Australia and France
“Drunk History” TV: Removing the “Dryness” from History?
Last year the US cable channel Comedy Central cancelled its totally left-field “educational comedy” program Drunk History after six seasons. On the surface it might seem improbable that a program with such a flimsy premise would have had such a good run in the cut-throat world of American TV. When the show started in 2013 I wouldn’t have put the ancestral home, or even the rustic “lean-to”, on its chances of surviving into a second season. My initial impressions—apparently mistaken (see below)—were that the actors were pretending, not very convincingly and in fact somewhat ham-fistedly, to be drunk.
ˢᵏᵉʷᵉᵈ ﹠ ⁱⁿᵉᵇʳⁱᵃᵗᵉᵈ ᵒᶻ ʰⁱˢᵗᵒʳʸ࿏࿏࿏
It’s relative longevity aside, another thing that surprises me about Drunk History was that the show didn’t really attract much knee-jerk flak from the Temperance Society, AA, fundamentalists of the Religious Right, the Puritan elders or other moral crusaders for its portrayal of people in states of intoxication bordering on the point of being ‘legless’. In the Australian version of ‘Drunk History’ there were some mild rebukes in the media, mostly a bit of tut-tutting from viewers about the dangers of “glamorising excessive binge drinking” in a country with an extensive history of problems with the Demon drink§(David Knox, TV Tonight, 2019).
ᵈᵉʳᵉᵏ ʷᵃᵗᵉʳˢ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᶜˢᵗ ᵒⁿˡⁱⁿᵉ⁾ The germ of the idea for Drunk History came from, of all things, a late night drinking session its co-creator Derek Waters had with a fellow actor (who’d have guessed!) It premiered under the name Funny or Die as a web series in 2008, the debut webisode featured a liberty-taking retelling of the famous Hamilton-Burr duel in 1804. From an unorthodox educational point of view Drunk History is a kind of adult version soulmate of the British children’s comedy series Horrible Histories, a similar serving of factually-based, humorously told anecdotes for junior viewers, which itself is a quantum leap forward pedagogically from 1950s children television fare of this ilk, eg, Peabody’s Improbable History, which consisted of an anthropomorphic cartoon dog who time travels with a naive and extremely annoying boy companion to earlier epochs to do a bit of history mangling.
The format’s opening gambit presents Waters in relaxed drinking mode with guest storyteller…with very little coaxing from Waters the narrator in no time descends into a boozy state and starts to unfurl a rambling, episodic, partially incoherent account of some historical event (the majority but not all from the pages of American history)…then it segues into a scene where actors in appropriate period costume act out the story while lip-synching the narrator‘s words with hilarious results. The narrators are usually stand-up comedians…possessors of the right skillsets for rambunctious story telling of course! Who better to do it than the dudes for whom off-the-lease manic ranting in booze-soaked establishments is second nature?
¹⁸⁰⁰ ᵖʳᵉᶻ ᵉˡᵉᶜᵗⁱᵒⁿ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ᵖⁱⁿᵗᵉʳᵉˢᵗ⁾
࿏࿏࿏
Given the cavalier narration and fabricated and anachronistic dialogue littered with liberal snatches of “hipster-speak” and “dude-speak”, you might suspect Drunk History to be sloppy as to historical accuracy. The producers however went to some pains to be accurate with dates and names and what actually happened in the stories. This can be put down to the efforts of hired UCLA PhD students who did the research heavy lifting to keep the history on the tracks. Special care was also taken with the narrators, tasked with getting sufficiently inebriated to capture the desired mood. As host Waters plies them with drink medics are on hand during the shooting—which took place within the familiar and safe milieu of the narrators’ own homes—just in case the alcohol was getting the upper hand over the comics (apparently this was the case on more than one occasion!) (Justin Monroe, ‘The Sober Reality of Drunk History’, Complex, 01-Sep-2015, www.complex.com).
ⁱⁿᵛᵉⁿᵗⁱⁿᵍ ᶜᵒᶜᵃ⁻ᶜᵒˡᵃ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾࿏࿏࿏
But from being initially sceptical about Drunk History, my opinion mellowed (perhaps helped by imbibing a snifter or two myself during viewing) and I slowly warmed to the series. Ultimately I came to appreciate the novel things it brought… introducing me to hitherto low-profile, perhaps minor historical figures and little known events from the past, eg, invention of Coca-Cola, the birth of Hip Hop, Nikola Tesla’s breakthroughs, Tunnel 57 (1964 Berlin Wall incident), “Dr Feelgood”, Lawnchair Larry flight, Typhoid Mary, “Night Witches” (German WWII military aviatrixes)✪. The storytellers raise a glass or three to forgotten women chauvinistically airbrushed from history, one such ‘minor’ figure unearthed in an episode was 16-year-old Sybil Ludington who made an heroic night-time dash by horse to alert New York citizens of the impending threat from the British forces during the American War of Independence (sound familiar?), and alerting us to the fact of how very differently history remembers Sybil and other females (or doesn’t remember!), compared to the immortal glory and reverence heaped on Paul Revere for his famous ride. Another female heroine getting her due recognition in history from Drunk History is Rose Valland, a Parisian art curator in WWII who thwarted the occupying Nazis’ heist of a huge haul of priceless first rank artworks.
ˢʸᵇⁱˡ’ˢ ʳⁱᵈᵉ ⁽ˢᵒᵘʳᶜᵉ﹕ ⁱᵐᵈᵇ⁾࿏࿏࿏
Giving an extra layer of lustre to the series are the various celebrities appearing in episodes of Drunk History – including “Weird Al” Yankovic as Adolf Hitler, Laura Dern as Nellie Bly, Jack Black as Elvis Presley, Will Ferrell as Abe Lincoln and Ben Folds as Nathan Cherry.
“ʷᵉⁱʳᵈ ᵃˡ ʰⁱᵗˡᵉʳ” ⁽ᵖʰᵒᵗᵒ﹕ ᶜᵒᵐᵉᵈʸ ᶜᵉⁿᵗʳᵃˡ⁾Postscript: Drunk History International The runaway success of the US prototype has spawned a number of international versions, at last count the franchise has extended to the UK, México, Hungary, Brazil, Poland, Argentina and Australia.
🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃 🥃
♚ ♚ ♚ ♚ ♚ ♚ ♚ ♚ ♚ ♚ ♚ ♚
§ ʷʰⁱᶜʰ ᵖᵉʳʰᵃᵖˢ ᵖʳᵒᵐᵖᵗᵉᵈ ᵗʰᵉ ᵖʳᵒᵈᵘᶜᵉʳˢ ᵗᵒ ᵉⁿᵗʳᵉᵃᵗ ᵛⁱᵉʷᵉʳˢ ᵗᵒ “ᵈʳⁱⁿᵏ ʳᵉˢᵖᵒⁿˢⁱᵇˡʸ” ʷʰⁱᶜʰ ᵃᵖᵖᵉᵃʳˢ ⁱⁿ ᵗʰᵉ ᶜˡᵒˢⁱⁿᵍ ᶜʳᵉᵈⁱᵗˢ
✪ ˢᵖᵘʳʳⁱⁿᵍ ᵐᵉ ᵗᵒ ʳᵉˢᵉᵃʳᶜʰ ᵃⁿᵈ ᶠᵃᶜᵗᶜʰᵉᶜᵏ ᵗʰᵉ ʰⁱᵗʰᵉʳᵗᵒ ᵘⁿᶠᵃᵐⁱˡⁱᵃʳ ᵉᵖⁱˢᵒᵈᵉˢ ᵒᶠ ʰⁱˢᵗᵒʳʸ ⁱ ᵉⁿᶜᵒᵘⁿᵗᵉʳᵉᵈ ⁻
Ibn Battūta, Moroccan Explorer of Dar al-Islam and Beyond: The World’s Most Prodigious Wayfarer of Pre-modern Times
Everyone’s heard the story of Marco Polo, his epic journey from Venice via the Silk Road to Cathay (China) and the court of Kublai Khan, and further explorations in Southeast Asia as the Great Khan’s foreign emissary, but much less well known outside the Maghreb and the Middle East are the more impressive peregrinations—in terms of immenseness of scope and distance—of the medieval Moroccan Islamic traveller Ibn Battūta.
Marco Polo’s ‘Travels’Battūta was born in Tangier, Morocco, into a Berber family of legal scholars about 50 years after Marco Polo’s birth. In 1325 the youthful Battūta set off alone initially with the purpose of undertaking the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, but circumstance and curiosity took the Moroccan scholar on a seemingly never-ending series of extended side trips. Over the next 29 years Battūta’s travels took him on a wide arc to the East, visiting virtually all of the Islamic lands including far-off Sumatra (in modern Indonesia). Battūta’s sense of adventure and desire to learn about distant lands led him to extend his journey far beyond Dar al-Islam (the lands of Islam) to visit Dar al-Kufr (the non-Muslim world). As an Islamic scholar Battūta’s travel to ‘infidel’ lands was legitimised by the Islamic principle of Talab al-‘ilm (“search for knowledge”) (Berman, Nina. “Questions of Context: Ibn Battuta and E. W. Bovill on Africa.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no. 2, Indiana University Press, 2003, pp. 199–205, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4618304).
Battūta’s travels (Image: ORIAS – University of California, Berkeley)
Battūta’s world Ibn Battūta’s adventure-packed travels—sometimes on foot, sometimes by sea, often for safety in the company of camel caravans—took him to the lands occupied today by 40 modern countries. Divided into two journeys, the first encompassed North Africa, Central Asia and Russia, the Middle East and Anatolia, India and South Asia, the Maldives, East Africa (down as far as modern Tanzania), Southeast Asia and China. A later, shorter journey took him into the Mali Empire and West Africa (crossing the Sahara to Niger, Timbuktu, etc) and later to Moorish-inhabited Spain.
The top three travellers in Pre-modern history – measured by distance
• Ibn Battūta (Islamic scholar and explorer) approx. 117,000 kilometres • Zheng He (Chinese admiral and explorer) approx. 50,000 kilometres • Marco Polo (Venetian merchant and explorer) approx. 24,000 kilometres
(‘Ibn Battuta’, Wikipedia entry; John Parker World Book Encyclopedia, 2004)
Image: www.history.com
Unreliable memoirs Although Battūta clocked up a phenomenal amount of mileage for a traveller in the Medieval age, many modern scholars believe that Battūta did not visit all of the destinations listed on his Rihla✡ itinerary, the narrative of his journeys. Amikam Elad for instance contends that Battūta plagerised large parts of the travel narrative including the description of Battūta’s travels in Palestine from another Muslim traveller Muhammad al-‘Abduri (Elad, Amikam. “The Description of the Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa in Palestine: Is It Original?” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 2, [Cambridge University Press, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland], 1987, pp. 256–72, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25212152). Doubts also exist about his visits to the city of Sana’a in Yemen, Bolghar via the Volga River and Khorasan et al. Some academics contend that in China Baṭṭūṭa only ever got as far as Quanzhou and Canton. Another false claim was that he witnessed the funeral of the Mongol Great Khan (the reality was no emperor died during Battūta‘s sojourn in China). The Moroccan storyteller borrowed liberally from hearsay evidence in the accounts of earlier Muslim explorers, and from his illustrious Venetian predecessor – the Rihla reveals many similarities in themes and commentataries to Marco Polo’s Travels.
Marco Polo, adapting to Tartar dressPolo/Battūta overlap Both Marco Polo and Ibn Battūta were in a sense oral historians, neither travellers penned a single word of the books they are famous for, instead dictating their travel stories to a scribe. Battūta’s tendency to rely on hearsay to describe some places he didn’t visit (eg, the Great Wall of China) mirrored the larger-than-life Venetian storyteller’s inclinations – Polo described the small island of Ceylon thus, “for its actual size, is better circumstanced than any island in the world”, despite never having set foot on Ceylonese soil (Marco’s contemporaries were well aware that “il Milione” was given to exaggeration).
Battūta/Juzayy’s ‘Rihla’
Battūta’s ghostwriter As Ibn Battūta never kept a journal during his nearly three decades of travel, the Marinid sultan of Fez commanded him to collaborate with court poet Ibn Juzayy who wrote the manuscript of what became A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling☯ based on Baṭṭūṭa‘s recollections. The title was later shortened for convenience to the Rihla☮. The travel book has transparent shortcomings, the format is undercut by extreme chronological inconsistencies. The travelogue relies on Battūta’s memory—Morgan points out that the memory of a traveller understandably may lapse especially if the travels stretch over such a large passage of time (Morgan, D. O. “Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Mongols.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 11, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1–11, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25188080).
Wives, concubines and divorce A curious side feature of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s global footprint is the disclosure in the travelogue of various personal relationships he entered in to. Baṭṭūṭa on arriving at a new town regularly married women and took countless concubines, leaving the (divorced) wives and some of his issue as well behind when he moved on. For an observant Muslim Baṭṭūṭa includes a surprising level of sexual detail pertaining to the local women he encounters on his journeys (Singer, Rachel, ‘Love, Sex, and Marriage in Ibn Battuta’s Travels” (2019). MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference. 1. http://commons.lib.jmu.edu/madrush/2029/love/1).
Though the Rihla was in essence intended as the devotional work of a pious Islamic scholar, its real value lies in its secular insights into the world of the Middle Ages…providing descriptions of diverse and far-flung countries’ geography, personalities, politics, cultural practices, sexual mores and the natural world (‘The Longest Hajj: The Journeys of Ibn Battuta’, Douglas Bullis, Aramco World, July-August 2000, www.archive.aramco.com).
(Photo: History Extra)In the 1350s after Ibn Battūta had finally had his fill of wanderlust and hung up his sandals for good, he settled into an altogether sedentary vocation, appointed as a Qadi (Islamic judge) in his hometown of Tangier.
Endnote: Polo and Battūta didn’t invent fabrication and embellishment in travel writing. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century BCE)—considered both the “father of history” and the world’s ur-travel writer from—was prone to mixing in ”legends and fanciful accounts” to his Histories (Euben, Roxanne L. “LIARS, TRAVELERS, THEORISTS: HERODOTUS AND IBN BATTUTA.” Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 46–89, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t5dw.7).
———————————————————————————————————————— ✡ literally the ‘Travels’
☯ the travelogue’s proper title
☮ the word Rihla strictly speaking refers to a genre of Arab literature rather than the name of the travel book (Bullis)