Weird Words

I feel like the Golden Dustman of "Our Mutual Friend", sifting through the jumbled detritus of the dictionary, with an eye for the oddly shaped, shiny item. In my haphazard searches, I have stumbled across a few remarkable words and phrases. Sometimes the simple fact that there is a word for something is surprising; or the word may suggest that it has a certain meaning while meaning something entirely different; in other cases, the etymology of the word is amusing.

• Ablegate - here's a word of deceptive form that I ran across on 10 July 1999 - it's not the opposite of "Cripplegate", but rather a variety of papal ambassador! The correct way to analyze this word is as ab-legate, where the ab- is the Latin prefix indicating from and -legate is an emissary.
• Ack Emma - is a British slang term for "a.m." as in ante meridian. The phrase derives from a British signalman's letter code, in which Ack stood for A and so on. This is also where the word Ack Ack for anti-aircraft (AA) fire comes from, as well as the origin of the companion term Pip Emma (see PG Wodehouse, somewhere). Now that we know three letters of the code, where's the rest?... (08 September 2000:) Well, I just ran across the phrase Tock Emma for "trench mortar", another phrase that originates in the same code, so we're 4 down and 22 to go. (05 June 2007): Here we go: Ack Beer Charlie Don Edward Freddie Gee Harry Ink Johnnie King London Emma Nuts Oranges Pip Queen Robert Esses Toc Uncle Vic William Xray Yorker Zebra
• Acrolith - you can get some of the meaning of this word from its form; here acro- should be taken to mean extreme rather than high while -lith refers to stone. An acrolith is a statue in which only the extremities (head, hands, and feet) are made of stone, while the other parts are made much more cheaply, of wood, which is then hidden by clever painting or the use of drapery. It is actually common in archaelogical digs to discover a head, hands and feet of a statue, and no "innards"; this is not because of some bizarre underground creature that devours statuary, but rather the age-old human practice of cheapness!
• Aftermath can be derived from after mowth, and refers to the second crop of grass or grain that comes up after mowing. Strictly speaking, it refers to anything that comes after something else; however, aside from being the title of a little-known album by the Rolling Stones, it seems otherwise to be reserved for use in newspapers when referring to hurricanes, wars, and serial killers.
• Amblygon is a triangle containing an obtuse angle, that is, one of measure greater than 90 degrees.
• Andragogy - a neologism that nobody asked for, and nobody will use, except for people who think that you can never be too precise. Cobbled together on the example of pedagogy, whose etymology is "youth+leading", we have this word, which actually means "man(not woman!)+leading". The educators who dug up this word should soon be revising it, once they discover a Greek word that is non-specific for sex.
• Annie Oakley - a free pass or complimentary ticket. Our research department was momentarily unable to explain how the sharpshooter of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and "Annie Get Your Gun" became associated with this idea! But then we discovered the connection: one of Annie Oakley's tricks was to toss a playing card in the air and shoot out the spots. The result was similar to a complimentary ticket, which was typically punched so that it could not be resold. Now there's an odd train of thought!
• Anthrax is related to anthracite, the word for hard coal. Both come from a Greek word meaning "coal". This relationship can be explained by the most remarkable symptom of a cutaneous anthrax infection: the formation of a hard black cyst in the skin, suggesting a pellet of coal. Surprisingly, the French term for anthrax is charbon, which has an obvious relation to carbon.
• The Apocalypse is the title of a book of the New Testament, often styled "Revelations", whose name comes from the Greek apo-kalyptein, meaning to take away the covering. The same root occurs in the word eucalyptus, whose buds are well covered, and in the name of Calypso, the sorceress who kept Odysseus on her island for seven years, and whose name might suggest hidden. The underlying Greek root kalyptein goes forward to Latin celare (as in conceal) and backwards to proto-Indo-European *kel which has a fantastic number of derivations including hell, hole, helmet, hill, hull, hall, color(!), occult, excel, colophon, column.
• Authentish is a coinage employed by Gary Taylor, a professor at Florida State University, and an editor of the Oxford edition of the complete works of Shakespeare. Presuming that a play "Double Falsehood, or the Distressed Lovers", written in 1727 was, as its author Lewis Theobald claimed, based on a lost Shakespeare manuscript based, in turn, on the English translation of Don Quixote, Taylor spent 15 years cutting passages he attributed to Theobald, adding passages from the translation that he believed were cut, and fabricating other passages out of thin air. A New York Times article of 1 March 2006 states that Mr Taylor writes that the result may not be authentic, "but it is at least, I hope, authentish."
• Bacon cooler - a word which was explained, in passing, while discussing a bizarre story in which a man, distraught over a failed love affair, tinkered with the gas lines to his four story brownstone house and blew it up, prompting the neighbors to speculate immediately on the value of the suddenly cleared land, and the number of law suits likely to ensue. A "bacon cooler" is apparently a newspaper writer's term for a news item bizarre enough that a man eating bacon will stop in mid-reach so he can finish reading the story, letting his bacon cool in the mean time.
• Baily's Beads - are bright spots of light that appear around the rim of the solar disk just before an eclipse. The spots are roughly the same size, and look like a string of pearls. Baily was a British astronomer [1774-1844].
• Barmecide - no, this is not murder via the frothy effluvia of beer making. It is the name of a Persian vizier who supposedly put on a banquet for a beggar. At the banquet, costly, but empty, dishes were brought out, and an elaborate ritual feast was mimed, but the poor beggar got no actual food. I don't know yet where this story comes from, though I somehow remember running across it as a child. I have to presume it's from the Arabian Nights;
• Bathycolpian begins with the Greek root "bathy", meaning "deep", and used in the name for Robert Beebe's "bathysphere", a deep-sea submersible, and in the names of various rarely seen fish. But "colpos" is a Greek word meaning "breast", and so bathycolpian is used to mean "deep bosomed", as in a woman with great cleavage.
• beepilepsy is an involuntary spasm caused by the beeping, buzzing, or vibration of a piece of electronic equipment, especially equipment worn in clothing, such as a cell phone or pager. Generally, the severity of spells of beepilepsy decreases with time, but cases are known in which, after two years of familiarity with a given piece of equipment, the beepileptic spasms of one sufferer still reliably amuse acquaintances and passersby.
• A bishop is a sort of a captain of priests. The name comes to English from its Germanic side, where the same word is Bischof. But that word comes from the Greek episkopos, whence we also get the episcopal used to descibe certain churches. Now episcopal simply means "upon-looking" - but this naturally suggests the true meaning, which is a watcher or guardian, or literally, using the Latin form, supervisor, the French form surveillor or the English form overseer. In the days when the Roman Catholic church was crumbling into sects, a great controversy arose over the independence of every worshipper, or of the pastor, or of the congregation, and various solutions arose, one of which was to have a higher order clergy to keep a watchful though non-papal eye on the behavior of each parish. Not to be confused, of course, with Presbyterian churches, where the oversight was done not by a higher-ranking clergy but by elders, aka "old folk", the same sort of people who get presbyopia, or "old eyes", that is, far-sightedness, probably not really the best supervisors!
• Bissextile - neither a swinger, nor someone who's 66 years old, this instead refers to leap years. But it really is saying "two sixes". The explanation is, that back in the really good old days of Roman times, the calendar year ended with February rather than December. When an extra day was required every fourth year, the 24th of February occurred twice. The 24th of February happened to be the "sixth calends of March", that is, the sixth day before the calends (first) of March. (This is back when February had 30 days, but that's ANOTHER story). So a leap year was one which had two sixth calends of March. The more I read about calendars, the more bizarre and haphazard the whole business seems.
• Bizonia, or Bizonesia or the Bizone, was the informal name given to the region of Germany formed by the 1947 merger of the American and British occupation zones. This merger occurred following disputes with the Soviet Union over the administration of its zone, and disagreements over the Soviet's seizure of German production facilities that would otherwise have been used to feed the population. The French had been given a token occupation zone of their own, but refused to merge their zone with those of the Americans and British until 1949, shortly before the formal establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. The establishment of Bizonia, which indicated that the western allies were prepared to act without the cooperation of the Soviet Union, and which ended expectations of the rapid reunification of Germany, is regarded as a definitive step in the onset of the Cold War.
• Blue moon - I don't know why a blue moon is blue, although a factitious folk etymology would be easy to contrive, but the common definition of a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. This only happens occasionally, and occurs because if the moon is full on one of the first few days of the month, there's just enough time for it to go through all its phases, and become full again before the month is out. This doesn't happen that often, just...once in a blue moon.

  The New York Times Sunday Magazine of 31 January 1999 claims that the specific use of the term "blue moon" to mean a month with two full moons was only coined in the early 1980's, by an unidentified NPR commentator!

  The most recent riposte in the controversy showed up in the New York Times on 1 April 1999 (presumably not a hoax!). This claims that in fact the first occurrence was in a 1946 article in Sky and Telescope, which in turn relied on a mistaken reading of a 1937 Maine Farmer's Almanac. Apparently, the Almanac used the term "blue moon" when four full moons occurred in a season, defined as one of the periods between an equinox and a solstice (you know, technical winter, spring, summer and fall). Moreover, when four moons occurred in a season, it was the third moon that was called blue; this was because the Almanac had traditional names for the first, second, and last moons occurring in any quarter. An article correcting this error is supposed to have been printed in the March 1999 issue of Sky and Telescope.

  The bird's eye lowdown on the caper is that, in fact, if you go with the older definition, 1999 does not have any blue moons, and the next one occurs in February 2000. As they say, everything you know is wrong!

• Brummagem - was neither the best friend of Beau Brummel, nor a native of Brobdinag, nor the wife of Pantagruel. This word, which means a cheap, tacky, poorly made item, is a corruption of the name "Birmingham", from which, supposedly, a great quantity of such trifles came at one time. This recalls the words Bedlam, which derived from the slurred name of the "Bethlehem" asylum, maudlin, which was a slurred version of "Magdalene", and stepony, a sweet beverage made of lemon and raisins, associated with the Stepney district of London.
• Bugloss - is a word you might even find difficulty just pronouncing. The suggested pronuciation is BYU-gloss, which already indicates that the word is probably not about the unexpected disappearance of insects. Instead, it is a kind of plant, member of the borage family (whose very name is under etymological dispute). It gets its name from its long hairy lance-shaped leaves, which suggest the tongue of an animal - in particular, that of a cow. The etymology of the name is hence from Greek "bous" (ox) and "glossa" (tongue). The same plant, or its relatives, is also known as ox's tongue, lingua bovina, and Langue de Boeuf. Another member of the borage family has a Latin name of cynoglossum, and is known in English as "hound's tongue".
• Bugonia - is the myth or mistaken belief or misapprehension that bees swarm on carcasses, or form hives in the dead bodies, or are spontaneously generated by the rotting meat. The Greeks seemed to think that bees arose from the bodies of oxen. The etymology of the word comes from "bous" for "ox" (compare "boustrephon" and "the Bosphorous" and "Bucephalus" and "bovine") and "gon" for "generation" (compare "gonad"). Virgil in his Georgics describes the story of Aristaeus and the discovery of bugonia, in his mind a useful technique by which a farmer, short of bees, may make up a new swarm by slaughtering an ox and waiting... This idea even shows up in the Bible, where Samson poses a riddle after seeing bees in the body of a dead lion.

  Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.

  However, bees most certainly do not nest in dead meat. On the other hand, a vast variety of flies do exactly this! One variety in particular is known as the drone fly. It looks and acts like a bee, and its maggots indeed live in carrion. In fact, the maggots are known as rat tail maggots because of the long appendage at the end of the body, which is actually not a tail, but rather a breathing tube necessary when the maggot has burrowed deep into the rotting and liquefying meat. Presumably, the myth of bugonia arose from observations of bodies of dead oxen, infested with maggots and crawling with newly matured drone flies.
• Butter sounds like one of those irreducible words that just can't be analyzed. However, it does have a derivation, and a clear relationship to a family of words that include bulimia, Bucephalus, Bosphorus, boustrophedon, bugle, bison, bovine, bucolic, buphthalmum and even the dreaded bugonia. The common "etymological gene" is, of course, the Greek root "bous" for "ox" or "cattle". Butter gets its name from "bous" + "tyron" which means "cheese". Of course, "cow cheese" doesn't sound silly to Greeks because "goat cheese" makes more sense to them! We've mentioned some "relatives" of "butter", and so we should explain that bulimia means "ox hunger", Bucephalus, the name of Alexander's horse, is best suggested by "bull-headed" (as in "stubborn"), Bosphorus means literally "cattle crossing", although it supposedly gets its name as the place where Io crossed to Asia, after having been turned into an ox by Zeus, boustrophedon refers to writing or printing that goes left-to-right, then right-to-left on the next line, and roughly translates as "as the ox plows", bugle gets its name because its sound imitates the lowing of an ox, bucolic refers to an idealized pastoral setting, and buphthalmum is a flower also known as "ox eye", although a person who is buphthalmic may need to see a doctor - or a cosmetic surgeon.
• A Caliper is a hinged device, something like a pair of scissors or a compass, which can be used to measure size by grasping an object. The separation of the ends of the long side of the device can be displayed as a measurement on a scale on the short side. The word is also spelled calliper, and was originally used in the phrase caliper compass. The word is related to caliber, derived from the French calibre, meaning "size" or "measurement". This word, in turn, seems to come from the Arabic qalib, which described a shoemaker's wooden mold, and that word can be traced to the Greek kalopodion or "wood-foot", which described the same thing. An alternative, less interesting but perhaps more plausible derivation suggests the Latin phrase qua libra, that is, "what weight?".
• CamelCase describes phrases (usually names) that are written using internal capitalization to indicate the beginnings of the constituent words. A further distinction is made by the term sulkingCamelCase or lowerCamelCase, which denotes the presentation of phrases in which the initial word is not capitalized. The name CamelCase is inspired by the similarity of the appearance of the internal capital letters to the humps on a camel. The use of CamelCase is common in trademarks and brandnames, where it helps to maintain the readability of words that have been jammed together to form a single entity; it is also a very common means of writing identifiers for variables in computer programs. In some computer languages the use of CamelCase is actually prescribed. In Java, for instance, lowerCamelCase is to be used for members and instances, while UpperCamelCase is used for the names of classes. Alternative methods of naming variables in computer programs begin with the primitive methods of abbreviating the words, or simply running them all together, or actually leaving spaces between the words (which was legal in FORTRAN77 but not in later versions of FORTRAN), the use of hyphens (dangerous because the hyphen is also the minus sign!) and underscores (which some people avoid because of the awkward placement of the underscore character on the keyboard). When I was presenting some sample MATLAB programs to a summer class of undergraduates, they all were made uncomfortable by my use of underscores in variable names, and in their own programs immediately reverted to CamelCase. "That's what we were taught by our professors," they said. "Your way looks funny!"
• care-about means something about which one cares, of course. This bizarre business-speak formation occurred in an interview with Bruce S Gordon, formerly of Verizon and now the president of the NAACP, in an interview published in the New York Times Magazine, 10 July 2005:

  (Gordon:) I'd like to find something that we as an organization care about that he, too, cares about so that he can take the Bush tenacity and direct it at that care-about.
  (Interviewer:) "Care-about"? Is that a noun?
  (Gordon:) Yes, and please attribute it to me in the future.

• Cat Latin is incoherent talk. Latin shows up as an archetypal foreign languange in other phrases, including
  • Dog Latin, bad or barbarous Latin;
  • Pig Latin, a simple children's code;
  • Thieves's Latin, a slang or argot used to disguise one's meaning;
• Chaditude - the name of a campaign by Francois Tombalbaye, president of Chad in the early '70's, whose explicit goal was to replace European influences in Chad by native authenticity, and whose implicit purpose was to destroy opposition to his rule. Some of the simpler effects included renaming himself "Ngarta Tombalbaye", changing various place names, forcing out foreign missionaries, and requiring that applicants for government jobs undergo traditional "yondo" initiation rites. Compare with the similar concept of Ivoirite, which was initially invoked to describe the common cultural identity of all inhabitants of the Ivory Coast, but quickly degenerated into a shibboleth used to denigrate the substantial population of immigrants from nearby regions.
• Chiasm - information from the left and right eyes goes back to the visual cortex along thick optic nerves. About halfway along this path, the nerves meet, and seem to cross. Actually, some of the nerve bundles on the left go left, and some right; the eyes are actually exchanging some information. This crossing area is called the optic chiasm, and oddly enough, the word derives from the X-shape of the Greek letter chi. Chiasm or chiasmus was originally used for a sort of inversion in literature, such as "He left Egypt; Egypt was left by her;" and "Never let a kiss fool you or a fool kiss you".
• Cinemacy, derived from "literacy" as applied to movies, but intended to suggest a higher level of experience, understanding and judgment than that exhibited by the passive idle viewer.

  "In the case of the moving picture, the historian would need to have basic 'cinemacy', as Professor Thorold Dickinson liked to call it, to which he could add some reading about the particular cinematic devices of different genres."

  The Moving Picture and Historical Research, by Nicholas Pronay, Journal of Contemporary History, 1983.
• Circumjovialist is not a round, jolly person, but something (any planet, in fact) that travels around Jupiter, whose variant Latin name was Jove. This term for Jupiter's planets was used back in the 1700's. (The word jovial itself has the same derivation; it has come to mean jolly or companionable, but originally meant godlike, enthused or inspired.)
• Cockamamie is one of those words whose bizarre form makes it seem like a loan-word from Mars. It's been a pet word of my friend Jim Fink, partly because it sounds enough like a bad word to get attention. While everyone understands that it means "crazy", "deranged" or "off the wall", it would seem to have no etymology, and to be simply an invented word.

  However, there is reasonable evidence suggesting that "cockamamie", in fact, derives from decalcomania, a word describing the fad of using decals, which could be either tattoos transferable from paper to the skin, or printed designs that could be copied onto a wall, furniture or other surfaces. Surprisingly, this fad supposedly reached its height between 1862 and 1864, suggesting (which is true) that the age of mass hysteria has been with us a mite longer than is fashionable to suppose. What was on those decals, and why they became so devilishly popular, is left for a diligent researcher to discover and report. In a note about the etymology, it is suggested that it ended up being "cockamamie", because nobody on the East Side could pronounce "decalcomania", let alone spell it!

• Defenestration is the ejection of someone or something through a window. Note the related cognates in German: Fenster and French: fenetre which both mean "window". This word attains its notoriety primarily because of a historical incident known as "The Defenestration of Prague": In 1419, followers of Jan Huss threw seven members of the town council out the window of the New Town Hall, and onto the pikes of Hussite supporters below.

  Surprisingly, in 1618, there was a "Second Defenestration of Prague", in which two vice regents of the emperor, and several governors, were tossed out the window of Prague Castle during an uprising. In this case, there is supposed to be a happier ending, for the castle moat was full of straw and garbage. On the other hand, this incident touched off the catastrophic Thirty Years War.

  The word has recently been extended to indicate the removal of the Microsoft Windows Operating System from a personal computer in favor, typically, of Linux.

• demijohn - is a volume measurement, and a barrel of that volume. (People who laugh at anything will joke that a demijohn is half a lavatory; people whose thoughts start and stop at the dictionary will parrot that it is a large glass container often wrapped in straw.) It might seem logical to guess that a demijohn is a barrel that is half the volume of a "john", but there is no such measurement, and the source of the word is obscure. One guess is that the name derives from dame Jeanne, supposedly a French name for the same barrel size, although this just casts the question over the English Channel. Traditionally, a demijohn is a standard measurement for a barrel of wine, corresponding to roughly 24 bottles of wine, or about 627 fluid ounces.

  Cash for the hard goods,
  Cash for the fancy goods,
  Cash for the soft goods,
  Cash for the noggins and the piggins and the firkins,
  Cash for the hogshead, cask and demijohn,
  Cash for the crackers and the pickles and the flypaper.

  (From "Rock Island", in "The Music Man", by Meredith Willson.
• Denizing - reading "Lord Churchill's Coup" by Stephen Webb, I was told that Mary Hyde, first wife of James II, because she was English, did not have the task of denizing her daughters Mary and Anne (who both later became queens of England). I suspected this was a typographical error, only to learn that in English law, until around 1914, there was a standard procedure to elevate a foreigner to the status of denizen, who then acquired a superior set of rights over a mere visitor, while falling short of citizenship.
• Deodand - it doesn't make you smell good, except maybe in God's eyes. A deodand is an item of property that has been directly instrumental in the death of a person. It is therefore forfeited to the king or state, and then used in some pious purpose.
• depeaked means to level out, as in

  Many long lines occur when a large number of flights leave one terminal at about the same time. Lines have been dramatically shortened when airline schedules were depeaked.

  USA Today, 15 July 2005
• derection, the gradual, natural subsidence of a spontaneous, random erection, or the sudden collapse of an erotic erection from surprise, shock, disgust, embarassment, or discovery.
• Dermagraphia - literally meaning "skin writing", which you might think involved parchment, say. Oh, no. The sister of a friend of mine came home from a reception with terrible itching on her back. Her husband tried to relieve it by rubbing her back, but got concerned at how red and irritated it looked, and sent her to the doctor. The doctor asked about her symptoms, then laughed and traced her name across her stomach. Within seconds, her name was traced out in angry red raised letters on her skin. "You've been eating seafood, and you're allergic to it!" he said. "Your skin has a primitive immune response which has been excited, and any pressure on the skin will cause it to swell up with histamines."
• Dord - means "density" said the dictionary. It was a mistake. What was meant was "D or d means density", but somehow the spaces got omitted and a new word was briefly coined, not that anyone was likely to have used it. I finally spotted this mistake with my own eyes on 06 May 1999, in Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition (a big old tattered unabridged dictionary lying around in the ISU Mathematics Office). This is an example of a ghost word. Another example is foupe, which appears in Samuel Johnson's dictionary, because he mistook an old-fashioned long s for an f in an old spelling of soup.
• Dvandva - refers to a kind of compound word formed by a pairing of two words, neither of which is subordinate to the other. The compound can be thought of as formed by omitting the "and" that could naturally be used between the two words. The term comes from Sanskrit, in which this form of compounding is common, and is derived from "dva", which means "two". Examples of dvandvas include "singer-songwriter" and "bittersweet".
• Ecnalubma, a kind of vehicle, full of sick people, and chased by reywals.
• Elapidation is the destruction of a building by the removal of the stones that form it. This etymology explains, as well, the word delapidate, both sharing the root lapis for stone, which also gives us lapidary and lapis lazuli. The existence of the word suggests that back in the old days, it was common practice to use neglected buildings as a cheap source of building blocks. Throughout the realm of ancient buildings, in fact, there are recognizable pillars and tablets and chunks of facing removed from even more ancient buildings. On a lighter note, we may suppose that the operator of a lithotripter can be styled an elapidator!
• The Eleventh Hour means "very late" or "at the last possible moment". The phrase is actually used in a parable of Jesus in the New Testament, where workers who came at the eleventh hour were paid as much as those who had worked all day. Presumably, the measurement of time was different in Biblical times, but the suggestion is that the day time was divided into twelve hours, ending at sundown. In any case, the phrase is liable to raise the puzzling question of "why not the twelfth hour?" There is an annoying ambiguity that means it's not clear whether there's a zeroth hour or a twelfth hour in the day; what do you call the time from noon to one? The first hour, surely. But then 1 to 2 is the second hour, and 11 to 12 is the TWELFTH hour. This is the same peculiar detail that gives us a 20th century full of years beginning with 19's. And don't get me started on the year zero or not. My feeling there is that year numbering was all done retroactively, and fictitiously, so whether Dionysius Exiguus could count to zero or not doesn't concern me one bit.
• Endianness or Endianess: the note on the door made perfect sense to me:

  Files shock.tar and gulf.tar; you may need to worry about endianness.

  The files where computer files of course, and were being transferred from one computer to another. They contained numeric data, and so the transfer would have to be done keeping in mind that different computers have different conventions about the coding and decoding of numeric data. To begin with, the "atom" of computer information is the bit, a 0 or 1, but usually programs deal with groups of 8 bits, called a "byte", which can be used to represent an integer between 0 and 255, or a character (simply by assigning an index to each character, using for example the ASCII system). But bytes themselves come in groups of 4, making what is called a computer "word". And here is where some trouble begins. To start with, you can represent a word by 32 0's or 1's, perhaps with a bar to mark the byte divisions:

              10010100 | 00110100 | 00011100 | 00100011

  and you have to decide on how to number these bytes. For sensible reasons, the bits are numbered from right to left, starting with 0; this can cause no end of confusion because our convention learned from reading left to right would put the first bit on the left. But the next problem occurs when we want to store an object made up of several bytes, in particular, a real number which uses a full word, or four bytes. There is a fairly standard way of converting a real number like 21.345 into a 32 bit binary code, and it's natural to think of that binary code in terms of the equivalent 4 bytes. Let's say the number 21.345 can be represented (on paper) by the letters "AcGZ". To store the value of the number, we need to put these letters into a computer word. There are again good reasons for doing it left to right, or right to left, and so we get the representations:

              A | c | G | Z

  or

              Z | G | c | A

  Now it doesn't matter which way you go, as long as you are consistent; the problem occurs when sending information to another computer whose convention is different. There are a number of such arbitrary conventions in computer coding, in which humanity has come to a fork in the road and gone both ways, causing pointless trouble later. The choices in this particular case have been baptized "big endian" and "little endian", inspired by the bickering factions in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, who differed over which end of an egg should be broken before eating.
• Endorse - which means to "authorize" or "approve" or "recommend", comes to us from old English, via old French, from Latin. The minute you realize that it's a "meaningful" word, you realize that it means "on the back"and that we still "endorse" a check by signing it on the "dorsal" or back side.
• Epigram - literally "Upon-Writing" - Recently, 112 unknown poems by the poet Posidippus were discovered in the papyrus lining of a mummy. Posidippus was an epigrammatist who had begun the process of regarding epigrams as an art form, suitable for collection in a book. Originally, an epigram was a dedicatory or admonitory verse "written upon" a column, a statue, the wall of a house, and was necessarily brief (you try writing in stone!).
• Esquivalience - n. the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities...late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, "dodge, slink away."...This is an example of a fake word, inserted into a dictionary to protect its copyright. In this case, the word was inserted into the second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary, as described in The New Yorker, 29 August 2005.
• Example is hardly a weird word, but it's unusual in that its explication is pleasing (at least it was to me). I was reading "Barcelona, the Great Enchantress", by Robert Hughes, and he expounded on "that singular piece of nineteenth-century urban planning, the Eixample, or 'enlargement' of Barcelona into a grid of equal squares". I realized, excitedly, that the Catalan word Eixample was related to our English example, and that its meaning exquisitely reminded me that the Latin roots must mean, more or less, 'out-plenty'. In other words, or for example, or to fill out my explanation, an example is something that expands or fleshes out a discussion.
• Expectorate might seem to mean "spit"; it actually describes that horrid (or uniquely satisfying) experience of mustering one's phlegm into a suitable hunk that can be propelled up the throat and out into the world. This is the function of medicines labeled "expectorants", since a buildup of fluids and phlegm in the lungs can inhibit breathing. The meaning of the word can actually be puzzled out from its roots, since it comes from "ex - pector" or "from the chest", which clearly does not describe spitting, but does correspond to phlegm-flinging or "hawking".
• Exude isn't all that weird, I supposed, except that its meaning hit me a day or two after I had incorrectly filled in a crossword puzzle with "exude" when "exert" was desired, corresponding to the clue "put forth". I was walking down the street, laughing about an advertisement for a new local clinic called "The South Florida Center for Sweaty Palms" when I recalled that the Latin for sweat is "sudor", and that exude must come from "ex-sudare" mean "out-to sweat", or to emit from pores, or simply to emit.
• Fencible is a surprise because it seems to be made of recognizable word parts, and yet the result is indeterminate. The word is historic, and refers to British regiments raised as a sort of home guard, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Local fisherman were also recruited into what was known as the Sea Fencibles. The word appears in Scottish records, referring to men capable of bearing arms, and of buildings and structures that can be used as defensive fortresses. The relationship to fencing and fence and defence suggests how this unusual word came about.
• Futhark is the name of the runic alphabet, you know, those vertical bars with little diagonal shoots here and there that you find so often carved into rocks in Minnesota. But I just found out that the alphabet gets its name from its first six letters: "f", "u", "th", "a", "r" and "c". Why can't they name their alphabet more sensibly, like ours?
• Futilitarian describes a person who, for obscure reason, obstinately persists in actions, relationships, or goals which, to other observers, are obviously unobtainable or pointless. As a friend pointed out to me:

  Several years ago, I had a good student who insisted on using Mathematica to solve a problem associated with his senior project and ignored my efforts to get him to switch to MATLAB. He would start a computation on a computer and have it run for days. He taped a piece of paper to the monitor asking others not to disturb the machine while it was chugging away. I decided to do a MATLAB computation myself and got an answer in half an hour - and I'm a lousy programmer. I would call him a futilitarian.

• Galactagogue - here's a word with a pleasant rhythm, a surprising definition, and a reasonable etymology. I really just ran across this word while leafing through a dictionary on 09 June 1999. It means any substance that promotes the production of milk. This might include the hormone shots given to mothers of premature babies, as well as the stuff they use to make cows go into hyperdrive. By the way, the fact that this word sounds like galaxy is no accident. Just think of the fact that our galaxy is named "The Milky Way". For that matter, agalaxy refers to a condition in which a mother is unable to produce milk for her baby.
• Gang Week ...is actually a time in the Calendar of the Catholic Church, more commonly known as Rogation Week, and more about all this later!
• Georgics is a poem by Virgil, published around the year 29 BC. It is generally described as "pastoral poetry", which I was told meant stories of shepherds and country living. But I never understood where the name came from. Then I met a man from Greece named Giorgios, who suggested I just call him George, and asked me if I knew the etymology of his name. "Geo- you should recognize from geography and geology and so on, just means earth. The -orge part is related to the erg in energy and urge and surgeon (kheirourgos, hand worker) and litury and organ and ergodic and allergy and argon (!), and just means "work". George is the name of a farmer." And that's why Virgil's poem about living in the country is called Georgics!
• Gisting, that is, to extract the "gist" of a text or conversation. In the age of computer text analysis, this has now become a standard technical term. Around him, Hebrew linguists were furiously "gisting" - summarizing - the conversations between Israeli pilots, while other crew members attempted to combine that information with signals from airborne radar obtained through electronic intelligence. James Bamford, 'Body of Secrets'.
• Globish is a form of English based on a severely-restricted vocabulary of about 1500 words, suitable for basic communication. Globish was proposed by Jean-Paul Nerriere. Globish is related to the Voice of America's Special English, which uses a limited vocabulary of 1500 words, simple sentence structures, and a slow speaking pace, to Simplified English, a form of English developed for aerospace documentation and communication, and Charles Ogden's Basic English, which used 850 words and a simplified grammar, as described in his book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar.
• A Googleganger is another person of the same name, whose records are intermixed with your own when you "Google" yourself, that is, do an Internet search for web pages that mention you. There is an odd thrill in discovering another person with the same name; an urge to contact them, and ask them their favorite music, their family history and so on. This is an inspired takeoff from the German word Doppelgaenger, or "double goer", a term used to describe a soul mate, a psychic double, or another person with whom one's fate was intertwined.
• Gorgeous is a word whose etymology demonstrates how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, though a little more knowledge is often enough to set you right. In this case, the root gorge- suggests "eating" or "devouring", and so a folk etymology is obvious: gorgeous means "edible beauty", that is, something so pretty you are tempted to eat it. But that would be wrong. The fossil record of words makes clear that the ultimate parent of gorgeous is, indeed, the root gorge-, which does not so much mean "eat" as it does "throat" or "narrow channel". But the descent of meaning is something like the following: gorge is taken to denote the throat, and then various things around the throat get similar names. A gorget is a piece of throat armor, and a gorgias was a neckerchief. Then, the use of fancy, colorful neckerchiefs spawned the word gorgayse, meaning "elegant", "dressy", or "showy", and now the final step to gorgeous, meaning "beautiful" or "captivating", is easy to anticipate.
• A grampus is a whale; when I first heard this word in class, I wasn't the only one who couldn't help laughing. It's just such an odd sound. But it turns out to have an understandable origin in the French phrase gran pisce or "big fish".
• Greek Calends is a sort of joke that comes from Latin, and is an indirect way of saying "never", since, unlike the Latin calendar, the Greek calendar had no calends. As Wimpy says, "I'll gladly pay you on the Greek Calends for a gyro today."
• A gurgitator is a person who competes "professionally" in an eating contest; the prime example is Takeru Kobayashi, who has downed 50 hot dogs (with buns) in 12 minutes at the annual Nathan's Hot Dogs challenge; there is, in fact, a newsletter for competitors, called "The Gurgitator". The word is a back-formation from "regurgitator" which has respective Latin origins from the root "gurga" or "gurges", meaning "throat".
• Himation is a strange word mainly because it looks familiar, but you can't figure out what it's trying to tell you. And then you can't even be sure how to pronounce it. It turns out this is the name for a kind of robe that the ancient Greeks wore, both men and women, draped over one arm and under the other. How that makes for an acceptable garment is a question I haven't considered. On the other hand, it also brings to mind another word that just looks strange, Bagration. I think I ran across this as part of the title of a musical piece, or the name of a military offensive, but you could tell it was a word with a meaning. And yet, it looks so much like bag ration that my mind shuts down...only to discover that it's "merely" the name of a Russian general who fought Napoleon. Of course, his real name is hidden in Cyrillic, and what we have is just one of several possible transliterations.
• A hotbed is a source of trouble, irritation, revolt, or unquiet. But how did such a word arise? Because a hot bed is uncomfortable? The word is actually a perfectly ordinary term from gardening. When scraps of vegetables, grass cuttings, wet leaves, wood chips and other such matter are heaped together and given some moisture, a natural process of rotting begins which takes on some aspects of fermentation. In particular, a considerable and steady amount of heat can be emitted as the material decomposes. This is called a hotbed, and can be valuable not merely for the fine rich organic matter that results, but also for the protection from frost that the warmth gives to plants placed near or even within the hotbed.
• The Innominate Bone is the official name of the two bones that make up the pelvic basin - and of course, the name means the "unnamed" bone. This is a step up in self contradiction, beyond unmentionables and the indescribable.
• Illiterature seems like a joke word, but has a sensible meaning, as used by Albert Friedman, in "The Viking Book of Folk Ballads":

  Ballads are songs or performances, not poems. They are not literature, but illiterature.

  His point here is that illiterature is the form in which unlettered people store, as best they can, their culture. Friedman's introduction to the book includes a very interesting story that suggests the conflict between literature and illiterature:

  Sir Walter Scott thought to flatter an old Scotswoman from whose singing he had taken down a number of ballads by showing her the printed texts of the pieces she had sung to him. But the old woman was more annoyed than amused. He had spoiled them altogether, she complained. "They were made for singing and no for reading, but ye has broken the charm now and they'll never be sung mair. And the wars thing o' a', they're nouther right spell'd, nor right setten down".

• Insinnuendo is a joking combination of "innuendo" and "insinuation", both of which have the meaning of an indirect suggestion of an improper or insulting nature. I have heard this word from time to time, intended either as cleverness, or as a suggestion of illiteracy, but was shocked to run across it in the venerable pages of Samuel Butler's posthumously published novel The Way of All Flesh:

  ...I'm as young as I ever was. Old, indeed! There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle. I hate his nasty insinuendos.

  The novel was written in 1884, but not published til 1902. It is always startling to come across evidence, in an old story or poem, that some words or phrases go back far beyond our own times. In this same book, Butler uses the word gay to describe a woman who has many gentleman callers at all hours, and who goes out a lot at night, and mentions that the hero was only able to comprehend a particular idea after it had dinged against his mind many times.
• Inter means to bury. But the form of the word itself tells us that, for it comes from the Latin roots "in-" and "terra" (earth); thus, too, the movie "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" has the Spanish title "Los tres entierros de Melquiades Estrada" and the French title "Trois Enterrements", in both of which you can pick out the relative of inter in a form that makes the "terra" more obvious. Surprisingly, there seems to be no word "exter", or at least my dictionary doesn't think so. Instead, we have "exhume", from the Latin root "humus" for earth; it seems unfair, or at least asymmetric, that the corresponding word "inhume" is still in use. (By the way, the word "bury" comes from a Germanic root meaning to hide.) Other ways of getting rid of remains include being "enurned", "encrypted", or "entombed"; however, one does not "engrave" the remains!
• Iron Curtain: In 1946, in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton Missouri, Winston Churchill solemnly warned that

  "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent."

  I thought Churchill had invented the phrase "iron curtain", but, as you would know if you watched Alfred Hitchcock's movie Stage Fright, there really was such a thing as an iron curtain, or at least that's what they called the fire-proof partition that could be quickly dropped from the flies to separate the audience from the stage, in case of a fire.
• Kleenex Code is a program written to be used once and then discarded. Such programs, of course, are usually not optimized, nor worth optimizing. (Observed during a presentation by an Intel representative, 10 March 2012.)
• Lakish came up when Marcus Garvie was trying to set up a convection-diffusion problem for the density of algae in a lake. He planned to take a satellite image of Lake Superior and use the processed image with his program. But then he decided that he had better use a lesser-known lake. But as he scanned over the vast array of satellite images of lakes, he complained,

  "There was always something wrong with every one of them. None of them looked quite lakish enough."

  Failing to find a suitable actual Ur-lake, he took the Slartibartfastian approach of designing his own, without, I suppose, all those fiddly bits.
• Lippitude simply means "soreness of eyes" or "bleariness". It's a word of medical background, naturally, with a proper Latin root. The only weird thing about it is its amusing form and sound.

• Mall, the church of the new religion, has a curious etymology that relates it to the word for hammer!. This word for an enclosed shopping area was an extension of its use for a tree-lined pedestrian walkway or shopping zone. Now you might recall a brand of cigarettes named Pall Mall; there actually was a place in London with this name; a site for the game of pall mall. The object of this game was to strike a ball with a mallet, aiming for it to go through an iron ring at the other end of an alley (this makes it sound like a cross between golf and that gladiatorial Aztec basketball game!) For some reason - perhaps the noise of the crowd or the frequent beaning of spectators - the game was thought to be unruly or even violent, and the word pell mell was born here too.

  The reason for the name of the game was that it came from France, where it was called palemale which had in turn introduced it from Italy, where it was called palla maglo, meaning "ball mallet". The Italian word maglo and the English word mallet both come from the Latin malleus which means "hammer". So enjoy your shopping trip to the "Hamm"!

• Mastodon: You wouldn't think that the first thing a cave man would say upon encountering a Mastodon would be "Dig those weird ivories!", but paleologists are a more refined species, and so they latched onto the strange shape of the teeth of this creature, whose biting surface reminded them of nipples, and came up with "breast tooth" from the Greek Mazos and Odont.
• Mathiness

  "Mathiness: a series of fervent gestures that gives the impression that mathematical ideas are being expressed, but doesn't deliver the goods";

  Jordan Ellenberg.
• Manyplies is a term for the third stomach of a ruminant, which has a complex folded structure. In fact, manyplies and multiplex and manifold are cognate words. The manyplies is also known as the omasum or the psalterium.
• Minned out:

  The film could not get much worse, because the stars themselves were incapable of getting any worse. They had minned out.

  Joe Queenan, "Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon".
• Mountweazel is a word or item inserted into a dictionary or reference work in order to protect copyright. Unlike the other items in the work, a Mountweazel is intended to betray people who copy data from reference works and republish it as their own. The term derives from a fictitious entry in the 1975 edition New Columbia Encyclopedia, which contains an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who published a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes called "Flags Up!", was born in Bangs, Ohio, and died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine. See also esquivalience. This information comes from an article by Henry Alford in The New Yorker, 29 August 2005.
• Murdrum was a fine paid under Norman law by the hundred (a local community) if a person was slain and the slayer was not produced. The fine could be avoided if the kinsfolk of the murdered man came forward and proved that he was of English birth, rather than Franco-Norman. (Presumably, the other members of the community would put heavy pressure on the family to do this and avoid the fine!) This plea was called presentment of Englishry!
• Morton's Fork refers to a sort of logical wordplay or paradox equivalent to "damned if you do, damned if you don't". John Morton was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Henry VII. In those days, an Archbishop was literally a landlord, and had to come up with his income by taxing his tenants. Morton was particularly relentless in requiring everyone to pay, rich or poor. His argument was that if you were rich, you were already spending plenty of money, and hence could spare some for his taxes; if your were poor, then you were holding onto your money, so you must have some to pay him. With this two-pronged argument, he was able to catch everyone. Back in those days, forks, if they were used at all, had two prongs. And so such an argument has come to be known as Morton's Fork.
• Namba - sometimes a definition is too funny for it even to matter whether it is true. I got this from the New York Times, and it wasn't April Fool's Day. Supposedly, namba is the Japanese traditional style of walking, namely, the right arm and leg swing forward together, then the left arm and leg. Why this should be preferred one cannot imagine. The story claimed that horses used in ritual archery were also trained in namba. For training these horses, it was necessary to tie a wooden board to both right legs, and another to both left, so that the legs had to be moved together. How a horse could possibly move in such a manner without collapse is beyond my imagination. Of course, you don't have to be Japanese or ancient to nambulate! I managed to get Michael Lambert and Elvira Prologo to nambulate with me down the hallway. It was quite a sight.
• Nasturtium is a flower with a sharp smell, and its name comes from two Latin words that together mean Nose Twister!
• Neck Verse is a written passage, read aloud by a condemned man to prove that he is literate, and hence can claim benefit of clergy, that is, exemption from hanging. Usually, the passage to be read was the first verse of Psalm 51.
• Newark, New Jersey is thought of as a run-down crime-ridden industrial unlovely city. One might simply assume it was named for some count or duke or a hamlet in England. But instead, the origin of its name goes back to a religious dispute. In Colonial times, the New England Congregationalist church only admitted members who had had a direct and personal conversion experience, which was deemed to be the sign of a covenant between them and God. Of course, these people had children, and the children were deemed to be entitled to membership in the church because they shared in the covenant of their parents, except that they were not included in the ceremony of the Lord's Supper. As these children grew up, came of age, and themselves had children, a new issue arose, for the question was whether the privilege granted to the children should be extended automatically to grandchildren. In 1662, it was decided that grandchildren should have the same membership rights, a status derisively known as "the Half-Way Covenant". Many of the member churches seceded over this controversy. More controversy arose because the colony of New Haven was forcibly merged into Connecticut, whose constitution allowed the baptism of children irrespective of the church membership of the parents. At this time, governor Carteret of New Jersey was soliciting New Englanders to come and settle, with substantial promises of religious freedom. About thirty families took the offer and sailed up the Passaic river to found what they called "The New Plantation of New-Ark on the Pesayack", that is, the New Ark of the Covenant!
• The Nocebo Effect is a counterpart to the "placebo effect". In double blind trials of medicines, it is common for patients to be divided into two groups, one given the actual medicine and the other a chemically inert substance, such as a sugar pill. Both groups must read an informed consent form setting out all the imagined possible side effects of the medication. It is common, during the trial, for patients who are receiving the sugar pill to report many of the prescribed side effects; at the end of the trials, there have even been cases in which such patients have complained of withdrawal symptoms!
• Obliterate comes from the Latin ob literate; the ob is a fascinating prefix responsible for obstreperous, obnoxious, obstinate, obstruction and other words that immediately suggest its meaning of "contrary", "counter", "against". "Obliterate" comes to its meaning of "destroy" via the idea of "wiping out" or "wiping away" letters that are written.
• Osprey is a name that seems to derive either from the Latin avis prede for "bird of prey", or more likely as a corruption of its other name, ossifrage, which is clearly derived from the Latin ossifragous for "bone breaker".
• Othering: Modern observers make much of the idea that people can become outcast as a group, or that focussing on some people as a group is preparatory to casting them out, because of a natural pyschological reaction called "fear of the other". The word "other" is so commonly used in such discussions that it has now caused the creation of a somewhat bizarre verb form, "to other", that is, to treat someone as an other, an alien or stranger, as used in this quote from Slate magazine, 11 August 2016:

  "More than anything, Trump has built his campaign on (white) America's fears of the other, and what better way for him to harness those than by othering the sitting president of the United States, be it by questioning his citizenship, his faith, or his loyalty."

• A Palimpsest is a manuscript written on "recycled paper". Parchment, in particular, could be reused if the ink was scraped or rubbed off it. This economizing has been a blessing for historians who've been able to read the faint markings of the older inscription. This was how an entire mathematical book of Archimedes was discovered. The word comes from Greek roots palin ("again" or "back") and psen ("rub"). The word palindrome is related, where dromos is Greek for "run", and a palindrome is a word that "runs back" as well as forward.
• A Pants Squirrel can best be described by Amy Yasbeck, TV actress and wife of John Ritter:

  When I was a teenager, you'd take off your Jordaches really fast at night, then jump up in the morning and put them back on again. Somewhere at school you'd look down and see your pants squirrel, yesterday's rolled-up underwear, somewhere around your knee. Those Jordaches were so tight!

• Paxwax means a neck ligament. The original Old English word was apparently faxwax, with fax meaning "hair" and wax having the meaning "grow". This in turn suggests that the word fairfax means "fair-haired", and if I was more sure of my old roots, I'd venture a guess as to the meaning of colfax, and ask for your help with carfax. Variant forms of paxwax include faxwax, packwax, paxywaxy and fixfax; In fixfax, the fix suggests "holding up" or "holding steady"; fixfax is also Scottish dialect for the stocks, in which the head is "fixed".
• A Penny Farthing was one of those very early bicycles that had a large front wheel and much smaller back wheel. How these things could be stable is hard to imagine! The name comes from the fact that an English penny (large) placed next to an English farthing coin (small) made a tolerable image of the relative sizes of the wheels.
• A Penny Hang is noted as (Sailor's Slang) and after you hear the description, the squalid practicality ensures that the phrase can claim no more likely heritage. A penny hang was an establishment common in port cities, and located in a cellar or basement. It featured hooks in the walls, with ropes strung in parallel from one side to another at about shoulder height. In the late evening, drunk and exhausted "clients", who had spent all their money, or were too boisterous to be allowed anywhere else, would enter the penny hang, after paying a penny, and then drape themselves over a rope, and attempt to sleep as best they could. As a crowning flourish to the glories of this place, the proprietor could come down in the morning and untie one end of the ropes, so that the clientele who had not managed to wake up and stagger out already would collapse together in a heap on the floor.
• A Penstab is a bygone convenience for writers. Back when you had to dip a pen in ink, it wasn't safe to lay your pen down on the desk when you wished to pause, since ink remaining on the tip could easily leak out. If you were lucky, your desk had a penstab, which was a sort of inverted brush. You simply "stabbed" your pen into the bristles, and it stood there, vertical and safe, with any remaining ink safely absorbed.
• A Pesca-pescatarian is, supposedly, a person whose meat-eating is limited to fish, but only fish that eat other fish. This concept mocks the hair-splitting variations of professed dietary restrictions that have proliferated among the morbidly healthy, and was publicized in episode 8, season 3 of the HBO television series "Silicon Valley".
• Phantom Ring Syndrome, arises when one's phone is not ringing, although one is sure that it is. In the now forgotten days of land lines, this was a rare phenomenon. Now that cell phones are ubiquitous and cell phone alerts obtrusive, the syndrome has begun to flourish. Certain default ring tones are so distinctive that when one sounds in a crowd, you can see many people searching hurriedly for their phones, only to realize it wasn't theirs. Again, cell phones appear on many TV shows, and merrily begin to ring, and it is common for the audience to mistakenly think the ring is theirs. But perhaps the eeriest form of this syndrome arises in discreet users whose phones are usually set to vibrate only. When the phone rings, the user experiences a physical throbbing aside from the low buzzing sound. Many long-time users have now found that they experience a spontaneously arising throbbing in the same area of the body. The first few times, this is mistaken for an actual call; for a while thereafter, the phantom signal is simply annoying; however, the phenomenon can be so persistent and pressing that users are sometimes driven to stop carrying the phone entirely. Even then, the sensation of phantom ringing will typically persist for weeks. Naturally, our top law firms have begun investigating this malady to determine whether they can pump yet more millions into their own pockets.
• Pot Walloper - before the English Reform bill of 1832, the right to vote was restricted to persons considered to be householders, who in turn, qualified by owning a hearth. Such an obtuse qualification system inspired this sneering nickname.
• Plutonium most commonly refers to a radioactive chemical element, named for a Greek god, as were Uranium and Neptunium. Pluto was the god of the underworld, which meant he was associated with grottoes, caves, mines, minerals and buried treasure. But more importantly, the god of the underworld was the god of the afterworld. If you wanted to beseech Pluto, you could go to Eleusis, home of the Eleusynian Mysteries, and there enter the Plutonium, regarded as an entrance to the underworld.
• Popeless; on the death of John Paul II, the New York Times blurted out the word interregnum and then earnestly defined this as "the popeless period". This replaces my previous favorite papistogram, namely popable, reminiscent of "potable", and a literal translation of the Italian papabile, which means "having the ability, reputation, and political support to be elected pope".
• Preacher is a word that I would have guessed came from some backwoods colloquialism; instead, it has a long history, through Old English to French to Latin, where it has the root prae-dicare, that is "to speak before", "to proclaim". It may seem strange at first that from this same root we also have the words predicament and predicate, while predict has a very close origin in prae-dicere, which is "to say before". While I can't quite explain the difference between these two roots, it is interesting to speculate that a "predicate phrase" is one that you "say before" the thing it describes, or that, philosophically, a thing has predicates if these are qualities you can "proclaim" about the thing, or perhaps that "come without saying" because they are implicitly "already spoken".
• Pre-bunking is a back-formation from debunking, meaning to demonstrate that a given notion is false or unfounded, which in turn comes from bunk, meaning nonsense or foolish talk. Pre-bunking refers to an effort by online social media platforms to anticipate the posting of false information by publishing accurate presentations in advance. This effort came about in advance of the US presidential election of 2020, following several years of torrential postings of lies and inflammatory statements aimed at influencing the public.
• Presenteeism is the opposite of "absenteeism", and refers to the attendance of work of people who would, in other circumstances, stay home because of sickness or family emergencies, but who are so fearful of losing their job that they feel compelled to show up rather than be marked absent.
• Protocol means customary rituals or formal requirements. The word has its root in the Greek protokollon, which was originally the first leaf of a manuscript that contained notes describing its contents or purpose. The word proto means "first", of course, but kollon has relatives in the words "collagen", "collodion", and "colloid", where it means "glue". The protocol was actually the first page, which was glued onto the front of the manuscript.
• Proud Flesh is a medical symptom that occurs in certain cases of wounding. As the skin heals, there may be excessive granulation, resulting in an abnormal growth of flesh.
• Psilanthropy looks like a misprint. It is formed from Greek words that mean "mere manhood". The "anthropus" is probably recognizable, but you may not know that "psi" has the meaning "mere" or "little" or "small". I don't know if the Greek letter Psi got its name for being written small or having a small or simple sound, but the name for the Greek letter epsilon is really e-psilon, a soft or small "E" sound, as opposed to the hard or long "E" in Eta.
  Getting back to our definition, one of the many controversies that rocked the early Christian world was the question of the divinity, humanity, or combined character of Jesus. Those who claimed that Jesus was merely human, with no inherent godhood, were believes in psilanthropy. A related word that also looks like a misprint is psilosopher, meaning a bad philosopher, or one with little knowledge!
• Pushback used to be a mysterious and meaningless operation carried out by an airplane after disconnecting from the terminal and before reaching the runway. Now, according to the usage in an article in USA Today, it means "resistance", as in

  "There was a pushback relating not only to ticket prices but the overall consumer experience, from the ticket-buying process and services fees to high-priced beers."

• Quidnunc means a busybody or gossip. The words quid nunc mean what now? in Latin, and are presumably the equivalent of today's tsup?. By the way, quiddity is lamely defined as whatness.
• Rankle means to bother, irritate, disturb, or anger, so where's the weirdness? Well, this word can be traced back to the Latin dracunculus, that is, "little dragon", where "Draco" means "dragon". It wandered into French as "draoncle", meaning a festering sore, either because the sore looked like a little dragon bite, or felt like one. Somehow, the initial "d" dropped off, and the word became "rankle", and meant a festering sore, then the painful feeling such a sore causes, and finally any significant irritation or annoyance.
• Reptation is a term used in the study of polymers. It refers to a model of polymers in which each individual strand is imagined to be constrained to remain within an imaginary tube that follows the axis of the strand and is somewhat wider than it. Deformations of the polymer are imagined as changes in which each strand reptates, that is, moves like a snake would, gradually drawing itself through and out of the original tube. Reptation was originally used to describe the motion of snakes, and borrowed for this chemical context. The root word for reptation is the Latin reptare, meaning "to creep", and it should be obvious that reptiles were given that name because of their "creepiness".
• Rewilding refers to a proposal to restore wild animals to areas of North America from which they have been gone for centuries...or millennia. We're not talking about the Buffalo Commons here (just drive all those useless people out of the Midwest), nor the restored Prairie, nor somehow bringing back flocks of passenger pigeons, but rather elephants, cheetahs and lions. This might seem like a pathetically misguided attempt at the restoration of nature, but it is passed off as an attempt at therapy - since it's all about us anyway. So those elephants, cheetahs and lions will be carted back here to cavort and propagate, and by communing with them, we'll get in touch with our inner wildness and be healed. I guess it gets you attention at parties or talkshows.
• Rovescio is a musical notation meaning to play in reverse or contrary direction. I'm not quite sure what is meant by that. The reason I include this word is that it is defined in my big dictionary as follows:

  Rovescio: a rovescio.

  Now what do you do? I was convinced I had found a classic recursively useless definition or CRUD, until I realized that perhaps this was an Italian phrase, a rovescio, and was able to find the real definition! By the way, my dictionary "defines" all the cardinal and ordinal numbers up to 100. I ran across definitions for "eighty-third: the eighty-third item in a sequence...", and that sort of well-meant bunk.
• Sac and Soc is a phrase used in early English legal documents associated with grants of land. Even the early English, or at least the late Early English, seem to be unclear about the exact origin and meaning of the phrase, but sac seems to indicate the right to hold a court and make legal judgments, while soc refers to the right of the owner to let out property under socage; that is, a socman or socager would be allowed to farm a portion of the land in return for a fixed payment. Thus, if the king awarded someone a tract of land with sac and soc, that person could rent out the land to others, and had legal jurisdiction over the inhabitants of that area.
• Sagination is the act of fattening up. Normally applied to geese and 4H hogs, the word is certainly applicable in other cases. The witch was certainly saginating poor Hansel. And aren't there many well-known cases of autosagination?
• Sibboleth - a word which has been pronounced as though its "s" sounds were spelled "sh". This is also an example of what might be termed lishping. Recall that the Gileadites pronounced the word shibboleth with the "sh" sound, but their enemies the Ephraimites would say sibboleth instead. Thus, the Gileadites, standing at a river crossing after a battle, could use this as a password allowing them to slaughter their enemies when they mispronounced the word. These days, a seemingly irresistible linguistic fad has arisen, in which the "s" sound is converted to "sh", and especially "st" becomes "sht", so we have "shtrong" and "shrtaight". I plan to stand on my side of the river and ask the crossers to say sibboleth and woe betide those modern Gileadites who respond with shibboleth!
• Skimmington is an old custom in rural Britain, in which the people form a mock parade to ridicule a nagging wife or an unfaithful husband. One hopes such dear customs are kept alive... over there. In some places, a long pole called a stang was used, and the hapless victim was made to ride the stang, carried by the townspeople.
• Software Origami describes a practice of software writers, in which new software is created from old, by renaming, adjusting, extending, reworking, cutting and pasting, to form a new product which still is recognizably a bent and folded version of the original.
• Solmization is the use of a set of syllables to denote the tones of a musical scale. Such scales include the Great Scale, the Guidonian Syllables (Ut/Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La), the Fixed and Movable Do Systems, the Sol-Fa Syllables (Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do).
• Spasmodical is a journal which comes out "spasmodically", in contrast to the more well-behaved "periodicals". A spasmodical is the bane of librarians, who must bear witness as the last dog-eared issue turns yellow and tattered on the "current" shelf beside all the spanking fresh issues of the periodicals. This usage was reported to me by Meg Geroch.
• Suicidality is, clearly, the product of a clinical need to denote the condition of being prone to suicidal thoughts or acts; it seems odd when you first hear it, but what other word might you suggest?
• Supercilious means "haughty" or "disdainful". This was hardly on my mind as I was reading an article in the New Yorker about facial expressions by Malcolm Gladwell, and read

  He lowered his brow, using his depressor glabellae, depressor supercilli, and corrugator.

  And I thought "supercilli - above the...little hairs?". In fact, an etymological dictionary claims that the root is cilium or "eyelid", but I believe cilia is hair all the same. Anyway, the disdain in a supercilious look comes from the raising of the eyebrows.
• Tantony is the runt of a litter of pigs. By analogy, it is also anyone who is a "tag-along", a needy, inquisitive follower. The word comes from the slurring of "Saint Anthony", who was the patron saint of swineherds, and who was normally depicted with a pig. Since he was also the patron saint of lost or hopeless causes, his name was popular for hospitals (a mixed blessing, if you ask me!), so a tanton was an inhabitant of such a place (apparently, in the old days, sickness was a calling, not a brief incident!); there were also such things as a tantony crutch and a tantony pouch which were items that were somehow dedicated to, blessed by, or marked with an image of Saint Anthony.
• Tawdry is something cheap, squalid or demeaning. It comes from Saint Audrey (or Ethelreda!), who died of a throat tumor, which she blamed on the fact that she wore fancy necklaces when younger. In some kind of odd tribute to her, cheaply-made lace collars were sold at the Saint Audrey's Fair. They were so poorly made that the slurred tawdry became a synonym for shoddy, tatty items.
• Toussaint is just a personal name, and personal names are allowed to be meaningless strings of babble, so I can't blame myself for never wondering further about it, until I saw a passing reference in A S Byatt's novelization of the movie Possession to the name, with the comment that it came from the French for "All Saints", as in "All Saints's Day". And I got to wondering whether the famous Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture's name actually meant "All Saint's Eve" ... in other words, "Halloween"! If only I'd had an education.
• Trinomial, a mocking reference to celebrities who were referred to by a three part name.

  "Holmes was railing at certain ignorant New York critics who were not sufficiently in awe of his fellow trinomials of New England literary genius, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson."

  E L Doctorow, "The Waterworks".
• The Tropics have the origin of their name in the Greek word tropos, meaning movement or change. The lines of latitude at about 23.5 degrees north and south mark the furthest points north and south where the sun can appear to be directly overhead at noon; this occurs at the summer and winter solstice (a word which itself means sun still). Once the sun appears to be directly over the Tropic of Cancer or the Tropic of Capricorn, it no longer moves in that direction, swinging back towards the equator. The sun appears directly over the equator at noon on the equinoxes. The tropics are the sweltering sun-baked region bounded between these two lines.
• Trucker Topiary, the rectangular tunnels carved into foliage that overhangs a highway, roughly conforming to the shape of trucks.
• umop-episdn is a clever typographical way of describing something which is topsy-turvy. I first saw it in an column by Brian Hayes in American Scientist.
• Undenticulated may suggest its meaning by its Latin roots or by its obvious meaning in the following passage from Evelyn Waugh's "Unconditional Surrender":

  Here it seemed some of them slept for there were divan beds covered with blankets only and a large, much undenticulated, comb.

• Vadium is not one of the more obscure chemical elements, but rather, a pledge, often the surrendering of a physical asset until some task is performed or loan is repaid. The posting of a pledge, in turn, is known as vadimony.
• Widual is an adjective referring to widows. Thus, after a husband's death, a woman might don black and attend to her widual duties.
• Widdershins means "counterclockwise", that is, to circle an object while keeping it always on your lefthand side. Mathematically, this is the direction of positive rotation; a positive angle of rotation is one which results in a counterclockwise movement. Traditionally, moving around an object, particularly a church, in a counterclockwise direction was considered unlucky. Supposedly, this was opposite to the direction of the sun, though I cannot see any sense in which the sun would seem to move "clockwise" around the earth except if we imagine ourselves standing towards the North Pole and looking "down" at the apparent direction of the sun. The etymology of the word seems to be from the German "wider sinnig", that is, "opposed sense" or "opposite sense", reinforcing the suggesting that this is the other, less usual, direction.
• Winsomeness, if you look it up, means attractiveness or appeal, perhaps with an element of tentativeness or shyness. However, that's not how it was used in the following statement, quoted in Slate magazine on 07 January 2013:

  Concerning 2012's losses on gay marriage and pot, he warned that evangelicals need to adopt a strategy of tackling social issues "with winsomeness", or else they'll continue losing.

  Here, winsomeness has become "the quality of being winnable"!
• Xanadu was made famous by its mention in Coleridge's poem fragment "Kubla Khan", composed in a dream and left unfinished when Coleridge was interrupted by a visitor from Porlock, itself now a byword for philistinism. (And you thought Olivia Newton-John started it all!) Since then, Xanadu has become a synonym for a lost, dreamlike world, along with Brigadoon, the land of El Dorado, Never-Never Land, Oz, Shangri-La and Wonderland. Yet, there really is a Xanadu; it's an ancient city in China, whose name has been transliterated as Shangdu or Chengdu.