Obscure Words Part One, Verbal Rarities from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word f the Day at www.billcasselman.com

Collection # 2

A garland of delightsome words

The Moho (noun, geology)

The Moho is the common abbreviation for the Mohorovičić Discontinuity, named after the extremely well-known Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovičić who, in 1909, first identified the boundary between the earth’s crust and its mantle by discovering during an earthquake an alteration in the speed of quake shock waves as they traveled across this boundary. The Moho is located about ten kilometers under the bed of oceans and 45 K under continents.

Exemplary sentence: I don’t care whether you get your mojo moving, but I would be most pleased to see you moving at the level of the Moho.

‘O ‘O or OO (noun, extinct Hawaiian bird)

The oo, pronounced oh-oh, and also written ‘o‘o, was a honeyeater of the genus Moho. Its lustrous, tufted black plumage condemned this bird to extinction since Hawaiian potentates, models of self-control weighing in at 400 pounds to the prince, ordered the birds slaughtered to make vast, billowy ceremonial feather cloaks for the lard-ass lords of the islands.

By 1990, all species of the oos were extinct. Says one authority: “Moho braccatus, the Kauai ‘o‘o, was the last surviving member of the genus.”

In the Polynesian language of Hawaii, ‘ō is a noun meaning ‘object that pierces or penetrates.’ The reduplication common to Polynesian languages gives another agent noun and a verb form, so that ‘o ‘o can mean ‘poker’ or ‘to poke.’

The genus name Moho is Maori derived from Proto-Polynesian *moso ‘the sooty crake.’ The Hawaiian cognate moho referred to the extinct Hawaiian rail, Porzana sandwichensis.

Exemplary sentence: The ‘o ‘o scurried across the aa.*

* As every deft Scrabble player knows, aa (pronounced ah-ah) is one of the two kinds of lava that pours forth from Hawaiian volcanoes. As lavas go, aa is rough and looks like slag with bubble holes. As molten aa cools after being exposed to air, gases formed by the melting magma escape, hissing and emitting blister bubbles that burst on the cooling lava surface to give aa its characteristic scoriaceous aspect.

Ning-nong (noun, pejorative)

A ning-nong is a fool or a stupid person. The word is still alive in New Zealand and Australian slang but may have originated as a slang term in northern Britain. An 1864 reference says that ning-nang was a worthless horse, perhaps a variant of ning-nag. I like the dismissive nasality of this bisyllabic insult. When spoken aloud, ning-nong has a tintinnabulary silliness that pleases. The sound of the compound summons up, to what’s left of the mind’s eye, the merry little bells that festoon the tips of a fool’s-cap and traditionally announce the advent of a jester to his audience.

Exemplary sentence: When President George W. Bush recites his fumbler’s catalogue of rightwing Republican inanities, we hear the sing-song of a ning-nong.

Opossuming (noun, the hunting of opossums)

The opossum has extended its range northward into my native Canada and now, in southern Ontario where I live, freshly squished opossum corpselets comprise 25 percent of all roadkill. This keeps our turkey vultures happy but sometimes makes for slithery tire traction. Opossuming has a delightful sound, and could also be a small town in Upstate New York, much like Ossining, home of the Ossining State Correctional Facility, better known in American penal history as the notorious prison, Sing Sing.

Famous American inventor Thomas Edison installed the first electric chair at Sing Sing in 1901.

Inmates’ nickname for the fatal chair?

“Old Sparky.”

Thanks a load, Tom.

“Old Sparky” became a generic name for many electric chairs throughout the American prison system.

Exemplary sentence: May I assume a possibility of opossuming?

skull of an American opossum

Prick-me-dainty (noun, affected dandy or fussbudget)

This excellent dismissal of Pecksniffian precisians and wrist-breaking flouncers has lately fallen into desuetude and we ought to revive it. Prick-me-dainty is a putdown of finicky, overdressed male fashion plates and males claiming extraordinary sensitivity but never demonstrating that claim.

Exemplary sentence: The purse-lipped prick-me-dainty swooned in shock when Roger arrived without his cashmere shawl. The incident provoked an attack of the vapours from which Frederick almost failed to recover.

Merkin (noun, a pubic wig)

We shall but quote the terse defining by the Oxford English dictionary: merkin – “an artificial covering of hair for the female pubic region; a pubic wig for women.” Some were made of mouse skin to which fur was glued.

Merkin may derive from Malkin, one of a group of affectionate diminutives for the given name Mary that include Marykin and Marykens. The aptly named Captain Grose in Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (ed. 3, 1796 CE) defines a merkin as “counterfeit hair for women's privy parts.” It may be because I had an upbringing that would not shame a clositered nun, but the purpose of a merkin escapes me, except as a subterfugious sham for a bald mons Veneris or a quick fix for a shaved one. Perhaps, in some candled chamber of lust, amidst defunctive flickerings of light, a merkin may have served as accoutrement to a slut’s dupery.

Exemplary passage # 1:

The modern instance appears in one of the most influential novels of the late twentieth century, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1981): “He wears a false cunt and merkin of sable both handcrafted in Berlin by the notorious Mme. Ophir, the mock labia and bright purple clitoris molded of… synthetic rubber.”

Exemplary passage # 2:

American literary critic Edmund Wilson had a go with it too, in a neat couplet from his Night Thoughts (1973):

“Said Philip Sydney, buttoning his jerkin

‘Allow me, darling: you have dropped your merkin.’ ”

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The ocean of English teems with fin-flapping words.

Fishers, cast wide your nets!

We shall apply live bait to the verbal hook again soon.

And with a due sang-froid.