Today, a valedictory riffle, an apopemptic winnowing through the chaff in my 2007 file. Out of cobwebbed cubbyholes and memoranda-jammed columbaria and slender Schlupfwinkeln, out of all the recesses and niches in my oaken rolltop desk, tumble odd words I was going to write about, questions of brash quizzery where I again delouse the bigwigs of linguistic orthodoxy, as well as the most valuable contents of my desk, readers’ letters of a corrective nature.

Vaccimulgence & Co.

First in the packet of scribbled-upon, rubber-band-bound index cards is one with the lumpish 18th century neologism vaccimulgence. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the ungainly word once in a 1796 letter. There the lonely vocable has cowered, bereft, glum, scarce uttered by the lips of men, moping in tristful obsolescence for lo! these 300 years.

Tristful? Sad. Shakespeare uses ‘tristful’ in Hamlet. Cf. French triste ‘sad.’

Vaccimulgence signifies the milking of cows, from Latin vacca ‘cow’ + Latin mulgire ‘to milk.’ A silly and unloved word, yes. But it led me to a pleasant medieval synonym for the phrase dairy farm, to wit, vaccary. A vaccary may also name a place where cows are pastured. And what if one were in desperate need of a word to rhyme with Thackeray?

 

That’s No Buick!

I put an expression in my last book under the heading of Fat: “That’s no Buick, that’s my wife.” Reader Andrew Brook corrects me.

Bill, I just got your 2006 Canadian Words and Sayings and am working my way through it. Concerning ‘That’s no Buick, that’s my wife’ on p. 359, I think you are forgetting something from our collective, misspent youth. In the mid-50s (maybe late 50s), for a couple of years, Buicks had two chrome protuberances on the front grille that looked a lot like (highly idealized) breasts. That must be where the expression came from.

Also in Canadian Words & Sayings (2006) I included this saying and explanation: Locked and loaded.

• On the point of beginning any difficult task, the joker will twist his baseball cap ninety degrees so that the visor portion is over one ear and say, “Locked and loaded.” So wrote contributor Denis Tremblay from Ontario .

Andrew Brook continues:

About ‘locked and loaded’, I’d bet it’s a transposed version of ‘loaded and locked!’ I.e., ‘The gun is loaded, the safety is on, and I’m ready to roll.’

On a previous page is ‘Don’t bust a gusset.’ The version I heard (or thought I was hearing) was ‘Don’t burst a gasket,’ i.e. don’t build up too much steam, work yourself into a lather (another one). But then, I didn’t know what a gusset was until I read it in your book, so your version must be the right, or at least the original, one.
As always, a great read.

Andrew Brook
Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy
Director, Institute of Cognitive Science
Member, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

  

Each year at this time I try to find an ornate verbal mode to express some thought appropriate to midwinter festivity. This year I picked a photo looking out my livingroom window upon a snowy street.

Herewith a few definitions:

Nivosity means snowiness from Latin nix, nivis ‘snow.’

A hibernacle is a winter home or residence from Latin hiberna ‘winter.’ To hibernate is to pass the winter in a state of torpor. There is even a verb in English meaning to pass the summer in a state of torpor, namely, to estivate. Hibernaculum is a somewhat fancy zoological term designating the winter refuge of a hibernating animal. It is used in birders’ jargon. The Latin word was usually in the plural where hibernacula referred to Roman soldiers’ winter tents, huts or encampments.

To wax = to increase, to grow (like German wachsen). This was the prime meaning of to wax in Old English; the polishing meanings all came later. As a verb, wax is both transitive and intransitive.

Happy New Year!

Party safely.

© 2007 William Gordon Casselman