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The daily countdown continues; today, the announcement
will be that there are Only 10 Shopping Days Left Until
Christmas.
The pressure builds. Am I the only one who
wants to shout, Hey, I want to take control of my own
life. I have enough deadlines already. I don't need another
one, and especially I don't need this nagging.
But rail as I might, it wouldn't change anything. I do need to find some presents, and among those who deserve gifts from me are the dedicated readers of this column, both of them. Often I devote hours to looking for a certain word. Presenting such words as gifts should save the recipients a considerable amount of time. You never know when you might need some of these.
Our traditional system of measuring liquid volumes is as binary as any computer. Two tablespoons make a fluid ounce, two fluid ounces a wineglassful, two wineglassfuls a gill, two gills a cup, two cups a pint, two pints a quart -- of course four quarts make a gallon, but shouldn't two quarts make something besides a stupid half-gallon?
We do have a word for two quarts: pottle. It should be
restored to its rightful place in daily discourse --
While you're at the store, could you pick up a pottle of
ice cream?
or No wonder I don't remember much about
the office Christmas party. They had ouzo by the
pottle.
Our language also appears to lack a polite word for male
homosexuals. Communication would be simplified if there
were a masculine counterpart to lesbian.
Sodomite
is considered quite offensive, and
gays
and homosexuals
comprise both sexes.
However, there is such a word, urning.
It is not in
common use, since it appears in only one of the three
unabridged dictionaries at hand. Webster's Second defines
urning
as a male homosexual.
That's simple,
precise and inoffensive -- it's a word that deserves more
usage.
While we're curing the paucity of polite terms, we
should also consider the Colorado General Assembly. Often
one feels the urge to use unprintable terms to describe our
legislature with sufficient accuracy. But even the
prissiest of editors would allow kakistocracy
to
appear in print, and it's perfect for the task. The new
Random House Unabridged defines kakistocracy
as
government by the worst persons.
That dictionary also contains the big kahuna of
unprintable words, which suffers from overuse. There's no
excuse for that. We have a wealth of archaic synonyms that
ought to be resurrected: tup, sard, jape, and my favorite,
swive. Chaucer used it -- Thus swived was the
carpenter's wife,
and a 14th-century historian
complained that Richard of Alemaigne, when he was king,
he spent all his treasure upon swiving.
Another favorite Colorado pastime is talking about
altitudes. In most other states, towns brag about their
populations on their city limits signs. In Texas, it's that
the municipal water supply has been approved by the state
health department. But in Colorado, we're obsessed with our
vertical distance from the tides. Thus we are enthusiastic
students of hypsometry,
which American Heritage
defines as the measurement of elevation relative to sea
level.
We might profitably add hypsometromania
or hypsometrophilia
to our official language.
All sorts of everyday things have their very own words;
some obscure terms are worth sharing. An aglet
is
that round tip on the end of your shoelaces. Zymurgy
is the study of fermentation, as well as the magazine of
the American Homebrewers Association. What I used to call a
hinge pin
and what is too often just a 16-penny nail
is technically a pintle.
Soon you will see drawings
of old Father Time in robes and grasping a snath
--
the handle of a scythe.
During the holidays, people play a lot of Scrabble. One
useful word is cwm.
It is pronounced koom,
and refers to a glacial cirque. When you have the reverse
problem, too many vowels, a good word is inion,
which is part of your skull. The best addition to your
vocabulary, though, is qat,
an Arabian narcotic so
obscure that the Just say no
jihad hasn't denounced
it yet. Not only does it employ a q
without a
u
, but its two variant spellings, kat
and
khat,
will score points while pulling you out of
tough spots.
That should take care of some of my Christmas shopping. I'm going to keep looking, though, until I find a single simple word that describes the rest of this esurient brumal frenzy.
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