On Interesting Words

Tom Christiansen was the first to point out to me how many talented Perl programmers are also talented musicians: Tom plays piano, Larry plays violin among other things, I play banjo, Mark Jason Dominus plays blues harp, Randal Schwartz has a black belt in the ancient martial art of karaoke, and Damian Conway can filk Gilbert and Sullivan with the "best" of them. But music isn't the only interest that a lot of top nerds have: I think a lot of us are word nerds too.

I blogged earlier about feague . Glenn Vanderburg recognized Mrs Byrne's and came back with one of his favourites:

"groak", which is the definition I remember word-for-word: "to stand watching someone eat, in the hopes they will ask you to join them."

I know Damian and Tom are classics nuts, as capable of emitting Latin as English. Damian even ported Perl to Latin. My favourite Tim O'Reilly story involves the day, many years ago, the dumb terminals got stuck on the Greek character set. Tim was the only one not to throw up his hands in disgust. He was quite happy putting his classics degree to good use by editing a computer book in vi with every letter transliterated into the Greek character set.

My family know I'm a word junkie (as much as my coworkers know I'm a four-letter word junkie) and have bought me books over the years, with mixed results. Many books that proclaim "Ingenious, Difficult, and Rarely Used Words" turn out to think "leviathan" and "nous" are difficult and rarely used. I want real rarities. I recommend:

Mrs Byrne's

Funny, sometimes ribald, and mostly obscure. Never takes itself seriously, either.

2000 Most Challenging and Obscure Words

Lots of etymology, and very few words that aren't genuinely obscure.

The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff

Hilarious and spot-on, as with all things Douglas Adams.

Here's a representative entry from 2000 Most Challenging and Obscure Words:

feck (FEK) n. We often use negative words, quite common ones, without stopping to think that they are based on positive words that are uncommon and unfamiliar. Everyday examples are words like impeccable, untoward, ruthless, uncouth, and disgruntled. We almost never give a thought to the positive terms in the senses that form the basis of the familiar negatives: peccable (liable to error), toward (propitious), ruthful (compassionate). So it is with feckless, meaning "ineffective, incompetent, feeble, helpless". It must be obvious that there would be no such word unless there were also the word feck, and there is such a word, as unfamiliar or obscure as it may be. Feck, a mainly Scottish term that is also heard in the north of England, has a number of meanings, including "efficacy, efficiency," and by extension, "energy, vigor." It is deemed to be an aphetic form of effect (aphetic being the adjective from aphesis, the linguistic phenomenon of the loss of an unstressed initial vowel or syllable). Feck gives rise to the adjective feckful, meaning "vigorous, efficient, powerful." In Robert Willan's List of Ancient Words at Present Used in the Mountainous District of the West Riding of Yorkshire (1811), feckful is defined as "strong and brawny." Hence our word feckless; and it all goes back to feck. This is a different term from the slang feck (origin unknown) used by James Joyce in the sense of "swipe" or "pinch." In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) he describes persons who "... fecked cash out of the rector's room," and in Ulysses (1922) he writes of "fecking matches from counters." Nothing to do with the feck we've been discussing. A word about aphesis (AF uh sis) and aphetic (uh FET ik): Aphesis comes from the Greek, meaning "letting go," based on the verb aphienai (to set free), built of the preposition ap-, a variant of apo- (away) plus hienai (to send); cf. aph(a)eresis in my 1000 Most Challenging Words.

And from The Meaning of Liff:

DOBWALLS (pl.n.)
The now hard-boiled bits of nastiness which have to be prised off crockery by hand after it has been through a dishwasher.

GLEMENUILT (n.)
The kind of guilt which you'd completely forgotten about which comes roaring back on discovering an old letter in a cupboard.

NAUGATUCK (n.)
A plastic sachet containing shampoo, polyfilla, etc., which is impossible to open except by biting off the corners.

As you might have guessed, there's no etymology in "Meaning of Liff" because they've taken all those things we needed names for (like the baked-on dishwasher nastiness) and applied them to placenames (which, after all, were just sitting around not doing much).

I'll end with a quote from Terry Pratchett related to the meaning of placenames:

The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.

The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

And one from Blackadder, where Blackadder is tormenting Dr Johnson over his allegedly complete dictionary of English:

[Dr. Samuel Johnson presents his comprehensive English dictionary to the Prince Regent.]
Johnson: This book, sir, contains every word in our beloved language!
Prince George: Hmmm.
Blackadder: Every single one, sir?
Johnson: Every single word, sir!
Blackadder: Oh. Well, in that case, sir, I hope you will not object if I also offer the Doctor my most enthusiastic… contrafibularities.
Johnson: What?!
Blackadder: Contrafibularities, sir? It is a common word, down our way.
Johnson: Damn!
[Dr. Johnson scribbles in his book. Blackadder: Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I'm andyspeptic, transmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.

(I could lose a day reading Blackadder quotes) What are your favourite should-be-used-more words?