kissing and intercalary and bissextile and osculate and osculation and osculant

Most of us don't spend as much time as we would like in osculation. Indeed a life can't be said to be fully rich without a good deal of it. I am writing this essay, then, in hope--hope that you, and I, will find time for a good deal of it in the future.

I say this because my first real exposure to osculation, apart from the kisses from doting aunts I quickly wiped off when I was a boy, was intellectual rather than physical. I need to explain this. I grew up in a rather too-strict Puritan home in a hyper-repressed suburb of NY City in the 1950s. Kissing and romance were never presented to me as something desirable in life. By the time I was ready to discover the world of girls for myself, however, we had moved to CA and I had another influence in my life which dissuaded me from the life of kissing: Evangelical Christianity. It was not the teaching of the Church itself that did it; it was my interpretation of my newly-discovered faith that led me to the conclusion that any time away from my mission in life to bring the good news of Jesus to people was wasted time.

I recall delivering my first "message" at a Sunday evening service in the Summer of 1972, when I was serving as a summer intern. For some reason I chose the topic of "biblical kissing." I almost redden in embarrassment when I relate this fact, but as I think of it, I began my career speaking with great authority on something of which I knew absolutely nothing. If what the Germans say is true--Enstehung ist Entwicklung (that is, to know the development, you need to know the origins), I might have inadvertently defined my life course in that talk. I knew the biblical texts well, even though I was only 20, and could weave together points about kisses of intimacy and kisses of betrayal (I still remember the points I made), but that is as far as it went. I never imagined at that time that kisses and longing for kisses could occupy so much energy in one's life...

Moving to the Words

Perhaps because of the signal importance of kissing to living we find 12 words in the OED derived from the stem "oscul" which relate to some aspect of kissing. The terms are from anatomy, biology, mathematics, religion and human interaction. Many are obsolete or even humorous words, such as oscularity--"Nowadays she was too mature for casual oscularity-- or osculable--"She had an alluring manner about her that made her eminently osculable"--but at least a handful have great possibilities for use in our conversation and writing today. Let's begin our journey with a survey of some of the terms.

Osculant means, quite simply, kissing. In biology an osculant is something that touches or is intermediate between two or more groups. As the Century says, it describes genera or families "which connect or link others together." Synonyms are inosculant or intergrading. An entomologist, W.S. MacLeay, coined the term in 1819 in the following sentence: "These genera I propose to call osculantia, from their occuring as it were at the point where the circles touch each other." Evolutionary biologists picked up the term in the 1870s. "Forms..intermediate to other forms hitherto well distinct--'osculant' or intercalary forms as they are called." I happen also to like that word "intercalary," though I usually think of it as being associated with the calendar.

How about if we invent a religious/theological use of the term osculant? It was formerly the case in American Protestantism (before about 1950) that you marked your economic upward mobility by changing churches. The churches at the top of the economic heap were Episcopal and Presbyterian, with Methodist and Lutheran, in general, in the middle and Baptist and Church of Christ at the bottom. Could we say, then, that as X succesfully pursued his economic pilgrimage he passed through the osculant denominations on his way to becoming a Presbyterian? After all, wasn't a sign of George Babbit's success in Sinclair Lewis' story the fact that he attended the Presbyterian Church with the old-money people of his town?

Digressing

But I confess that as I am thinking through the ramifications of osculant denominations my mind is drawn back to that word intercalary, and I am afraid I am going to make a digression. The word intercalary, meaning intervening or interpolated, is most frequently used in "calendar speak." An intercalary day or month is inserted at intervals in the calendar in order to bring an inexact reckoning of the year into harmony with the solar year. One might have an intercalary day between two months or an intercalary month. Though we use the solar calendar, we insert an intercalary day every fourth year, which we call leap year, in February. This inserted day has a proper name: the bissext. From 1618: "In four years, there is one Bysext." The adjective is bissextile. We know that every fourth year, therefore, is bissextile, although century numbers whose first two digits are not divisible by four (1500, 1600, 1700) are not bissextile. Thus, an 1854 text could properly say: Thus 1600 was bissextile, 1700 and 1800 were not so."

But why is this intercalated day in leap-year called the "bissext"? (Indeed, if someone is acting up on Feb. 29, could we tell them to knock off their bissectual/bissectile behavior?) In order to answer this we have to know a little bit about the Roman calendar. At first the Roman calendar was a lunar one, naming its days after three of the phases of the moon: (1) new moon ("calends"); (2) first quarter ("nones"); and (3) full moon ("ides") ["Beware the Ides of March...]. Days were counted down inclusively to the next named day, so the 24th of February was called the "sixth day before the calends of March" (you do the math...March 1, February 28, 27, 26, 25, 24--6 days). Thus, February 24 was so called. But this intercalary day was added on leap year in February. Originally it was added as the first of the two February 24ths, but since the third century A.D. it has become the second of these. Hence, the word bissextile, meaning the "2nd sixth day", is a term meaning the day added in a leap year--on the "2nd" Feburary 24th. It can be a bissextile day in the year or the year can be called the bissextile (or leap year).

In conclusion, what is a person called who is born on February 29? Give up? A leapling. There are an estimated 200,000 leaplings in the US and 4.1 million worldwide. Let's leap to the next essay and see if we can get back on track.

1804