A Few More Bodily Motion Terms

A few years ago I wrote a series of essays on bodily motions. (they begin here). In those essays, I looked at jactitation, nictitation, sternutation, eructation, osculation, and oscitation. I also talked about stertorous breathing (snoring) and bruxism. Then, yesterday, I wrote a little on nidorosity, which is an "eructation with the taste of undigested meat;" surely a pleasant dinner-table-conversation subject. But I have also found a few other words on bodily motions over the years that repay some mention. Especially important here will be pandiculation, singult, and quassation. We may find, if we are really lucky, that these words will take us on journeys of their own.

Pandiculation

Lying behind this word is the act of stretching, which I spell "s-t-t-r-r-e-t-t-c-h-h-h." As the OED tells us, however, this word can also mean "yawn," but the Century says that this signification is erroneous. We already have a word for yawning (oscitation), so we really don't need to "stretch out" pandiculation further than it originally stretches. By the way, the Latin word underlying it is pandere, which means "to stretch." Our most popular word in English using this root is "expand." We actually don't get the word pander from pandere, and I will return in a moment to that word. Let's focus first on pandiculation.

Pandiculation is "the act of stretching (extending the limbs and neck), as a manifestation of weariness, a sign of disease." Well, the Century aslo tells us that it is a stretching when one is "newly awaked from sleep" as well. So, just think of pandiculation as that kind of stretching. When I think of pandiculation, actually, I think of cats.. What is interesting for me is that no dictionary I use has the verb pandiculate. Why not? I have no idea, but if there ever was a need to invent a word in English, we need to invent the verb pandiculate. "There he was, pandiculating on the couch, enjoying the morning sun." I like the combination of several "bodily movement" words in a 1668 quotation from the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions: "About Sneezing, the Hickocke (hiccup), Yawning, Pandiculation and their Causes..." Wouldn't you have loved to be there for that lecture? Born to late..just like the Pony-tails late 1950s hit.

In view of furthering my intention of bringing a new verb into English, I vow to use that word at a reception I will attend next week for a candidate for the US Senate. I won't put it to him; it would make him uncomfortable. I will use it on many of the doctors present. See how they respond.

Moving to Pander

As suspected, when looking up pandiculation, my eye wandered up the page of the Century and landed on pander. I smiled inwardly and went still higher, to pandemonium, because my discovery of the Miltonic invention of that term in Book I of Paradise Lost got me memorizing that classic. But, back to pander. The "natural" way to read it, which would be entirely wrong, would be to see it as derived from pandere, and so to suggest something to do with "stretching," perhaps the stretching of morals or something. This, in fact, is wrong. There is no such origin. Instead, Pandarus is the name of the man in Bocaccio's poem "Filostrato" and Chaucer's paraphrase of it in "Troilus and Criseyde," followed by Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," of the man who procured for Troilus the love and good graces of Cressida. He was, then, a "go-between" in love. No mention of him is made in ancient literature, even though both Virgil and Homer have a Pandarus, a leader of the Lycian forces allied with the Trojans in the Trojan War. Virgil mentions a Pandarus who was a companion of Aeneas. From Troilus and Cressida:

"If you ever prove false to one another, since I have taken such pains to bring you together, let all pitiful goers-between be called to the world's end after my name: call them all Pandars; let all constant men be Troiluses, all fase women Cressids, and all brokers-between Pandars!," III.2.210ff.

So, the definitions in ever dictionary I have seen of a "pander" include someone who "caters for the lusts of others" or is a "male bawd" or a "pimp" or "procurer." The OED has it "a person who assists the immoral urges or evil designs of others."

But then I said to myself, "Wait a second!" Why is someone who plays the middleman in love so negatively characterized? Why isn't such a role to be honored, and sometimes even revered? We have the word "match-maker," and many women, more frequently than men, love to be known as one. Is a male "match-maker" to be denominated a pimp, but a female "match-maker" to be honored and respected? I think that because of the complexity of human intimate relationships the people "in between" can sometimes play essential roles in helping things work out, too. Shall we call a psychologist who is committed to helping a couple reconcile a "panderer?" Or, alternatively, don't people all the time have people stand in for them or be their "go-betweens" in relationships where they need someone to soften the blow, to discover information or otherwise to "scope out the land" before the two principals engage in a connection?

Thus, I think I am concluding that the negative connotation of pander, to minister to the immoral urges or distasteful desires of another, is a definition more in tune with Victorian sensibilities of another era than the realities of love's "go-betweens" in our day.

Finishing with Prog

While ruminating on these thoughts, I saw a quotation from John Milton using the word pandar, that also introduced a word with which I wasn't familiar and which holds promise for the future: prog. Milton said, in his tract On Reformation (1641): "This most mild, though withal dreadful and inviolable prerogative of Christ's diadem [excommunication] serves for nothing with them but to prog and pander for fees." That is, excommunication caters to the lusts of the [Catholic] Church by enabling them to get additional fees, either by the threat or actuality of it. But I am entranced by prog, a verb that means, as one of its definitions, "to forage, delve; to poke about for; search or hunt for; seek after; solicit; beg." Zora Neale Hurston used the word in 1935: "We proaged thru the woods that was full of magnolia, pine..and many kinds of trees whose names I do not know.." One can prog through old collections of memorabilia, or through stacks of papers, or in almost any context if you are looking for something. I think I have found a new word-friend.

I still have to get to a few other words for bodily movments...

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