Gallows/Gallus, Autoclave and More

I have been away from my beloved words for a while principally because I was hired to write a short book, and I wanted to press ahead and finish the book while the stuff was all still fresh in my mind. The book concerns the psychological/medical diagnosis of "Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy," a complicated way of blaming mothers for inexplicable medical conditions in their children. But now that I have that task mostly off my plate, I can return to the stunningly vast vistas of words and the worlds they open. Because the freerice.com web site has improved and expanded its words considerably in the past few months, I have returned to their site, in order to make sure I am completely caught up on all the words they introduce. Along the way, I learn so many new ones--which open worlds which I would like to open for you here and in the next few essays. Let's pause on autoclave, porbeagle, orthosis, chivy or chevy, ligroin, metheglin, nostoc, gallus, gride, palmer and clathrate.

1. Autoclave. If you take the word apart, you simply get "self" and "key," or a "self-fastening apparatus." The two OED definitions didn't create vivid pictures for me (one is "a vessel for carrying out chemical reactions at high temperatures under pressure.."), so I found this web site, maintained by Prof. David Fankhauser, which is devoted to explaining what an autoclave is. It always amazes me to learn that there is often someone "out there" who cares for any particular subject you can name, and that s/he is usually kind enough to post pictures and clear explanations of these unfamiliar objects. Dr. Fankhauser says that an autoclave, simply, is a piece of laboratory apparatus which acts as an automated pressure cooker. Even though water boils at 100 degrees C, boiling water at that temperature doesn't kill all microorganisms; they need to be blasted at 121 degrees C at 15 pounds pressure for 15 minutes. This can be done in an autoclave. I will remember this next time I want a really clean house.

2. Gallus. Yep, Long's rule on words was confirmed again when I ran into this word. My rule? Every word is trivially simple--to someone. Once we really internalize that principle, we become emboldened to learn every word, even if at first it isn't fully clear to us, because we know that it is simple--to someone. So we seek to find the way it is simple. The definition given for gallus in "Free Rice" is "suspenders." Ok, but I have never heard anyone call suspenders galluses. One web site, which sells suspenders, says that they have two kinds--gallus suspenders and rugged comfort suspenders. They didn't appear to be that much different, so I went back to the dictionaries. Then, I discovered that the word in most dictionaries is gallows, though the OED says that it frequently appears as gallus (plural galluses) in the US. Well, the words to describe suspenders are three: brace, gallows, suspender. Gallows is the first attested in the 1730s, and is defined as "contrivances made of cloth, and hooks and eyes, worn over the shoulders by men to keep their breeches up." Jane Austen was the first to use the word brace in the sense of gallows/suspenders in 1798: "There were no narrow braces for children and scarcely any notting silk." Not until 1810 did the word "suspender" appear to describe "one of a pair of straps passing over the shoulders to hold up the trousers." The OED tells us that it appeared "chiefly in the US." Before its "clothing" use, the word suspender had meaning in Scots law--one who presents a bill of suspension, that is a petition for a judicial order or warrant for the postponing of the execution of a sentence pending its discussion in the Supreme Court. Already in 1827, however, the words "gallows" and "suspenders" were used synonymously: "The ball appeared to have hit the buckle of his gallows (yclept suspenders) by which it had been impeded." Why were the things that we know as suspenders first called "gallows" (or galluses)? Principally because the oldest use of gallows was "an apparatus for hanging" that usually consisted "of two uprights and a cross piece." Suspenders, or gallows, from the back can look like that.

3. Orthosis. When you have this much fun, and gain this much insight from words, you wonder why every course of study in university doesn't spend half of its time just working through words and their meanings. If you really understand the words, you understand the fields; you don't have to read 500 pages of dense prose by some Germanic author to get the point of the field. Well, back to reality. Orthosis is a simple word, a noun, and refers as a "brace" or "splint." Note that this is a different sense of the word "brace" than in the previous word. Literally it means "making straight." Thus, an orthosis is used to support, align, prevent or correct deformities or to improve the function of movable parts of the body.

4. Porbeagle. This has nothing to do with impecunious dogs. The word's origin is uncertain, though the OED says that it derives from Cornwall. It refers to a large active shark, Lamna nasus, with a pointed snout, found chiefly in the open seas of the North Atlantic. It is a popular game fish off the coasts of Britain. Indeed, it is a trivially simple word to those from portions of Britain, but to us in the West Coast of the US, well, it isn't so familiar. Here is a picture so that you will never lose it from your mind. It is described as a "stout shark that is blue-gray on top and white underneath with a white patch on the trailing edge of its first dorsal fin." As you see, we enter into a world, but only a little bit..before we rush to the next, in the next essay.

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