More New Free Rice Words--Essay IV

With that ruminative essay out of the way, let's see how far we can get in this essay with the "new words." I will begin with titian. This word is difficult because it is derived from a name (the Renaissance artist who died in 1576), but the meaning doesn't derive obviously from the name. That is, we have classically or biblically-derived words like "nimrod" (a hunter) or "nabalitic" (churlish) or "boeotian" ("thick-head") that are easily explicable from the stories we know of the person/place. But Titian bequeathed to us the name of a color, a 'bright golden auburn' which denotes the color of hair favored by him in his paintings. This web site has 133 shades of brown, auburn and red. If you look at #'s 27 and 31, you see "titian."

I was fascinated by the brief word sima, which I hadn't heard, and its near-neighbor sial. What could these words mean? This picture couldn't make it clearer. The terms come from geology and were invented about a century ago. They refer to layers of the earth's crust. The innermost layer is called the "mantle," but then there is an oceanic crust underlying, you guessed it, the ocean and a continental crust underlying land. The oceanic crust is called the sima; the continental crust is known as the sial. What's in a name? Well, the sima is made mostly of silica+ magnesium, while the sial consists primarily of silica + aluminum. It almost made me want to turn the clock back 38 years so I could begin university again as a geology major... By the way, you need to understand these things or else when you see the word sial, you might just think of "saliva" (the Greek word for saliva or spittle is sialon), and think it is related to sialogogue (producing a flow of saliva) or sialoid (pertaining to or resembling saliva). But, you would be wrong, as I was. I have to mention one other thing. While looking up sialologue, I discovered a synonym for it is ptyalogogue (ti AL oh gog), derived from ptyalon, another Greek word for spittle. I guess the Greeks spit a lot or they wouldn't have needed more than one word for it. Before we get too carried away on this, however, let's move on.

While we are on "pairs" of words, I thought I would introduce the words spathe and spadix, though I think only the latter was on the "freerice.com" list. In any case, a spadix is a term from botany and is defined by the OED as "a form of inflorescence consisting of a thick fleshy spike, closely set with flowers, and enclosed in a spathe." I don't really get a good picture, do you? Well, all you have to do is find a picture, like this one, and there you have it. But now that you have the drawing/picture, you are "freed up" to look at real pictures, since you know the basic principles of spathes and spadixes.

Conclusion--Getting Lost on the Way to Navew

Like most of you, perhaps, I hadn't heard of the word navew. To many people, as you no doubt believe, it is a trivially simple word. It is a kind of turnip; Brassica is the genus name. The word navew is from Middle French; indeed the OED tells us that it is "rare." There are lots of things one could learn about the Brassica genus, which is "remarkable for containing more important agricultural and horticultural crops than any other genus." The root of the Brassica produces swedes or turnips, the stems produce kohlrabi, the leaves give us cabbage and brussels sprouts, the flowers yield cauliflower and broccoli and the seeds give mustard seed, oilseed rape and others. Truly an amazing plant. Though the word navew is seemingly rare, it was attested not long ago in this sentence: "Parsnip, carrot, radish, turnip, the longer-rooted navew, and rape were grown in gardens." I think that this comprises probably the list of my least favorite vegetables, even though they are highly regarded for their nutritional value.

I close this essay, however, with another "side trip" I took on the way to navew. I ran into ne exeat regno, which should have stopped no one, but since I like Latin phrases, I had to stop and see what was going on. Actually, I ended up at ne exeat regno because the Century told me that another spelling for navew was neep. Ok, that explains how I got to ne exeat. Literally translated "that he not leave the kingdom," it was a common law writ issued from chancery to forbid a defendant to leave the kingdom (or jurisdiction) without permission. Today we have bail and the promise to appear in court, but at that time we had interesting Latin phrases. It makes me wonder under what circumstances, at common law, a person could be held for trial or other legal process and in what circumstances he would be free, though perhaps with the restraint of the ne exeat clinging to him. So many worlds are opened through words, both the words that we intended to examine and those that just came along while we were on our journey.

Let's continue it in the next essay.

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