New Free Rice Words VII
Bill Long 5/16/08
Words That Are Harder Than They Look
There are a lot of compound words in English that are easy to spell and pronounce but are confoundingly difficult to figure out for us in the 21st century. Here are about 15: spoonmeat, sticktight, bluebottle, saucebox, shiplap, lapstrake, staysail, tattersall, spokeshave, layshaft, skidpan, leechcraft, skewbald, leatherhead and blackdamp. Let's try to take these apart one by one, and gradually make sense of the world... I will begin with the more "obvious" ones
1. Leechcraft is the art of healing. The word is very old, going back to Old Englsh, and was still being used in the 19th century: "Nature, to say nothing of Madge's leechcraft ultimately triumphed." By the way, leechdom is, or was, a medicine or medical formula.
2. A staysail is a triangular sail hoisted upon a stay. Here is a picture of two masts, with the staysail in between. A stay is "something that supports or steadies something else..."
3. Sticktights are composite weeds, Bidens frondosa, whose flat achenia bear two barbed awns. Ah, two more words to look up--achenia and awn. An awn is a "spinous process" or "beard" that terminates the grain-sheath of barley, etc.; or any similar bristly growth. An achene is a small dry one-seeded fruit which does not open to liberate the seed. It is derived from two Greek words meaning "not gaping"--hence, not 'opening.' This site (with picture), calls them Harpagonella palmeri, the ultimate "hitchiker" of the SW US.
4. A skidpan is a slippery road surface that is specifically designed to help drivers practice skid-correction. But, it can also refer simply to a treacherously slippery road. From 1959: "Rain turned many roads into skid-pans and caused hundreds of accidents."
5. Now, we are getting further away from a "literal" meaning for the words. Let's continue with tattersall, which is a fabric with a small and even check pattern--or garments made from such material. It also is named after Richard Tattersall (1724-95), a horse-auctioneer, to denote the horse-auction market established by him in 1766 at Hyde Park Corner, London. Here is a tattersall shirt you can get for only $50. The connection between the horse and the check? Well, horse blankets were originally made in the checked pattern--which was later called tattersall.
6. A saucebox is a person who habitually makes saucy or impertinent remarks. From 1820: "She's a goosecap, you know, and a romp, and a saucebox." A goosecap is a "booby, noodle, numskull, simpleton, fool." I like this word.
7. A spokeshave is a carpenter's tool having the blade placed lengthwise and used for planing curved work--such as in shaping and finishing spokes. The Century has four cuts depicting four different styles of spokeshaves. Here is a picture.
8. Spoonmeat is soft or liquid food for taking with the spoon, especially by infants or invalids. Thomas Huxley could write near the end of the 19th century: "A fortnight's spoon-meat reduced me to inanity."
9. A layshaft is a "short secondary or intermediary shaft driven by gearing from the main shaft of the engine." There are pictures here and there of it, but you have to know your engines (which I don't, unfortuantely) to have it make a lot of sense for you.
10. The most interesting sounding of all these words is skewbald--which is a term describing animals, especially horses, that are irregularly marked with white and brown or red or a similar color. It is a "skewed" horse that is "piebald," or composed of a motley arrangement of colors. Here is a picture of a skewbald horse.
11. A bluebottle can refer to many things, the most common of which is the "Blue Corn-flower" (Centaurea cyanus) or the "bluebottle fly" (Musca vomitoria), which has a large bluish body. Here we have one (the fly, that is). I think I have seen loads of them over the years...
12. The word leatherhead is either slang for a blockhead or, as the free rice entry said, the "friar-bird" from Australia. These birds have a black bear neck and sides of the face. This guy's head sort of looks like it is made out of leather, doesn't it?
13. Blackdamp is the "suffocating damp" or the "choke-damp" in coal mines. This is a miner's term for carbonic acid gas which accumulates in old workings in coal bits. I wonder what the EPA does with this stuff... The meaning of "damp" in this hyphenated word is "an exhalation, vapor of gas, especially of a noxious kind." I wonder if John Milton ever used the term in his memorabl picture of Hell...
14. A shiplap is a form of joint in carpentry made by halving. The word first appeared in 1854 and was defined as follows: "A carpenter's term for a mode of uniting the end of one piece of wood to the side of another, at right angles, by a bevil-shaped bearing on the upper edge." Whereas it might originally have been used in ship construction, the Wikipedia article defines it as a board used in construction of barns, sheds, outbuildings and inexpensive homes. The rabbet at the opposite sides of each end allows the boards to overlap. Thus, the "lap" part of the word. A rabbet is a recess or groove cut into the edge of the wood, to help it interlock with adjoining pieces. William Faulkner could contrast shiplap (cheap) with "tongue and groove" construction in his 1939 Wild Palms.
15. Finally, a lapstrake is a boat in which each streak overlaps the one below. It is synonymous with a clinker boat, which is defined as "a method of constructing hulls of boats by fixing wooden planks and, in the 19th century, iron plates to each other so that the planks overlap along their edges." Shipbuilding was all the rage in 19th century New England, and anyone who reads Melville must know a lot about it, but I am afraid we are too distant from that period for it to be common knowledge. Maybe someday someone will explain all of this to me--and maybe also I will learn about trireme construction...
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