The Pleasure of Words--New Free Rice Words XII

Let's begin with a word that isn't an object that can be photographed. The verb moider (one of which suggested definitions in the freerice.com quiz was the hilarious "a killing in Brooklyn") has three meanings, none of which is really used today: (1) to confuse, perplex; exhaust, overcome; and (2) to work very hard or dissipate by toiling; and (3) to be delirious, babble; wander about aimlessly." Thus, like Clete Boyer for the Yankees in the 1960s, it looks like a good utility player, even though it might not be used as often as would be valuable. So, an author could write in 1974: "The phrase kept moithering (i.e., moidering) round in my brain..." The most frequent usage of it in sense 1 is in respect to the brain. From 1880: "Moidering his brain with temperance meetings,..temperance papers, and such trash." The freerice.com meaning, the second, isn't very well attested at all, but this 1882 quotation is an eloquent one:

"She lived only to scrape and hoard, moidering away her loveless life in the futile energies and sordid aims of a miser's wretched pleasure."

Moidering seems to be derived from mithering, which means to "bother, pester" or "ramble, be delirious; complain, make a fuss." The complaining/fussing meaning of mithering is evident in these two late 20th century quotations. From the London Times of June 10, 1989, "It's no use mithering on about individual freedom." And, from 1998: "The throng of pale grey Brummie lawyers sipping champagne and mithering..about how poor they are." Whenever I see a person complaining from now on, I will think of them as mithering; whenever I see someone confused, I will thing of them as moidered. Oops, maybe I just have to look in the mirror...

Returning to Visible Things

Actions and verbs that catch those actions are wonderful but I think I need to return to visible things for a while, in my Adamic quest to name all the things out there. A nardoo is a semiaquatic Australian ferm of the genus Marsilea. By the way, the Marsilea were named by Linnaeus in 1767 after the early Italian naturalist Aloysius Marsili. It just goes on and on, doesn't it? Here is a great picture of that clover-like floating fern. As this site says, it is a food plant for aboriginal people (the word nardoo is an Aboriginal term), who gather the sporocarps and grind then, mixing the powder with water to form an edible dough. For some reason I don't think I will be eating this tonight; maybe, in honor of the Olympic games, I will be trying out some Chinese delicacy.

Well, staying with the 'n's, and the water lilies/ferns, we have the nuphar, a genus of water lilies of Eurasis and eastern North America, having yellow or purple flowers and usually held above the water. The word nuphar is a shortened form of the Arabic and ultimately, Persian-derived word nenuphar, which is a "water lily, esp. the white water lily." The Nuphar lutea, or yellow pond lily, is pictured here. What a beautiful flower! It almost kindled within the desire to take my world tour soon, but with a horticultural and faunal emphasis....

Windy Words

Oops, it happened to me once again. As I was looking to my list of words to exposit (and I was truthfully going to return to some "visible" things, like animals), I ran across samiel on my list, a kind of wind. Indeed, the samiel is the Simoom, or desert wind. From 1815: "The samiel or mortifying (i.e., deathly) winds of the deserts near Bagdad." The terms are connected in 1832: "The most dreadful of all winds is the famous semoum or samiel, which prevails in the desert bounded by Bassora (Basra), Bagdad, Aleppo, and Mekka, and the effects of which are suffocation and immediate putrefaction of the body." This is similar to the leveche, defined as "a hot, dry, more or less southerly wind of south-eastern Spain, the local counterpart of the sirocco."

But we can keep going on the words for winds for a second longer. We have, from 1962, this quotation: "The Mediterranean area also is the home of a hot, searing, dust-laden wind off the Sahara, known in various localities as sirocco, khamsin, leveche, or samiel." So, add simoom to the list and we have five terms for the brutal hot wind from Africa (sirocco, simoom, leveche) or the Middle East (samiel, simoom). We could go into these words in detail, which we won't, and establish that the khamsin, for example, a hot and oppressive wind from the south or south-east, from the perspective of Egypt, is named for the 50 day period in blows in March - May (khamsun is Arabic for fifty). There is also the gibli/gibleh, a local name in Libya for the sirocco. So, each country might have its name for the wind, which is cool, even though the wind is very hot.

Then, libeccio is the Italian word for the south-west wind. From Shelly (1820): "The Libecchio here howls like a chorus of fiends all day." Finally, we have shamal, which is derived from the Arabic word for "north," and is a wind from the north or northwest, depending on where you are. From 1900: "The prevailing wind at Bahrein..is the shemmal or Northwester." But this brings us to the north, doesn't it, and I have a few things to say about that--in the next essay. [oops, I left out a desert wind!]

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