The Pleasure of Words Again--Essay 14

I have had enough of abstraction for a while; let's learn some new words of things we actually can touch and even, at times, taste. Let's begin with a zeppole, which is an Italian doughnut. Here is a picture of and recipe for these fritters. They are slightly crispy on the outside, tender inside and filled with homemade pastry cream. Yum. The site says that it is a sort of bigne, which is the Italian word for "cream puff." A nice sentence which includes several kinds of Italian food is from 1976: "The mingled smells of salsiccia, bracciola, zeppole and calzone wafted from the stalls of food vendors around Father Zemo Square." Salsiccia, by the way, is homemade Italian sausage, while bracciola is stuffed, rolled flank steak, where the stuffing ingredients "can be as varied as the list of foods which complement the flavor of beef."

After having a taste of some Italian food, my eye fell down the dictionary page to zerda, a word I am sure I have never seen previously. The OED says it is "so called by the 'Moors,'" and is the "fennec, Canis zerda." A fennec is a small African fox. This article tells us that this noctural omnivore, small in size, is found in the Sahara Desert of North Africa. This is one small fox with some very large ears.

A Few Other Animals

What are the sapajou, serow, sika and sambar? Well, let's take them apart (not literally) one by one and see what they tell us. We have seen carcajous (wolverine) and kincajous (raccoon-like quadruped of Central and South America), but now let's meet the sapajou--a South American monkey of the genus Cebus. The word first appeared in English in 1698. Here is a picture of a little guy atop the head of its owner. They are also called capuchin monkeys, not because they hang out at Starbucks and drink cappuccino, but because their head looks the like cowl/hood of a Capuchin priest.

A serow is an Asiatic antelope formerly of genus Naemorhedus, esp. N. thar. So, it can also be called a "thar." Now only the goral is classified under Naemorhedus. So, in our quest for vocabulary and concept mastery, we have this sentence from 1833, when the word "thar" first appeared in English. "As compared with the Ghoral, Antilope Goral...the Thar is a massive beast, twice the size, and has suborbital sinuses, and a mane along the back of the neck and shoulders." Here is a goral, a small antelope, which looks as if its rear end has been rammed by a bus and thus has been jamed together to make it shorter than it looks like it should be. The serow now consist of six species of goat-like or antelope-like mammals of the genus Capricornis. Here is a picture. Does it look like it ought to be in the same genus as the goral? I really don't think so.

So, we have gone from South America to Asia. Now we stay in Asia but go even further east to meet the sika deer, which is native to China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, but was brought into the US early in the 20th century. The sika's coat is dark brown to black. Some have faint white parallel spots on their back. Their Linnaean name, Cervus nippon tells ust that it is both from the deer family (Cervidae) and it comes from Japan. This page gives a picture and some identification tips; it stresses that the sikas differ from the roe deer in that the former has a white rump and often has a dark stripe running alone the spine. I am so looking forward to making their acquaintance!

The sambar, the fourth word above, is both an animal/living thing (an Indian deer with large, rugged antlers), and is also a highly seasoned lentil gravy in South Indian cooking. The word indicating the food only dates from 1957 in English: "Sambar powders go well into meat curries." Then, from 1972: "South Indian dishes--idli, dosa and sambhar--have become popular." Sometimes I just go to international restaurants to try out foods that are new words to me. Once I taste the food, the word "sticks." Here is a picture of a typical South Indian breakfast meal, with the vada (donut-looking piece), the sambar (chowder-like drink), and idli (the white puffy pieces in front).

The OED lists the deer, Cervus unicolor or C. equinus under the spelling sambur. Can't you see how spelling bees, the instrument of learning, and missing, so many good words, really gives us a false sense of how to render words in English? Especially problematic are words of foreign extraction. Arabic, Tamil, Chinese words all have so many different they can be rendered in English; spelling these words is like the spelling of English words used to be, before there was standardization.

In any case, here is a picture of a sambur, indeed a mature an baby sambur.

Conclusion--A Different Kind of Animal

I hadn't run into the word scandaroon until freerice.com kindly tested us on it. Two definitions are given. The first is preceded by a question mark, indicating that the lexicographers are not sure of its meaning. But, the OED suggests a "swindler, fraudulent dealer." From 1631: "There are a company of notable Skanderouns which greatly desire to be stiled Merchants, and these are such as runne from house to house, from Market to Market,..with packs and Fardels upon their backes, filled with counterfeit and adulterate wares...: and these are called Pedlers." But, scandaroon is also a variety of Carrier Pigeon. It is perhaps so called, the OED informs us, from the fact that "the pigeon was employed by the English Factory at Scanderoon, Syria to carry intelligence of the arrival of their ships in that port to Aleppo." Why is it scandaroon rather than scanderoon? Got me, but I better learn it as scandaroon, because that is how the Unabridged spells it, and the Unabridged will probably become the dictionary for the National Spelling Bee in the not-too-distant future. Oops, I just realized there is much more to say about scandaroon; it deserves its own essay.

All for now...

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