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Bill Long 8/17/08
International (and Local) Terms Combined
I am always amazed at people's ingenuity in inventing new words. Amazed, for example, at smaze, which is just "smoke and haze." How does this really differ from smog? Let's do a little historical work here and sort out the words. Whereas the word smog goes back to 1905, when it was invented by the honorary treasurer of the "Coal Smoke Abatement Society" (that seems humorous; that there is an 'honorary' treasurer. What were his duties?) in England. It was first coined to describe the "London fog" or "smoky fog" not found in the country but only in the city. However, in 1953, we have this sentence from a Charlottesville, VA newspaper: "Manhattan skyscrapers look like misty dream-castles as a combination of smoke and haze drifts around them. Called 'smog' by most people, the smoke-haze combination might more aply be termed 'smaze.'" No matter how right the person might be (and, indeed, it seems like smaze is the more appropriate name for the stuff in most circumstances), smog entered early and "stuck" and smaze shows no indication of gaining ground on it.
A Few Quick Hits
About two weeks ago I devoted a section of one essay to the bride-price, which I called the lebola, a long-standing and widespeared African custom. I spelled it lebola because that is how my source spelled it. But since then I have discovered that the OED spells it lobola and the latter spelling (along with lobolo) appears about 40X more frequently than the former. So, it shall be lobola for me, though not literally.
Barranca is the Spanish (English, too, I suppose) word for a ravine. Actually, the word goes back to 1691 in English, even though it was at first called a barranco. Washington Irving, in his work Granada, spelled it barranco in the first part of the work and barranca in the second. This was the great transition to the barranca spelling.
A carambola is the fruit (star-shapped, which the OED calls "obscurely 10-ribbed") of a small East Indian tree Averrhoa Carambola. Here is a picture of the fruit. The linked article also says that it is closely related to the bilimbi. Well, a moment ago we may have known neither word; now we know two. Ultimately, we don't appreciate them until we have eaten the fruit or perhaps gone to East Asia (or south Florida or Hawaii, where they are grown in the USA) to see some of the trees/fruit.
Let's leave objects for a moment and go to a musical term: ostinato. There really are tons of nice Italian musical terms around, such as dal segno, rallentando, ripieno, allegro, vivace, sforzando, lento, etc., but ostinato means "a continuously repated melodic or rhythmical figure or phrase." We can see the word obstinate behind, or in front of, the word. There is such a part as a basso ostinato, which the OED defines as "a musical structure in which a figure is repeated successively througout a work, with or without variation, usually in the bass part." A basso ostinato differs from a ripieno in that the latter (literally, full) is instrumentation that is continually in use. Yet I wonder, on further reflection, whether there really is too much difference between the two. I like the figurative use of ostinato form the late 1950s, in a quotation from Roy Fuller's Ruined Boys:
"He became aware of the noises of summer-of insects, larks, leaves--that provide the normally unidentified ostinato that nevertheless enriches the obvious themes of color, sun and cloud."
I like the phrase: "the normally unidentified ostinato." I guess another way of saying it would be the "background buzz" or "noise," but I like ostinato better.
Getting Lost in the "O's"
As I was just about ready to close the door on ostinato and the "o's," my eye fell on a few words below, and I decided I couldn't go on without mentioning them. We have various osti-terms, derived from the Latin word for door or gate, such as ostium, ostiole, ostiolum; then, we have the words ostler and ostleress. The word ostler is a variation of hosteler (from which we get our word "host") and it means "a person who receives and lodges guests, esp. at a religious house." It can also be an innkeeper, as is indicated by the use of the word in a Wyciffite version (15th century) of the Gospel of Luke 10:35: "He brought forth twey pans, and sas to the ostiler.." Ostleress is just the female version of the ostler. From 1639: "Jews and Pagans slander her to have been stabularia, an Ostleresse or a she-stable-groom." There are too few words in English derived from stabul... (though, of course, we have "stable") to take a digression there. Tennyson used the word Ostleress: "A plump-arm'd Ostleress and a stable wench/ Came running at the call, and help'd us down."
Let's get near the end with ostomachy. It is a "game played with bones." Apparently in Byzantine Greek the word ostomachion was a game played with fourteen pieces of bone. Thus, even though it was a "game," it was a sort of "war." There are no real reference to this anyplace; not on the Internet, not in data bases of scholarly articles I have found. So, at this point we will have to leave it right there, until I find a Byzantine historian who likes to play...
Conclusion
Let's close with the word pantile. I could just quote the OED definition--about its being a roofing tile curved to an ogee shape, etc., but I think I will just link you to a picture. Here is a picture of a pantile roof. We have pantile upon pantile upon pantile. Never again should we have to look up this word. Then, finally, before we leave, I just noted the word panthnetist. It will never be used in our day because it is almost impossible to pronounce, but it is a person who believes that the soul dies with the body (it all dies). Actually, if you think this word is bad, you should try to pronounce its synonym: thneopsychism--where you can see the "death of the soul" more directly. Let's take a break for a while, with gratitude for the insights we have received and the opportunity to study.
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