Second Essay on "C's"

The words beginning with "c" which I would like to explore in this and the next essay are cacique, camlet, chapbook, carnet, carmalum, chigoe, chaffer, cardoon, chinch, capelin, collet, cachuca, capoeira. As we are finding in almost every "word" essay, so these words open world to us, beckoning us to enter in and giving us sample of their glory even as we only have time to squiz at them. Let's begin easily...

1. A chapbook is a word of modern origin (1824) to describe works of popular literature formerly circulated and sold by itinerant dealers or chapmen, consisting chiefly of small pamphlets of popular ballads, tales, tracts, romances, etc. Behind the "chap" of chapman is the German kaufmann... or merchant. A gloriously easy beginning.

2. The etymology section for camlet in the OED is much longer than the entry itself. After all of it, the OED concludes "The ultimate origin is obscure." The name originally applied to a costly eastern fabric, early defined as "a kind of stuff originally made by a mixture of silk and camel's hair." In the 16th-17th centuries it was made of the hair of the Angora goat. So, over the years it could refer to something made of of hair, wool, silk and combinations of these. Here is a picture of the fabric. The verb "to camlet" means to have wavy or watered veins or lines such as in the fabric. From 1652: "In sackcloth chamleted [today "camleted"] with tears." I would love to have "fabric day" where an expert on these would bring 20 into a class, let me and others feel them and, while we are enjoying the feel, tell us the story of each..

3. We can easily define cacique [a native Haitian word for 'lord, chief'] as a native prince or chief in the pre-European West Indies and Central/South America. A cacique can also be a political "boss," or one installed by the big cacique himself to do his will. The word was first used in English by Richard Eden in his 1550s A treatyse of the newe India and then again, by Eden, in the 1570s. In both instances he was describing the pre-European Native leader. I found a fascinating article "Spanish Justice and the Indian Cacique: Disjunctive Political Systems in Sixteenth-Century Tehuantepec," by Judith Zeitlin and Lilian Thomas, Ethnohistory 39 (1992), 285-315, which describes in detail the cultural dislocation in the native legal system brought about the Spanish incursion into Zapotec on the Mexican Isthmus in the mid-16th century. Central to the story is Don Juan Cortes, an Indian cacique who had changed his name in order to represent the Spanish power in his old country. Zeitlin and Thomas point out the different conceptions of ruling of the Natives and the Spanish, and how the cacique Don Juan Cortes got caught in the middle of it. I never will forget what a cacique is after reading their article..

4. I am afraid that chinch may open up too many wonders, as it is the gateway not only to chinchy but also to chintz and chintzy, but let's look more closely at it. A chinch or chinch bug is really a complex of three different species within the Lygaeidae family. Common to them all is the piercing-sucking mouthparts that feed on the sap of grass plants. They suck the sap where the blade emerges from the runner or rhizome. Then, as they feed on the sap, they release their saliva into the wound thus created, making the grass turn yellow and die. They have black bodies with silvery wings that overlap across their backs--which gives them an hourglass look. They are about 1/8'' to 1/6'' in length. Here are some pictures, with one of them seemingly crawling across your computer screen. Blissus insularis is perhaps the most common in the Southern US, while Blissus hirtus is most common in the Northeast. No "bliss," however, for those who must deal with them. Maybe I take back what I said earlier about the "wonders" of these creatures....

In any case, chintz is a fabric, "a firm usually glazed cotton fabric of plain weave commonly with colorful printed designs...used for clothing and for interior decoration." Hundreds of pictures of chintz are online; here is one. Something that is chintzy is, first of all, decorated with or like chintz, but quickly became associated with something unfashionable, petit-bourgeousie or cheap. George Eliot first used the word in 1851: "The effect is chintzy and would be unbecoming." Graham Greene seemed to love the word: "He got up from his chintzy chair and came and sat with me on the chintzy sofa..."

5. After all that, let's return to an easy word: carnet (car NAY). It is derived from the French word meaning "note-book" or "booklet" and meant, first of all, a note-book and then, in the 20th century, a permit, either issued to an aviator, a vehicle (allowing it to cross a border) or to people wanting admission into camp sites. So, it originated in France, but was taken up into English, primarily in the 1920s. "The AA issues Triptyques or Carnets to its members." Here is an entire web page devoted to carnets; thus it is a trivially simple word to lots of people on this earth. The web site defines it as a "Merchandise Passport" or "international customs documents that simplify customs procedures for the temporary importation of various types of goods.." Enough...

6. Carmalum is a term from histology to describe "a stain composed of carminic acid, alum and water for use in microscopy." An 1893 issue of Natural Science (surely a hot read!) describes various stains in microscopy. The word carmalum appears on pp. 118ff when the author is contrasting various kinds of treatments (Hermann's fluid and Flemming's fluid, for example) on chick embryos. Then he moves to stains and says that it is "best done in alum carmine if it is to be mounted whole, or in carmalum if it is to be sectioned." Thus, the word has been around for 115 years, but doesn't appear in the OED or any dictionary I have found except Webster's Third International. Well, I doubt if I will learn about this stain in Philip Roth's 2000 bestseller.

7. Let's conclude this essay with capelin, a small fish very similar to a smelt, found on the coast of Newfoundland and much used as bait for cod. To show my insularity, I, who live in the Pacific NW of the United States, didn't know this word, but there are millions of capelins in Newfoundland. Indeed, this site pictures the "capelin" roll, a frenzy where "for about two days millions of capelin roll in with the surf where the females spawn and the males fertilize the eggs before they too die." Excited yet?

One more essay will "finish" these c's.

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