Last Words For This "Page"--II

Bill Long 11/21/08

I have a lot of words to "clean up" on this page, ranging from cahot, palliyan and caimitillo (from the Seattle Spelling Bee) to odonata, cere, elater, namaycush, seriema and villanelle from the previous essay, to a few random words such as caiman and tatouay. There are 11 words here, so let's begin..

1. The Unabridged is the only major dictionary in which I found cahot (ca HOE), and it defines it as a French Canadian "thank-you ma'am." Huh? That makes the dictionary? But cahot is also the French word for "bump" (as in a road), and so I am more satisfied with it as "bump" than "thank-you."

2. Palliyan is another rare word, and can be spelled with one or two "l's." It is, as the Unabridged tells us, a race of "negroid jungle dwellers" in South India who speak Dravidian languages. As this article nicely points out, the 73 languages in the Dravidian family are spoken by more than 200 million people worldwide. My goodness--you read around in Dravidian languages, and you come across scholars such as Susumu Kuno (b. 1933), emeritus from Harvard, who was Japanese-born but devoted a lot of his energy to understanding his native Japanese as well as Dravidian languages. I don't think palliyan should have been given in a spelling bee; even the leading web pages which talk about the 20 leading Dravidian languages don't mention palliyan.

3. Caimitillo is the third word remaining from the Seattle Bee--and is a tree, diminutive of caimito, the Star Apple tree. As this site says, "the caimito fruit has a star like design when it is sliced..." The caimitillo is a "tropical American timber tree with dark hard heavy wood and small plumlike purple fruit..."

4. The cere is part of the beak of parrot, specifically the "soft waxy swelling, containing the nostrils, at the base of the upper beak" of the parrot. Its name is derived from the Latin cera, which means "wax." Here is a picture of that small part of the upper beak. You wonder if parrots in lover fondle these smooth parts--as human lovers like the smooth parts of each other..

5. Namaycush (NAM uh cush) is the species name of the lake trout. That is, the Salvelinus namaycush is a freshwater char living mainly in lakes. The word derives from the Algonquian, which I plan to take up after mastering a few Dravidian languages...

6. The seriema, known also as the "red-legged seriema" or "crested cariama," is a mostly predatory terrestrial bird in the Cariamidae family. It is found from the grasslands of Brazil south of the Amazon to Uruguay and northern Argentina. Look at its feet, with the sickle claw, and you will see a most interesting hooked appendage. You wonder what the range of uses for this appendage is...

7. Odonata is an order of predatory insects comprising the dragonflies and damselflies. Characteristics? "Long, slender body, large eyes, two pairs of transparent membranous wings, and aquatic nymphs." There were so named by Fabricius in his 1793 Entomologia Systematica because they have "serrated mandibles." The Greek word odon means "tooth." There are about 6500 extant species in just over 600 genera of these flies. We could be memorizing forever, but let's content ourself with a dramatic picture of their transparent wings.

8. Now is the time for tatouay-- a Tupi (language formerly spoken in Brazil by the Tupi people) word for a South American armadillo. The Century tells us that its species name is Xenurus, which means "strange tail." The xenurines or kabassous were named in 1830, with one of the two species being the Xenurus unicinctus. This picture shows its strange covering and tail...which gave it the name. Oh, unicinctus means "one girdle" or "of one girdle," so the name very appropriately means, "strange tail, one girdle." And you thought all those Latin/Greek names were so sophisticated...

9. The caiman has little to do with where you would set up your offshore bank account. In fact, two spellings (cayman and caiman) look acceptable, and is the name given by Caribbean natives to some "large saurians of the crocodile family." Well, the OED goes on to say that the caiman is distinguished from the "true crocodile" (you wonder if crocodiles make fun of caimans for not being "true" crocodiles..) by the "shortness and roundness of the muzzle, and the inferior development of the webs between the toes." Definitely wouldn't make it in Oregon, then.. It also says it is the Spanish word for "alligator." So, here is a picture, with the short and round muzzle. Oops, you also have a fish caught in its jaws. Well, better that it is a fish than a human leg..

10. I ran across the word villanelle in ch. 5 of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I had seen the word previously, but I don't believe I had ever tried to understand the complexity of this 19-line poem until today. The content of a villanelle is usually "pastoral or lyric" [villanella is the Italian word for "rustic"] and it consists of five three-lined stanzas and a final quatrain, with only two rhymes throughout. In addition, the first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated alternately in the succeding stanzas as a refran, and form a final couplet in the quatrain. I would like to ask you, before giving the most "famous" of such villanelles, who in the world would have even thought up the idea that such a rhythm should be named and be a special type of poem? Here is a page explaining it in a bit more detail. And here is Dylan Thomas' villanelle "Do not Go Gentle into That Good Night."

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night,

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night,

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

I think I will leave the word elater for some later essay... Thanks, once again, for joining me.

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