Miscellaneous Words--Oke to Balibuntal and Beyond

In an earlier essay I likened the study of words to "poor man's travel," because it often enables one to escape from one's situation and go elsewhere in mind. Of course, this isn't as nice as actually flying to San Diego from Duluth in January, but it does allow some learning to take place. It also encourages us to speak with greater precision, since each area of the world has its own ways of doing things and its own self-understanding. We learn to tread humbly when we study words.

1. Let's begin with oke (OOK), a word predictably absent from the Collegiate but present in the OED and Century. It is/was a Turkish (Ottoman) unit of weight or volume equivalent to about 2.8 pounds or 2.2 liters. This word is related to the Latin "ounce" in a very roundabout fashion, but I will stay in the Ottoman Empire for now. This unit of measurement stayed in place until the 1870s, when the metric system was introduced. The kilogram was called the "new oke." Funny it is to me that the various quotations given in the OED using the word spell it about 9 ways (Oquies; Okkas; Oka; Ochas; Oqueas, etc.). Maybe we can develop a joke about how many Britishers it takes to spell a three-letter word... In order to understand Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk's work, you need to know the word: From My Name is Red: "He boiled soapwort in a pot containing three okkas of water."

But the "journeying" part of the word is suggested in an explanatory note in the OED--"The Empire's successor states all use the metric system, but the term okka [why does the OED spell it oke then?] is still heard among the villagers in parts of Anatolia, notably in the province of Malatya." Hm. Malatya. I hadn't run into that one, and so I had the opporutnity to study about this province (81 of them in Turkey; I also comment on the Hatay Province here). If your knowledge of the world through words is built up one word at a time (well, sometimes you get a whole mouthful of words you never forget), that is also the way one learns about the regions or any country. The Malatya Province, population of about 900,000, is in a mountainous region of the Anti-Taurus mountains (map here). It has 14 districts within it, and the largest city is Malatya. The area is known for its apricot production. I found an abstract of this exciting article online: "Preliminary results of clonal selection of hachihaliloglu apricot cultivar in Malatya." Actually, I am glad that the entire article isn't online! Here is a YouTube video with Turkish singers celebrating the virtues of Malatya apricots and culture. Cool pictures of notable sites in Malatya don't really take you there, but it takes you further than your living room. Makes me want to return to my Turkish, though I am afraid it will have to wait in line--until I get a series of other languages under the belt.

2. Well, let's go to the opposite part of the world to explain balibuntal. It is a "fine straw of a very close weave, used for hats." The word can also be used attributively, as in a "balibuntal hat." Pictures galore are online. From the NY Times of 1928: "Baku and Balibuntal are favorite straws for Easter Wear." The OED informs us that it is short for "Baliuag buntal," a weave of the straw known as buntal (made largely from the talipot and buri palms) and coming from Baliuag in Bulacan, Philippines. So, I had to go there, so to speak. Bulacan is a region just north of Manila. It has an English-language website which emphasizes how much they are "open for business." Never hurts to promite oneself, I suppose. Here is a map of the region, which shows the town of Baliuag on Route 5. I suppose we could just drop in on it more and more, but I am content to know that the straw comes from there, and that someday I might even understand that area a little more...

3. We have ended our traveling for now, and so let's look at words that keep us firmly in our chair. Clapperclaw is a verb meaning either to scratch, beat, thrash or, figuratively, to revile or abuse. Shakespeare was one of the first to use the word. In Merry Wives he says, "He will Clapper-claw thee tightly." I suppose the picture behind it is pawing something/someone with the open hand or with a claw. From 1846: "While we expected to be clapper-clawed, there was courage in braving it and speaking the truth." "In order to expect to make a significant contribution in the world, one must be willing to be clapperclawed by people who don't understand, who just want the status quo, who are jealous, or who just can't abide another person having talent that eludes them..." Good, visual word.

4. A pigeonwing can refer to at least two things: (1) in hairdressing, a type of hair or wig fashionable with men at the end of the 18th century, in which the side hair is curled into a roll above the ear. We see these guys looking rather ridiculous all the time in British works or, especially, American colonial shows set at this time. "Many of the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia sported their pigeonwings." Then, (2), it also is a dance step, "performed by jumping up and striking the legs together while in the air." This web site, maintained by a historian and teacher of dance Doris Volz, says that "early settlers arriving into the USA in the mid 1800s brought new dance steps..non partner dancing consisted of extemporaneous footwork--clogging, shuffling, leaping, heel clicking and 'cutting the pigeon wing,' (clapping the feet together while leaping in the air)... Joy.

5. I ran across the word segnitude/segnity on the way elsewhere and just wanted to stop on it for a second. Derived from the Latin segnitia, meaning "slowness" or "tardiness." Segnis means "slow, slack, sluggish, disinclined for exertion." Thus, segnitude is slowlness, dullness or inactivity. This is one of the many words, like rantize, invented in the 17th century in English, when we were just "stretching" to see how far the language would reach. Many words invented then (see also Cotton Mather's use of balant and latrant in 1702) would quickly pass out of use, if indeed they even had a "use" in those days. So, we may find segnity, to express a person's dullness or slowness, not to be very useful today, but I think we should be aware of the ways that people have tried to "stretch" the language before us so that we might be encouraged to take it to its limits today.

6. I make remarkably little progress in an essay, and so I close with one more: segreant. No one is quite sure exactly how this was derived, but it is a word from the world of heraldry applied to a griffin. The OED doesn't inspire us with much confidence when it says that "the real meaning of the term seems to be unknown." Guillem's Heraldry (1638) explained it as an epithet of a griffin meaning "of a twofold nature" because the griffin passant combined parts of the eagle and the lion. The Century then goes on to define it as "in heraldry: rising on the hind legs, usually with the wings raised or indorsed..." It is "equivalent to rampant (running) and salient (jumping)." Indorsed (OED endorsed) in Heraldry means "Of wings: Thrown backwards." Ok, so at least we have a definition, even if we don't know precisely what the definition means....

I am afraid we are out of space for today, with lots of words still to go...

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