A Third Group of Words--Beginning with P

When I began my essays on "P" yesterday, I thought I would get one essay out of the dozen or so words I had; then, as I began writing, more words came out and, from the words I selected, delicious stories or perspectives arose. So, as I start essay # 3 on "p's," I still have eight words to go: piolet, pipa, piedra, prang, pecten, planchet, passulate, and piperazine. Again, let's begin with easy words.

1. A piolet, derived from the French and Italian, is simply a two-pointed axe used in mountain-climbing. Its first English usage was in 1868, when mountain-climbing just was beginning as an American hobby. "If you intend to wander much on the glaciers without guides...a piolet is preferable [to the alpenstock]." Such an easy word, if you know something about that endeavor. By the way, an alpenstock is an "Alps stick" [German this time], a long iron-pointed staff, used first in climbing the Alps. Here is a "modern" version of the alpenstock, while here is a great picture of a piolet. Note the small design of the piolet on the piolet cuff.

2. While on easy words, let's do passulate, which the OED says is now obsolete. It is derived from the Latin passulatus, flavored with raisins. Behind that lies passula, which means "dried grapes, raisins." Thus, passulate is "flavored with or containing raisins." What could be like this? Well, a salad or even a medicine. I have a suggestion. Why not, in order to "trump" the other people in a wine-tasting exhibition (a very competitive activity, for those that didn't know..), use this word in your next wine-tasting experience. Something like, "Hm..a hint of Edam cheese [thanks to Sideways!] and slightly passulate. Don't you agree?" I generally am not in favor of using words to "trump" other people but, as prosecutors say about the death penalty, it is nice to have it in their quiver so that you get defendants to come around to reality...

3. Let's move on to "prang," which has a "two-prong" definition. Derived from the Khmer, it means, in Cambodia and Thailand, a tall tower or spire usually shaped like a corncob. A brief article, with picture, of the prang form is here. Getting into this Thai/Khmer world would take us on a wonderful historical jaunt, but not now. When you think prang, think of a finger-like spire. Then, prang is a also a word developed by the Royal Air Force in WWII to denote an aircraft's crash landing. From 1942: "American flyers in the RAF Eagle Squadrons have introduced a new decoration. 'The Order of Prang'...'Prang' is Eagle slang for crash." From 1992: "Luckless pilots can claim unsightly forehead scars came from their reflector gunsights after a prang in the war." As a verb, prang not only means "to crash a plane" but, figuratively, to "smash, damage, injure or strike heavily." From the New Yorker in 1995: "There was a new tear, with a smeary stain, in one knee of his trousers. 'Pranged my leg,' Burgess said."

4. Pecten is to be distinguished from pectin, the "neutral colloidal carbohydrate formed naturally in plant and fruit tissues" that makes jellies "jell." Before getting to pecten, I thought I would quote a sentence that explains how pectin, found particularly in apples, helps jellies jell. It is speaking of commerically-made powdered recipes of pectin, made from apples and imported from Europe.

"Pectin's molecular structure looks like a chain with spikes sticking out. When these chains contact fruit acid in a jelly mixture, the acid charges the spikes, causing the pectin chains to fold in on themselves and trap water to form a gel."

Once again, chemistry is the key to life. Oh, I suppose the Greek language is, also...the Greek word pektikos means "congealing, curdling," which is precisely what pectin does....

Well, back to pecten. Pecten comes from the Latin verb pectere, which means "to comb," and behind it lies the Greek pekein, meaning "to comb, card." Thus, in zoology, a pecten (noun) is a "comb-like" process. What are the variety of things in nature that have such a process? They are multitudinous, and the Century lists a lot of them. Not to be exhaustive or exhausting, a few are: (1) the bursa or marsupium of a bird's eye in the vitreous humor, which is plaited or folded in a pectinated structure. Scholars write on everything: there is even an article "The morphology of the pecten oculi of the ostrict, Struthio camelus." Don't bury your head on that one. Figure 2 on this web page gives you a diagram showing the wavy pecten of the bird's eye; (2) the Pecten magellanicus, sketch of which is here, the giant sea scallop, with its pectinate shell easily visible. But why isn't the sea scallop's shape flabelliform? Ah, but then, looking up the word flabelliform (fan-shaped), I found this 1828 quotation: "Antennae flabelliform or pectinated." Case closed; (c) the comb or comb-row of a ctenophore [this word always trips up at least one speller in a bee]. Actually, ctenophores are sometimes called "comb jellies" and are voracious predators of animal plankton (zooplankton eggs, etc.).

So as not to prolong this interminably, in anatomy pecten denoted at one time the bones in the hand between the wrist and fingers; the metacarpus. This usage goes back to the late 14th century in English, as does a use to describe the pubic bone.

There are still a few "p-words" left, for the next essay.

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