Interesting Words Beginning with "S"

In my continuing quest to learn "all the words," I came across these 20 or so words beginning with "s," which call for notice. We have: satang, stotinka, skirret, salep, swaling/swealing, stacte, succuss, spall, sough, sheugh, strass, stot, slivovitz, swither, sautoir, skeel, springhalt, sinapism, surra and scraw.

1. Let's begin with swaling and the identical word swealing, derived from to sweal. Swealing/swaling means "burning; singeing." From 1759: "The singeing of a pig they call sweeling." It can also suggest the blazing of something or the guttering of a candle (i.e., the tendency of wax of burning candles to channel or furrow with streams, tears and the like). I ran into the word this week when reading DH Lawrence's 1913 Sons and Lovers. When Gertrude Morel was discovered with a tumor on her side, the big issue was whether the doctors could give her something to sweal it away. Unfortunately not...

2. and 3. I had to get that out of my system before returning to monetary units (with which I had ended the previous essay). So, let's look at stotinka and satang. The first is the former monetary unit of Bulgaria, until it was recently replaced by the Euro. Well, I suppose it is more accurate to say that the Lev, representing 100 stotinka, was the former currency unit. Lev means lion, and it was in use more than 125 years (beginning in 1881). You can learn the history of a country, or at least some significant issues, by looking at their paper and coin money. Here are some pictures. The Thai baht is divided into 100 satang. As you can see in this picture, the interesting satang coins have holes in the middle, something like donuts. Oh, the Kyat is the monetary unit of Myanmar; the word appears on the freerice.com web site.

4. While we are on either visible or practical terms, mention should be made of slivovitz, a plum brandy. I didn't know this, but each year there is the US Slivovitz Festival in Duluth, MN. Other than Duluth's being the town of Bob Dylan's birth, I am not sure I know much about it at all, but now I am comforted by knowing there is a such a festival there. Here is the web site. The word is both Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. Ah, we already know Bulgarian currency, don't we, so now you have a drink of theirs. I wonder how many Lev or stotinka a glass of slivovitz costs.. By the way, there is even a queen of the American Slivovitz Festival. Sounds like Garrison Keillor ought to be doing something with this.

5. and 6. Let's continue on visible or practical things, with sheugh (SHOOK) and sough (SUFF). The former, a Scottish term, is a "furrow, trench, ditch, drain." The OED tells us that sheugh is a Northern variant of sough. Sure enough, the second definition of sough is "a boggy or swampy place; small pool" or "a drain, sewer, trench." But sough can have a fuller meaning than this. It is not only the ditch or trench into which the water flows, but it is "a rushing or murmuring sound as of wind, water, or the like, esp. one of a gentle or soothing nature." Wordsworth used the word this way in 1792: "Faint wail of eagle..., and pine-wood's steady sugh." Or, Scott could write in 1816: "It is the sough of the wind among the bracken." Showing that the term had a wide and useful life, Charlotte Bronte said in 1847: "That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the earliest streams, the sough of the most remote." Just say "SUFF" and let the sound escape your mouth and suffuse the room. That, or a sound like it , is what the word tries to capture. So, rustle, sough, susurrus--good words to capture those ever-present sounds.

7. Skeel is a word derived from Icelandic through Middle English and means "a shallow wooden vessel." The Century tells us that it can also be a shallow wooden vessel for holding milk. I suppose this is just grand, but I don't think I will ever run into one--except perhaps at an antique show. The OED also attests the use of skeelful, which might be a useful word to have around for a synonym to "pailful" or "bucketful."

8. Springhalt, an alternative form of stringhalt, is "an affection of the hind legs of a horse which causes certain muscles to contract spasmodically." Scott, in Rob Roy, wrote in 1817: "The stringhalt will gae off when it's gaen a mile." Shakespeare, actually, was the first to use the term springhalt in Henry VIII (I.iii.13): "They have all new legs,/ And lame ones; one would take it...The Spaven and Spring-halt rain'd among 'em." Perhaps the spasmodic moves of a horse afflicted resemble the subsultus or carphologia of the person who lashes out unknown to himself on the bed.

9. Then, we have scraw. The usual meaning of the term is a "turf used for covering the roof of a hovel beneath the thatch." Jonathan Swift decried the custom of using scraw to cover cabins in 1725: "That odious custom..of cutting scraws (as they call them) which is flaying off the green surface of the ground to cover their cabins, or make up their ditches..."

10. Finally, strass can be a kind of waxed straw with silky appearance, or, more usually, a "vitreous composition used as a basis in the manufacture of artificial stones." Pictured here are glittery "strass ball" pendants. But much more can be made of strass. This site says that the original colorless stones used as the basis for factitious gems were found in the Rhine River. They were used on account of their remarkable luster. Thus one can have strass jewelry or pendents or crystals. This site tells us that the technique was named after George (probably Georg) Frederick (probably Friedrich) Strass.

So many words...so little time. Until the next time.

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