Unexpectedly Tough Words II

The words I would like to examine here are marc, diseuse, caliology, nidification, arshin, quitch, bort, spall, surra, kip. These are not very exiciting words, but sometimes neither is your 2:30 appointment...

1. Actually marc is not such a dull or useless word. It can be the spelling of a man's name, but it mostly means "the refuse remaining after the extraction of juice, etc. from fruit or other plant material." It often refers to the remains after pressing of grapes. So, those in the wine business should know the word. It is useful because we often are reduced to struggling for a word to describe these leavings, and the best we can do is "dregs" or "lees." Two quotations--the first referring to a plant. Form 1960: "Flowers [of pyrethrum] are ..gristed [and] the remaining grist, known after treatment as marc, is..sold as cattle food." Then, referring to wine, "It is important for the macerating must [a noun!] to have as much contact with the 'marc' as possible, but..one should avoid moving the marc around too much, as it gives the wine a herby taste." Herby taste? That's a new one for me, but I will swallow and accept it..

2. Quitch is pictured here and is popularly known (if it is popular at all) as "couch-grass." As the linked site says, it was traditionally used in Europe as a diuretic and also to treat urinary problems including gravel, respiratory catarrh, respiratory inflammation, bronchitis, cough, and laryngitis. I am always fascinated by the knowledge displayed by herbalists and "non-traditional" practitioners. One would think they would live forever, with all the seemingly helpful knowledge they have about diet, nutrition and natural treatment of illness...

3. The OED thinks that bort may be derived from the Old French bord, bort which means "bastard," for the word describes fragments removed from diamonds in cutting when too small for jewelry. Thus, bort is to jewelry as marc is to grapes....Too bad they have gotten rid of analogies in the SAT and the LSAT tests, for this would be a good one for the highest levels, I am sure. From the London Times in 1959: "The diamonds produced in the laboratory...are similar to so called boart or abrasive grit." What do you do with the bort? Well, we are told that the lowest grade of left-over stuff is crushed by steel mortars and used to make industrial-grade abrasive grits. Indeed, perhaps the really true grit. On this page is a discussion of bort and how it is formed.

4. Arshin (ar SHEEN) can be spelled in a few other ways (arsheen/archine) and means "a measure of length used in Russia and Turkey." I introduced oke a few days ago, which is a measure of volume or weight in Ottoman Turkey, so it seems only fair to touch on length now. From 1783 we have: "The arshine or Russian ell, equal to twenty-eight and one-tenth inches in English." Here is a conversion chart, where you can see what an arshin is in terms of rods, meters, links, hands, or even angstroms. Why should certain lengths be precisely as long as they are? You might well respond, 'Because if they were any longer, they wouldn't fit the definition,' but that is a mere quibble. Why did the Turks and Russians adopt this length measure, while we adopted a "yard" and the English a "meter?" Someone knows all this, and maybe I will know it some day..

5. A diseuse is a female entertainer or artiste specializing in monologue. From an older version of Cosmopolitan (1896): "She is only a concert-hall singer (or diseuse, to use a newly-coined and specific title)." Picasso, who painted a picture on nearly as many subjects as I have written essays, has a 1901 charcoal and pastel drawing known as La diseuse. Here she is. Diseuse is just French for "female talker," and so you have it. I think thatt with the prevalence of female entertainers today it, like "co-ed," is disappearing rapidly from our vocabulary.

6. A spall is a chip or splinter, esp. of stone or ore. In the "old days" the term found its home primarily in masonry, where the spall would be a piece of stone chipped off by a blow of a hammer or mallet. It also refers to the surface brick or concrete or natural stone that peels or flakes off when water enters the material and expands. But today, we have found another use for the word. Or, more accurately, particle physics has. As this article says, in "neutron scattering instruments, neutrons are generated by bombarding a uranium target with a stream of atoms. The neutrons ejected from the target are known as spall." This word truly opens another world, even if I don't have time (or expertise) to pursue it here.

7. and 8. I can quickly define nidification and caliology together, because they are the Latin-and Greek-derived terms for the same word. They relate to the "department of ornithology which is concerned with birds' nests." I suppose there is not only a book about everything, but also a "department," but still I was a bit surprised to find the word. The Encyclopedia Britannica in 1875 did a double service: "There are not many works on nidification, for 'Caliology' or the study of nests has hardly been deemed a distinct branch of the science." Though, perhaps, it is a nest of the science...Kalia is the Greek word for "wooden dwelling" or "hut." Well, shortly after the Britannica had issued its pronouncement, Elliott Coues, in Key to North American Birds, could write: "The extraordinary taste and ability many birds display in this matter as well as the wide range of their habitudes, furnishes one of the most delightful departments of ornithology, called caliology." I suppose you could substitute the word "humans" for "birds" and have an equally correct sentence (changing, of course, the final words). Nidification is simply the "building of nests," and this word goes back to the 17th century.

9. There are eight meanings for kip in the OED, as variable as the "hide of a young or small beast as used for leather" and "a sharp-pointed hill." The latter is the meaning given in freerice.com. From 1815: "The kipps, above this, are remarkably steep and pointed hills." I first learned the term, however, as a gymnastics move--"a vigorous and rapid extension of the hip joint for the purpose of developing momentum to raise the center of gravity of the body." "Kip-ups" are ways of rising from ones back to standing very quickly. Here is a description of how to do a kip-up. Here is a cool teen-age guy showing you how to do a kip-up on a YouTube video.

10. Though I am having entirely too much fun, I have to stop after one more word--surra. As this site says, surra is a chronic disease, primarily of horses, caused by the protozoan Trypanosoma evansi. It is mostly present in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America. In dogs and cats it often is fatal, but in horses, where death may ensue, it is manifest in fever, weakness, petechial hemorrhages, urtiricial eruptions of the skin and other things. We are told in the OED that the word surra is an Indian word for air breathed through the nostrils. The word is onomatopoeic or echoic. Try to say it with your nose flaring...

Enough for another day. That, really, is how you learn...a few good things at a time.

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