blaxploitation and bizarrerie and dickens and boehmite and blepharoplasty

Let's begin today with a nugget of information I learned that has little practical import but at least it is something learned. The OED doesn't have the word bobeche, but the Collegiate does, and it defines it as follows: "A usually glass collar on a candle socket to catch drippings..." I thought I had a picture of it in my mind until I decided to do an internet search for bobeche and, behold, DiscountCandle.com advertised the little items. You can get them in paper or metal, and they are those round paper guards that slide up over the candle so that it can catch the wax when the candle burns. Or, as they describe it, "These bobèches come in a pack of one hundred allowing many hands to come together in a vigil, without the worry of burning wax." No fuss, no muss, with a bobeche. Now I will never forget it, I know. It catches candle drippings.

More "Substantial" Knowledge

Three or four terms that have a more stirring intellectual content are blaxploitation, blepharoplasty/blepharoptosis, boehmite and Boehmism. A few words on each, before getting to "the list." The word blaxploitation was first used in 1972 to describe the exploitation of Black actors in film and, by extension, the genre of film that did this. A fascinating web page describes these films. In a nutshell they are defined as follows. "These films trumpet their topicality, with an outrageous gallery of hunky pimps and pushers, knockout whores, and corrupt cops snorting, shooting, and screwing everything in sight. Wildly colorful ghetto garb, lurid, approving drug and sex scenes, extreme (if often cartoonlike) violence, classic soulful scores (Curtis Mayfield, Willie Hutch, Isaac Hayes), and touches of black nationalism are the still irresistible lures of the blaxploitation movie." You'll never misspell this word again, will you?

The Greek word blepharos means "eyelid," and it has bequeathed itself to the English language in about a dozen predictable words, mostly used in medicine, describing either what doctors can do to your eyelids or what diseases you might have with eyelids. There is blepharoconjunctivitis, blepharoplasty and blepharospasm. If your upper eyelid falls, it can be referred to as a prolapsion of the eyelid or a blepharoptosis, with the "ptosis" being the Greek word for "falling." However, we can take the Greek word one step further. Ptosis means a "falling" and, beginning with Aristotle, it was used in grammar to describe the "falling" off from the nominative case to the other cases (genitive, dative, accusative, vocative). Antiptosis is the Greek rhetorical device of substituting one case for another (proper) one. A New Testament example of this is in doubting Thomas words to the risen Christ in John 21. He says, "My Lord and My God," which should be in the vocative case, but the author puts them in the nominative. Hence, a sweet instance of antiptosis. Oh, the one unpredictable use of the term is blepharoplast, which is defined as "a basal body esp. of a flagellated cell." Moving on.

But we really are getting off track, here, so let's close with the last example of "fun"--boehmite. It is defined as a mineral of orthorhombic form of aluminum oxide and hydroxide. Of course, no one upon discovering it knelt in the dirt and said, "Wow, boehmite!" It was named after a 20th century German chemist who probably had something to do with its discovery and was so honored. Better to be honored this way than to have a disease named after you, don't you think? But this use of boehmite reminded me of Jacob Boehm, the 17th century German mystic, who bequeathed the word Boehmism to the language. Though everyone in the orthodox Protestant traditions seemed to want to trash him, he was brought into English through the respected British mystic William Law who, as one scholar said, using a word that had not yet attained its current meaning when he used it, "Law channeled Behemist thought into the main current of English mysticism." Channeled indeed.

Getting Serious

Ok, enough fun. Here are the words that I need to learn. There are tons of Scottish loan words, such as birl (to carouse), birse (anger), blastie (ugly; dwarf), bittock (little bit), blaw (blow) and blae (blue or pale blue). The last has an interesting application to "terror" and was used by one theologian, "Oh! sirs, some of you will stand with a blae countenance before the tribunal of God." I really don't think that as many 21st century people are worried about that as were 19th century folk. Blancmange is a sweetened dessert and blanquette is a stew in white sauce. Someone who is blate is timid or pale, while a blesbok is a South African antelope. A bodhran is an Irish drum, which the OED doesn't recognize, while a bocaccio is a large rockfish. Something that is bluey is blue, while something bluesy is characteristic of the blues. A bistort is a perennial herb with twisted roots (hence "tort"), while the definition they give for birr is not the one listed in the OED (a strong wind) but an Amharic unit of currency. I will keep that in mind for my next Eritrean vacation. Finally, there is bizarrerie, which means nothing more than something that is bizarre, but I thought the little quotation in the Century by a nameless author referring to the bizarrerie of Charles Dickens' genius called for mention. Who is more bizarro here?

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