chiasmus and chelonian and chelonic and chimer and chirr an dchlorosis and cholelithiasis

Rather than taking nice detours to look at some pretty words, let's run through several words I simply need to know. First there is chancre, pronounced SHANK er, a sore or ulcer. A chandelle is an abrupt climbing turn of a plane, while a chansonnier is a singer of medieval ballads. The word chape describes the metal triming of a scabbard, while a charabanc is a British sightseeing bus (I am taking the Collegiate at its word, here). Charas is hashish and charcuterie is a deli special of dressed meats. A charivari, pronounced shiv a REE, is a mocking serenede. Just like tchotchke, which has repeated letters that make it easy to learn, so if you learn the repeated letters of charivari, you don't need to worry about the word. It is almost like this, for me, with caoutchouc; just get in the rhythm of two five-letter segments, one of which ends in "t" and the second of which ends in "c," and you have the word. A charpoy is some kind of Indian bed and chaulmoogra is an Indian tree, the oil of which treats leprosy. In order to get to the latter I had to skip over "chat room," one of the most attractive new features of our culture.

Cheechako is the Chinook word for tenderfoot or greehnorn, but the OED expands the definition to include "a newly-arrived immigrant in the mining districts of north-western North America"--I suppose around Wallace, ID, don't you think? Chela is a pincerlike organ or claw borne by a limb of a crustacean or arachnid. Cheongsam, which I think was used last year (Dr. Kirsch got it right) is a Southern Chinese garment, while a chetrum consists of 100 ngultrums, or is it the other way around(?), if you were in Bhutan. I am glad that the Icelandic, Gambian and Bhutanese, as well as loads of other, currencies, are listed here. A chigoe is a tropical flea and a chimere is a robe that a clergy person wears over a rochet. A chirr, like a chirp, is a short sharp sound of a small bird, while chlorosis is "green-sickness." I don't know if that is the disease the Bush Administration has, but it seems like environmentalists make them sick.

A surgical excision of the gall bladder is a cholecystectomy, whereas the "rocky" production of the gallstone is called cholelithiasis. A chondrule is a rounded granule of cosmic origin while choucroute is sauerkraut. A chough, pronounced chuff, is either of two Old World birds that are related to crows.

A Few Other Words

Let's start with chiasmus or chiasm and see how far we get. The Collegiate has an anatomical meaning of chiasma: an anatomical instersection or decussation, while it defines chiasmus as "an inverted relationship between the syntactic relements of parallel phrases." But then the example it gives seems to me to be exactly what chiasmus is not, at least in my understanding. [My understanding of it goes back to the mid-1970s when I was trying to find chiasm, as I called it at the time, in every paragraph of the Apostle Paul's Greek.] What I think it means is that the identical word or words were used [or very similar words] in inverse order in successive clauses. The example given by the Collegiate: "to stop too fearful, and too faint to go," has a family resemblance to chiasm, in that the paired thoughts are in the A-D and B-C positions, but the words are sometimes synonymns and sometimes opposites.

There is a great web site which lists many chiastic constructions. Two it provides are: "Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you," or from John Rockefeller, "A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship." The web site claims to be able to "bring quotations into your life and bring life into your quotations." That, to me, is what chiasmus is. Take the letter "X" and draw it from a to d and from b to c and you have identical, or near identical words. "It's not the dog in the fight but the fight in the dog." "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

I could dwell all day in chiasmus, and I know you believe that. But let's gracefully withdraw and end with chelonian. The Collegiate defines it only as "turtle," while the OED speaks of it as "belonging to the order of Reptiles called Chelonia, distinguished by having the body inclosed in a double shell, and comprising the various species of tortoises and turtles." The word chelonian is derived from the Greek "cheloney" which means not simply a tortoise-shell but can also mean a sounding-board for a lyre or a shed for protecting people, or a kind of frame or cradle on which heavy weights were moved by means of rollers underneath. The Latin equivalent is testudo, which is transliterated into English as testudo and used in a military context as a "cover of overlapping shields" or a "shed whelled up to a wall used by the ancient Romans to protect an attacking force." Thus, I want to resurrect the word chelonian and use it in a military context or in a psychological context in which one feels assaulted. "He put up chelonic defenses in a vain attempt to try to ward off the onslaught of the recurrent melancholia."

I think I need to do a few more words before moving to the next dictionary pages.

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