culet and cubeb and cuadrilla and cuisse and crural and femoral

I have the impression as I start with these words that each word is so different from the others around it that each opens its own world which beckons me to enter it. However, time does not allow that potentially delicious trip. For example, the first word, crouse, is only defined by the Collegiate as "brisk" or "lively" but when you turn to the OED you have a much more nuanced rendering. As an adjective it can mean "angry, irate, cross, or crabbed," but the OED lists only a quotation from 1300 and then says that this meaning is obsolete. Then, it lists as a second definition: "bold, audacious, daring, hardy, forward, full of defiant confidence, 'cocky.'" This, too, it says is obsolete, yet it passes "insensibly" into definition 3, which is "in somewhat high or lively spirits; vivacious; pert, brisk, lively, jolly." An example from 1593: "The little Fly, Who is so Crowse and Gamesome with the flame." Or, if you want to confuse your womenfolk, you say, "My faith! she was a wife right crouse."

Crouse can also be used adverbially to mean "boldly, confidently, briskly, vivaciously." The idiom craw crouse means to talk boldly or over-confidently. Glad I know that one, but I am afraid if I use it in any kind of speech, people will look at me with blank stares. So, even thought the Collegiate provides a "correct" definition, it is not a definition that will help one use the word. And, indeed, if we gave the matter some thought on how we might want to rehabilitate crouse today, we might never get to croustade. Yikes. Or is it yoicks (a word I missed at the Oregon Bee)?

Moving More Quickly

So, a croustade is a crisp shell in which to serve pastry. Crowdie is Scottish for cottage cheese, even though the word isn't in the OED. A cruck is a pair of curved roof timbers, while crudites are raw vegetables as hors d'ouevres. I like the word crural a lot. Derived from the Latin crus, meaning "leg," crural refers to the femoral (thigh) bone. Thus, we could say that the fighter's crural armor consisted of the cuisse. The cruzeiro was a former monetary unit of Brazil, though I didn't check to see exactly when it was in use. A crwth, pronounced kruth, is a celtic instrument, according to the OED, but the Collegiate only defines it as a "crowd." But the Collegiate is unwittingly confused/confusing because, as the OED says, crwth is means "crowd," but it is the WELSH word for "crowd," which means "musical instrument." Thus, the Collegiate is fully misleading. The word is attested as recently as Dylan Thomas, who said in a 1953 writing, "He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn (I HOPE this isn't in the Collegiate. Nope, it isn't).

Then there are a ton of words beginning with the prefix cryo--meaning "cold." Of course, with all due regard to Ted Williams, the word cryonics and related terms have been in the news of late. Oh, if you didn't know, cryonics is the "practice of freezing a person who has died of a disease in hopes of restoring life at some future time when a cure for the disease has been developed." Cryosurgery is surgery through freezing an abnormal tissue (as a wart) and then removing it. But we will have to leave the rest of the related words out in the cold and move on. Can't cry over spilled milk even in cryotherapy.

I simply don't know why people think that the OED is a complete dictionary. It leaves out tons and tons of words. Our next example of this phenomenon is cryptarithm, a word first attested in 1943, according to the Collegiate, and meaning "an arithmetic problem in which letters have been substituted for numbers." For example, a trivially simple cryptarithm is so + so = too. If the "s" is a "5," the "o" is a "0" and the "t" is a "1", we see that this represents 50+50=100. There are so many cryptarithms online that the first one that came up in my Internet search (of more than 800 different sites) had 90 cryptarithms developed by one person over the last several years. How can the OED get off without even mentioning the word? Someone, please, help.

Conclusion

Let's skip over a few words, to which I will return in the next page, to rush on to several more words in the list. A cuadrilla is the team helping out a matador; they probably have to pay really high workers' compensation premiums. A cubeb is a dried berry and a curcurbit is a vessel or flask OR a plant of the gourd family. As said above, a cuisse is an armorial piece for the thigh; it protects the crural bone. The jambeau, on the other hand, protects the lower leg. A culet has to do with the collection of fees in medieval Oxford University, but, more to the point, also refers to part of armor also. In the Victorian language of the OED it is "A part of ancient armour, consisting of overlapping plates, protecting the hinder part of the body below the waist." In other words, butt armor. But, culet is also a word known to jewelers: it is "the horizontal face or plane forming the bottom of a diamond when cut as a brilliant."

That is enough for now, I believe, no matter how brilliant you or I may be.

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