bariatric and barology

1. Let's start "straight" again, like the last essay, and give several words on which I don't want to comment. There is ballon, pronounced bal O, lightness of (ballet) movement. Then there is ballonet, a compartment inside a balloon, and bandicoot, a large rat. There is a banteng (don't pronounce the last "g"), a South Asian wild ox, and a baobab, a tropical tree. Barathea is a cloth of fine texture, while barchan, derived from the Russian, is a moving crescent-shaped sand dune. I suppose there must have been a Cossack who said at one time, "Hm, where is that barchan? It was here yesterday." A balletomane is a devotee of ballet. A barong (last letter not pronounced) is supposedly a knife from the Moro culture, but when I looked it up online, because it is not in the OED, it said that it appears most frequently in the phrase "barong Tagalog" to mean the "dress of a Tagalog." I would try to figure that out, but not for today. Moro knife it is: barong. Then there is a bartizan, a cool look-out structure which is depicted in the Century. Apparently the word didn't occur in English before Sir Walter Scott wrote about it, and that leads to the question of whether a bartizan actually exists, but I believe it does, because the Century has an actual picture of it. Ok, now to some fun.

2. I really like a word that is only in the OED and is attested as a verb but once in English, and that is balbutiate. Derived from the Latin balbutire, meaning to stammer, the word made its entrance and departure as a verb in the 18th century. However, we also have balbutient, such as in balbutient speech, and balbuties, the noun, so there is the shadow of attestation here. Actually, if I would use the word I would invent balbutience as the noun. "He vainly hoped that elocution lessons would diminish his balbutience." I rather like it. Just to throw in a word that I ran into someplace: bananavorous--of course, banana-eating. This should stimulate my creativity on other "vorous" words.

3. Let's pause on banausic, pronounced buh NAW sik. It is derived from the Greek, and means "utilitiarian" or "practical" but how it got to mean that is pretty interesting. I decided to do some research on this word in the large Liddell Scott (classical Greek dictionary), which I keep open on my kitchen table, only occasionally moving it so that I can put food down to eat. There are fewer than 10 words in this massive dictionary that begin with "ban," and "banausos" and related words are about half of them. The most frequent usage in Greek is banausos techne, which may be translated "mechanical art" or "technique." Thus, banausos has to do with mechanical rather than mental work. As time went on this became associated with "mere" mechanical work and the Greek phrase "banausos bion zeen" could be translated "To live a (mere) mechanic's life." Thus it became associated with common, vulgar or mundane things. Its use in English reflects the last stage of this evolution of the Greek term. The quotation in the Collegiate actually is pretty good--"such mundane and banausic considerations as comfort and durability." I realize I am running out of space quickly, and so I will have to forego consideration of words I would love to discuss, such as banjax and ball-buster.

4. Care should be take to differentiate two words pronounced identically, barbet and barbette. The former is a poodle or non-tropical bird (how does THAT compute?), while the latter is a mound of earth used for military purposes. The Collegiate only had the bird definition for barbet, while the OED gives us the full picture. Now, I want to know, why did the Collegiate opt for the bird rather than the dog when it gave its defintion? Does Mr. Mish have a little prejudice against the canine creatures, do you think? I think it was something much more banal than that; maybe even some banausic considerations entered into the picture. But, if barbet is confusing, barbette is even more so, for me. A barbette is a "mound of earth within a fortification, on which guns are raised so that they can be fired over the parapet." Ok, I got that. But the origin of the word is from the French, and it is a diminutive of barbe, meaning "little beard." What is the connection between a little beard and a defensive fortification? None of the dictionaries gave a clue, and the only thing that I could figure out is that if you are behind a mound of earth, rather than a structure, that grass and vines might be growing on the earth, making it look like the stubble of a beard. Well, can YOU do any better?

5. Time flies and space diminishes, so we have to compress. A word that has just entered into our speech is bariatric, meaning "dealing with obesity." No, you haven't heard the word before, unless you are or deal with fat people. It only first appeared in 1977, though the doctors cashed in on the term rather early by forming the American Society of Bariatric Surgeons in 1983. The OED doesn't have it. But we could invent a slew of words built off the root. Apparently barology (why not baryology or bariology?) is now the "scientific study of weight." It can get to be a heavy topic, I have heard. I suppose you could say that if a person has too much bariatric pressure, he is in line for surgery or some kind of radical weight-loss diet.

Conclusion

I am beginning to feel like the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who, in ch. 11, catalogued the heroes of faith and then, near the end, said that time would fail him to give the stories of the rest. So, time fails me to tell about the difference between basinet (the helmet) and bassinet (for babies), or the roots of the word barmecidal, which has nothing to do with killing anything. I would love to get into basilar and explain the complex base of Greek pillars, but time fails me. And then, in these pages, the Collegiate gives us words such as barf, whose origin it mysteriously says is unknown (first attested in 1956). Well, I can tell you, it didn't arise in a monastery.

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