accipitrine and accipitral and chymous and agiotage and choriamb and trochee

When you prepare for a spelling bee, you run across lists of words that sometimes are helpful in your preparation. One of my lists was a "final words" type of list for the kids Bee, sent to me by Dr. Jeff Kirsch. It consists of about 1100 words. I was surprised to see that only about twenty of them were unfamiliar to me. This and the few pages will go through these unfamiliar words one by one. A caveat is in order, however. None, or maybe one, of these words is in the Collegiate, the dictionary I am supposed to be studying for the Senior Bee. I have always found it more attractive to color outside the lines...

1. Accipitrine. The Collegiate only has accipiter, which it defines as "any of a genus of medium-sized forest-inhabiting hawks..." So I knew I was flying with the birds here. Sure enough, the OED has accipitrine as "of the falcon kind; hawk-like." The scientists have, of course, taken over the word, but an 1872 quotation by Ruskin gives me hope: "The difference between man and man is in the quickness and quality, the accipitrine intensity, the olfactory choice, of his nous." The OED has four "accipiter"-related words. It has, in addition to the two mentioned, accipitral ("keen-sighted" or "rapacious"(!)), and accipitrary (not well attested). Listen, however, to usages of accipitral by Carlyle and Lowell, respectively. "Of temper most accipitral" and "That Hawthorne's eyes were sometimes accipitral we can realily believe." It seems that all you have to do is study hawks and then you have a universe on which to draw as you look for occasions to use this word.

2. Agiotage. This word would have appeared between aging and agism in the Collegiate, but truth be told, I wouldn't want to get in the middle between those two words either. To give equal time to larger dictionaries, the Century has it and defines it as "speculation in stocks, etc.; stock-jobbing." And then it tells us that it is not used in the United States. I didn't think so, and you would have thought that had it existed in the US it would have been used in the speculative environment of the late 1980s and 1990s. The Century provides a sentence: "Vanity and agiotage are, to a Parisian, the oxygen and hydrogen of life." The word agio appears in the OED and means the percentage of charge made in the exchange of paper currency, as in Adam Smith's quotation: "Bank money..bears an agio of four or five percent." Interesting to me, as I was surveying the Century page, was to note that the next word was agist. I was thinking, hm...how was it that a dictionary 100 years old would know something about a modern form of discrimination (i.e., ageism or agism)? Then I looked the definition: "To feed or pasture, as the cattle or horses of others, for a compensation." The root is a complex Old French/Latin root and has nothing to do with aetas. 'For the words, they are a changin..'

3. Choriamb. Nothing remotely similar to this appears in the Collegiate, but the OED renders it as "a metrical foot composed of a choree (also known as a trochee) followed by an iamb." Well, a choree is "long, short" while an iamb is "short, long," so that a choriamb goes "long, short, short, long." One quotation tries to explain, "The choriamb consists of six times, of which three are in the arsis and three in the thesis." However, if you look up the word arsis, you begin to see what a pain in the arsis it is to understand. Let's just stick with "long, short, short, long." We are not very well attuned these days to what the ancients called the "quality" of our syllables. Or, for that matter, to the quality of our souls.

4. Chymous. We know that this has to be related to chyme, which the Collegiate defines as "the semifluid mass of partly digested food expelled by the stomach into the duodenum." The Century adds that it is food after it has left the stomach and before being acted upon by "pancreatic, hepatic and intestinal secretions." If you want to visualize it, imagine your food as a car going through the car wash. First it is pummeled by the soap and big brushes, and then it gets "secreted upon" by loads of water. The chyme would be the state of the food/car after the "first" pummeling. So, my question is: If you vomit, is the food that comes out of the mouth chymous or is it pre-digested? Shows my ignorance.*

[*Sorry, I just can't avoid this footnote. While I was doing some research on vomit a while back, I came across my mother's favorite word for it when we were kids: upchuck. I haven't heard many other people use the word upchuck in the last 30 or so years, so I thought I would study it briefly. The Collegiate tells us that it originated in 1929 while the OED has its first attestation in 1960, though it recognizes that the word goes back to 1925. I know it was in use well before 1960 because my brothers and I were doing it before then. But the OED's first quotation, from a slang dictionary, is great. "Since 1925...Considered a smart and sophisticated term.. (since 1935) especially when applied to sickness that had been induced by over-drinking." Wow. I know I wasn't drinking as a child, but I am glad that sophistication surrounded even this aspect of my young life.]

There are many, many words built off chyme in the Century. As my dad used to say, in another context, "they have more XXX than Carter's has liver pills." Ever hear that one?

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