Now HERE'S a Fascinating Word

[BriarRose Kildare]

Mission that is Great.

Now I am gonna have to see if I can find the Scarlet Pimpernel

[Captain Jim]

Now I am gonna have to see if I can find the Scarlet Pimpernel

She seeks him here

She seeks him there

BriarRose seeks him everywhere

Is he in Heaven or

Is he in Hell

That damned elusive

Pimpernel

But it is not just a dashing hero but a red flower:

And also the root for the word "Pimp": Etymology: 17c: possibly related to French pimpant well-dressed or smart, from French pimper to dress smartly.

[Misson]

"That demmed elusive...Pimpernel."

I've seen both the original and new version and they're pretty comparable, actually. The new one is a little more complicated in execution, but the story is essentially the same. The older one is a bit more subtle, however, and slightly better for it. They both use the phrase "Odds fish!" several times.

(It seems to me that the Sheriff of Nottingham says the same thing in the Bugs Bunny cartoon Rabbit Hood...if I'm not mistaken, he says, "Odds fish! The very air abounds with kings!" when Bugs hits him on the head one of those times.)

[BriarRose Kildare]

Well now after Captain Jim's lovely poem I am definitely goona have to see this movie. I have not seen it in a very, very long time. I know it was one of my mother's favorites.

By the way, that was a beautiful flower, Captain Jim, that you posted.

Thanks.

[Captain Jim]

It's actually a slightly modified quote from the movie...and yes you should see it. Or read the book, by Baroness Emmuska Orczy

[Red Cat Jenny]

BAGGY WINKLES

Tassels of unravelled line that are lashed around chafe spots to minimize chafing on the sails

[Misson]

blo·vi·ate intr.v. Slang - To discourse at length in a pompous or boastful manner

I came across this somewhere recently and it just struck me as being a funny word. It sounds like this: bloh-vee-eyt. That just sounds funny to me. Sort of like bovine. (I believe it was in an article on a politician.)

[michaelsbagley]

Now I am gonna have to see if I can find the Scarlet Pimpernel

She seeks him here

She seeks him there

BriarRose seeks him everywhere

Is he in Heaven or

Is he in Hell

That damned elusive

Pimpernel

But it is not just a dashing hero but a red flower:

And also the root for the word "Pimp": Etymology: 17c: possibly related to French pimpant well-dressed or smart, from French pimper to dress smartly.

I've not read or seen the Scarlet Pimpernel yet, but being familiar with the story, I have always questioned if any correlation to Alexandre Dumas' "Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge" exists..... The story of Le Chevalier is a story of a red dressed hero trying to save Marie Antoinette from the revolutionaries during the French Revolution.

From reading the plot synopsis of the Scarlet Pimpernal, the two stories are very similar, the main difference being the Dumas story stars a French hero, and the Pimpernel is an Englishman, the other main difference is the Pimpernel tries and successfully rescues petty French nobility, and Le Chevalier unsuccessfully tries to rescue Marie Antoinette.

[Red Cat Jenny]

What exactly is a “poop deck,” and aren’t most ships equipped with a “head” for that purpose?

The so-called poop deck is the roof of the poop cabin, which is located on the stern and extends from the mizzenmast aft. The word is derived from the Latin puppis, which means “stern,” or the rear section of a ship. It apparently was first transmogrified into “poop” by William Caxton in 1489.

[Misson]

I kept coming across this word in the literature on 16th and 17th century surgery:

Noisome

At first I thought it meant "lending itself to noise" or something like that, but I soon realized that didn't make sense in context. From context, I figured it must mean "very smelly." But that turned out to be wrong too. From freedictionary.com:

noi·some (noism) adj.

1. Offensive to the point of arousing disgust; foul: a noisome odor.

2. Harmful or dangerous: noisome fumes.

And here it is from one of the many places I've found it in:

"A badly placed sick berth could be very deleterious to the health of the occupants. Some of the sick might be placed in the ‘fore-part of the hold which was damp, unwholesome and filled with stench from the bilges.’ This would be a particularly noisome place low down in the ship, for the ballast in the very bottom was very foul and unhealthy. " (Goddard, Jonathan Charles, “An insight into the life of Royal Naval surgeons during the Napoleonic War, Part I,” Journal of the Royal Naval Medical Service, Winter 1991, page 212)

[Duchess]

That one shows up a lot in O'brien's books. Along with frowsty. I like them both.

[Sjöröveren]

That one shows up a lot in O'brien's books. Along with frowsty. I like them both. 

That's one of the things I love most about O'Brian's writing. He uses obscure and archaic words and puts the onus on the reader (now there's a word for ye all - onus.) to discover the meaning. And not just the nautical terms. Of course, it makes it easier to have Dean King's A Sea of Words, a lexicon of words used in the O'Brian books. How else would you discover the difference between homoiousian (of like essence or substance) and homoousian (of the same essence or substance)? These are words you can use everyday! No one will understand you of course, but you can still use them. Example:

"Are these avocados on sale homoousian as the ones you had last week?"

[Misson]

If you like authors that unapologetically throw obscure words at you, read Leslie Charteris. I used to keep a dictionary close by when I was reading his novels. (In fact, the words were so interesting that I started keeping them in a notebook - which I have since lost. As I recall it, there were about 7 or 8 pages filled with words I'd never seen before and their definitions.) One of my favorites was cognoscente. Curiously, a few years after I stumbled across it in one of Charteris' novels and made it a part of my written lexicon, it started popping up all over the place in the press. (I found it absolutely hopeless in conversation - no one understood me - well, to be fair, I should say they understood me less than usual. )

[Misson]

Here's another curious word I have frequently come across in period writings:

Indifferent

If you are like me, you think you know what it means, but it actually means many things and we should not be indifferent to the difference.

First, a sample from a sentence in Woodes Roger's book A Cruising Voyage Round the World (it's a bit buried, but the description is sort of neat, so I'm reprinting it all):

"[The Natives in a bay in the Straights of Magellan] were of a middle Stature, well limb'd, with round Faces, low Foreheads, little Noses, small black Eyes and Ears, black flaggy Hair Of an indifferent length, their Teeth white, their Faces of an Olive-Colour, daub'd with Spots of white Clay and Streaks of Soot, their Bodies painted with red Earth and Grease, their Clothing of the Skins of Seals, Guianacoes and Otters, wrapt about them like Scotch Highlanders Plads." (Rogers, p. 66)

I have seen indifferent used this way many times in period tomes. From my favorite on-line dictionary, thefreedictionary.com:

in·dif·fer·ent (n-dfr-nt, -dfrnt) adj.

5. Being neither too much nor too little; moderate.

thefreedictionary does not describe this as an ancient use of the word, but I don't think it's in common usage - we seem to have focused on the following definitions:

1. Having no particular interest or concern; apathetic

2. Having no marked feeling for or against

3. Not mattering one way or the other

Curiously, besides being used in this way frequently in period writings, indifferent sort of pops out at me because it was used oddly in a Bond "Know-It-All" Moment in one of my personal favorite Bonds, Goldfinger, in reference to some brandy:

"I'd say it was a 30 year old fiend indifferently blended Sir. (sniffs) With an overdose of bon bois."

Here, I think we are talking about yet another definition:

6. Being neither good nor bad; mediocre

Such a word!

[Ransom]

While looking up another word in my Oxford English Dictionary, I spied this one.

Redivivus = adj (Placed after a noun) Come back to life

Something a lot of us pirates do in the morning, after a fun night a' pubbing.

[Misson]

Wow, I just saw redivivus somewhere recently...I wonder where it was?

Here's another word I've come across in several period accounts that I think sounds funny.

beeves (bvz) n. A plural of beef.

Actually, in the random phonetic spelling style so widely used during the time, surgeon James Yonge sometimes spells it 'beaves', which looks even funnier to me for some reason.

[Matusalem]

beeves (bvz) n. A plural of beef.

I was watching 3:10 to Yuma last night, and I heard that word uttered.

[Misson]

When no one's around, say it. It sounds funny. Beeves, beeves, beeves. You could do a whole Monty Python sketch around that word.

"This here's the wattle, the emblem of our land.

You can stick it in a bottle, you can hold it in your hand."

"Amen!"

[Cpt Sophia M Eisley]

I would have never thought...beeves as a plural for beef.

Caught an interesting word today - vog, meaning the volcanic smog emitted from an eruption mixing with moisture in the air.

[Misson]

Ok, this is just an interesting sounding word to me:

Turbot n. pl. turbot or tur·bots

1. A European flatfish, Scophthalmus maximus, that has a brown knobby upper side and is prized as food.

2. Any of various flatfishes similar or related to this fish.

It was even the featured character in a Canadian war. (I'll bet you didn't know the Canadians got involved in their own wars. Me neither - and this was only a decade or so ago):

From Wiki:

The Turbot War of 1995 was an international fishing dispute between Canada and the European Union which ended in Canada boarding a Spanish fishing trawler in international waters and arresting its crew. Canada claimed that European Union factory ships were illegally overfishing the nose and tail of the Grand Banks, just outside Canada's declared 200 nautical mile (370 km) Exclusive Economic Zone.

A turbot is a fish... It sure sounds like some specialized type of robot to me. I think BoB from The Black Hole looks like my idea of a turbot:

[Mission]

floccinaucinihilipilification (FLOK-si-NO-si-NY-HIL-i-PIL-i-fi-KAY-shuhn) noun - Estimating something as worthless.

The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first use of the word by William Shetstone in 1777: "I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money."

[Ransom]

Now, that sounds like something you should be vaccinated against.

[Red-Handed Jill]

I've always been fascinated by the very common misuse of words.

For example, piracy. There's another topic here about the "don't talk like a pirate" day aimed at quelling "software pirates". And I see those public service messages all the time at the beginning of DVD's about video piracy (you know the ones - the person goes to a flea market and sees illegal copies of movies and finally decides to do the right thing and not buy one...) Piracy, by definition, occurs on the water. If it doesn't happen on the water, by definition, it isn't piracy.

The other word is decimate. The literal translation of this word is kill one tenth (deci=1/10, mate=kill). This was a tactic used by the Romans when they were expanding their empire. They would arrive at a town and invite the townspeople to join the Roman Empire. If the inhabitants refused, the Romans would select one tenth of the townspeople and kill them. The remaining 90% were asked afterward if they had changed their minds about joining up. However, almost everyone uses the word "decimate" as if it meant the same as "obliterate".

There are certainly other misused words, but these stick out the most to me.

[Ransom]

What makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up is the when people say things like:

Pitcher, when they mean picture

Calvary, when they mean Cavalry

I seen it, when they mean I have seen it, or I've seen it.

I'll stop there....

[Mission]

Well, our language is such that it changes with common usage. From Freedictionary.com (my personal favorite on-line dictionary):

decimate

1. To destroy or kill a large part of (a group).

2. Usage Problem

a. To inflict great destruction or damage on: The fawns decimated my rose bushes.

b. To reduce markedly in amount: a profligate heir who decimated his trust fund.

They go on to explain,

"Usage Note: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group. Sixty-six percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. However, when the meaning is further extended to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, only 26 percent of the Panel accepts the usage."

So, for better or for worse, there is room for interpretation. (I don't know who 'the usage panel' is, but I'll bet they meet at midnight wearing black robes in a large chamber with lots of shadows and overhead spots focused on the members.)

There are far more intense examples of word usage being modified (and even being used in a way completely opposite of their original meaning) in the English language. The usage panel is probably patrolling the streets with semi-automatic weapons looking for the people who started using "bad" to mean good. Michael Jackson is to be hung by his thumbs if they catch him. (Which actually makes some sense on general principle.)

And pronunciation...well, wotcha gonna do? Besides, cavalry is pronounced "eff-troop."

"I dunno why everybody says you're so dumb, Agarn."

(Several scenes later.) "Who says I'm dumb?!"