Blatherskite's Lexicon
 

In this thread, post interesting words in any language, and/or brief poems that they inspire you to write.

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Entry #1:

blatherskite
(also bletherskate)

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I ran across the following Spanish word in an article about a sonnet by Quevedo. The sonnet in question is full of nonsense words, lampooning the tendency of Quevedo's rival (Góngora) to include highfalutin new coinages in his poems.

Entry #2:

jitanjáfora

A quick search turned up the poem in question:

That seems closer to glossolalia than to amphigory. Which could be entries #3 and #4 in Blatherskite's Lexicon, I suppose.

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And glossolalia puts me in mind of bondieuserie, which makes Entry #5.

Someone else's turn now!

I incorporated a bunch of "real" words that are likely to be unfamiliar to anyone these days when I translated a poem by Baltasar de Alcázar. The original Spanish did a riff on ancient and obsolete words in Spanish (and these were obsolete already back in 1600), and so I chose in my translation to dig up an old dictionary of ancient and obsolete words in English as well. Some of these are so obsolete they are no longer in dictionaries from the past century. In either the Spanish or the English, the words are "real" but not meant to be understood by the reader. Here's the relevant piece of the poem:

You see, the fact that I’m advanced
in years means often I
write prose in ancient words I learned
in days and times gone by.

Words like eftsoons, whoreson, lief,
cocklebread, piscarius,
fuxol, cockloft, cockmate, cronge,
peever, vaginarius.

Diffibulate or galantine,
quister, drenge, rotarious,
brightsmith, brownsmith, burgonmaster,
currydow, pannarius.

Hostler, mayhap, emerods,
swoopstake, usward, thole,
hawker, maugre, hatcheler,
fletcher, rantipole.

(The rest of my translation is here).

It also seems apropos to mention here that the current contest in the Washington Post Sytle Invitational asks for short poems employing various new words that were included in the Merriam-Webster dictionary this year. The rules, how to enter, and a list of the words can be found here. The deadline is December 14th.

Honeymoons
end eftsoons.

See, I'm inspired already! Thank you, Roger! And thanks for reminding me of your delightful translation, too--I needed a smile today.

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If anyone needs a very small unit of measurement, I propose, from the Swabian dialect of German:

Muggeseggele

(My son-in-law spent a year as a foreign exchange student in Germany, and came back speaking fluent German...but with such a strong Swabian accent that German-speakers can't help laughing out loud in astonishment. Fortunately he's a good-natured soul.)

Julie and Bob,

You're both very entertaining! :)

In this thread, post interesting words in any language, and/or brief poems that they inspire you to write.

Another German word I love is funkelnagelneu, which is our equivalent of 'brand new', but which in translation is more like 'shiny nail new'.

(I can't say that 'funkelnagelneu' has inspired me to write a poem, though! :D)

Jayne

This one was published in Snakeskin. Not wholly compliant with the rubric, but I'll toss it in for now while I work on a new one.

Meshantador

A silly word, a surreptitious joke
between old ladies. From a French description
of a Napoleonic prison ship:
méchant odeur, tainting the onshore wind.

Why do the young suppose the old don’t know
that vintage craft give off an emanation
that hints at obsolescence and demands
an instant, arbitrary change of purpose?

Tant pis. Let’s downgrade slowly, you and I,
equip ourselves for further voyaging,
test our unshivered timbers while we may
on seas that still invite us into action.

Still fighting, still avoiding tell-tale talc
and anything suggesting lavender;
taking on board the Oeillet Mignardise,
Rive Gauche, Chanel, and white camellias.

After a last quick check for rogue whiskers
one of us asks the all-important question:
"Meshantador, darling?" "Nah, you’re OK."
and two fine ships set sail into the street.

Struck by the artful British dodge of calling an ass an arse, I sunk to the low netherlands of this:

Arse Poetica

Epics chart a culture’s mind
in sprawls of history and wit—
their sweaty redolence warm wind.

The lyrics are much smaller songs
leaking just a little wind
perfuming feelings as they’re sung.

Dramatic verse can be perverse,
befoul the major players’ wind,
their offal smells a gagging curse.

An Arse Poetica, of course,
releases scents of artful will
as contrails of a flying horse,

Symbol of a poem’s source:
Pegasus of course, of course.

No luck for me in the WaPo Style Invitational (for reasons that will shortly be apparent), but maybe this thread is a good home for my single entry.

Z o n k e y
e
d
o
n
k

I’ve figured out the difference twixt
a zedonk and a zonkey,
though both of them are squarely mixed
part zebra and part donkey:

While zebra front and donkey rear
is how a zonkey’s got ‘em,
a zedonk has (alert Shakespeare!)
a donkey’s head on bottom.

grotesque

How had I not known this word's etymology until 20 minutes ago? I find it fascinating.

From M.D. Usher, "Classics and Complexity in Walden's 'Spring'," Arion 27:1 (Sping/Summer 2019), p. 122. The first quotation below is Thoreau's, and the second is Usher's discussion of it.

If you love etymologies, you have to adore Thoreau’s works. Rarely a page goes by in Walden, for instance, without a handful of etymological puns. One of my early research projects, working title The Depths of Walden Pun, fished out hundreds, some grotesque, adding an extra reason to laugh or smile at the surface word-play. Two of my favorites, which I’ve written about in several ways, are in Walden’s “Conclusion”: Exaggeration and Extravagance.

Thoreau’s Extravagance

"I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander. . . .without bounds. . . . I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression." Walden, Conclusion”

He’s radical with etymologies,
extravagantly leaps linguistic fences,
heaps the roots in punning histories,
exaggerates beyond the common senses.

He says our parlor parlance is absurd,
too distanced from its sources, mere parlaver,
its far-fetched figures, tropes and symbols blurred
in parables. But his are rooted, clever.

Out on the pond, he turns his tropes to pun
upon a trickster loon, his moonstruck double,
whose loony antics keep him on the run.
Two lunatics, they’ve turned into a couple.

Extravagantly thorough in this game,
he puns outlandishly on his own name.

From Ghost Trees

Hot off the press, in the bastard lexiconology that the Urban Dictionary harbors, these two words have reared their peculiar heads:


Pseudocoup. Pronounced like the word puzzle "sudoku". The coup attempt by the Trump supporters.

Nussy The act of swabbing a person's nose right up to where the brain connects, causing a person's eyes to roll back and gag.

Far from being inspiration, these two words produce a weird strain of deflation in my heart... What a world, what a world.

.
.

woman - a "man" who is a "wife"

hellware "inhabitants of hell"
http://ebeowulf.uky.edu/cgi-bin/Bosw...sworth?seq=546

muscle - "little mouse" (Latin)

подбородок (podborodok) [literally "thing under the beard"] "chin" (Russian)

Ouagadougou - the capital Burkina Faso

Funafuti - the capital of Tuvalu

arachnodactyly: "spider fingers" -- a condition in which the fingers and toes are abnormally long and slender, in comparison to the palm of the hand and arch of the foot.

A.k.a. why I can't wear high-heeled shoes. They never bend in the right place for me.

a·le·a·to·ry
/ˈālēəˌtôrē/

depending on the throw of a dice or on chance; random.

relating to or denoting music or other forms of art involving elements of random choice (sometimes using statistical or computer techniques) during their composition, production, or performance.
"aleatory music"

from alea, Latin "dice"; aleator, Latin "dice player"

Aleatory was a word I used in another life as a risk analyst. When we consider uncertainty, the part of uncertainty that is inherent and random is aleatory. The part that is due to our ignorance, our lack of information is epistemic.

A word I like from the world of statistics is

ogive

/ˈəʊdʒʌɪv,əʊˈdʒʌɪv/

In statistics it is an empirical cumulative distribution function.

In architecture it is the curve of a gothic arch.

Yes, but it's important to recall that "man" in Old English meant "human being," regardless of gender. Males were called "werman" and females were called "wifman." Over time, the "wer" was dropped for males and the "wif" turned into "wo" for females.

Syzygy. Perfect for visitors at Yuletide. Polydactyly. Often found in cats.

Woman - a traditional marriage (man and wife as one)

Not sure where you came up with "werman". No such word existed in Old English.

I cannot confirm that the word existed, but the point remains the same. The word "man" did not refer to the male gender, but to human beings of either gender. The word for a man was "wer", not "man," and the "man" suffix in "woman" simply referred to being human. So "woman" isn't a lesser term, or a definition of a gender based on its opposition to another gender, but simply a compound word that combines "wife" with "human." You may be right that the word "werman" didn't exist, as I see with further research that some have claimed it to be a myth. I stand corrected if that's the case. (I did spend a few months studying Old English in college, but that was long ago).

No one was saying the meanings of the component words were the same as they are now. "A man who is a wife" is accurate (in terms of the original meanings) and amusing (in terms of their current meanings)

Bah. And more bah.

Unhelpful definition of the year, from RhymeZone:

I am not making this up.

Julie, that wouldn't be so bad, except for their definition of viviparous:

Or even more helpfully

retromingent
noun
obsolete
An animal that urinates backwards, such as the camel, hippo or raccoon.

Lagomorphs too, Julie.

The Defeated Hare Questions the Value of Retromingency.


Trick question: what can the hare do that the tortoise can’t?
Smart answer: urinate backwards.


It blinks as it slinks bandy-leggedly into the spotlight
To the roar of the crowd and the laurels and the champagne
And yes, you can guess at the cause of the celebration:
Hey, no shit, Sherlock – the tortoise has done it again.

I am flat on my face on the ferny floor of the forest.
I’ve been snivelling, dribbling and muttering into the moss
And wiping my eyes with my ears (and it can’t do that, either)
And telling myself that I don’t give a twopenny toss.

I ought to be used to it, given how often it happens;
It’s the way of the world and I don’t have the right to complain
But it hurts and I’m sad and I wish it were me on the rostrum.
I’m alone in the dark and the tortoise has done it again.

Omniscient Pan, who distributed gifts to your minions,
Why on earth did you give me a retrodirectional cunt,
For what is the point of the power of pissing behind me
When the tortoise is always, always, always in front?
.