Category: Musings

W is For Wonderful

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Wonderful – Inspiring delight, pleasure, or admiration; extremely good; marvelous.

I use this word a lot, in my head for the most part, because I’m worried about sounding like an emoting dipshit, also as a writer I need to be precise in choosing my words. Between the two I manage. But I must tell you, the feeling of delight or marvelousness or extremely good, spills right out of me sometimes and I have to hug someone. With dogs, no explanation needed and with people, well, so far I haven’t had any cringing or WTF looks. And sometimes the hugee will provide a reason for me, like my Jazzercise instructor yesterday, when after class I grabbed and hugged her tight, filled with gratitude for her instruction and for my life.

“Good day, huh?” she said.

 

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V is For Venireman

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Venireman – Juror. A person summoned to jury duty under a venire (panel).

Now, everyone I know hates jury duty. I don’t. Well, I did while I was working full-time and trying to write and trying to deal with delinquent children and a delinquent husband and two dogs. And then I found myself for the first time at the courthouse in Santa Ana anxious to get the hell out of there, I didn’t have time for this. But then the judge spoke to us like we really mattered. I looked into the face of the accused. Here was a man fighting for his life. I had to make the right decision. And I did. I know that because I couldn’t be impartial. It was a murder, which involved mutilation, something I’d witnessed first hand in the Mau-Mau rebellion. I found myself speaking up, something I’m not very good at–my upbringing and all that–but I did. My decision mattered.

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U is For Unctuous

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Unctuous – a person who is excessively or ingratiatingly flattering; having a greasy or soapy feel.

Despite the negative connotations of this word, I like saying it.

My favourite unctuous cartoon character is Snidely Whiplash, archenemy of Dudley Do Right, a spinoff of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.  Whiplash is the stereotypical villain in the style of stock characters found in silent movies and earlier stage melodrama, wearing black clothing, cape, and a top hat, and twirling his long handlebar moustache. In the cartoon’s opening segments, Snidely is seen tying Nell Fenwick to a railroad track.

“Nyah, ha-ha,” he’d cry, twirling his moustache.  “I love a woman with spirit.”

 

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T is For Tablier

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Tablier – Apron; part of dress resembling an apron.

It’s French. Of course.

I wrote about apron-wearing rickshaw “boys” in my memoir, Loveyoubye, but I think the word tablier is more apt, except how many people will know what I’m talking about?

“Wearing layers of intricately beaded and tasseled aprons, tabliers, quills and feather boas, along with animal hair leggings, the men tow customers in garish large-wheeled rickshaw carts up and down Marine Parade. Their outrageous headdresses are vast beaded displays worthy of Rio carnival.”
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S is For Scrumpy

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 Scrumpy – Strong apple cider as made in western England.

Finding this word (another one I’d never heard of) has allowed me to revisit the trip I made to England in April of last year where I reconnected with my two old chums, Donna and Joan, from Nkana, Zambia. That was my first experience with the A-Z Challenge and being the terrific planner I am, I didn’t have all the blogs already written, which had me scrambling to compose during my visit. Oh, and did I mention I’m a Taurus, so there was no way I was going to give it up. I think Joan got a kick out of being my sounding board for the posts. Here’s a photo of me sitting on the floor of her lounge (American translation=living room) composing into the night.

Me on computerSo back to scrumpy. I didn’t know that’s what we drank that night in the pub Joan and her ex used to own. The place looked like Inspector Morse or even the footman in the ragingly popular TV series Downton Abbey might have frequented. You can read all about it here.

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R is For Raisonneur

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Raisonneur – A character in a play, novel or the like who appears to act as a mouthpiece for the opinions of the author, usually displaying a superior or more detached view of the action than the other characters.

Origin: 1900-05, French: literally, one who reasons or argues, equivalent to “raisonn” to reason, argue

First of all, I love the sound of this word, “rayson-neuh” said with your best Frenchly puckered lips. That’s why I chose it in the first place. The meaning was the cherry on top. I learned something. I didn’t know there was a word for what at first glance I thought meant the same as “authorial intrusion.” This is a literary device wherein the author of the story, poem or prose steps away from the text and speaks out to the reader. Authorial intrusion establishes a one to one relationship between the writer and the reader where the latter is no longer a secondary player or an indirect audience to the progress of the story but is the main subject of the author’s attention.

A raisonneur was encountered most frequently in European plays of the 17th and 18th centuries; examples are Shakespeare’s King Lear, Cléante in Molière’s Tartuffe and Starodum in Fonvizin’s The Minor.

Interestingly, there are a number of people on the internet who use the moniker, Raisonneur, including a a 17-year whose favorite book is “Eat, Pray, Love.”

Q is For Quagga

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Quagga – An extinct South African zebra (Equus quagga) that had a yellowish-brown coat with darker stripes, exterminated in 1883. (Check out the photo at the bottom.)

The only quagga photographed alive was a mare in London’s Zoo in 1870. They were once found in great numbers in the highveld of the Cape Province and the southern part of the Orange Free State of South Africa. The name, quagga comes from the Bushmen’s word for zebra, the sound said to resemble the quagga’s call. Because of the confusion between different zebra species, particularly among the general public, the quagga had become extinct before it was realized that it may have been a separate species.

I blogged about the quagga before, but had to use it again. It’s a cool and unusual word.

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P is For Pip

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Pip – A small hard seed in fruit.

Grapes have pips, so do loquats as well as mangoes, which like the avocado only has one. Gladys Knight, on the other hand, has three of them, her brother Merald “Bubba” Knight, and cousins Edward Patten and William Guest. They took the name “Pips” from another cousin, James “Pip” Woods. The group signed with Motown’s Soul label in 1966 and quickly rose to prominence with their version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”, which boasted more of an uptempo, gospel-style arrangement than Marvin Gaye’s classic version from the following year.

I wonder if Gladys and the Pips thought it funny, pips singing about a grapevine. I’ve never heard an American use the word “pip” in relationship to fruit, it’s always “seed” or “pit.” I get puzzled looks when I use the word.

 

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O is For Opposite Marriage

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Opposite Marriage – The PC way to specify the legal union of a man and a woman, as made popular by Miss California at the 2009 Miss USA pageant.

I got this from the Urban Dictionary, a treasure trove of weirdness. The term was endorsed by Miss California in an attempt to begin a movement to give rights to heterosexual couples.

Bob: “Hey did you hear Miss California’s speech last night?”

Mary: “Yeah! Maybe opposite-sex couples will finally have the same rights as everyone else! Maybe we can finally have an opposite marriage and express our true love!”

Actually, after writing this, I’ve decided that the Urban Dictionary is not a treasure trove after all, it’s a junk pile. But I’m going with Opposite Marriage. I already spent too much time on another “O” word–“Ostranenie: the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar”–but I couldn’t get a handle on it. The personal example I had in mind was too obscure, so I hit the Urban Dictionary at the last moment. Hey, at least Opposite Marriage is a conversation starter, or stopper.

 

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N is For Niggardly

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Niggardly – miserly, stingy, cheap.

The company was particularly niggardly with salaries; serving out the rations with a niggardly hand.

Niggard is thought to be related to the Old Norse verb nigla = “to fuss about small matters”. It is cognate with “niggling”, meaning “petty” or “unimportant”, as in “the niggling details”.

In the United States, there have been several controversies concerning the word niggardly due to its similarity to the racial slur nigger. Etymologically the two words are unrelated. On January 15, 1999, David Howard, a white aide to the black mayor of Washington D.C. used the word in reference to a budget, offending one of his black colleagues who took it as a racial slur. Howard resigned.

The incident led to a national debate in the U.S., in the context of racial sensitivity and political correctness, on whether the use of niggardly should be avoided. Julian Bond, then chairman of the NAACP, deplored the offense that had been taken at Howard’s use of the word. “You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding,” he said. “David Howard should not have quit. Mayor Williams should bring him back — and order dictionaries issued to all staff who need them.”

I remember the incident well, and applauded Julian Bond’s take on it. But then when I was researching the word for this blog, I came across David Howard’s reaction when the mayor offered him his job back. He refused but accepted another position with the mayor instead, insisting that he did not feel victimized by the incident. On the contrary, Howard felt that he had learned from the situation. “I used to think it would be great if we could all be colorblind. That’s naïve, especially for a white person, because a white person can afford to be colorblind. They don’t have to think about race every day.  An African American does.”

I was struck by Howard’s words. As a white South African, I grew up witnessing the pain and injustice of apartheid and as a result have a hypersensitivity to prejudice of any kind, but I didn’t and I don’t have to think about race every day. I can see how just the first three letters of the word niggardly can hit the emotional body and reason can fly out the door.

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