iːˈɡɒfənɪ

ægophony: a characteristic “bleating” quality heard in conducted voice-sounds when listening to the chest over an area of consolidated lung

When I was a medical student, we spent a lot of time listening to patient’s chests with our stethoscopes. Two things we were told to listen for were bleating ægophony and whispering pectoriloquy, which always sounded to me like the names of two Mafia mobsters—you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Tony “Bleating” Igofonni or Franky “Whispering” Pectoriloque.

Bleating ægophony is largely tautological—it says the same thing twice, because ægophony means “goat-sound”, from the Greek aix, “goat”.  Goats don’t really do much vocalizing apart from bleating, so I’m glad to see that the clinical sign is now more often called just plain ægophony (or egophony in the United States, where they have an unreasoning antipathy to the æ diphthong).

What’s happening with ægophony is that lung tissue which contains no air conducts sound differently from normal lung tissue. In particular, it tends to trim out lower frequency sounds. So the conducted sound of the patient’s voice takes on a high-pitched, bleating quality when the clinician listens over the abnormal lung.

The word ægis is related to Greek aix, “goat”. In mythology, it was a shield or breastplate used by a god—Zeus or Athena. The name probably comes from the fact that such objects were often fashioned from goatskin. The phrase under the ægis of used to mean “under the protection of [some powerful entity]”, but has slowly evolved until it is more often used to mean just “under the control of”.

In Greek, a male goat was tragos. It is the origin, albeit obscurely, of our word tragedy. The serious style of Greek play that Aristotle defined as evoking “pity and horror” was referred to as tragœdia, “goat-song”, but no-one seems to be entirely sure why. The Roman poet Horace claimed that the origin of the word was a custom that the winner of choral competitions would receive a goat as a prize. While that certainly seems tragic if true, it doesn’t really seem to link perfectly to the tradition of Greek tragedy. Tragos has also given us tragus, the little flap of cartilage at the entrance to the ear, which in older men will often sprout a tuft of hair like the beard on a billy-goat—another tragedy, of sorts.

To the Greeks, a female goat was chimaira, which for some reason was also the name given to a fabulous monster in Greek mythology, with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a snake. In English, as chimera, it’s a word for any combination of mismatched parts, including organisms that contain cells from several different sources.

In Latin, a male goat was caper, and a female goat, capra. A capriole or cabriole is a goat-like leap, as is a caper. The word cabriole in turn led to cabriolet, a type of two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage that tended to bounce along because it was light and had good suspension. These were often available for hire, and the word was soon contracted to cab, which is still applied to taxis today. If you experience a mental goat-like leap, you have a caprice; you are capricious. And a piece of music that bounds around in a lively fashion is a capriccio.

Something that pertains to goats is caprine, and something goat-shaped is capriform. There’s also a word caprigenous, “produced by a goat”, but it has relatively few applications beyond wool and cheese. Something goat-footed (like the god Pan) is a capriped, and something goat-horned is a capricorn—hence the Latin name of the zodiacal constellation, the He-Goat.

And while we’re talking about stars, the Romans had a diminutive, capella, applied to she-goats and kids, which is the name of the brightest star in the constellation Auriga. The star Capella represents the mythical she-goat that nursed the infant Zeus, whom he rewarded by translating her into the heavens.

Another Latin word for a male goat was hircus, and that gives us words for various goatish unpleasantness: something hircose or hircinous smells like a goat; hircine may indicate both smelliness and lustfulness. (And we’ve all had someone like that in our lives, haven’t we?)

And then there’s hirquitalliency, apparently from the Latin hirquitallire, “to resemble a billy-goat”. The Latin word was reputedly applied to boys passing through puberty, in reference to their breaking voices and lustfulness. Unfortunately, in the only use of hirquitalliency recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary, it is applied to a woman, and its meaning is a little unclear. It was coined in 1652 by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty: translator of Rabelais, inventor of a universal language, inveterate word-coiner, and impenetrable prose stylist. I think he used the word to imply a certain amount of lustful feminine vocalizing, but I’ll let you judge for yourself. Here’s the relevant passage from his Ekskybalauron:

Thus for a while their eloquence was mute, and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both; the visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here it was that passion was active, and action passive, they both being overcome by other, and each the conquerour. To speak of her hirquitalliency at the elevation of the pole of his microcosme, or of his luxuriousness to erect a gnomon on her horizontal dyal, will perhaps be held by some to be expressions full of obscoeness, and offensive to the purity of chaste ears; yet seeing she was to be his wife, and that she could not be such without consummation of marriage, which signifieth the same thing in effect, it may be thought, as definitiones logicae verificantur in rebus, if the exerced act be lawful, that the diction which suppones it, can be of no greater transgression, unless you would call it a solaecisme, or that vice in grammar which imports the copulating of the masculine with the feminine gender.

Phwoar.

Note: In case you’re wondering, pectoriloquy is “chest speaking”—being able to hear conducted speech sounds in the patient’s chest with a stethoscope. Whispering (or whispered) pectoriloquy is being able to hear whispered speech in the same way, which is not normally possible, but which (like ægophony) occurs over areas of lung that contain no air.

ædˈvɛspəreɪt

advesperate: to draw towards night

Writing about crepuscular rays recently reminded me that there are two kinds of crepuscule (twilight): matutine, from the Latin matutinus, “morning”, and vespertine from vespertinus, “evening”.

Vespertinus is of course the origin of vespers, the evening prayer in some versions of Christianity. And it gives us my headword for this post, to advesperate. In the days when scientists spoke Latin to each other, a bat was a vespertilio, from their habit of taking flight at dusk. The Italian language mangled this slowly over the centuries, from vespertillo to vispertello to vipistrello to pipistrello, from which last we get the English word pipistrelle, for a small bat.

Thomas Hardy seems to have coined the word vespering, “flying westwards”, in his poem The Year’s Awakening, but it hasn’t seen much use since. It does let me point out the obvious connection between “ves-” and “west”, however. The sun sets in the west, and the linguistic link between evening and the west goes right back to a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as wespero-. The first syllable of that root was adopted into the Germanic languages, and ended up in English in both west and Visigoth (“western Goth”). Wespero- got into Latin almost unchanged, and gave us all those vespertine words I’ve described already; and in Greek it appeared as hespera, meaning both “evening” and “west”. Hesperus was a minor mythological character (according to Lemprière, he was an obscure brother of Atlas); his only claim to fame is as the personification of the planet Venus in its role as the Evening Star.

As the Morning Star, Venus had two other names—Phosphorus, “light bringer”, or Eosphorus, “Dawn Bringer”.* Eos was the Greek goddess of the dawn, and (from the colour of the dawn sky) she gives her name to the red dye eosin.  Her name goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root aus-, which supplied the English language with east, Austria (“eastern kingdom”) and Ostrogoth (“eastern Goth”).

The Roman name for Eos was Aurora. So the aurora borealis is literally “dawn in the north”. The Romans saw a resemblance to a sunrise because, when the Northern Lights are strong enough to appear as far south as Rome, they are often tinged with red—the Emperor Tiberius once called out the fire-fighters when he glimpsed an auroral glow in the sky over the port of Ostia.

The Romans, who had a deeply confusing attitude to the names of their gods, also called Aurora Mater Matuta, “mother morning”. Which brings me neatly back to the Latin matutinus, “the morning”, the origin of our word matutine, “pertaining to the morning”, which helped me start this post. Matutinus also gives us matins, the morning prayers that are a counterpart to vespers. Matutinal means “in the morning” and matutinally means “every morning”.

And finally there’s matutolypea, “ill humour in the morning”—one of the reasons so few of these posts appear before midday. Matutolypea is a hybrid word, built from Latin matuta and Greek lype “sorrow”. Sadly, it seems to be one of those words that is never seen in the wild, only ever appearing in lists of unusual words. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for it …

*Given that the Ancient Greeks had different names for Venus according to whether it appeared in the morning or evening sky, you might ask whether they properly understood that it was just one object, seen in different positions at different times. They seem to have sorted that out quite early:

Eosphoros and Hesperos are one and the same, although in ancient times they were thought to be different. Ibycus of Rhegium was the first to equate the titles.

Ibycus of Rhegium, Fragment 331, 6th Century BC

ˌflɒksɪˌnɔːsɪˌnɪhɪlɪˌpɪlɪfɪˈkeɪʃən

Floccinaucinihilipilification: The act of estimating as worthless

Flocci, nauci, nihili, pili, assis, hujus, teruncii, his verbis, aestimo, pendo, facio, peculiariter adduntur.

Eton Latin Grammar (1758)

What the sentence above was telling generations of Etonians is that the verbs aestimo (“to value”), pendo (“to weigh or consider”) and facio (“to make”) take certain objects irregularly in the genitive case. These objects are floccus (“tuft of wool”), naucum (“trifling thing”), nihilum (“nothing”), pilus (“hair”), as (“penny”), hic (“this”) and teruncius (“farthing”).

The first four genitives (flocci, nauci, nihili, pili) all provided metaphors for worthlessness.  Non flocci facere, for instance, was a phrase meaning “to consider of no importance”. In the days of rote learning, “flocci, nauci, nihili, pili,” no doubt tripped off the tongue, and presumably stuck in the memory of many a Latin student. So floccinaucinihilipilification came into existence as a bit of ironic fun at the expense of the Latin classroom.

The Oxford English Dictionary attests its earliest written use, in the form “flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication”, in a letter by William Shenstone in 1741, slightly before the publication of the Eton Latin Grammar—but the Eton grammar was a codification of a much older standard text by William Lily. Presumably Shenstone had studied this earlier version of the Eton text.

If something is worthy of floccinaucinihilipilification, then it is floccinaucical: trifling. It is in a state of floccinaucity. If you don’t have time to floccinaucinihilipilify something, then you might just floccipend or floccify it instead—the three are synonymous.

Floccus (“tuft of wool”) also gives us the medical term floccillation, which is the delicate plucking movement sometimes exhibited by people suffering from delirium, as if picking at hallucinatory tufts of wool. It has a Greek synonym, carphology, “twig collecting”. It may also be responsible for the word flock, as applied to coarse tufts of wool used for insulation, and frock, the long garment of which disgraced priests were unfrocked—but there’s some doubt as to whether these come to us from Latin or from the Germanic languages.

Naucum (“trifle”) hasn’t done much else for the English language except provide us with naucify, another synonym for floccinaucinihilipilify.

Nihilum (“nothing”) gives us nil, “nothing”, annihilate, “to reduce to nothing”, and nihilism, a belief in nothing much. And Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined transnihilation, the transformation of nothing into nothings; that is, a proliferation of nothings. It’s a fine dismissive term for the make-work record-keeping of modern organizations, and it needs to be revived and released into the environment.

Pilus (“hair”) gives us the pile on a carpet. Something that bears hair is pilose, piliferous or piligerous, and something that resembles a hair is piline or piliform. Something that removes hair is depilatory, and something that makes your hair stand on end is a horripilant, causing horripilation. And few things cause horripilation like pilimiction—the passing of hair-like objects in the urine. That may seem positively hallucinatory, but it’s a real thing. A blow to the kidney can cause bleeding into its fine internal tubes. And if blood clots there, it eventually shows up as fine, dark, hair-like casts in the urine. Something not to be  floccinaucinihilipilified.

Note: In case you’re worrying that floccinaucinihilipilification might have become extinct by now, I’m pleased to report it was used in the UK House of Commons as recently as 21 February 2012, by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the (predictably) Conservative Member of Parliament for North East Somerset (and son of the perhaps very slightly more famous William Rees-Mogg):

“I am glad to say, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the requirement not to be rude about judges applies only to judges in this country. It does not apply to judges in the EU [European Union], so let me be rude about them. Let me indulge in the floccinaucinihilipilification of EU judges …”

So there you are—recorded for posterity in Hansard. *

* And in case you’re worrying why the printed record of debates in the House of Commons and House of Lords is called Hansard, it’s named after the printer T.C. Hansard, who started publishing unofficial records (written by William Cobbett) in 1809.

fɔəˈɡəʊ

forgo: To abstain from, go without, deny oneself

If that word looks a little odd to you, it’s perhaps because you’ve seen it written “forego” more often than “forgo”.

But forego is a different word, meaning “to go before, or in advance of”. At a Burns Supper, a few may be tempted to forgo the haggis, but only the piper is required to forego the haggis.

The trouble is, the verb to forego isn’t much used any more. It generally only sees the light of day as an adjective, as either foregoing or foregone, the latter almost always in the stock phrase “foregone conclusion”. Forgo is in more common use—people forgo things more often than they forego things. But since that Old English for- prefix is relatively unfamiliar, whereas fore- is still being used to form new words, the more common word seems to be making a determined bid to steal the other’s spelling.

Another for-/fore- confusion, invisible to spellcheckers, crops up with the forbear/forebear pair. The verb is to forbear, meaning “to abstain or refrain from”; the noun is forebear, meaning “an ancestor”.

And then there’s forgather/ foregather. A Scots word, borrowed from the Dutch, to forgather is “to assemble, to gather together”. Somewhere along the line people began to write foregather instead, as if the gathering was being done in preparation for some event. Nowadays you can get away with either spelling, but the fore- version is a little misleading.

The prefix fore- almost always signals something to do with the idea of preceding, in time or space—think forecast or forefront. But for- turns out to be a bit of a mess. The Oxford English Dictionary manages to come up with ten subtly different meanings signalled by for-, but I won’t list them all. The highlights, together with some examples still in (more or less) current use are:

• away, off, apart: forget, forgive
• prohibition: forbid, forfend
• abstention or neglect: forbear, forgo, forsake, forswear
• excess or intensity: forlorn

That last one makes us wonder what “lorn” might mean, if forlorn is to be interpreted as “intensely lorn”. It turns out that there was an Old English verb leese, “to be deprived of”, of which lorn was the past participle, later pressed into adjectival use: “abandoned, desolate, wretched”.

Being an Old English prefix, we can find analogues of for- in other Germanic languages—German and Dutch have a prefix ver-, for example, which does a similar job. It crops up in the old Dutch expression verloren hoop, “lost troop”, who were a group of picked soldiers sent out in advance of the main party as skirmishers. Bad stuff tended to happen to them. (The French called such soldiers the enfants perdus, “lost children”.) Verloren hoop made its way into English as both forlorn hope and flowing hope. The latter seems more upbeat, but the former prevailed in common usage:

FORLORN HOPE. Officers and men detached on desperate service to make a first attack, or to be the first in mounting a breach, or foremost in storming a fortress, or first to receive the whole fire of the enemy. […] Promotion is usually bestowed on the survivors.

Admiral W.H. Smythe The Sailor’s Word Book (1867)

Nowadays, we’re left with only the figurative meaning.

There used to be a lot more for- words than there are now, and I for one mourn their passing. Here’s a sampler:

Verbs:
forslug: to neglect through sluggishness
forgab: to defame; to publish someone else’s misdeeds
forgnaw: to gnaw to pieces
forweep: to exhaust oneself through weeping
fordin: to fill with noise
forbliss: to make happy
fordeave: to deafen
formeagre: to make thin

Adjectives:
forfrorn: stuck fast in ice
forswarted: blackened
forbritten: broken in pieces
forcrazed: fallen to pieces
forfrushed: shattered to pieces
forstormed: tempest-tossed
forwintered: reduced to straits by winter
forflitten: excessively scolded
forglopned: overwhelmed by astonishment
forswunk: exhausted with labour

Surely, between us, we can get some of these back into circulation?

Note: Predictably enough, the spellchecker on my website software refuses to believe there’s such a word as forgo. Sigh.

ˈskaɪəpɒd

Skiapod or Sciapod: A mythological human with a single leg and large foot, used to provide shade in tropical regions

The existence of skiapods was common knowledge in Classical times—they are mentioned by Aristophanes in his play The Birds, and by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, in which the are described as inhabiting India.

The name comes from the Greek skia, “shadow”, and the pod combining form of pous, “foot”, that I’ve talked about already. So the skiapods were “shadow feet”. Makes sense. You can use the word skiapodous or sciapodous to refer to anyone with large feet.

The skiapods were just one of many races of imaginary types of person who populated the remote corners of the Classical and Mediaeval world. The Nuremberg Chronicle also provides illustrations of the Blemmyae (who had no heads, but faces in their chests) and the Panottii (who had large ears they could use instead of clothing).

Greek skia, “shadow”, produced a lot of words, but you have to go digging to find them. Skiagraphy or sciagraphy is “shadow drawing”, and it seems to have had a number of meanings over the years. It has been applied to that complicated part of perspective drawing that involves accurately rendering shadows:

But it also has been used for the drawing of silhouette portraits, for the making of X-ray images, to refer to any sort of rough sketch (presumably because the sketch  foreshadows the final version),  and for the telling of time using  shadows—that is, by sundials (of which, more later).

Skiamachy or sciamachy is “shadow fighting”: either literal shadowboxing (for training in combat sports), or metaphorical fighting with imagined enemies.

An antiscian is a person whose shadow points in the opposite direction to yours: someone on the same meridian  but in the opposite hemisphere. (Strictly, that only works properly outside the tropics.) I’ve waited all my life for a chance to use that word, but the occasion doesn’t come up very often.

A macroscian is a person with a long shadow; not usually a tall person, but instead one who lives at high latitudes, where the sun is always low in the sky. A periscian also lives at high latitudes, but specifically within one of the polar circles. The word means “all-around shadow”, and if you live within one or other of the polar circles there will be at least one day of the year on which the sun never sets, and your shadow will sweep right around you during the course of the day.

An ascian has no shadow. The word designates someone who lives in what was called the Torrid Zone when I was at school—between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Anywhere in that region there will be two days a year when the sun is directly overhead at noon, and people appear to cast no shadow. The word amphiscian means “both-sides shadow”, and also designates the folk in the Torrid Zone, who (on every day but an “ascian” day) may see the sun either to the north or south at noon, and who therefore can cast shadows in either direction at that time.

That’s the inhabitants of the polar and torrid zones dealt with. What about those in the temperate zones? They’re heteroscians—”different shadows”. In the temperate zones, the direction of your shadow at noon is always the same—it points north in the northern hemisphere, and south in the southern hemisphere. People in the two zones are therefore always heteroscian to each other: their noon shadows point in opposite directions. So the word should really be used by one bunch of people, in one temperate zone, to talk about the other bunch of people in the other temperate zone. But instead it’s applied loosely to all the inhabitants of temperate zones, presumably because someone felt the need to come up with some sort of shadow-based nomenclature to match periscian and amphiscian.

While these are fine linguistic curiosities, they say important things about the world. Since shadow directions at noon are always opposite in the two temperate zones, but the sun always progresses across the sky from east to west, shadows sweep in opposite directions as the day progresses in the two zones: clockwise in the north, anticlockwise in the south.

So for the purposes of skiagraphy, sundials need to be numbered in different directions, according to which side of the equator they’re on: