Words of my Life
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I'm marvelously fond of the Italian word "fango," which translates into English as "mud." "Fango" is expressive of the matter which it describes. To my ear, the word fango sounds slimy and disreputable, perhaps even repulsive, while its English counterpart "mud" is bland and lacks character. And "fangoso" is so much more dramatic than "muddy."…
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"Orts" is a rare but tasty word. Orts are the bits of bones, gristle, stems, skins, pits and other inedibles that are left on the plate after one finishes eating — the stuff that is scraped directly into the garbage can. Orts are to be distinguished from "leftovers" which are the uneaten remains of the…
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When I was a boy, the word boob denoted a simpleton, a nincompoop– what Shakespeare calls a mooncalf and what in an earlier life I might have called a schmuck or a schmendrick. "Boobs" was an everyday expression; so common and pervasive that The Three Stooges might just as easily have been called the The…
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In the catchment area of P. S. 217, as indeed in all of my home territory in darkest Flatbush, there was very little immigration or emigration. People stayed put, for the most part, and the students with whom you entered kindergarten were the ones who were likely to graduate with you at the end of…
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I would have thought that I'd have had in the hopper all the senses, proper and improper, of "'stopper." But I've come a-cropper. The most familiar stopper is, of course, the blocker of liquids, as for example the cork that fits into the top of the wine bottle — or the polished glass stopper that used…
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Before there were dikes there were terpen. I was disgracefully ignorant of terpen until I read Robert Van de Noort's North Sea Archaeologies: A Maritime Biography, 10,000 BC to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2011). Van de Noort devotes many pages to terpen, which are artificial islands constructed between 500 BC and 1000 AD in parts of…
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To decide upon the language's silliest word, many would steep themselves into the gallimaufry that features such sesquipedalian monstrosities as mollycoddle, liripoop, and kinnikinnick, but in my view such words are no more than flagrant tomfoolery. (In point of fact, almost every word seems silly, if you just say it over and over again, especially…
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We're packing up, getting ready to go — even though there hasn't been the slightest hint of frost. When I loaded the metal sculptures into the bed of the truck, I realized that it would be a good idea to cover them with a tarpaulin. So down I drove to Main Street and to the…