Haggard Hawks 12

Woods, wordplay, and gigantic feet

POPULAR THIS WEEK

SHADY CHARACTERS

 

By far the most popular tweet this week was the word mogshade, defined simply as “the shadows cast by trees”. This tweet raised quite a few questions over on Twitter—but alas, no, it has nothing to do with cats.

 

This mog is thought to be a corruption of mock, which as well as implying that the dappled shade cast by a canopy of trees isn’t the most comprehensive cover from the sun is also an old dialect word for a tree stump. Alternatively, if neither of those interpretations is correct mog might be in some way related to muggy, in the sense of hot, sultry, humid weather—the kind that might have you running for shade below a tree.  

 

While you’re there of course you might well come across a nemophilist, namely “someone who loves being in the woods”. That word comes from nemos, the Greek word for a woodland or wooded pasture—so alas, no, it has nothing to do with Captain Nemo. 


Elsewhere this week we found out that:

 

  • actors looking for a challenge need look no further than a monopolylogue
  • delicious/repulsive* Brussels sprouts were once known as muffle-greens
  • when you say something but don’t mean a single word of it, that’s enantiosis
  • there really is an Inuit word for everything—including this
  • and “gnu dung” is a lot more interesting than it might sound.

 

(* Delete as appropriate.)

NEW ON THE BLOG

SCIAPODOUS

 

Last week on Twitter we posted the word sciapodous, defined as an adjective describing someone who has big feet. Last week on the HH blog, we talked about the word periscian, a term coined by an Ancient Greek geographer to refer to someone who lives at the poles. And, as unlikely as it might sounds, those two are actually related.

 

First at all, both words have at their centres the Greek word for “shadow”, skia (for reasons that we’ll come to in a moment). Secondly, they both refer to groups or races of people presumed by the Ancient Greeks to inhabit an extreme region of the earth. But while the periscian inhabitants of the poles turned out to indeed exist, the legendary people that the term sciapodous alludes to are, thankfully, the stuff of legend.

 

A quick recap, then: as we explained last week, periscian literally describes someone whose shadow moves all the way around them throughout the day, like the spike on a sundial. It was coined by the Ancient Greek geographer Posidonius to refer to the (then only theoretical) inhabitants of the far north, who live at such an extreme latitude that at the height of summer they must endure twenty-four hours of sunlight.

 

The adjective sciapodous, meanwhile, derives from the name the Greeks used for the legendary inhabitants of the unbearably hot and sun-scorched deserts of Africa and the Indian subcontinent: the Sciapodes.

 

Sciapodes literally means “shadow-feet”, and brings together the Greek skia, “shadow”, with the same Greek word for “foot”, pous, found at the root of words like tripod, podiatry and podium. So what does that have to do with having big feet—or, for that matter, with living in blisteringly hot climates? Well, at this point we can hand things over to the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder.

 

In his epic reference work Natural History, Pliny described a race of people supposed by an early Greek historian named Ctesias to live in India:

 

He [Ctesias] also speaks of another race of men, who are known as Monocoli, who have only one leg but are able to leap with surprising agility. The same people are also called Sciapodae, because they are in the habit of lying on their backs, during the time of the extreme heat, and protect themselves from the sun by the shade of their feet. These people, he says, dwell not very far from Troglodytae; to the west of whom again there is a tribe who are without necks, and have eyes in their shoulders.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History (VII/2, c. 78 AD)

 

As anthropological descriptions go, that’s hardly the most reliable. But it’s the legendary, single-enormously-footed Sciapodes who are at the root of the word sciapodious.

 

The word first appeared in English in the early 1700s; since then, it’s hardly been the most widely-use of words (hence its appearance here on HH). Kudos, then, to the editors of the Fremont Argus, who ran this headline in 1977:

 

WANTED: SCIAPODOUS GRAPE-CRUSHER

VISIT THE HH BLOG

POPULAR THIS WEEK

CHANGING PLACES

 

Last weekend, we tweeted David Shulman’s astonishing sonnet Washington Crossing The Delaware (1936), all fourteen lines of which are anagrams of the title: 

 

A hard, howling, tossing water scene.
Strong tide was washing hero clean.
“How cold!” Weather stings as in anger.
O Silent night shows war ace danger!

The cold waters swashing on in rage.
Redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
When star general’s action wish’d “Go!”
He saw his ragged continentals row.

Ah, he stands—sailor crew went going.
And so this general watches rowing.
He hastens—winter again grows cold.
A wet crew gain Hessian stronghold.

George can’t lose war with’s hands in;
He’s astern—so go alight, crew, and win!

 

Shulman, who died at the age of 91 in 2004, was a crossword compiler, Scrabble player, a master of wordplay, and a prolific amateur lexicographer—a self-styled “Sherlock Holmes of Americanisms”. Single-handedly he antedated (i.e. tracked down earlier evidence of) thousands of English words and phrases, sending his findings to the editorial team of the Oxford English Dictionary on batches of handwritten index cards. Among those words he is credited with updating are jazz, hoochie-coochie, shyster, doozy, and hotdog—which, he discovered, was a term from US college slang long before it became the name of a type of sausage. 

 

Inspired by Emanuel Leutze’s painting (below) however, Washington Crossing The Delaware was Shulman’s magnum opus. “I wrote the sonnet in 1936,” he once wrote in a letter to the New York Times. “And now, after waiting 60 years, I find that nobody so far has equaled or surpassed it. I even tried to—but I failed.”

TEMPLATE No. 12

 

And finally, a puzzle just for our subscribers: only one English dictionary word (that we could find) fits each of the templates below. What are they? 

 

FOO_ _ _OOF

_ _ _F_ _OO_

_ _ _ _ _OO_F_ _

 

 

[Answer to last week’s puzzle: BACKGROUND, BACKGAMMON, BLACKGUARD]

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