Imps, poops, and wind-sculpted trees

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LOLPOOP. LOL. 

By far the most popular word on Haggard Hawks this week was lolpooping, defined as “idly lounging about”. Hey, it is Sunday, after all. 

As we mentioned on Twitter, in this context the word lolpoop dates back to the eighteenth century. But as a noun it’s been in use since the early 1600s, when it originally referred to a lazy good-for-nothing. 

Don’t let that spelling fool you: this has nothing to with laughing at poop. The “lol–” of lolpoop is just the verb loll, meaning “to droop” or “hang”. The “–poop” is thought to come from liripoop, or liripipe, the long dangling tail of an academic hood. Perhaps through association with intelligent-looking people who turn out to be not quite so intelligent, or else to not-quite-so-intelligent people trying to appear educated and informs, in the early seventeenth century liripoop began to be used as another word for a fool or dunderhead. From there, connotations with laziness were quick to follow and over time the word eventually morphed into lolpooping—the perfect word for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Elsewhere this week we found out that:

• the “rainbow” you can see in oily water is an example of thin-film interference
• onyx and your fingernails have a lot more in common than you might think
• yes, the loose fluff that comes out of your cushions and pillows has a name
• you might hear the first wryneck before you hear the first cuckoo this spring
• and 29 March 2017—sorry, 1625 will go down in history as “Murk Monday”

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IMPISH BEHAVIOUR

The expression imp of the perverse—defined as “an urge to do something inadvisable just because you can”—cropped up on the HH feed on Wednesday morning. 

As we mentioned on Twitter, it’s an expression credited to Edgar Allen Poe, who used it as the title of a short story published in 1845.

In typically macabre fashion, the story begins with an unnamed narrator explaining how he murdered a man with a candle that emitted a poisonous vapour as it burned. With the man dead, the narrator inherits his estate, and happily lives alone with his guilty conscience—until one day, while walking around town, a thought crosses his mind: he will only remain safe and unsuspected of the man’s murder so long as he is not foolish enough to confess. With that idea now planted in his head, the narrator finds himself inextricably drawn towards an urge to blurt out a confession in public, and as he tries to escape it by walking faster and faster throught the town, he only succeeds in drawing more and more attention to himself: 

I bounded like a madman through the crowded thoroughfares. At length, the populace took the alarm, and pursued me. I felt then the consummation of my fate. Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have done it—but a rough voice resounded in my ears—a rougher grasp seized me by the shoulder. I turned—I gasped for breath. For a moment, I experienced all the pangs of suffocation; I became blind, and deaf, and giddy; and then, some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with his broad palm upon the back. The long-imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul.

You can read Poe’s brilliant tale of the tortures of a guilty conscience in full here. 

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DAY OF THE JACHELT

Every so often, one of our most popular tweets from yesteryear rears its head over on the HH feed, and this week it was the turn of the Scots dialect word jachelt—used to describe trees that have grown in the direction of the prevailing wind.

Thanks to a stunning picture by Flickrographer Nick Fullerton, jachelt has been doing the rounds on Twitter for nearly two years, but in that time we’ve never really addressed anything about it. Until now. 

According to the Scottish National Dictionary, jachelt is pronounced /dʒɑxlt/: it begins with the same “j” sound as jump or judge, and contains the same rasping “ch” sound as loch or Bach. So think along the same lines as jackal, only with a with a T on the end. Or jacket with an L added into it. Or jack with an E, an L and a T added to it, for that matter.

Etymologically, its roots lie in the older and more widely-used dialect verb dackle, which is variously defined as “to hinder” or “impede”, “to hesitate”, or “to remain in a state of doubt”. Clearly, the notion here is of the wind hindering or holding back the otherwise arrow-straight growth of a tree, causing it to morph into a gnarled, wind-shaped mass.

That’s only possible, of course, when the wind blows in one direction, with considerably strength, and for a prolonged length of time—which might go some way towards explaining why this word originated in Scotland... 

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A PLAY ON WORDS

Last week it was World Poetry Day, this week it was World Theatre Day.

That gave HH the opportunity to bring together another 15 suitably theatrical facts, from the theatre’s oldest knock-knock joke to the bizarre device nineteenth-century Parisians used to listen to plays while still in bed. You can read the full list here.

And, in case you missed it, you can catch up on the story of how a notorious seventeenth century Puritan who hated actors, fell foul of the king of England and had his ears cut off gave us a word for a theatrical critic here... 

JUMBLE No. 2

Another one of our fiendish new word jumbles this week: four related words have been jumbled up and their letters placed in alphabetical order below. What are the four words? All the letters are used just once.

A A C C E E E E E E E E E E G H I I I K L M N N O O R S T T T T T T T T T T W

[Answer to last week’s puzzle: BIOGRAPHY, CALLIGRAPHY, GEOGRAPHY, ICONOGRAPHY]