Rule No. 1 of the Internet:

Nothing competes with pictures of baby animals

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PUPPY LOVE

So our week here at HH got off to quite a start when, early on Monday morning, JK Rowling retweeted this tweet about the word theic to her 9.8 million followers. In case you missed it, theic is a term for an excessive drinker of tea, coined in an 1886 article in Scientific American that blamed excessive tea-drinking on everything from hearing disembodied voices to the characteristic irritability of seamstresses. Well, quite. 

That’s that, thought we. Nothing can compete with an audience of 9.8 million people. This week’s—perhaps even this year’s—most popular HH fact is surely guaranteed. So a little explanatory history of the word theic was prepared for right here in the intro (spoiler alert: it comes from thea, the Latin for “tea”) and we got on with the rest of the week.

Then on Thursday, we tweeted that a baby pangolin is called a pangopup. JK Rowling retweeted it again, and the internet exploded. 

Proving yet again that no amount of linguistic trivia compares to pictures of baby animals, the pangopup fact broke all our records, broke Paul of HH’s phone, and broke the hearts of Twitterers all over the world. But seriously though—just LOOK AT ITS LITTLE FACE.

Elsewhere this week we found out that:

• when the sky starts to get lighter but the sun still hasn’t risen, that’s foreshine
• if you really, really want it to snow you just might be a chionomaniac
• there’s a word for anagrams that contradict one another because of course there is 
• if you’re eloquent or well-spoken, then you (alas, not literally) have a golden mouth
• and when something is so staggering you have to walk away, you’ve been bewandered

NEW ON THE BLOG

PANCHRESTON

The word panchreston popped up on the HH feed the other day, defined as “an explanation or answer too broad or too vague to be of any real value”. In fact, it was our Word of the Day the morning after President Trump’s first solo press conference, but that was just a coincidence of course. (As was this.)

The earliest use of the word panchreston in English dates from the early seventeenth century. Only back then, the word wasn’t used in quite the same way as it is today:

There are certaine Empericks or Quacksalvers in the world, that use a Pill they call Panchreston, that is, a medicine for every malady, a salve for every sore.

Edward Misselden, The Circle of Commerce (1623)

Originally a panchreston was a “cure-all” or panacea—a universal medicine capable of solving all ills and alleviating all disease. In that sense it derives from two Greek roots, namely pan, meaning “all” or “entirely” (as in pandemic and pandemonium), and chrestos, meaning “useful” or “serviceable” (as in chrestomathy, an early nineteenth-century word for an anthology of literature used to aid the learning of a language).  

In its original medical context, panchreston (or rather its Latin equivalent panchrestus) was first used by the Roman physician Galen as far back as the second century AD—although he used the term as a nickname for one type of medicine in particular: 

PANCHRESTUS ... An epithet for collyrium, described by Galen and so named for its general usefulness.

William Turton, A Medical Glossary (1802)

Collyrium is just an old-fashioned word for medicated eyewash, which for some reason Galen believed had extraordinary healing powers and was ultimately worthy of being known as a literal “cure-all”, or panchrestus. In reality, it’s unlikely collyrium would have been much use at curing anything besides a bad bout of conjunctivitis—and it’s for that very good reason that the meaning of panchreston ultimately changed. 

Although it fell out of use towards the turn of the twentieth century, in 1956 the word was rescued from relative obscurity by the American ecologist Garrett Hardin. In a paper entitled The Meaningless of the Word “Protoplasm”, Hardin lamented that there are commonly-used words in the scientific vocabulary that don’t help to explain difficult subjects, but only prove to complicate or muddy them:

Such enemies of thought, like all enemies, may be easier to spot if we label them. Such “explain-alls” need a name. As we borrow from the Greek to call a “cure-all” a panacea, so let us christen an “explain-all” a panchreston ... A panchreston, which “explains” all, explains nothing.

In resurrecting the name Galen had given to his questionable cure-all, Hardin gave us a word for a questionable term—and ultimately, a questionable theory, explanation, or answer—that attempts to or gives the impression of being all-encompassing, but in fact is entirely without substance. As well as, perhaps, a contender for Word of the Year... 

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ALL SQUARE

Recently a 9 × 9 word square—apparently the largest possible perfect word square in the English language—cropped up on the HH feed:

A C H A L A S I A

C R E N I D E N S

H E X A N D R I C

A N A B O L I T E

L I N O L E N I N

A D D L E H E A D

S E R I N E T T E

I N I T I A T O R

A S C E N D E R S

This fact turned out to be one of the week’s most popular, but raised a few questions about the meanings of the words involved, what precisely a “perfect” word square entails, and whether this is, genuinely, the largest one possible. 

It’s safe to say that the likes of anabolite, crenidens and linolenin aren’t among the most everyday of words. So here’s what we’re looking at: 

• achalasia (n.) a medical condition affecting the muscles of the oesophagus
• crenidens (n.) the karanteen, a species of sea bream found in the Indian Ocean
• hexandric (adj.) a botanical term describing a plant having six equal stamens 
• anabolite (n.) any complex molecule produced by anabolism from simpler ones
• linolenin (n.) glycerol tri-linolenate, a glycerol ester of linolenic acid
• addlehead (n.) an addle-headed person; a contemptable fool
• serinette (n.) a miniature barrel organ used to teach caged birds to sing
• initiator (n.) one who initiates; a substance that starts a chain reaction 
• ascenders (n. pl.) the parts of lowercase letters that ascend above a line of text

The fact that all of these words are unhyphenated, uncapitalized, single-word dictionary entries—each one used just once—is what makes this the best example of a “perfect” word square we have. To produce anything equalling (or surpassing) it typically requires bending those rules, and often by quite some distance.

So another 9 × 9 square can be built from the words nassicola, antidoron, stageland, signallee, ideations, collingei, oralogist, lonenesse and andesites—but that involves one obsolete spelling (lonenesse) and two Latin taxonomic names (Gynaecotyla nassicola, a species of flukeworm, and Xyletobius collingei, a type of beetle). If bending the rules like this is allowed, then there are actually hundreds of possible 9 × 9 word squares (as explained in this 2003 article [PDF] from Word Ways magazine), but so long as we’re seeking perfection, the achalasia example above is our best bet.

The quest for perfection continues, however—as the does the quest to create a perfect 10 × 10 square. So far, no perfect 10-word example has been produced, but that’s not to say that there haven’t been a few of close shaves:

O R A N G U T A N G

R A N G A R A N G A

A N D O L A N D O L

N G O T A N G O T A

G A L A N G A L A N

U R A N G U T A N G

T A N G A T A N G A

A N D O L A N D O L

N G O T A N G O T A

G A L A N G A L A N

This, from author and linguist Dmitri Borgmann’s Language On Vacation (1965), is about as close to a perfect 10 × 10 square as anyone has yet managed to get. But even then it contains two place names, three repeated words, two obsolete spellings of orangutan, and a few words you would be hard pushed to find in any standard English dictionary: 

• rangaranga (n.) a type of parsley fern that grows on walls in Micronesia
• andol-andol (n.) in Chinese medicine, a blistering agent made from dried beetles
• Ngotangota (prop. n.) a town in east Africa, on the west coast of Lake Malawi
• Galangalan (prop. n.) a mountain on Luzon island in the Philippines

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EVERY MANX FOR HIMSELF*

One of our most popular tweets resurfaced on the HH feed this week, and quickly became one of the​​​ week’s most shared:

According to the original definition of a SHIPWRECK in English law, if the ship’s cat survived then the ship wasn’t considered a wreck.

We first stumbled across this superb piece of trivia while delving into the origins of the expression time immemorial back in 2015. You can read all about why time immemorial originally specifically referred to any time before 6 July 1189 here—but for now, all we need to know is that the same thirteenth-century document that defined it also defined precisely what constitutes a shipwreck. 

The document in question was the 1st Statute of Westminster, drawn up by Edward I in 1275. These statutes—three in total—set about not only clarifying all the existing laws of the land, but laying down the groundwork for new ones, and in doing so constituted perhaps the earliest formal attempt to codify the English legal system. (Ironically, they were written in French, which at the time was still the language of the law in England.)

The 1st Statute comprised a total of 51 legal clauses, the fourth of which is what gives us the earliest definition of a shipwreck in English legal history:

On a wreck of the sea, it is agreed that when a man, a dog, or a cat escapes alive from a ship, neither the ship nor the boat nor anything that was in them shall be adjudged a wreck.

Why was it important to know whether any of the crew (or indeed the ship’s cat or dog) survived? Well, if anyone (or anything) escaped the wreck alive, ownership of the ship’s cargo could likely be ascertained. If no one survived, ownership of its cargo essentially went down with the ship, which meant that anything that washed up on the shore was—well, let’s just say there was a reason why shipwrecks were once known around the coasts of England as “godsends”... 

___________

* Yes, this really was the best cat/ship pun we could think of. But count yourself lucky we didn’t go with any of the other suggestions, which included “Jolly Cat Tars”, “Like Cats From A Sinking Ship”, “Abandon Kit” and “The Cat-tain Went Meown With His Ship”.

TEMPLATE No. 9

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? 

M_ _ _ _M_ _ _C_

_I_ _H_I_H_ 

_ _ _K_ _ _ _ _ _F

[Answer to last week’s puzzle: UNDERBELLY, SUFFRAGETTE, MULTIPLAYER]