10 Words Derived From Places In America - 500 Words Ep. 26

It seems we’re always late to the party here at HaggardHawks. Yes, it was July 4 last Monday but, hey—what can you do? 

So. A very belated Happy Independence Day to anyone reading this over in the States, and in honour (or rather honor) of your celebrations, this week on the HH YouTube channel we’re looking at 10 places in the United States that somehow ended up in the dictionary. Dinner jackets. Outdoor symposiums. Endless, mind-numbing political speeches. Frankly, it’s all here.

One little bit of linguistic Americana that didn’t make the final cut this week, however, is hooch.

As a slang term for alcohol—and in particular homemade or rough quality alcohol—the word hooch first appeared in the language in the late nineteenth century. It derives from the name of the Hoochinoo, a tribe of Tlingit Native Americans based on Admiralty Island in the far southeast of Alaska. And as they knew all too well, if there’s one thing guaranteed to keep you warm on a cold southeast Alaskan night, it’s home-brewed alcohol. Apparently. 

The Hoochinoo had long manufactured their own liquor, but when the Klondike Gold Rush brought 100,000 prospectors to the region in mid-1890s, they realised they had the perfect captive audience. Before long, they were making a considerable profit selling their alcoholic beverages to the prospectors hoping to strike it rich in the Yukon—and to the prospectors, the name Hoochinoo, and eventually the reduced form hooch, came to be their byword of choice for potent, homebrewed booze. (Booze, incidentally, is another story for another day…)

As for the Hoochinoo themselves, they took their name from a local Tlingit word, Hutsnuwu, literally meaning “grizzly bear fort”, thought to be either the name of one of the tribe’s settlements on the island, or else a local name for the island itself. All of which makes hooch the perfect geographical accompaniment to your tuxedo, your Denver boots and, of course, absolute bunkum. 

100 words worth knowing

Typical. You wait months for a milestone to come along, and then two come along at once. 

Just two days after reaching the 15,000 followers mark, the @HaggardHawks Twitter feed tweeted its 10,000th tweet in the early hours of Monday morning. If you’ve been with us since the start (and some of you certainly have), that’s 10,000 obscure and unusual words you’ve potentially added to your vocabulary. So apologies for fuelling your lexiphanic tendencies—you may well be guilty of gadzookery, but at least you can now consider yourself a logodaedalus.

But for those of you who have joined us more recently—or for those of you who might have forgotten some of the best HH words (which would make two of us...)—not to worry. To mark our 10,000th tweet, and to refresh our collective memory, here are 100 HaggardHawks words that are well worth remembering, each linked to its original tweet should you want to read or share it over on Twitter.

Thanks again everyone for following, and stay tuned for another development very soon…

1. The pleasant feeling that follows a nice dream is euneirophrenia. 
2. Bomphiologia is boastful, self-aggrandizing language. 
3. To famgrasp is to shake someone’s hand...
4. ...while kissing a woman’s hand on meeting her is called a baisemain. 
5. To unhappen something is to make it look like it never took place. 
6. A growlery is somewhere you like to retire to when you’re ill or in a bad mood. 
7. If you’re comfoozled then you’re utterly exhausted. 
8. An autohagiography is an autobiography that makes its subject look better than they are. 
9. A ridibundal person is prone to laugh at things. 
10. A hangy-bangy is a good-for-nothing. 
11. An ohnosecond is a moment between doing something and realising you shouldn’t have done it.
12. Jamais-vu is the opposite of déjà-vu...
13. ...and a eucatastrophe is the opposite of a catastrophe.
14. If you’re noctivagant then you like to wander around at night. 
15. A gowkthropple is someone who frequently uses bad language.
16. To jirble is to spill liquid while pouring it with shaking hands. 
17. Old women who gossip over tea and cakes? They’re muffin-wallopers.
18. Huckmuck is the feeling of confusion caused by things not being in the right place.
19. A bessybab is an adult that likes childish things. 
20. To dacker is to deliberately spin out a simple task just to fill up a day’s work.
21. Killing time is temporicide. 
22. To do something lickfaladity is to do it with full force. 
23. A miscomhap is a stroke of bad luck. 
24. Infucation is the process of applying makeup. 
25. A sudden feeling of grief when you remember a loss is a stound. 
26. If you’re parvipotent then you have very little power. 
27. A buccula is a double chin. 
28. Shivviness is the uncomfortable feeling caused by wearing new underwear.
29. A muck-robin is a child who likes deliberately annoying adults. 
30. To goufter is to laugh heartily. 
31. Looking younger than your age is called agerasia. 
32. Posing a question and then immediately answering it yourself? That’s sermocination.
33. An ichnogram is a footprint. 
34. Talking in your sleep is somniloquy. 
35. An aquabib is someone who drinks water, not alcohol. 
36. To honeyfuggle someone is to trick or deceive them. 
37. A zwodder is a drowsy, stupid state of mind. 
38. A callomaniac is someone who believes they’re more beautiful than they really are. 
39. To walk in shoes that are too big for your feet is to clomph. 
40. Cats that like to climb along high shelves are climb-tacks. 
41. To titty-toit is to tidy up. 
42. Aimlessly wandering the streets is vicambulation. 
43. If you’re ludibrious, then you’re the butt of the joke. 
44. A compulsion to look at awful things, like horror movies, is called cacospectomania.
45. A mouse-nook is a hard-to-reach, hard-to-clean corner of a room. 
46. Mogshade is the shade provided by trees. 
47. A puckfist is someone who braggingly dominates a conversation. 
48. To constantly repeat something so that it loses all meaning is to battologize. 
49. The drops of food or drink that fall down your chin when eating are your lebber-beard. 
50. To sklute is to fall into something wet or muddy. 
51. An onomasticon is a list of names. 
52. Speaking through gritted teeth is dentiloquy. 
53. If you’re pawp-footed, then you’re prone to walk into things. 
54. To dedoleate is to cease being upset. 
55. Your opisthenar is the back of your hand. 
56. The drops of rain that drip from things after it’s stopped raining are the easing-drops.  
57. If something is xyresic then it’s razor-sharp. 
58. Making mistakes at work because you’re so tired or bored? That’s fauchling. 
59. To scurryfunge is to hastily tidy a house. 
60. Using a fan to cool yourself down is flabellation. 
61. A crinkie-winkie is a fuss over nothing, or a pointless reason for not doing something. 
62. The boredom that comes with being unwell is alysm. 
63. Oysterhood is unsociableness or an overwhelming desire to stay at home. 
64. A nonty-niddlety is a fool. 
65. A zoilist is an unfair critic, or someone who loves complaining or finding fault.
66. A spinkie-den is a woodland clearing full of flowers. 
67. Trinkgeld is money intended only to be spent on drink. 
68. A fyoag is a loud, cheerful laugh. 
69. Anything that is hoozy-poozy is done just to pass the time. 
70. A brother-chip is someone who does the same job as you...
71. ...while a nameling is someone with the same name as you. 
72. Something that is isochroöus is the same colour outside and throughout. 
73. Untidy or unpleasant work is vargling. 
74. If you’re floby-mobly, then you’re not unwell, but still not quite feeling your best.
75. The stiffness in your legs after a long walk is called hansper. 
76. Eating your words is autologophagy. 
77. A lennochmore is a larger-than-average baby. 
78. Glutching is trying to stifle sobs or cries. 
79. A scliff is an old, worn out shoe. 
80. The loose feathers that fall out of cushions and pillows is called culf. 
81. To bang-a-bonk is to sit lazily on a riverbank. 
82. Armogan is the perfect weather for travelling...
83. ...while hurling-weather is the perfect weather for drying clothes... 
84. ...and if the weather flenches, then it looks like it might improve but never does.
85. An adoxography is a great work written about a pointless subject. 
86. Crockans are bits of food that shrivel up during cooking. 
87. Hanging around with nothing to do? That’s lobbeting. 
88. Saturday-wit is dirty jokes. 
89. A waffle-frolic is a sumptuous meal or feast. 
90. To twankle is to idly play a musical instrument. 
91. Superalimentation is eating too much food. 
92. The process of taking off your shoes? That’s discalceation. 
93. A scripturient person has a constant desire to write. 
94. Trying to cover up the fact that you’re laughing is kneistering. 
95. An ocnophil is someone who clutches onto familiar things when upset. 
96. To penelopize is to restart a piece of work just to waste time. 
97. A dildram is a strange or improbable story. 
98. All the facial features that make someone recognisable comprise their headmark.
99. To jakes is to walk mud into a house. 
100. If you’re linguipotent, then you have great skill with languages. 

Carpet

Since the first HaggardHawks post for BuzzFeed went up last week, it’s been viewed more than 300,000 times and, incredibly, has boosted the Twitter account past the 13,000 followers mark—so you can now pit your wits against the fourth HaggardHawks Quiz… But of all 53 language facts cherry-picked from the Haggard Hawks fact book for BuzzFeed, one has attracted far more attention than all the others put together: 

Nothing rhymes with CARPET. http://t.co/oLcpVgYaIF

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) July 18, 2015

This fact actually went up on the Twitter account a few months ago (bonus fact: nothing rhymes with month either), and caused quite a stir back then too. But in the comments section over on BuzzFeed, the same debate has been sparked all over again:

So. Does nothing really rhyme with carpet? Exactly what does it take for two words to be classed as rhymes? And just how rare are unrhymable words anyway?

Well, as some commenters quite rightly pointed out, determining whether or not two words rhyme depends of course on your pronunciation, and what kind of rhyme you’re looking for. As a benchmark, rhyming dictionaries understandably limit themselves to one standard accent of English, and to finding only the most accurate and most straightforward form of rhymes, known as ‘perfect’ or ‘full’ rhymes—otherwise they’d be overflowing with words, pairs of words, and entire phrases that almost-but-not-quite rhyme with one another.

British English rhyming dictionaries tend to use standard Received Pronunciation as their basis, but naturally things are different elsewhere—that’s why American English rhyming dictionaries, based on General American pronunciation, will tell you that nothing rhymes with iron (pronounced /aɪərn/, with a noticeable R sound), aside from derivatives like gridiron and andiron, while British dictionaries (which give the pronunciation /ʌɪən/, without a heavy R) will quite happily tell you that it rhymes with a whole clutch of words, including the likes of lion, Ryan, O’Brien and Uruguayan. (Note to self: write a poem later about a Uruguayan lion named Ryan O’Brien.)

Regardless of your accent, however, seriously—nothing rhymes with carpet. 

According to The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, for two words to form a perfect rhyme, the final stressed vowels in both words and all the sounds following them have to be identical. In the case of carpet (RP: /kɑːpɪt/, GM: /kɑɹpɪt/), the stressed vowel is the ar sound in the first syllable, which means that any word or words that we can safely say rhyme with carpet have to end with the full combination of sounds /-ɑːpɪt/, or /-ɑɹpɪt/. And in English, there just isn’t anything else that works.

Pet is too short (and is pronounced /pɛt/, not /pɪt/ or /pət/). While trumpet, armpit, basket, pulpit, market, parapet, and all the other suggestions being thrown back and forward in the comments section don’t follow the same pattern, and so don’t quite fit the bill. Almost-but-not-quite rhymes like these are often labelled ‘slant’, ‘half’, or ‘imperfect’ rhymes, but by definition the consonants in a slant rhyme should remain the same, while the vowel sound varies (like hand and bend, or rhyme and Rome); market, trumpet and basket all just take too many liberties.

By far the best suggestion here is tar pit, which appears to match all of the phonological criteria required. The trouble is that both the Oxford English and Merriam-Webster Dictionaries list tar pit as two separate words—and if separate words are required to form a rhyme, then it’s no longer classed as a perfect rhyme but a ‘mosaic’ rhyme. After all, we could just as easily claim that car pit, star pit, sitar pit, or Jordanian dinar pit rhyme with carpet if we’re not fussed about ‘mosaicking’ words together.

There are, of course, lots of different forms of rhyming, and some intrepid poet will no doubt at some point have used the word carpet and quite happily (and successfully) rhymed it with armpit or parapet. (In fact, the stories behind two undeterred writers’ attempt to write a poem about a carpet and rhyming story about oranges are explained in Word Drops.) But so long as we’re drawing the line at perfect rhymes based on a standard pronunciation, then it’s true—nothing rhymes with carpet.

But just how rare are unrhymable words? Well, although a lot of words you might think have no rhyme actually do, the problem with limiting ourselves to perfect rhymes—which require the stressed vowel and everything after it to rhyme—is that the further back from the end of a word the stressed vowel is located, the more troublesome finding an appropriate rhyme for it becomes. 

So while a handful of monosyllabic words—like month, scarce, gouge and ninth—contain such a tricky combination of sounds that nothing else matches them, in polysyllabic words, as the stress shifts further and further back in the word (to the penultimate syllable, as in carpet, neutron or penguin, or even the antepenultimate, as in animal, dynamo or citizen), the rhyming element of the word (–arpet, –ynamo, –itizen) becomes longer and more complicated, and the chances of finding a perfect match for it diminishes. So potentially there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of unrhymable words in English—of which carpet is just one.

Now then. There once was a lion named Ryan. Whose passport was stamped Uruguayan...

Aluminium

This week over on @HaggardHawks, this intriguing little fact popped up: 

Write out the names of all 118 chemical elements currently known to science, and you’ll never use a single letter J.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) September 17, 2015

As a couple of diligent followers pointed out, yes, we’re only talking about English here. And yes, Q is also entirely absent from all 118 names. And, in case you’re wondering, there are Zs in zinc and zirconium, and Xs in xenon, oxygen and ununhexium (at least until it was renamed livermorium in 2012).

But with the New Scientist Twitter feed now seemingly muscling in on HaggardHawks’ patch (I can sense the geekiest showdown in internet history brewing already), now seems like the perfect time to spread our wings and try a little bit of science ourselves—albeit from a dictionary-orientated viewpoint.

So. All this talk of chemical elements raises an interesting question: why is it aluminium in Britain, and aluminum in America?

There’s an old story that claims a sizeable shipment of aluminium was once imported into the United States from Europe, but when it was recorded in the logbook of whatever port it arrived at, it was misspelled aluminum by the local harbourmaster (or harbormaster, as the case may be). It’s a neat story, but a fairly unrealistic one—would a mistake like this really be enough to alter the spelling of a word in an entire regional variety of English? It’s unlikely. Is this tall-tale probably a complete fabrication? That’s very likely. So what’s the truth?

Well, like a lot of the perceived differences between British and American English (we’re looking at you, zed vs. zee), things here haven’t always been as clear cut as they are today. Brace yourselves, then—here comes the science bit.

Minerals containing aluminium have been known and used since antiquity, but it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that scientists began to realise that alums—naturally-occurring aluminium minerals, once used to do everything from dressing wounds to dyeing fabrics—all contained some kind of as-yet-undiscovered base metal. This metal was tentatively given the name alumine by the French chemist Guyton de Morveau in 1761, but it wasn’t until 1807 that the great Sir Humphrey Davy used his newly-refined process of electrolysis to try to isolate it from its mineral source.

Although he failed, in writing up his experiments Davy nevertheless discussed this tantalizingly unobtainable metal in English for the first time. As his paper, published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions the following year, explained:

Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names silicium, alumium, zirconium and glucium.

Confusingly, Davy’s list of the metals that eluded him—silicium (now silicon), alumium, zirconium and glucium (now beryllium)—means that the earliest written record we have of in English is neither spelled aluminium nor aluminum. At least that was until 1812, when Davy published a book cataloguing all of his discoveries to date, in which he stated:

This substance [alum] appears to contain a peculiar metal, but as yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state, though alloys of it with other metalline substances have been procured sufficiently distinct to indicate the probable nature of alumina.

This appears to give the American spelling aluminum the edge—but, confusing things even further, there’s this:

The result of this experiment is not wholly decisive as to the existence of what might be called aluminium and glucinium.

This final quote comes from an 1811 review of a lecture given by Davy at the Royal Society in London, two years earlier. Whether Davy himself had used the name aluminium in his lecture or whether it was merely the reviewer’s name of choice is impossible to tell, but one thing is clear: Davy, it seems, couldn’t make his mind up—and he was by no means alone.

While Davy’s original spelling alumium quickly dropped out of use, in the years that followed his experiments the names aluminium and aluminum were used interchangeably in both British and American literature, as well as by Davy himself. And all this confusion wasn’t helped by the fact that, because isolating aluminium was proving so problematic, the metal itself remained astonishingly scarce. In fact, for much of the nineteenth century aluminium was one of the rarest and most expensive metals in the world: in the 1850s, Emperor Napoleon III of France reportedly had a set of cutlery cast from aluminium that he reserved for only his most important guests, while everyone else had to make do merely with gold. The need to mention aluminium in print consequently remained small, and so a standardized form of the word failed to emerge.

Napoleon III: Expensive tastes, exceptional moustache

When Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, however, the only spelling that made his final cut was aluminum; because aluminium was still so rare at the time, it’s possible that Webster’s preference for aluminum was an attempt to ally it more closely to  platinum, another equally rare and equally precious metal. Back in Europe meanwhile, the trend drifted the other way: the Latin-inspired –ium endings common to many of the other recently-discovered elements (including a number of those isolated by Davy’s more successful experiments) led to the spelling aluminium steadily gaining ground among classically-educated scholars in Britain. 

But the breaking point eventually came from the unlikeliest of places: behind a shed in the garden of a family home in northern Ohio.

In the early 1880s, an American chemist and inventor named Charles Martin Hall began experimenting with samples of alumina—solid aluminium oxide—to find a cheaper method of producing pure aluminium. Having constructed his own coal-powered furnace in his family’s garden in Oberlin, Ohio, Hall came up with a process in which alumina is dissolved in a bath of molten cryolite (a pale, quartz-like mineral), which is then electrolysed to produce a pool of pure molten aluminium at the bottom of the tank.

For the first time in history, Hall’s method—which was simultaneously discovered by the French chemist Paul Héroult, and is hence called the Hall-Héroult Process—allowed aluminium to be mass produced; within a matter of years of his process being patented in the United States, pure aluminium was reportedly 200 times cheaper than it had ever been before.

Although Hall used the spelling aluminium when filing the patent for his process, in his advertising and promotional material he opted for Webster’s spelling of aluminum. And as his business grew, and as his technique for producing pure aluminium became more widespread, this meant that aluminum steady established itself as the metal’s preferred spelling in North America, while the classical –ium ending remained in place back in Britain—a distinction that has remained in place ever since.