10 Obscure Words For Everyday Things

You might have spotted this word over on the HaggardHawks Twitter feed the other day:

A mirror image is called an ENANTIOMORPH.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 17 May 2016

Originally used in reference to crystallography and chemistry, an enantiomorph (literally an “opposite shape”) is a mirror image or reflection, while something described as enantiomorphic or enantiomorphous resembles or provides a reflection.

And that word got us thinking about all the other obscure words there are for things you see and do everyday—and it’s 10 of those that feature in this week’s YouTube video.

But of the 10 words looked at in the video, two—calceate and discalceate, meaning “to put on” and “to remove your shoes”, respectively—are worth a little further investigation. Both date back to the 17th century in English, and both share a common root in the Latin word for “shoe”, calceus. That in turn is descended from the Latin word for the heel, calx—which opens up a whole new vocabulary of obscure heel-related words.

To calcitrate, for instance, is to kick, while to recalcitrate is to kick back or kick out in resistance or frustration. (No prizes for guessing that’s where the adjective recalcitrant also comes from.) Likewise, to calcate is to kick something down or to stamp it into the ground with your heel, while to exculcate is to tread or trample something down. To conculcate also means “to tread” or “to trample”, while the use of the word inculcate to mean “to impress upon” or “to indoctrinate” comes from the notion of figuratively “stamping” something into someone’s mind.

The “cal” of caltrop—a spiked metal weapon used to impede vehicles or horses—is also derived from the Latin calx, as caltrop is literally a “heel-trap”. Similarly, calks and calkins are both parts of a horseshoe; something that is calciform projects outwards like a heel; and a calcar is a heel-shaped spur at the bottom of a flower petal that attaches it to the stem.

But it’s not all unfamiliar and obscure territory here. Among the more familiar heel-words English has to offer is the word cockatrice, which is thought to be a part-English, part-French adaptation of the Latin word calcatrix, meaning “treader”, “tracker”—or, literally, “one who treads on your heels.”

Nose-wipe

This tweet nosed its way onto the @HaggardHawks feed yesterday:

To NOSE-WIPE someone is to cheat or deceive them.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) January 26, 2016

And, in response to a quick query tagged onto it…

Be good to get links to more info on your tweets @HaggardHawks :)

— G (@Gordon) January 26, 2016

…here’s a quick history of nose-wiping—or rather, here’s a quick explanation of why nose-wipe means “to cheat someone”.

In this context, nose-wipe dates back to the early seventeenth century, but an all but identical expression, to wipe someone’s nose, had been in use in English since the late 1500s. Likewise, to play with someone’s nose was an Elizabethan expression meaning “to ridicule someone” or, as the OED eloquently puts, “to make a game of someone”.

Both phrases probably have their roots in Latin, which it’s worth knowing had a specific word for the process of wiping your nose: emungere. That’s an etymological relative of mucus, as well being the origin of a handful of unfamiliar and unsavoury English words like emunctory (“having the function of conveying waste”), emunction (“the act of clearing the bodily passages”), and emunct, a seventeenth century adjective meaning “keen” or “acute” (probably derived from blowing your nose to improve your sense of smell).

In Latin, however, the verb emungere could also be used in a figurative sense, to mean “to cheat” or “deceive”, and in particular “to cheat someone of their money”. It’s from there that the English nose-wipe in the tweet above eventually came from—but why or how did “wiping your nose” come to have lying, swindling connotations?

Well, the clue probably lies in the adjective emunct above: wiping or blowing your nose improves your sense of smell, making it keener or more acute (especially if you’re snottering). The comic writers of Ancient Rome are thought to have picked up on this implication and played on it, using nose-wiped to mean “taken advantage of” or “duped” in the sense that “wiping someone’s nose” would make them keener, more alert—and so less likely to be duped a second time. To have wiped someone’s nose ultimately meant that you had somehow taken advantage of them, but that they had learnt from their costly mistake and were now keen not to fall for the same trick twice…

Hypochondria

You know how it is. The slightest ache or pain, and that’s it—you’re a goner. Raise your concerns, and the answer’s always the same: “Oh, stop worrying about nothing. You’re such a hypochondriac!” 

It’s a sign of intelligence, apparently, just like bad handwriting, introversion, doodling, not being a morning person, and all the other much-maligned quirks and traits that smart people like to tell you all smart people have in common. But what exactly is hypochondria?  

Hypochondria: The only disease you haven’t got

You’ll probably recognise the hypo– prefix from dozens of other words like hypodermic and hypothermia. Derived from Greek, it literally means “under”, or “below”. So a hypodermic needle passes under the skin. Hypothermia is dangerously decreased temperature. The hypotenuse is the line that literally “stretches below” the other two in a right-angled triangle. And a hypothesis is the idea forming the basis of an argument, literally beneath everything else.

The –chondria part, though, is more complex, or at least more unusual. It derives from the Greek word for bodily cartilage, khondros, which is a distant etymological cousin of words like grind and grounds. But how did a word meaning something like “below the cartilage” come to mean “anxious about one’s health”? 

To answer that we have to go back to the early days of medicine, when physicians blamed just about every condition you can think of on the Four Humours—no, not the Marx Brothers, but four bodily secretions (namely blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), the correct balance of which was necessary for a healthy life. Each of the four was said to be produced in a different organ or region of the body, and an excess of any one of them was enough to cause you problems.

Of the four, black bile was said to be produced in the spleen, the blood-filtering organ found just below the protective cartilage of the ribcage—the hypochondrium. If the spleen or any of the other visceral organs in this area acted up, then an excess of black bile would be produced that could, it was believed, cause feelings of depression and anxiety. 

We still use the Greek name for “black bile”, melancholia, to describe these kinds of feelings today, and, ultimately, we still call a feeling of anxiety about one’s health hypochondria.