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.”

Pedigree

Archery. Tapestry weaving. Playing the lute. Invading England. There were all kinds of things you could do to pass the time in medieval France. 

Another popular pastime was genealogy, the study of heritage and descent. Seemingly, the nobility of the day liked nothing more than drawing elaborate tree diagrams to boast both in print and in picture of their family’s proud French heritage.

Some of these diagrams comprised little more than lists of names connected by a series of hand-drawn strokes and lines. Others, like the one above, were more involved and more detailed. And some were even drawn as actual trees. But no matter how they were put together, there was something about the lines on these genealogical diagrams—long, flat and broad, with shorter vertical strokes linking one generation to the next—that reminded the writers and artists who produced them of birds’ feet. And, in particular, of cranes’ feet.

Today, in modern French, “crane’s feet” is pieds de grues. But back in the eleventh century, it would have been something more like pée de grue. And if that particular snippet of obscure medieval French sounds even slightly familiar, then it’s because pée de grue eventually morphed into our word pedigree—namely, the traceable ancestry or descent of something.