The prestigious American Film Institute — a nonprofit group promoting film heritage — loves to make lists: the 100 greatest movies; 100 greatest comedies; greatest thrillers; greatest stars; greatest movie-quotes — and a whole lot more.
In the early 2000s, when AFI announced their forthcoming roster of 100 greatest heroes & villains, some friends and I debated whether James Bond or Indiana Jones would land in the top spot.
Both of our guesses were wrong, it turned out.
Since these “Weird Word” columns are currently handling Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, you can probably guess AFI’s No. 1 hero….
That’s right: Atticus Finch.
It’s just one more fascinating detail on what I like to call “America’s favorite novel.” When I re-read it last month for the umpteenth time, I couldn’t help noticing numerous unfamiliar words; and so, given the wide familiarity with this book, I’ve been using those for several of our recent vocabulary columns.
Here’s another batch from Part II. (We’ve been taking them in order from the book.)
Amanuensis (uh-man-yoo-EN-siss, noun) – Old-fashioned synonym for “secretary” — containing the Latin root man(u), meaning “hand.” (See manual, manicure, manipulate … even manure!) But the definition doesn’t explain why it’s the name of a social group in the novel.
I can only guess it’s because the club members are women, who would commonly have had that job during the novel’s Depression-era setting. But while the formidable Alexandra (aunt to narrator Scout) joins as club secretary, that is certainly not her real-world job; I doubt she’d be caught dead taking dictation. (In fact, she’s usually the one giving it….)
Shinny (SHIH-nee, noun) – This normally designates an informal hockey game — though as a verb it can mean “to climb something” (as in, “shinny up that tree!”). Yet in Mockingbird, it cannot refer to either of these things. In Chap. 13, for example, Scout tells us, “Miss Maudie Atkinson baked a lane cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight.”
As long as you know that tight is slang for “drunk,” this sentence is a perfect example of context defining the word. Here (and later, when some boozed-up rednecks threaten Atticus), it’s is a colloquial form of “moonshine.”
As for “tight”: One of my source-books on American English indicates that our overstuffed language offers no less than 2000 synonyms for “drunk.” Weird Words covered some of those in 2023; you can find that list by searching at webbweekly.com for nimtopsical (yes, that’s one of the 2000).
Linotype (LIE-nuh-type, noun) – Though rightly capitalized as a trademark, Linotype is lowercase in Mockingbird, where it describes the typesetting machine used by the town’s lone newspaper (Chap. 15). This now-obsolete device was a revolution in its time.
Perhaps you’ve seen an ancient printing-press of the sort designed by Gutenberg: individual letters lined up by hand in a huge grid, all backwards, with ink smeared across them and then the paper placed on top to pick up the ink. The Linotype machine allowed that type to be dropped in place much faster — using a keyboard. That process was, in turn, later replaced by photographic typesetting — and then, of course, by digital.
Monkey puzzle (noun) – Also called the pewen or pinonero, this is an evergreen tree with large, sharp leaves — and it’s native to Chile, though they can be grown in the American South (Scout mentions seeing them in the Maycomb town square — Chap. 15). The origin of this nickname is uncertain — perhaps from its intertwining limbs (dictionary.com).
Privy (PRIH-vee, noun) – As an adjective, this is not an uncommon word; it means secret, personal, private or sharing in a secret (as in, “I’m not privy to that”). But … again in Chap. 15, Scout uses this as a noun — and it means, simply, “outhouse.” Its origin, of course, is from “private.”
We’ll finish this next week with a few final terms, and maybe look at one puzzling Latin phrase too.
