After recent forays into terms related to March Madness, Easter and Tax Day, Webb’s Weird Words is back to its stock-in-trade this week: another set of 10 oddball words for your perusal and edification.
All are nouns except the adjective milchig.
Biltong (BILL-tong) – Long strips of dried meat, usually cured in the sun. Though this is an Afrikaans word (from South Africa), it’s related to tongue: Biltong literally means buttock-tongue.
I don’t know about you, but I just lost my appetite for beef jerky.
Coccolith (KOK-uh-lith) – Here’s one definition I won’t try to put in my own words: “a microscopic calcareous disk or ring making up part of the covering of certain marine plankton and forming much of the content of chalk rocks” (Dictionary.com).
Lith(o), by the way, is a Greek base meaning stone. It occurs in numerous English words — many involving fossils; but for some of the others, their relation to rocks is not always clear: lithograph (once made with engraved stone), monolith, paleolithic, neolithic and even lithium (from its mineral content).
Cunctator (KUNK-tay-tor) – Someone who delays or procrastinates.
Diapir (DYE-uh-peer) – A geological term — again with a definition I will quote verbatim, this time from the magisterial Collins English Dictionary: “an anticlinal fold in which the brittle overlying rock has been pierced by material, such as salt, from beneath.” It is not related to the diaper used on babies.
An anticline is an arch-shaped fold in the rock bed, usually involving several layers. Pictures and photos are available online if this description isn’t clear; Lord knows I’m no geologist.
Eelpout (EEL-powt) – A ray-finned fish that is, as you may have suspected, shaped like an eel. It includes more than 300 separate species; again, pictures are available online.
As for ray-fins, also known as Actinopterygii: These are fish with thin, bony, webbed fins. Astonishingly, several websites indicate that ray-fins make up 50 percent of all living vertebrate species in the world!
This is as opposed to lobe-finned fish called Sarcopterygii, most of which are now extinct.
And as a final note for this entry: Both of these class-names contain the Greek base pter-, meaning wing (here used in the sense of a fin, of course). From this base we get not only pterodactyl (“wing-finger”) but also, somewhat surprisingly, helicopter; using a form of helix, this literally means “spiral wing” — one of my all-time favorite etymologies.
Kinnikinnick (kin-uh-kuh-NICK) – A compound of bark and leaves (sometimes including tobacco) that was once smoked by Native Americans and pioneers in the Ohio Valley. Also, any of the various plants (such as bearberry) used in this mixture. Collins indicates it has various other spellings, including killikinick.
Liripipe (LEER-ee-pipe) – Among several sources there is disagreement on this one. It appears to be generally synonymous with tippet, a hanging piece of cloth attached to a hood, cap or sleeve. Dictionary.com indicates that it can refer to the whole hood itself — one with a long, hanging peak, worn mostly during the Middle Ages.
Milchig (MILL-kig) – Yiddish has contributed a huge number of truly great — and truly weird — words to our language. This is one of them.
It generally means “made from milk products” — though more formally, it indicates something made entirely from milk and therefore, in strict Jewish dietary laws, not to be mixed with meat. Can be spelled milchik.
Peduncle (peh-DUNG-kul) – A stalk or stem, usually in a flowering plant; sometimes refers to this structure in an animal — or a polyp. Also called a pedicel.
Samizdat (SAHM-iz-dot) – “A system in the Soviet Union and countries within its orbit by which government-suppressed literature was clandestinely printed and distributed” (Merriam-Webster). Also, any work dispersed in this way.
More next week!
