From the NewsBites section of the winter 2007-08 edition of McGill University’s news magazine.

Body Language

If someone calls you Callipygian and you are not sure what to think, you may need a copy of Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia. You will find the term means “having beautiful buttocks” and can act accordingly. Be flattered that you have been compared to Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, whose rear end inspired the word, or smack the villain in his buccal cavity (aiming for the mouth).

Charles Hodgson, BEng’81, is a dedicated logophile and has compiled the origins, meanings and uses of hundreds of anatomical words and phrases in Carnal Knowledge.

Did you know that the word “sideburns” had its origins in the shaving habits of 19th-century U.S. senator Ambrose Everett Burnside? That there is no word in English for that bony bump on the outside of your wrist, referred to by acupuncturists as the “yanglao”?

Hodgson has had careers in engineering and technology management, worked on environmental issues and participated in the dot-com bubble, getting out just before it burst, which is when he started writing full-time.

“Words and wordplay have always been an interest of mine,” he says. “Every time I come across some new twist in how a word has developed, I feel it gives me a little more insight into human nature and history.”

Hodgson has developed a daily podcast about the extraordinary origins of ordinary words, called Podictionary, which has now had three million downloads and been written up in publications like USA Today and Jane magazine.

While working on Carnal Knowledge, Hodgson consulted Dr. Dennis Osmond, McGill’s Robert Reford Emeritus Professor of Anatomy, for expert advice. “I’m like many authors in that I’d like to have my errors pointed out to me before publication,” he says, “and so I sought out several people who might gently tell me where I’d gone wrong. Professor Osmond was very supportive.”

Visit www.podictionary.com for more information.

Andrew Mullins