WORD PLAY: ANATOMY LESSONS: FOR THE STIFF OF SPINE AND STRONG OF HEART

Dunch me if you wish, but not in the thirl or the coccyx

Saturday, November 3, 2007
WARREN CLEMENTS

Where there’s a word, there’s a proliferation of word books. General dictionaries and phrase-origin books may have cornered the main reference market, but plenty of room remains for specialized entries to squeeze their way onto the shelves.

Mark Dunn’s book Zounds!: A Browser’s Dictionary of Interjections explains that “How,” the caricatured greeting wearily familiar from any number of Hollywood fake-Indian movies, probably originated in “a legitimate Indian word, hao (from the Sioux), or haw or hau (from the Omaha), meaning variously ‘come on,’ ‘let us begin’ or simply ‘hello.’ ”

Craig Conley’s One Letter Words: A Dictionary notes that R, in addition to being a medieval Roman numeral and a motion-picture rating, was once used in England as a mark for rogues. (That must be why pirates always said, “Aarrr, matey.”)

A new addition to the shelf is Charles Hodgson’s Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia, presumably distinct from a naval gazer’s dictionary of the sea, ships and sailors. Hodgson concentrates on the body. We call our front pointy teeth canines, he says, because the dog (Latin: canis) has long been mankind’s reference point for a domestic animal with sharp teeth. Molars, the teeth we use to grind our food, get their name from the Latin mola, for millstone.

The elbow is a double-barrelled construction. Ell, derived from the name for one of the bones in the forearm, “came to refer to the span of the entire arm, and then the extent of two arms outstretched.” Bow means bend. An elbow is a bend in the arm. To hit someone with your elbow is to dunch him, or at least it was in the 13th century. By the 18th century, it was to jundy him. Dunch and jundy have both gone out of fashion, though Dunch and Jundy would make a great name for a puppet show in which the antagonists elbowed each other out of the way instead of walloping each other with sticks.

The list goes on, passing by nostril (nose plus thirl, an Old English word for hole) and coccyx, the bone at the base of the spine, which got its name from the Greek word for cuckoo, kokkyx, because somebody imagined that the coccyx looked like the beak of a cuckoo bird. A relative of the cuckoo, Hodgson writes, is “Geococcyx californianus – the roadrunner who was always running away from Wile E. Coyote.” Coincidentally, whenever one of Wile E. Coyote’s Acme products backfired and caused a huge boulder to drop on his head, the top of his spine would meet his coccyx.

Hodgson is far from the first writer to explore the words and phrases related to the body. In her 1981 book Tenderfeet and Ladyfingers: A Visceral Approach to Words and Their Origins, Susan Kelz Sperling examined such expressions as “to warm the cockles of one’s heart,” which derives from the observation by 17th-century anatomists that the ventricles (Latin: cochleae cordis) of the human heart resemble a ribbed, heart-shaped shellfish called the cockleshell (conchyllium). “By metaphorical extension, as deeply contained inside the heart as were the ventricles or cockles, so deeply held also were the emotions of a person.” Better a cockle than a cuckold.

But since this is the season for invading the body with flu shots, let’s close with the viral disease influenza. Bill Sherk’s 500 Years of New Words says the term first appeared in English in a 1743 issue of the London Magazine, which conveyed “news from Rome of a contagious Distemper raging there, call’d the Influenza.” It’s the Italian word for influence, Sherk says, and was borrowed for the virus because astrologers insisted the stars and planets were responsible for the flow of germs through the body (fluere is Latin for flow). This should be of great comfort to those who love whining about their fevers. If you’re unlucky enough to contract the flu, you can truly say the universe has it in for you.