monoxylous
adj. made out of a single trunk or piece of timber
For this 2011 work, Italian artist Giuseppe Penone carved away the successive growth rings of a fir tree, revealing the sapling of its early days.
“My artwork shows, with the language of sculpture, the essence of matter and tries to reveal with the work, the hidden life within.”
daymark
n. a mark to help navigators to find their way
nimbiferous
adj. bringing storms or showers
kenspeckle
adj. easily recognizable, conspicuous
onymous
adj. having a name
During World War II, pilots in northern Australia noted that an enormous thunderstorm formed daily between September and March on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory. Regularly reaching heights of 20 kilometers, “Hector the Convector” is one of the world’s largest thunderstorms, an object of concentrated study by meteorologists, and a relative oddity — a cloud with a name.
obeliscolychny
n. a lighthouse
morsure
n. the act of biting
salvediction
n. salutation on meeting
grandisonant
adj. stately-sounding
In 1900, a collie on Wood Island in Saco Bay, Maine, gained international fame for ringing the lighthouse’s fog bell to greet passing ships. “When ‘Sailor,’ for that is what he is called, sees a vessel passing the lighthouse he runs to the bell, and with a quick, sharp bark seizes the short rope between his teeth and rings several times,” wrote a correspondent to the Strand.
“As the years have passed ‘Sailor’ has kept on ringing salutes to passing vessels and steamers,” observed the Boston Herald. “Indeed, he feels hurt if not permitted to give the customary salute to passing craft, while skippers whose course takes them often past Wood Island are accustomed to see ‘Sailor’ tugging viciously at the bell rope. They reply with a will on their ship’s bell or horn, and in case of steamers a hearty triple blast is sent back to the watcher of Wood Island, who gives a new meaning to the good old sea term of ‘dog watch.'”
(Thanks, Frank.)
passeggiata
n. a leisurely walk
In the ancient world, distances were sometimes measured by pacing. Specialists known as bematists were employed for this purpose in both Egypt and Greece, and their accuracy could be startling: In his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder notes that two bematists employed by Alexander the Great had measured the distance from Hecatompylos to Alexandria Areion on the Silk Road at 851 kilometers. The actual distance is 855 kilometers, a deviation of just 0.4 percent. In general, according to Pliny’s records, Alexander’s bematists showed a median deviation of just 2.8 percent from the true distances; a separate account by Strabo shows a median deviation of only 1.9 percent.
This accuracy suggests that the bematists may have been using an early odometer, such as one described by Heron of Alexandria, though the records don’t mention this.
12/30/2023 UPDATE: Reader Charlotte Fare has made a data visualization. (Thanks, Charlotte.)
greenth
n. green vegetation; the state or quality of being green
chevelure
n. a head of hair
abditive
adj. hidden
protreptic
n. a writing intended to exhort or instruct
revolute
v. to imbue with revolutionary spirit
For Histiaeus, when he was anxious to give Aristagoras orders to revolt, could find but one safe way, as the roads were guarded, of making his wishes known; which was by taking the trustiest of his slaves, shaving all the hair from off his head, and then pricking letters upon the skin, and waiting till the hair grew again. Thus accordingly he did; and as soon as ever the hair was grown, he despatched the man to Miletus, giving him no other message than this — ‘When thou art come to Miletus, bid Aristagoras shave thy head, and look thereon.’ Now the marks on the head, as I have already mentioned, were a command to revolt.
— Herodotus, Terpsichore
advigilate
v. to watch carefully; to keep vigil
cunctation
n. lateness; delay
vagarious
adj. roving; wandering; characterized by vagaries
mundivagant
adj. that roams around the world
Letter to the Times, Aug. 24, 2001:
Sir, Some years ago when I lived in Livingstone, Zambia, I received a letter from Lusaka, the capital, correctly addressed but weeks late.
Among the numerous back stamps the envelope had collected in its travels the last was Livingstone, Canada, with an inscription ‘Try Livingstone, Zambia’.
The letter had also visited Scotland and New Zealand.
Yours truly,
David H. Walton
Crowland, Peterborough
forgettery
n. a faculty or facility for forgetting; faulty memory
ascesis
n. the practice of self-discipline
retrospection
n. the action, process, or faculty of looking back on things past
evanid
adj. liable to vanish
“King Darius, so as not to forget the harm he had received from the Athenians, had a page come every time he sat down to table and sing three times in his ear: ‘Sire, remember the Athenians.'” — Montaigne
Cato the Elder ended each speech with the phrase Carthago delenda est, “Carthage must be destroyed.”
Tertullian observed that a slave was stationed in the chariot of a triumphant Roman general to whisper in his ear, “Remember that you are human.”
A nomenclator was “a slave with a good memory who accompanied a public figure when he went out and whispered in his ear the name of anyone important he was about to meet.” (Anthony Everitt, Cicero)
Much later, Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign manager, James Farley, would keep a file on everyone Roosevelt met so that the candidate might later ask after a spouse or child. Modern politicians maintain “Farley files” for the same purpose.
metrophobia
n. an irrational fear of poetry
arrident
adj. pleasant
agrised
adj. terrified
presentific
adj. causing something to be present in the mind
cacology
n. a bad choice of words
Shortly after physicist Anthony French joined the MIT faculty in 1962, he was asked to teach an introductory mechanics course to hundreds of freshmen.
“I wanted to be cautious about giving it a name,” he said. “So I called it, blandly, ‘Physics: A New Introductory Course.’
“I couldn’t imagine how I could have been so stupid. The students read that as ‘PANIC’ … it was known forever afterwards as the PANIC course.”
