Word To Use Today: palanquin.

Want to be green?

Want to lower unemployment?

Keep your boots dry?

Then why not bring back the palanquin:


That's the Emperor Muhammad Shah being carried in a palanquin by Ladies. ca. 1735, Collection Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Ahmedabad.

Actually, a covered palanquin might be even nicer, though it looks rather hard work to carry:


Still, think of how much quieter, more carbon-free, and less, well, rushing, the rush hour would be if we took palanquins instead of the taxis.

The main pleasure, though, it would be being able to use a simply beautiful word.

Word To Use Today: palanquin. There is another form, palankeen, but that's not as lovely. Both words comes from the Portuguese palanquim, from the Prakrit pallanka, from the Sanskrit paryanka, which means couch.

Ogooglebar: a rant.

People in Sweden have been using the word ogooglebar.

An ogooglebar is something which is impossible, or very difficult, to find via a search engine.

Presumably someone in Sweden made up the word, other people found it useful, and now it's embedded itself in the Swedish language.

It must be clear to the meanest intelligence that any attempt to expunge the word from the language would be either the work of a mad dictator or...well, just someone mad.

Now, the members of the Swedish Language Council seem to be a helpful bunch. They make recommendations about Swedish  spelling and grammar, and they also put out an annual list of new Swedish words. The 2012 list, for instance, included henifiera, which means using the neutral hen instead of han and hon, which mean he and she.

Ogooglebar appeared on the Swedish Language Council's most recent list: but this has caused such tantrums from the people at Google that the word has had to be removed.

The trouble is that people use ogooglebar to mean unable to be found via a search engine, and Google want it to mean unable to be found via the Google search engine.

Now, do you see what I mean about madness? For one thing, the word is out there and so it's too late. For another, having a word for unable to be found via the Google search engine just draws attention to the fact that the Google search engine might be worse than others.

Right, so do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to use ogooglebar at every possible opportunity.

I may even sing it to myself while hoovering, in my jacuzzi, and eating my graham cracker. And always while wearing my leotard and my mackintosh.

(Do you see what I did, there?)

And, hey, you at Google! Just think: you may have just thrown away your chance of immortality.

Word To Use Today: ogooglebar. Pleasingingly, when I searched on Google for "derivation" "ogooglebar" I got no relevant results at all.

Nuts and Bolts: the many-tongued Kuna.

The writing of the Kuna people is ancient, unlike any other writing anywhere else in the world, and is used for magic.

The Kuna have a special spoken language for magic, too: in fact the Kuna people have different languages for all sorts of things.

Sakla kaya, which means chief's language (which is also called konkreso kaya, or congress language) is used for meetings of the community. This language is different from coloquial Kuna or tule kaya, which means people's language, and from suar mummi kaya, used in curing people, and from the language used by the ceremonial leader of girls' rites, kanture kaya.

And that's not all the languages of the Kuna: there are other languages for telling jokes, for lullabies, and for riddles.

Here's an example of how different the languages are:

In Panama, the Kuna people call Baird's tapir:



 moli in their colloquial language (tule kaya); oloalikinyalilele, oloswikinyaliler, or oloalikinyappi in their political language (sakla kaya); and ekwirmakka or ekwilamakkatola in their spiritual language (suar mimmi kaya).

I am full of envy and curiosity and admiration.

Oh, and I do wish the English had a special magical language of our own!

Word To Use Today: colloquial. This word comes from the Latin colloquium, which means conversation.

The Kuna people live in Panama, the San Blas islands, and North Western Columbia.

Thing To Do Today: squelch.

These boots:



are made for squelching.

At the moment, as I write this, the only noise I get from walking anywhere is the cracking and crinking of ice: the snow has frozen hard, and the car's white mohican is welded on so solidly that even several trips along the motorway haven't budged it.

So I feel nostalgic for a good squelch, especially now we're in April. As dear Flanders and Swann pointed out long ago:

April brings the sweet spring showers,
On and on for hours and hours.

Except that at the moment the showers are all snow...

Ah well, there are other ways I can squelch. If someone suggests we break the ice so we can go for a nice swim in the canal I can soon squelch that idea. Ditto a picnic on the beacon, or anything at all that involves a tent.

If I were an electrician I could squelch my radio amplifier - ie cut it off when there's no signal, to prevent that annoying hiss it otherwise makes.

And if all else fails I can always mash up some rhubarb for some jam.

Squelch!

And how gloriously satisfying.

Thing To Do Today: squelch. This word arrived in English in the 1600s, and is an imitation of the noise it makes.

Spot the frippet: bluff.

Welcome to Spot-the-Bluff morning.

The biggest bluff is a sort of cliff. These aren't difficult to spot if you happen to have one about you. Otherwise, I must admit, they're a bit on the impossible side.

To make things even more difficult, a proper bluff  needs to have been formed by some earth being washed away by a river.

Luckily a Canadian bluff is easier. This is a copse, or a clump of trees, and I myself can see one from here. 

If, however, you live in the far north, or a desert, or on a ship, or in the middle of a city, then perhaps you can spot a bluff person. This is someone good-natured, frank, and hearty. They'll probably be quite fat, too, because fat people have fewer wrinkles to betray any sour or shifty thoughts.

Lastly, if all else fails, you can conjure up your own bluff by asking someone to invest in the gold mine you've just discovered at the bottom of your garden.

If you do it before noon, you might just escape a prison sentence for it, too.

Spot the frippet: bluff. The word meaning cliff may come from the Middle Dutch blaf, which means broad. The word meaning trick was originally a poker-playing term from the USA and comes from the Dutch bluffen, to boast.

Sunday Rest: Word Not To Use Today: orgulous.

Orgulous wouldn't be quite such a bad word if it meant gargling. It sounds as if it should mean gargling

Unfortunately it means...well, it means rather a lot of things: proud, haughty, disdainful, ostentatious, showy, swollen, augmented, excessive, threatening and dangerous.

 

Thomas Malory used the word in 1485 in Le Morte D'Arthur:

At that time there was a knight...the which was an orgulous knight, and counted himself one of the best of the court; and he had great despite at Balin for the achieving of the sword.

and it was picked up by Sir Walter Scott, Robert Southey and Virginia Woolf who used it to create historical atmosphere.

It's surely much better left in the cupboard as a curiosity, though, with the castor oil, the moustache curlers, and the bust of Ozymandias.

Word Not To Use Today: orgulous. This word comes from the Old French orguillus, from orgoil, which means pride. There's a related Old High German word urguol, which means excellent.

• 1966, Eric Walter White, Stravinsky the Composer and his Works, University of California Press (1966), page 5:

  Her nephew describes her as 'an orgulous and despotic woman', and it is clear that he noticed and resented her numerous unkindnesses.

• 1975, Georgette Heyer, My Lord John, Arrow Books (2011), ISBN 0099476428, pages 14-15:

  They knew that my lord of Arundel had grown so orgulous that he had lately dared to marry the Earl of March's sister, without license.

Saturday Rave: The Princess and the Pea.

Of course I was a princess.

The distinct lack of a palace, royal relatives and sticky-out dresses...well, it just made my position all the more romantic, that's all.

So all I had to do to prove my royal birth was to get hold of about fifteen mattresses...


The Princess and the Pea - Credit: Tomasz Sienicki

...well, perhaps one would do. I had one.

Then I just had to put a pea underneath the mattress...

...unfortunately my mattress proved to lay upon wire mesh. A pea would fall through that.

Okay then, if I put my pea on a book before I put it under my mattress then...

...the real problem was that I'd only ever comes across fresh peas. Which, (because I was quite a hefty child) would obviously immediately get squashed.

Ah well. I would prove my sensitive royalty in other ways, like crying bitterly whenever I saw something dead.

Because of course I was a princess...

Word To Use Today: pea. This word used to be pease, but it got shortened because everyone thought it was a plural. Pease comes from the Old English peose, from the Latin pisa, which is a plural (of pisum) from the Greek pison.