Sopt the Frippet: something vernicose.

 Leaves can be vernicose.

No, not vermicose, which would presumably imply they'd been chewed at by worms; vernicose.

These leaves are an example:

Angelica pachicarpa. Photo by Devra

Vernicose means shiny.

Petals can be vernicose, too:

buttercups. Photo by Carine06

and so can the bark of trees:

Yellow birch bark. Photo by Joseph O'Brien

But the botanical word vernicose can describe anything very shiny. Poets sometimes have used the word to describe other very shiny things, too. 

So today is a day to look out for gloriously shining hair, or a richly polished table. Or a ladybird.

What can you see now that's shining?

Spot the Frippet: something vernicose. This word is basically the same word as varnish. The Old English form of that word is vernisch, and it goes back to the Latin veronix and to the Greek berenikē. Some say that this word is named after the town Berenice, where varnish derived from pine tree sap is first said to have been made. But most people who have an opinion about this disagree. 

Sunday Rest: belfie. Word Not To Use Today.

 A belfie is a photographic self-portrait featuring the buttocks.

The worst thing about this word is that it might give people ideas - and, sadly, they're all going to be really really bad ones.

Sunday Rest: belfie. The b is for bottom or buttocks or bum, and the rest rhymes with selfie, which is a shortened form of self-portrait. 

The Old English form of self is seolf.

photo of the Belgian Federal Parliament building by KoS

I don't know why this comes up as the first image on a Wikimedia Commons image search, but it was a considerable relief. 

Saturday Rave: Willingness, by Chairil Anwar

 Chairil Anwar was brought up in Medan, in North Sumatra, and his work is credited with helping to establish Indonesian as the official language of his country. Most of his writing life was spent under Japanese occupation during the Second Word War, so his poems were liable to censorship.

 

He died in 1949 at the age of twenty seven.

This poem is, I think, a simple, and rather lovely thing.

Willingness

If you like I'll take you back
With all my heart.

I'm still alone.

I know you're not what you were,

Like a flower pulled into parts.
Don't crawl! Stare at me bravely.

If you like I'll take you back

For myself, but
I won't share even with a mirror.

Word To Use Today: mirror. The Old French mirer means to look. Before that, the Latin mīrārī means to wonder at.

Word To Use Today: gastrocnemius.

 The main point of learning Latin, or so our Latin teacher used to tell us, was to be able to spot the origin of English words and thence guess their meaning. 

Now, gastrocnemius is a Greek word at root; but, working on the same principle, what does it mean?

Well, as you probably already know, the gastro- bit means stomach; and as it happens the -cnemius bit means leg.

So. A stomach-leg. Or possibly a leg-stomach. 

Any ideas?

If you have, then you probably have a career as a science-fiction writer.

If not, then you can blame the Ancient Greeks. I mean, what did the Ancient Greeks ever do for us?

Well, apart from democracy, the alarm clock, the Olympics, juries, geometry...

Word To Use Today: gastrocnemius. The gastrocnemius muscle is in the calf, and is used especially for running and jumping.

illustration by Johannes Sobotta

The word comes from the Greek words gastēr, stomach, and knēmē, which means leg. The idea is that the calf of the leg bulges like a well-filled stomach.

Mind you, as the speaker of a language which calls this part of the anatomy by a word meaning young cow, I'm really in no position to throw stones.

The End of Latin: a rant.

 Look, it's true that Latin nouns (a noun is a word which describes an object, like a table or a law or an idiot) behave oddly (to an English speaker) when they arrive in groups. 

Servus = servant; servi = more than one servant.

Obviously it would be much easier if the Roman's had made the more-than-one-servant word servuses, but they didn't. It was probably something to do with the fact that the Romans were completely ignorant of the grammar of the English language - and that was probably because when they were around the English language hadn't actually been invented, yet.

Anyway.

Now, people naturally like to show off their knowledge, and so if a word looks like a Latin noun they will often give it a Latin-like ending if the thing suddenly pops up in a group.

But just because a word looks like a Latin noun, it doesn't mean that it is one.

Ignoramus, for instance, is not a Latin noun.

And the people who use the form ignorami are actually ignoramuses.

Word To Use Today: ignoramuses. This word is legal Latin for we have no knowledge of, from the Latin ignōrāre, to be ignorant of. It's use in English began with the character of an ignorant lawyer in George Ruggle's 1615 smash-hit play Ignoramus.

If only the play had had two ignoramuses!

Nuts and Bolts: country codes.

 Codes ISO 3166-1 are an internationally recognised way to describe countries. 

(ISO stands for the International Organisation for Standardization. Yes, I know, I know. But it just does, okay?).

There are three ISO 3166-1 systems, a two-letter, a three-letter and a three-number one.

The two-letter codes are most widely used (nearly always for internet domain names, for instance), but the three letter code has the advantage of giving people more of a clue which country the code represents (ALB is easier to guess than just AL, for instance. Yes, it's Albania). The three-number code, used by the United Nations Statistical Organisation, is useful because numbers are recognisable even in places which don't use the Roman alphabet.

Here are ten two-letter country codes. Which country do they represent?

DZ

AS

BJ

TD

HR

GQ

IR

CH

UA

FM

Answers ** below.

And if you got any of those right, you can preen yourself.

Word To Consider Today: Algeria. Other forms of the name are: in Arabic الجزائر‎, or al-Jazāʾir; in Algerian Arabic الدزاير‎ or al-dzāyīr (and there's the DZ of the country code). There are also a few different names in Berber languages, of which ⵍⴻⵣⴰⵢⴻⵔ is in an interesting alphabet. In French, Algeria is called Algérie.

The name Algeria comes from the city of Algiers, which comes from the Arabic al-Jazāʾir  which means The Islands.

**Algeria, American Samoa, Benin, Chad, Croatia, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Switzerland, Ukraine, Micronesia, respectively.

Thing Not To Do Today: get in a tizzy.

 Stay calm.

You may have smashed a honey jar while minding next-door's toddler and been so busy separating the mess and the child that you've neglected the frying pan and set off every smoke alarm in the house, but approach the situation with a clear and logical mind...

...oh well, all right: sometimes the headless-chicken routine is as good a response as anything.

I can only advise keeping a wooden spoon to hand so you can reach the fire alarm off-switch. That, and keeping your honey in a plastic bottle.

There's not much you can do about the toddler, though. They get everywhere.

DEEEEP breathhhhh...

Thing Not To Do Today: get in a tizzy. This is an 1800s expression of mysterious origin. Some claim it as 1930s American, and speak of the word tizzy meaning sixpenny piece, or Tizzy, a character in a 1930s cartoon. I just note that tizzy sounds very like the word dizzy - and that testa is the Italian for head.

Sometimes tizzy is shortened to tizz, or lengthened to tiz-woz. It's a reaction to a minor but complex problem. No one gets in a tizzy in tragic circumstances, but they might if they were trying simultaneously to answer a query on the phone and plait someone's hair in the middle of writing a shopping list.