Wordcatcher by Phil Cousineau Read Free Book Online Page B

you from shame?” Ulysses responds, “Uh, I take your point. But it does put me in a damn awkward position, vis-a-vis my progeny.” Rolling her eyes, Penny says: “Vernon here’s got a job. Vernon’s got prospects. He’s bona fide . What are you?” Companion words include the anguished antonym malafide , bad faith, a word well worth reviving.

BONDMAID
    A woman bound to the land or the lord, as a bondman was bound . One of the notorious “lost words” from the first edition of the OED. It’s editor, the venerable James Murray, who was the very personification of “philosophical calm,” was mortified to learn that shortly after the “B” volume had been mailed to the publisher the white slip with the inscription of bondmaid was found under an unturned pile of fellow words. In 1901, fourteen years after the famed first edition appeared, Murray wrote to a caviling correspondent: “I am afraid it is quite true that the word bondmaid has been omitted from the Dictionary, a most regrettable fact.” Upon review of that project the omission becomes understandable, if you consider that Murray had to comb through 5-6
million slips or citations, from which he and his assistants in the “Scriptorium” chose 1.25 million headwords. Later lexicographers have rued the seemingly random process by which some words were included and others went missing, for lack of time or lack of space, such as the incandescent lamprocarpous , defined as “having shining fruit,” and the clangorous collide , to crash into.

BOONDOCKS
    A distant place, the remote mountains, the farthest reaches of civilization . A favorite word of mine, popularized in books and movies, as well as by baseball announcers such as the legendary Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell, who used the word to describe long home runs: “Kaline swings—and it’s a long belt to left field—it’s long gone—way back into the boondocks!” Its origins are as surprising as they are fascinating: not the docks of longshoremen like Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront , but the rice terraces and head-hunting villages of the far, faraway Philippines. The root word is bundok , a Kapampangan word for “mountains” learned the hard way by American GIs who were captured by the Japanese army during World War II while fighting in central Luzon. The few who escaped the Bataan Death March disappeared into the remote villages of northern Luzon, where Filipino rebels and the last of the headhunters still controlled the rice-terraced bundoks . Those who survived described where they’d waited out the war as “in the bundoks ,” which
later became our boondocks . Companion words include the short version, the boonies , and its distant cousin boondoggle , a sonicky word, as Roy Blount, Jr. calls the ones that sound as great as they appear on the page, for a useless task, a futile project that wastes time and money, coined in 1929 by American Scoutmaster Robert Link.

BORBORYGMUS
    Stomach growls; the rumble in the jungle of your tummy. Our word descends from the Greek borborugmos , from borboryzein , to rumble (no kidding) which meant the same then as it does now, the burbling sounds issuing forth from your intestinal passing of gas. This is a great word to pull out around the Thanksgiving table when the snarls and growls coming from within the bowels of your guests threatens to drown out the cheers and jeers coming from the football game on television. Kids tend to be especially delighted with this word because it sounds as goofy as the Looney Tunes sounds coming from their own stomachs. For those who are uncertain how the word can possibly be used, see Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada : “All the toilets and water pipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions.” Companion words include eructation , commonly called burping , the expulsion of air from the stomach, and flatus , the explosion from the other end, an exercise school kids and “bromance”