NAMES FOR THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW HAD ONE!

The Whatchamacallit: Those Everyday Objects You Just Can't Name (And Things You Think You Know About, But Don't) by Danny Danzinger and Mark McCrum, Hyperion, 2009
NEW 422 Dan

After such an exhaustive title there's no need for me to explain what this book covers. Faithful readers of my entries already know I am mad keen on English vocabulary, and this little treasure has proven most illustrative.

I first gazed over the table of contents, which is a list of the terms explored, and tried finding some which I already knew. I was pleasantly surprised at recognizing several of them:

aglet, the plastic casing which seals off the end of a shoelace

borborygmus, gurgling sounds emitted from the stomach

crozier, the ceremonial shepherd's crook bourne by bishops, cardinals, and the Pope

fontanelle, the soft spot on a baby's head

interrobang, a double-duty punctuation mark that looks like this ?!

philtrum, the small indentation between the upper lip and nose

Of course I was terribly interested in the many other words I'd never learned. Some of the more interesting ones include:

caruncula, the tiny pink corner of the eyeball (and the medical term for "sleepy dust" is rheum, which accumulates in the caruncula)

drupelets, the little globules that compose a raspberry or blackberry

grawlix, a string of symbols used to represent a spoken obscenity in a cartoon

muselet, the small wire cage used to keep the cork in place on a champagne bottle

purlicue, the span of measurement made between the extension of the index finger and thumb
rowel, the spiked, revolving wheel located at the tip of a spur on a cowboy boot

tmesis, the deliberate hyphenation of a word for effect (i.e., un-freaking-fair)

The authors not only elaborate as to what each word describes, but many articles list similar terms as well. An example is the entry for tmesis, which also elucidates the reader on other lesser-heard figures of speech, such as antonomasia (using a proper name to describe someone, such as "She's such a Martha Stewart" for a woman who is freakishly obsessed with crafting overdone dinner parties) and metonymy (using the name of a facet of something to describe the thing in it's entirety, such as referring to Harrisburg when one really means the state government of the Commonwealth).

Each entry’s language of origin and, where applicable, inventor (grawlix is apparently but one of a lexicon of cartoon terms coined by Mort Walker, author of the venerated strip Beetle Bailey) are very capably discussed as well.

The Whatchamacallit is certain to entertain and edify the vocabularean in all of us.