Words 8

Sundowning.

New one to me. Noun. Verb.

One evening Peter was wandering the fourth floor hallway of the apartment complex, knocking on doors. His live-in partner Shirley watched him, slumped by the elevators. I greeted him as I passed.

"He's sundowning," she said. Doors were popping open.

"Why are you knocking on doors, Peter?" Shirley asked for the benefit of the audience.

"I'm trying to find out what's going on," Peter said mildly.

Sundowning is a subset behaviour of confusion, anxiety, or belligerence in people with dementia, occurring at a certain time of day, usually evening. Wandering may be part of it.

The coinage elicits mixed feelings. Whereas one could say what the symptoms mean, i.e. "late day worsening," sundowning is a gentle word, quite apt. 

But it also carries that connotation of approaching end ... not simply the end of the day but the increasing loss of familiarity in a loved one. And naturally, the closure of life itself.

I visualize Harry Chapin "All my life's a circle, sunrise and sundown ...".

Like cancer and depression, dementia affects almost every family in some way.

"Seems like I've been here before, can't remember when ...". Music has power.

  

Words 5

William Boyd has been educating me. These are words he used in Armadillo, and OxfordDictionaries obliged me (with a little self-interpretation here and there). I might have heard one or two of them before. It's important, I think, to use a word in a sentence to stick it in your mind. Or stick it somewhere.

ziggurat: a rectangular stepped tower, Mesopotamia, Tower of Babel

Waterfront condominium towers are now required to design a ziggurat-like facade facing the lake.

(Does ziggurat-like count?)

rebarbative: unattractive and objectionable

The restaurant needed a facelift for its rebarbative decor.

spatchcock: chicken or game bird split for grilling; verb: split open to place somewhere

Let's spatchcock a quick lunch between conference sessions.

(That was a tough one.)

integumentary: tough protective outer layer (integral to the thing/animal)

Denial seems to be integumentary for those who can't inarticulate emotional pain.

(Even tougher.)

Words Again

Author Amitav Ghosh delighted me by adding “The Ibis Chrestomathy” as a very clever appendix to Sea of Poppies. The “author” (a character in the book) of the shipboard lexicon was “a man obsessed with the destiny of words.” After being drawn into the lives of the characters, the etymology of commonly used words among East India traders and sailors is fascinating.

Meanings can often be deduced from their context, although others are elusive. Doolally-tap is construed as an illness, perhaps from prolonged drug usage; luckerbaugs describes men who behave like vicious animals. We can recognize words such as b'longi, backsee, bullumteer, mistri, as of English derivation either by pronunciation or context. And so many words from the Indian subcontinent that migrated into modern usage: dinghy, dungaree, cockup, bandanna, loot, pundit, shampoo, seersucker, and so on---with or without their original meanings. Some didn't migrate, and I wish they had! --- buckwash (idle talk, nonsense); choomer (a chaste kiss), duffadar (a minor bureaucrat), ruffugar (ruffian, villain), gollmaul (uproar).

The “Chrestomathy” is a splendid bonus for readers who savour words. Now if I could just figure out what buncomising is.

Words to Savour

Historical fiction is not all that high on my reading list unless they portray odd corners of the world or obscure (to me) events. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell was one such. As Amitav Ghosh's book, River of Smoke, climbs the bestseller list, I decided I should read the first in his trilogy: Sea of Poppies.

What an introduction to the salty world of nineteenth-century pijin-lingo of the East India trade sailors! Very fine words here, indeed. Enriching mixtures of fractured but inventive English with input from myriad other languages. Creative swearing and slang euphemisms were never better. We need more of this, brighten up our daily speech.

I began to make a list. Because I do O-C things like that sometimes. And my vocabulary could use pepping up. The only word in a long list I'd ever heard of was taffrail, a word from nautical/ship terminology---colloquially it was applied to the human anatomy as were so many others. A few samples:

collywobbles

shagbag

jiggy-pijjin

tumasher

luckerbaugs

gamahoochie

doolally-tap

acreocracy

shiplouse

choomers

simkin

jildee

fustilugs

gollmaul

badmashee

You'll notice I'm not “translating” them: context is everything, and I'm still in the learning process. But I will say that simkin is champagne, and tumasher is a party. I can guess that explerate is a verb but whether foozowling is a noun or an adjective defeats me.

Someone told me, probably Miss Barker---my grade 4 teacher---say a word three times and it's yours. I'll be dickswiggered if my lexicon doesn't improve dramatically.