by Kevin Burton
I hear it’s a whale of a book, but I haven’t read it. So sorry.
Moby-Dick
This comes up because our friends at Merriam-Webster dictionary have compiled a list of nine fun and weird words from Moby-Dick.
I hear the book is very long also. So the dictionary has done me a great service in serving up these words on a platter, so I didn’t have to go fishing for them.
So if you’ve taken the bait, read on:
1-Scaramouch– a rascal or scamp
Capitalized, Scaramouch refers to a stock character from Italy’s commedia dell’arte who was typically both boastful and cowardly.
Similar to how a more recent comedic character name, Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live, has become generalized in the language, Scaramouch became scaramouch, one sense of which is, appropriately “a cowardly buffoon,” and a second, “a rascal or scamp,” which seems to be the sense Melville used in Stubb’s description of a cunning huckster who called himself the archangel Gabriel.
Scaramouch doesn’t get used a lot these days–not enough commedia dell’arte stans out there, we suppose–but our research did turn up a letter to the editor of The Toronto Sun from 1988 whose author referred to a certain politician and diplomat as “a scaramouch and a master of political expediency.” Ouch. But could he do the fandango?
2-Farrago – a confused mixture or hodgepodge
As far as synonyms for clutter go, farrago is but one of many. To wit: gallimaufry, salmagundi, ragout, gumbo, and olio, etc. The narrator of Moby-Dick (let’s call him Ishmael) uses it to describe the Spouter-Inn landlord’s cryptic responses to questions about his (Ishmael’s) potential bedfellow for the night.
Farrago is derived from the Latin far, for spelt. In Latin, farrago meant “cattle fodder,” but it was also used more generally to mean “mixture.” That’s the meaning that farrago carried into English. Today, we often use it for a jumble or mishmash of disorganized, haphazard, or even nonsensical ideas.
3-Gurry – fishing offal
Our current definition for gurry is quite broad: the offal (viscera and trimmings) that is the byproduct of fishing. But as recently as a 1953 copy of the unabridged Webster’s New International Dictionary: Second Edition it was slightly more specific: “the offal of fish, esp. the refuse from cutting up a whale and trying out the oil.”
It’s not difficult to see why this was revised, namely because whales aren’t fish! The change to “fishing” makes sense, since one can technically “fish” for whales, even if one shouldn’t. Anyhoo, Melville went whole hog (er, whale) in penning his own definition of gurry:
4-Hooroosh – a wild, hurried, or excited state or situation
Outside of occasional appearances at the National Spelling Bee, hooroosh doesn’t cause much of a hooroosh these days. Hubbub seems to do the job of describing a confusing ado or hullabaloo much more frequently than hooroosh, though the latter is just as fun to say–especially when you’re on a fanatical revenge mission against a whale that took your leg.
5-Durst– archaic and dialectal past tense of dare
“We English speakers love to trot out archaic, “old-timey”-sounding words and phrases, even when the constructions are not that old (re: ye olde)! But durst is one that is not so often durst.
6-Orison – prayer
Although, in the context of Melville’s beautiful and sad passage following the slaughter of four whales by the Pequod crew, it might seem as though “orison” should rhyme with “horizon,” this lovely Latin-derived synonym for prayer instead rhymes with Morrison, such as he of the vesper hymns “Light My Fire,” “Riders on the Storm,” and uh, “Peace Frog.”
7-Samphire – a fleshy European seacoast plant (Crithmum maritimum) of the carrot family that is sometimes pickled or a common glasswort (Salicornia europaea) that is sometimes pickled
Samphire is a common name for several (apparently pickle-able) coastal plants, including those listed in our online dictionary definition, which makes determining which one Melville invoked in Moby-Dick quite the pickle! But such is the conundrum posed by common names for plants and animals, however delightful they might be (and samphire is a delightful word, being an alteration of earlier sampiere, from Middle French ((herbe de) Saint Pierre, literally, “St. Peter’s herb”).
The genus Salicornia, for example, contains dozens of edible species found around the world whose common names are different depending on where you live, from sea asparagus to sea beans, pickleweed to pickle grass. Some French speakers of maritime Canada even refer to them as titines de souris, which… we’ll leave to you to translate.
8-Slobgollion
Slobgollion is, alas, not defined in our dictionary, though we do define slubberdegullion (“a dirty rascal”) and slumgullion (“a meat stew”).
Slobgollion is neither of those, however, as made clear in Moby-Dick, which paints about as vivid a picture of the spermaceti-derived substance as anyone could hope for, probably forever.
9-Bombazine – a twilled fabric with silk warp and worsted filling or a silk fabric in twill weave dyed black
In one of the early chapters of Moby-Dick, Ishmael has a bit of fun at the expense of “bumpkin dand[ies],” i.e. “scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.” Just look at the clothes they wear, forsooth! A bombazine cloak? LOL, poor Hay-Seed!
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