whiffling – podictionary 1069
Dec 2nd, 2009 | 
Today’s podictionary episode is an interview with Adam Jacot de Boinod author of The Wonder of Whiffling (and Other Extraordinary Words in the English Language).
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Charles: Adam Jacot de Boinod started out by explaining what got him interested in dictionaries in the first place.
Adam Jacot de Boinod: The Meaning of Tingo began when one day, working as a researcher for the BBC. I picked up a weighty Albanian dictionary, discovered they have no less than 27 words for “eyebrow” and the same number for different types of mustache.
Charles: Now this interested me because I found years ago that the word eyebrow had only come into existence in English because that feature of our faces had earlier simply been called “the brow”, but the word “brow” had then migrated like a caterpillar. First down to the eyelashes, and then up to mean forehead.
I asked Adam Jacot de Boinod why the Albanians need so many words for “eyebrow.”
Adam: Well, I deliberately don’t state exactly why they have in as much as I like people’s imaginations to take them where they want to go with it. But it is fairly obvious to me that they’re no doubt a very hirsute, male, virile, rugged, mountainous lot, the Albanians, and I suspect that those would be the reasoning for having quite so many words.
Charles: OK. Quick check here. Hirsute. OED says “having rough or shaggy hair.”
So what about English words, then?
Adam: I’ve discovered many old words that make very useful additions to any vocabulary today.
Most of us know a blatteroon, a person who won’t stop talking.
Charles: I checked, that’s from Latin.
Well we talked for awhile, but here’s what we said about the word “drink”.
Adam: In feudal times, drink actually meant to “smoke tobacco.”
Charles: Now I’d heard that before.
I think it was because when Europeans discovered tobacco, because the native North Americans were smoking it, they’d no word to describe inhaling the smoke, and so spoke of it as “drinking” the smoke.
Adam: Well, I would simply say that it’s quite possible. There’s a number of different ways that words change or go on an exciting journey. My book is called The Wonder of Whiffling (going back to the notion of smoking) because whiffling is one of the words for smoking yet whiffling in Wodehouse language can also mean “drunk.”
And I call it The Wonder of Whiffling because there’s so many different and wonderful definitions for whiffling. Anything from the way geese descend aerodynamically to the guy with the whip in morris dancing.
Charles: Whiffling makes me think of waffling, as if you can’t make up your mind.
Adam: Well it sounds halfway, doesn’t it, between whiffling and waffling, but it’s more to do with blowing or scattering with gusts of air, or trifling and pettifogging, or being erratic, or thinking erratically.
Charles: And there you have it. Books about strange words from the past in English and current ones too, and about strange concepts from other languages and cultures.
Adam: How and where, for example, would a man be described as a marilopotus - ancient Greek for “a gulper of coal dust”? And could the Japanese samurai really have used the verb tsujigiri, meaning to “try out a new sword on a passerby”?
