“My name is Nino Ricci and a word I like is runcible.” [audio clip]

Nino Ricci has written a number of novels including Lives of the Saints and more recently Testament.  I met him at a writers’ conference.

His word runcible wasn’t one I was looking forward to doing because it’s a made-up word and so likely wouldn’t have much of an etymology.  But I’m up for a challenge; and as it turns out it’s a great word.

The poet Edward Lear introduced the word runcible to the world and I think most people would recognize it in his poem The Owl and the Pussy-Cat:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon.

But it turns out that Edward Lear was so enthusiastic about the word that, even though it didn’t mean anything, he used it in other poems too.  He called a cat runcible in a poem called The Pobble Who Has No Toes and he refers to a hat as runcible in the preface of a collection of nonsense songs.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates his first introduction of runcible at 1871 but claims that by 1926 a runcible spoon had actually acquired a meaning.

Here’s an example of a word that started out with no meaning but that was so widespread or so delicious that people started giving it a meaning.

The meaning it acquired was what some people call a spork; one of those implements with the curvature of a spoon, tines like a fork and sometimes a bit of an edge suitable for crude knife-like cutting.

I see this definition at almost all my usual dictionary sources.

The OED says there is nothing at all in the senses that Lear gave to the word—as mysterious as those senses were—that might suggest such a meaning.

As to etymology both the OED and the American Heritage Dictionary suggest that runcible might have come from a place-name Roncesvalles.

This place is located in the Pyrenees between France and Spain and for some reason that I haven’t been able to sort out, this place-name gave English a word rouncival—now largely obsolete, but once attached as a kind of qualifier to give something a meaning of “largeness.”

For a hundred years each side of Shakespeare a woman who was rouncival was a big gal with a big friendly personality (maybe too friendly).

Other meanings appear too and seem to stem from a kind of pea that grew larger than other peas and was said to have first come from that place on the French Spanish border.

There was a tantalizing note in the American Heritage Dictionary that says giant bones were found at this place. American Heritage says nothing about peas.

I’m left with a feeling—but can’t find any evidence—that some medieval or later find of fossils was attributed to giants, which might have given the sense of size rather than the peas.

I don’t know what Edward Lear meant by runcible but if he meant “big” then he might have applied it to his family.

He was twentieth of twenty-one children.

He is most famous now for his nonsense rhymes but during his life he was also a landscape painter and ornithological illustrator—that means he drew birds.

In part because he was one of the last of a long line of kids in his family, and in part because he was kind of sickly, he didn’t get to go to school much as a child.

For much of his life he felt a little embarrassed about his lack of education and some say it influenced his willingness to explore the unknown and his nonsense.  He later felt that it helped him because he saw many of his peers constrained by their “cut and dried” educations while he felt free to explore.

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