Strange New Words

 

Absquatulated (pg. 81, The Alamo, by John Myers Myers)

Defalcations (pg. 116, The Alamo, by John Myers Myers)

and

Sciniphs (Exodus 8:16, New Catholic Bible)

 

One of the pleasures of being a ferocious and voracious reader is encountering new words. Strange new words. The stranger, the better. I feel like one of those old-timey scientists out in the jungle coming across a new specimen of insect. Or, more appropriately, a jeweler who discovers a new gemstone in a new setting never before beheld.

 

Paradoxically, it’s not a common experience. Perhaps it’s the type of books I read. Well, obviously it is. And though I haven’t specifically been tracking it, I’m sure over the past year where I purposefully put away more bucket-list classic literature I’ve noticed sparkling new examples of these gemstones, these strange new words.

 

So I was quite pleasantly surprised over the weekend when I encountered not one, not two, but three of these neat little gifts: absquatulated, defalcations, and sciniphs.

 

Now, sciniphs I can understand. It’s from the Douay-Rheims bible, translated into English sometimes in the late 1500s if I’m not mistaken, so there’s four centuries of word evolution in play here. A more modern translation Bible I have handy replaces it with the word “gnat”, and it is one of the Ten Plagues on Egypt in the Book of Exodus. But isn’t it more evocative, more mysterious, more satisfying, to use the older, now out-of-date “sciniphs” for “gnats”? Don’t answer; that’s a rhetorical question.

 

But the other two, especially the first, truly blew my mind: “absquatulated” and “defalcations.” In a book on, of all subjects, the Alamo. True, it was published in 1948, and I wholeheartedly believe in the dumbing-down of the culture thesis. But these two words left me with no choice but to scratch my head.

 

Care to venture a guess based on context? Here are the sentences in which they each appeared:

 

“Even before the council had absquatulated with the government and scrambled the chain of command, the state’s military situation had continued to deteriorate.”

“Such expert transfers of balances to undiscovered bournes! Such august defalcations!”

(Bonus points for including the word “bourne” there.)

 

Well, contextually I read “absconded” for the first and “misdeeds” for the second. And that’s generally correct when I looked them up afterward, after having my not-so-little little ones make their own attempts at definitions (and they were generally correct, too).

 

Still, a nice trio of finds.

 

Now I challenge you to go out into the world and use one of them in a sentence today!