Picking a favourite word is a tricky business
Date Published: {J}
I'M in need of a new favourite word. Having cast an eye around the lang-scape and caught it again, I think I'm gonna go with ‘coatimundi’. The coatimundi is a reasonably cute but not very distinguished small mammal, with a long tail and a mobile snout that give it its nickname of the Brazilian aardvark.
Funnily, the smaller mammals do tend to have pretty good names. I am fond too of the bandicoot and especially of the agouti. But none has a name quite so redolent of weirdness in the leaf-litter as coatimundi. And as a bonus feature: it seems to be used in error more often than correctly. People call the whole species coatimundi, but the word really means a solitary male coati.
While my main reason for this choice is the sheer fact that ‘coatimundi’ is so much fun to say, I'd be lying if I pretended the meaning didn't matter. I wouldn't be dumping my old favourite word if I didn't care about meanings. You see, my old one was ‘oubliette’, which is also huge fun to say. It means? Well it comes from the French verb for forgetting but has a diminutive noun ending, so I guess a natural translation would be a ‘forgetty’. Which sounds like a minor lapse of memory - but that ain't what it actually means...
An oubliette is a dungeon that is only accessible by a hatch in the floor – the point being that once someone goes in there, they are never coming out. It's a little place you throw people when you want to forget all about them. Fun word, unspeakably nasty thing. And you know, I would like my favourite word to be speakable.
I have toyed with others. As I believe I mentioned in this column many years ago, I'm quite keen on splanchnic, which means ‘of the internal organs’. It's just that it sounds like it was inspired by the noise a heap of guts makes when it falls out of a whale and onto the deck of a ship. Splanchnic. Ew.
I'm wondering why there are so few modern words I really like. I think it's language evolution in action. Any newly-invented word will be irritating because your immediate reaction is I did without this before, why should I use it now? And most of the time a new word actually is pointless and irritating. In business, they are usually transparent attempts to disguise truth. In culture, they are often invented deliberately to be annoying. Remember the mercifully brief vogue for the projectile-vomit-inducing ‘rosemantic’? I am truly sorry for reminding you of that.
Words like that are not meant to last. ‘Rightsizing’ will never replace ‘massive job losses’, I can't really see myself calling any lady I know ‘shorty’. But now and again a new word survives - because it stands for an idea that couldn't be expressed in an easier way. A case in point is ‘synergy’. I used to find that hugely irritating, but then one day I was looking for a word meaning new advantages that arise from combining things, and I realised that there wasn't another single word for that. So, maybe synergy is OK.
But not as good as coatimundi. Go on, say it out loud. Coatimundi. Coatimundi!