Good morning readers. It was slim pickings in this weeks issue for "Words Nobody Uses or Knows." I only found three, which is OK, because I'm still recovering from last night's Iron Fork event (where I may have had one too many samples of bourbon) and the less thinking I have to do, the better.
The best (or worst) word in this weeks issue is pompatus, which actually appears in the deck of Brian Baker's interview with singer/songwriter Maurice Mattei. Neither Microsoft Word nor the blog platform I'm writing in recognizes this as a real word. Because it's not. Wikipedia says (there's an entire page devoted to this) that pompatus is a nonce word, a word coined for a special occasion and not likely to be heard again, found in Steve Miller's 1973 Rock song "The Joker."
- "Some people call me the space cowboy/
- Yeah! Some call me the gangster of love/
- Some people call me Maurice/
- 'Cause I speak of the pompatus of love."
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- In this issue: "Singer/songwriter Maurice Mattei details the pompatus of loss on Celebrity Issue"
OK. I still don't know what this word means or is intended to mean. New World Dictionary defines pompatus as: one who is pompous (n.) But in the above context, that doesn't make much sense.
I suppose the lesson this morning is: Famous people sometimes coin disposable, meaningless words that confuse regular people who aren't "with it."
Next best word is oeuvre, found in the review of Vivian Maier's exhibit at FotoFocus. It's pronounced something like "ew-vra." Fancy.
Oeuvre: the group consisting of all the works, usually of a lifetime, of a particular writer, artist, or composer (n.)
In this issue: "
But a whopping 33 of the aforementioned images in Pursuit are self-portraits, which — due to their abundance in her oeuvre — we might conclude Maier was quite fond of taking."
And finally, there's triptych, which is a great sounding word and it's found in this week's Staff Picks.
triptych: a set of three panels with pictures, designs, or carvings, often hinged so that the two side panels may be folded over the central one, commonly used as an altarpiece (n.) Similarly, a diptych is two related panels of art work, while a quadtych is four, you see what Latin does there?
In this issue: "North American New Opera Workshop (NANOWorks) continues to challenge traditional ideas of opera as it kicks off its new season with the first two parts of Daniel Felsenfeld’s triptych, She, After."
