Oojamaflip

MY thanks, first, to readers who replied with kind words to the 600th Word Ways [20ix2018].

Oojamaflip

Reader One offered ‘‘an interesting word to celebrate your anniversary: hoojamaflip or oojamaflip’’. It means a thingumybob, thingummyjig, thingummy, or thingy. All these spellings fluctuate because the word is more spoken than written: in the heat of conversation you grope for the exact name, fail to find it, and offer one of these handy improvisations.

Swahili

Reader Two, from Oamaru, confirms from having lived in Kenya that the words of that old campfire song, Ging gang gooly gooly gooly oompah oompah and so on, are not Swahili. I had already put them into Google Translate without their being recognised as Swahili. So, aren’t they just invented silly sounds which sing well, sliding joyfully off the tongue? Like Shakespeare’s hey nonny nonny no [6ix2018], or obladi oblada.

Mizzle

Reader Three commended mizzle to me, from the web article A Word A Day, for ‘‘words which have unrelated senses’’. Mizzle means rain falling in small drops; a kind of thrush (the bird, not the infection), though may be spelt missle or misselthrush; or a dialect word for departing; and another one for urinating. The unrelatedness may be a freak of English spelling, or closer inspection may reveal links after all; or people in past times may have thought of some.

Who versus that

Reader Four asked, ‘‘I much prefer to say ‘the person who’ rather than ‘the person that’. Is this a grammatical preference, or merely a personal one?’’ Me, I would say who, because it keeps the pronoun more visibly personal. I see no problem, anyway, because the issue, or rather the choice, already existed for Shakespeare (so it’s not a recent debasement): He who the sword of heaven will bear/ Must be as holy as severe, and He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man. Who has more dignity, that is less formal.

Sleazy

Reader Five followed up my column on ‘‘Textiles and texts’’ with more examples of the language of weaving transposed into general usage. ‘‘I spin and weave, and some words have entered the language sneakily. When you take a woven piece from the loom it needs to be fulled — washed in hot water and agitated until the warp and weft meld into a fabric. You keep taking it out and looking at it to see if it is firm enough. If it is still all slippy, it is said to be sleazy. So sleazy comes to mean any slippery customer, unreliable person’’.

Shoddy

Another one is shoddy. ‘‘When the fibre staple has become pretty short, the resultant fibre is known as shoddy. Many cheaper merino garments we buy from overseas manufacturers are made from this. Though correctly labelled ‘‘merino’’, they soon go into tiny holes. I think the practice is giving NZ merino a bad name’’.

Screwage

Reader Six, from Kakanui, has heard more coinages in age: like silage, (‘‘stock fodder stored in silo’’), there’s baleage, ditto stored in bales. Still on the theme of fodder, screwage is an updated corkage, and boilage, ‘‘term used by members of our tramping club to describe the state of water which has reached boiling point in the billy’’. But ‘‘the last two may not be general usage!’’ Good to think of trampers playing around with suffixes as they hoof along.