Rick Santorum’s triple win last night and his reconfigured new eminence as a Presidential possibility (he wants, poor man, a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage and another compelling raped pregnant girls to bear and suckle the ill-gotten babies of even underage incest) brought to my mind the contentious definition of ‘santorum’ which two Pasadena-based Latin scholars lately uncovered in old sodden manuscripts in a Florence priory: ‘a loathesome aggregation of expended fluids and fecal matter in the anuses of male homosexuals’. My team’s further exhumations of the meanings in Old English, Gaelic and Norse of other lost lamented words like ‘plibersek’, ‘heffernan’, ‘albanese’, ‘abetz’, ‘pyne’, ‘tuckey’, ‘beazley’, ‘keating’ and so on, have been published as The Santorum Variations (1) and (2) in these pages.
Since then, my researchers have not been idle; and I hereby offer this exclusive readership some further intriguing verbal relics of an ancient and simpler time. This include ‘hartcher’ a sneeze; also, in some Lincolnshire dialects the legendary stupid bowman ejected from the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest for aiming at a deer and twice hitting Little John in the eye, and in the early thirteenth century a synonym for ‘missing the mark every time’, as on a disastrous wedding night, or breaking wind inadvertently when bowing to a monarch; ‘grattan’, a large and rugged woman-shaped mountain for centuries on the brink of ruinous avalanche but somehow, though monstrously disfigured, still standing, with a gaggle of plaintive ravens in a dead tree at its top; ‘dempster’, a wooden wheeled corpse-collecting vehicle pulled by a pale, unageing leper with a bell; ‘uhlmann’, a wintry vigilant presence visible after midnight in a dead fireplace, an unsleeping reminder of unadmitted sins; ‘coorey’, a crow-like harbinger of doom, found sitting on the teapot on the morning of a significant death or suicide; ‘albrechtsen’, an avalanche of frozen faeces that in the seventh century wiped out an alpine village — set off, some surviving aldermen believed, by the echoes of a nasty gossiping woman, the faeces derived from a section of hillside used as a mammoth-toilet in early Cro-magnon times; a secondary meaning, ‘bad news brought by an evil woman’, is perhaps related to this event; ‘speers’, a two-headed tapeworm lured from the anus of a retreating giant by the smell of fresh horse meat in a time of unusual famine; a secondary meaning, unwanted passenger on the third horse of the Apocalypse in the time of Last Things, may be unrelated linguistically to the first; ‘murdoch’, a poisonous weed whose delicious taste and widespread wind-borne prevalence caused many a hungry Highlander to die dry-heaving to bagpipe music in the time of Robert the Bruce; and ‘gittins’, a large marauding murderous nocturnal feline able to seem in daylight a harmless, purring, domesticated cat.
Further discoveries will be posted as they come in. A seminar discussion in the Opera House between myself, Bob Carr, Tim Flannery and Bronwyn Bishop, and five new featured songs by Enya, is already selling out.
Name:
Plibersek is a derivation from the greek Pleb/a/site a highly efficient use of labor in building construction.
Despite the ALP’s member’s John Hancock the original derivation of Plibersek is of Tory origin the “P” was originally silent, and used widely during the Howard Government, indicating the velocity and volume of members of the Liberal party that kissed Howard’s arse during a cabinet meeting.
Although heard often at children’s party’s ie “easy peasy Albanese..” . Albanese is a condition of pallid patellas, conditioned by being often in a crouching position trying to restart the Labour Party Machine, although the crank handle has been replaced by digital technology, clearing the vents of paperwork jam still means having to get down and dirty.
“Beazley”, being on the sheltered side of a hornets nest, normally afforded by the great man’s bulk.
“Abetz” is a singular admonition offered after sneezing in Tajikistan. In the German guttural it is a wager placed on a horse being put down before the end of a race fired from a high caliber rifle from the Spectators’ stand. Odds shorten considerably after rounding the first turn.
“Heffernan”, AA Milne found the word so offensive he changed it to Heffalump, a mythical beast used to scare Teddy Bears. Alternative usage; Heffernan a rather large Grandmother.
“Pyne” from Pyneal; a structurally simple hormone located near but unattached to the brain, it uses still remain a mystery to modern medicine.
Gillard, the fat that emanates from a fishes breathing apparatus. Usage smoothing the way, gillarding, easing one’s way into a tight spot.
Now hear the tale of David Hicks
Whose colleagues fought not just for kicks
Their militancy makes me wet
They’d sweep me off my feet I’ll bet.
I am a pale and vegan dork
But good old Hicksy walks the walk
Why BDS when he goes far
Fires gun and is a lefty star.
Ummm…wassail….is this okay editor?
Sorry, “guns”
Now it really is perfect!!
Sorry “fired guns”
I don’t know how to spell wassail either, your poems contain words I haven’t used since William the conqueror was a wee lad.
Can’t you take this show on the road?
bernardi : a tool with a blunted point, once used to remove black or coloured objects from whitish ones;
hanson-young : as distinct from hanson-old as it may be possible and still be of the same species, this creature only has a left side, making it rather awkward at times when manoevering is required.
Further investigations are continuing; if a use is ever found for either, we’ll let you know.
More respect for Bernardi DQ, he’s written books!
Turnbull: Male oxen with confused identity.
Vanstone: Drug addled state while in the back of a ute
Brendan Nelson: lovemaking position favored by Irish Lesbians.
‘Cunnilingus’, an Irish railway line.
It starts at Agape, runs through Puckane and arrives at Orgasm, all too quickly for some.
Well done, that man, well done.