Fulgurate
I always get a little thrill when I stumble across a new word, which may be yet another sign that I need to get out more. On the other hand, that it happens fairly frequently may be a sign I need to stay in and read more. Either way, when I spotted the following quote on Wikipedia about mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, my reclusive little heart skipped an excited little beat.
He was so completely unknown to this group … so ignorant at the start of his research career, that his fulgurating ascent to sudden stardom is all the more incredible.
Much to my surprise, when I went to etymonline.com, my go-to source for word history, it didn’t list fulgurate or any of its variants (fulgurating, fulguration, etc). As far as I can recall, that’s a first.
What a rare word fulgurate must be!
If you know what it means, take a bow (but watch your weighty brain doesn’t cause you to tip over). If you don’t, and haven’t yet guessed its meaning from the visual clue I’ve thoughtfully placed above, it means “to flash or emit flashes like lightning”.
It comes to us from Latin and can likely be traced back to PIE *bhleg (“to shine, flash”). That makes it related to more familiar words like black, blush, flagrant, flamboyant and flame, which share the same root.
You may be wondering what black is doing on that otherwise radiant list. It’s because for our ancestors black could not only mean “dark”, but also “burnt”.
Fulguration is also a medical term, sometimes shortened to electrofulguration. It’s a procedure undertaken with a pen-like device that generates high-frequency electrical currents. According to one medical website, the idea is that abnormal cells can be destroyed by directing such currents at them. Because skin doesn’t conduct electricity, the current raises the internal temperature of the cells in question until they die, without causing problems for the surrounding cells.
At the risk of providing more information than you really need, the same website explains that at 99 degrees Celsius, cells will dry out, and at 100 degrees they vaporise like the victim in a splatter movie. As if that wasn’t drama enough, during the procedure sparks literally fly. Whether those performing it are required to wear welding masks with the theme song from Flashdance playing in the background, I don’t know, but an infantile part of me certainly hopes so.
You may be wondering why it is that if human skin doesn’t conduct electricity, loitering outside in a thunderstorm is a bad idea. That’s because the website I referred to is fudging the facts a little. Skin does, in fact, conduct electricity; just not very well. What makes lightning so effective is: a) it whacks enough of a punch to overcome skin’s resistance (300 million volts and 30,000 amps is typical), and b) blood and tissues with a high fluid content and plenty of electrolytes are great conductors, and our bodies have an abundant supply of both, especially after a night at the pub. (Counterintuitively, pure water is an insulator.) On a brighter note, bones are very poor conductors, so at least your skeleton is likely to remain gorgeous.
Another meaning of fulguration pertains to chemistry. According to Wikipedia, which says the term is now obsolete in a chemical context, it’s the “sudden brightening of a fused globule of gold or silver, when the last film of the oxide of lead or copper leaves its surface”. If that’s not a highly specialised term, I don’t know what is, and I can’t help wondering whether it’s actually obsolete or simply biding its time, Kraken-like, until the next time it’s needed.
As you might have gathered by now, fulgurate is probably not the unicorn I first imagined it to be. If you want to find words that truly fit that description, a good place to look is this wonderful web page. The work of linguistic anthropologist Steve Chrisomalis, it offers a host of “lost words” which, although they appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, cannot be found in their proper context on any readily accessible English-language web page. After a quick read of the first two pages I can attest to two things: one, I didn’t recognise a single damn one; and two, if you tilt your head the right way, most lost words sound like Elizabethan insults relating to genitalia, copulation or bodily effusions. (And so, when you think about it, does fulgurate.)
Given the size of the English lexicon, it’s no surprise that there are so many words you and I don’t know. By most estimates, the language contains somewhere north of one million (how far north no one is really sure). If you’re well educated, you may know a mere 40,000 or so.
And it’s not like you haven’t been working on your vocabulary. In your first year of life you were busy listening for words and learning how to manage the various upper body parts that allow you to articulate them. (There are many, and their interactions with one another can be mind-blowingly complex. To confirm this, try to replicate speech sounds from another language that don’t occur in your own.)
At about 18 months your vocabulary underwent an explosion to rival the Big Bang. You learned a new word at an average of every two waking hours, a rate you maintained right through your adolescence. During your third and fourth years you also mastered the essentials of your language’s grammar, an achievement that has never left you despite what your English teacher told you in high school.
That infants develop language so quickly and with such mastery is surely one of the great wonders of the world. And yet your vocabulary is still a pitiful fraction of what’s available and will remain so until you die. By one measure, we’re all miracles. By another, we’re a bunch of dumbarses.
Given the enormity of the task, I believe I will dial back on trying to learn new words and, instead, start getting out more. I may not extend my vocabulary, but who knows, maybe I’ll have a fulguratingly good time.
Bits and specious
Can you clean an air filter with a firecracker? Quite possibly.
In a recent Lingwistics post I praised the Barbie movie. Not everyone agrees.
In 1939 at the age of 67, Ernest Vincent Wright published a 50,000-word novel called Gatsby, in which the letter e did not appear once. Sadly for Wright, he expired - sorry, died - no, that won’t do, passed away - still won’t do, kark’d it! the very day it was published. There’s probably a moral in there somewhere.
I was surprised by the outpouring of grief from so many people over the recent death of Matthew Perry, but on reflection I shouldn’t have been. He was a fantastic actor. What I didn’t realise until now was the extent of his courage and honesty. Here he is standing up for those on the margins against an arrogant bully. More people like him, please.
Like rubber trees, dandelions produce latex. In 2017 a Chinese company invested $450 million in commercialising dandelion latex production.
Quote of the week
“Retirement” isn’t in my vocabulary. They aren’t going to get rid of me that way.
Betty White. (They didn’t.)
Interesting! I hadn't heard the word, but the process itself was also lost for many decades. From 1880 to 1920, electrotherapy was an active and productive part of medical work. The electrotherapists developed precise techniques for killing cells at various depths. Around 1920 the field was declared to be quackery, as pharmaceuticals took over both psychiatry and medicine.
Electrotherapy was "newly" invented in the 1980s, without mentioning the giant shoulders it stood on.
https://polistrasmill.com/2021/12/25/electrotherapy-again-soothing-part-3-3/