The Supreme Tradition of Spelling Bees

I have an English friend here in Toulouse. She is about 70 now, but a few years ago she was in the Tube (subway) in London. For some reason she had her purse on the seat beside her and as the subway pulled into a stop, a guy grabbed her bag and ran out. She got up and ran after him, cornered him and screamed,"give me back my bag". So the guy turned to the people who had gathered around and accused Margaret (my friend) of attacking him.

It was quite funny when she told us the story later, but at the time she was furious.

I thought of making an OP of this but don't really have a question. Perhaps worth posting here, although language-related. From the column The Straight Dope:

Dear Cecil:

Whilst reading through a (fictional) account of King Arthur's childhood, we came upon the word fewmet. The book explained that the droppings of the beast for which one might quest were fewmets, and that a knight on such a quest might carry some with him (one assumes for comparative purposes). The Oxford English Dictionary was consulted. It said that fewmets, with various spellings, refer specifically to deer droppings. The specificity of the reference moves me ask you, our illustrious illuminator, this question: does this imply that there are other, equally specific terms for the droppings of other beasts? That is, for every gaggle, pride, exaltation, flock, etc., there are left behind trails of things which have names? That there may have been a taxonomist hard at work naming all these creations and that his labors are forgotten should surely tug at the heartstrings of all sensitive Straight Dope readers.— Jim Tolson, Chicago

Cecil replies:

Jimbo, you are a man after my own heart. I wouldn't go so far as to say that every sort of animal caca has a name, but a surprising number do. We have tath, cattle dung; spraints, otter dung; bodewash, cow dung; the familiar guano, seafowl excrement used as fertilizer; wormcast, a cylindrical mass of earth voided by an earthworm; and coprolite, fossil excrement--e.g., dinosaur poop. For completeness' sake we ought to include cowpies and buffalo chips.

A related word is jumentous, pertaining to the smell of horse urine. Nor can we forget ichthyomancy, fortune-telling with fish offal, or spatilomancy, fortune-telling by investigating animal droppings. Other milestones in the fecal vocabulary, as long as we're on the subject, are shardborn, born in dung; stercoricolous, living in dung; and sterquilinian, pertaining to a dunghill. This last one, I think, has many obvious applications in interoffice memo writing.

Thanks for the vocab builder, Vinny. "Fewmet" I remember (along with "aglet" and a few others) from the original Book of Lists. I had always thought of "spraint" as a verb, being what a tiger does to mark its territory, but I may be wrong about it as I can't seem to find it in that sense. Most of the others on the list are new to me--or else I've seen them and forgotten them.

Cecil missed "stercoraceous," which I can claim the distinction of having used in an office memo, to characterize the addressee's earlier memo.

CK

Edited by: chriskean1

Nah, if you use "shit" in the memo then you've lost the points you gained for stercocoraceous or sterquilinian.

CK, did you mean to link to that photo?

He also missed "scat(s)"--mammal feces. Bears definitely have scat but it's also used for other wildlife, such as foxes or rabbits. . Coprophilia is sometimes called scatophilia. I wish I hadn't just discovered that there is a sexual practice called "scat play."

There was a famous memo, dating from sometime in the 1960s in a lab where I worked. The lab supervisor had a stuffed ferret. Someone placed a pile of raisins under the raisins back end, to simulate droppings. He wrote a tongue-in-cheek memo about it, complaining that it was a joke that didn't work. The memo went on at length to discuss how that could not possibly have been ferret scat and where's what ferret scat really looks like and raisins are more like rabbit scat and how could the jokester be so stupid as to confuse them. . "This proves," the memo concluded," that the scientists here don't know shit."

CK, did you mean to link to that photo?

Yes, but more to the caption below it.

I like the ferret prank story, nutrax. We were going to put rabbit poop into a box of Raisinets for my brother. I was about seven and should have known better. My sister-in-law must have been 25, so she really should have known better. Nothing came of it, just as nothing came of the "let's substitute Ken-L Ration for the pate" plan.

My father came back from a trip once with a buffalo chip for the house. It was spray-painted gold, I think, and on a wooden base. He was a hero to us...

CK

Edited by: chriskean1

Somehow I missed the caption.

In college, my roommates & I did once make a Cat Chow cake covered with shaving cream. I can't remember why or who was the intended victim.

Someone placed a pile of raisins under the raisins back end, to simulate droppings.

Interesting imagery. Of course, the raisins went under the ferret's back end.

Cat Chow cake covered with shaving cream

Yuck.

Reading this interesting information, it struck me that "spraint" would be a great verb to describe urban wall painting: a combination of spray + paint.

We must have covered all possible issue to talk about here and so now we are discussing about poop and caca, hahaha