Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

wlatsom glet

The Discouraging Word has a grand entry [no permalinks, scroll down to 11/23/03, The dad to all that gallimaufry ] near to the essence of this blog going over the term gallimaufry. John came across a passage in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

Must your hot itch and pleurisy of lust,
The heyday of your luxury, be fed
Up to a surfeit, and could none but I
Be picked out to be cloak to your close tricks,
Your belly sports? Now I must be the dad
To all that gallimaufry that’s stuffed
In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb?

Languagehat pipes in, in a update, with the exciting news (or is it olds?) that gallimaufry is a pentasyllabic word. For good measure, he throws in a synonym: olla podrida. Both terms were originally kinds of stews that came to mean jumbled mixtures in general. Over the years, I’ve come across one or two hodgepodgian terms myself: Hoppelpoppel, a sort of scrambled egg dish, in German, and prebōggiōn (‘Mazzo d’ortaggi, composto di biete, di cavoli cappucci primaticci (gagge), prezzemolo, ed altri, camangiari, che usasi comunemente da noi cuocere col riso per minestra’) in Genoese.

And this entry’s title comes from some lines which immediately came to mind when I read the Ford quotation above, “Thar [in the womb] duellid man in a myrk dungeon ... Whar he had na oder fode Bot wlatsom glet, and loper blode, and stynk and fylthe.” [Richard Rolle of Hampole, ca.1340, The pricke of conscience (stimulus conscientiæ); a Northumbrian poem.] Not a pretty picture.

[Addendum 11/25/03: I was taken to task by Steve at Languagehat for leaving the reader without a definition for the term wlatsom glet. Gleet is defined in the OED as 1. slimy matter; sticky or greasy filth. 2. Phlegm collected in the stomach, esp. of a hawk. 3. A morbid discharge of thin linquid from a wound, ulcer, etc. b. A morbid discharge from the urethra. It's etymology is listed as fr. OFr glette ‘slime, filth, purulent matter’, Fr glette ‘litharge’, whence app. Ger glätte, Du glit, Sw glite. Wlatsom is interesting. Basically it means ‘loathsome’, but it is not cognate with that word which derives ultimately from OE láð ‘sorrow, pain’, but rather with wlætta ‘nausea, loathing, disgust’.] Posted by jim at November 25, 2003 07:17 AM | TrackBack