And now, we, putting ourselves in the mind and voice of the one and only Stephen Fry, come round to the end of the Liar Lexpionage series with a couple words, a quote, and a plea from the bottom of our American hearts for somebody out there to please explain cricket. We love the English, the way I suppose you love someone older and more cultured than you are, but for whom you never the less feel significantly patronizing toward what with all the creaks and quirks of age.

The final unknown word, chatelaine turns out to be anticlimactic. Much like the book itself? I’m not certain. I think I’m going to need to read it a second time to really determine whether or not I like it. Regardless, a chatelaine is simple a castellan; a castellan being the master of a castle. Between this and the cricket and shopping for a bedspread rather than a duvet, I’d say the American-British divide has been thoroughly wined and dined and was settling for a nice good night kiss but had to stop when the word “snog” was mentioned and closeness devolved into arguments and now there are alternate declarations of jingoism on the part of British English while American English has planted itself in front of the wikipedia entry on cricket shouting, “And just what the hell is a googlies!?” They’ve entirely forgotten that Americans don’t have castles at all, going so far as to call the end pieces in chess “rooks” and very large houses by schmancy names. Ah well. So much for new words.

Then, there was a word, tog, that Fry defined right in the middle of a paragraph. It was great—a new literal meaning for a word that had previously been only slang. Fry writes, in the middle of several pages of stream-of-consciousness narrating on the part of the main character, “…why on earth Donald calls him Duvet—the word for the unit of thermal insulation in duvets is tog—Donald will know where it comes from…” And that’s right, though shock of shocks, Dictionary.com has failed to list any meaning for “tog” besides “clothes.” But Wikipedia has a short entry on the tog, and how 1.55 togs makes a clo, and how to determine how warm your particular duvet will be, tog-wise, so that you can choose an appropriate one for the season. Hence my need to shop for bedspreads—winter is coming and I’d like a little something extra to throw over our summerweight (4.5 tog) duvet.

I plan on spending some more time trying to figure out cricket, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to without actually watching some. I respect a sport where you take a break in the middle of things for high tea, and where there are no cheerleaders, but something about the ball bouncing before the batter hits it, and hits it from sort of a more vertical-ish position is off-putting. It’s like vicious croquet. Perhaps I’m too soak in baseball. Regardless, a long and thoroughly narrated cricket match was one of the best parts of The Liar, mostly because I could follow them and there was no German, nor was there anybody referred to solely by one of the articles of clothing they were wearing. And this is the particular bit that really makes me want to learn more:

Cheat? Good heavens. This is an amateur cricket match amongs leading prep schools. I’m an Englishman and a schoolmaster supposedly setting an example to his young charges. We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game man ever devised. Of course I’ll cunting well cheat. Now give me my robe and put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me.

Cunting well! You could NEVER say that in conversation in American, especially not with kids around. It boggles. It nearly googlies, but a googlie is a cricket bowl that “swerves in one direction but breaks in another.” Americans, still in front of the computer, scream, “Why didn’t you just say curve ball!?”

Reading The Liar is the opposite of that adage, “never use a large word where a diminutive one will do.” So today’s lexpionage is three words that Fry’s characters used, in ostensibly normal speech, and how I could barely understand what he was saying.

First, macedoine. It’s a mixture of diced fruits and vegetables, usually served as a salad. Like a square-cut coleslaw or ratatouille or something. From there, it means medley. It’s a French term, the same as the English word Macedonia, and a reference to the many and varied people living there. It makes me imagine French chefs standing around in ridiculous hats and accents asking, “What shall we call ze salade?!” “Let us call is ze macedoine! After ze many non-French peoples of ze Macedoine!” And then “little cut-up veggie medley” sounded more French and people were like, “Oooh, try the macedoine!” And perhaps you were like, “Oh! Little cut-up veggies!”

In context, Fry’s characters use macedoine to mean a medley more like a hodge-podge, or something linguistically nearing a portmanteau:

‘Right. Oh, by the way–’
‘Sir?’
‘Prioritise. Ever come across that one?’
‘Ugh!’ said the St. Matthew’s Tie. ‘Langley?’
‘No, that arse Reeve, of course. Last week it was “having a meet-up with”, God knows what new linguistic macedoine he’s going to serve up next.’
‘One shudders to think, sir.’
‘All right then, Simon, off you pop.’

And it could just be me, but the end there gives me a certain amount of ironic pleasure. Like Fry might just be acknowledging that however much the English think Americans come up with dreadful words, it’s really just the pot calling the kettle black.

Then there was stearopygus, and all I could think was “fatty? oily?” It doesn’t appear literally in dictionaries, because “stear-” is the less common of two roots used to mean “fat”, the other being “steat-”. “Pyg-” means “buttocks.” Both are Greek. Put them together and you get very fat rear ends, especially on women. Really, stearopygus is the scientific term for ghetto booty.

Lastly, for now, plash and pleach are one-way synonyms. To plash is to splash something gently– so gently that you leave off the s entirely. The etymology points to Middle and Old English variants of the word as meaning “puddle.” But it’s probably onomatopoeic, don’t you think? But sometimes, plash can mean the same thing as pleach, which has nothing to do with puddles. To pleach is to weave or braid, especially if there’s vegetation involved. If you were concentarting on training plants to grow together to form a hedge or an arbor, you’d be pleaching them. It’s from Middle English plechen, which came from the Old French plechier, from the Latin plectere and probably the Indo-European root *plek-. It’s also notably the root of words like plait (to braid hair) and flax (cloth made from weaving). So, to plash can be to pleach, but pleaching might not have anything to do with plashing.

Next week, a plash or pleach of new words and a lot of good ideas about the internet that Stephen Fry had long before anybody else. Read part 1 of Liar Lexpionage here.