Verandah Magazine’s last Word of the Week from AUM PR.  How did 26 weeks pass so quickly?  Ziggurats were massive structures built in the ancient Mesopotamian valley and western Iranian plateau.  Notable ziggurats include the Great Ziggurat of Ur, the Ziggurat of Aqar Quf and the now destroyed Etemenanki in Babylon (which may been the inspiration behind the biblical Tower of Babel).  Well, we’ve built our own Ziggurat of words over the past few months, and it’s been great…watch out for some new great weekly offerings.

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Yean is Verandah Magazine’s penultimate Word of the Week from AUM PR, and a good one it is too.  Originally from Middle English, ‘iyenen’ or ‘yenen’ which was from the Old English ‘geeanian’, when sheep or goats ‘yean’, they give birth to their young.  Not an easy word to drop into everyday conversation, but if you happen to know a sheep or goat farmer you can impress them with your esoteric vocabulary.

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Verandah Magazine’s ‘U’ word from AUM PR, is a a somewhat sad one this week.  The word ululation is derived from Latin, and it’s the sound that’s produced when the tongue is moved rapidly back and form in the mouth while someone is sobbing.  We’ve all heard babies do it, but anybody in full lament is likely to ululate.  When Leonard Cohen wrote ‘I’d howl at your beauty like a dog in heat, and I’d claw at your heart, and I’d tear at your sheet,’ he pretty much summed up ululation.  But then, he is ‘our’ man…

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Verandah Magazine’s Word of the Week this week comes from the Latin, transilient, and translates as jumping across or passing over.  Although our friends at AUM PR, love the idea of a hammock – the word is often used in a medical context, for example:  The transilience of the cortical association fibres that pass between nonadjacent convolutions of the brain.  Right, well that’s clear then.

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Latin.  Greek. Lithuanian, German, Old Church Slavonic, Sanskrit – susurration’s been with us since the early 1400’s – originally from the Latin susurrationem, and meaning as our friends at AUM PR tell us here at Verandah Magazine, a whisper or a murmer.  Shhhhh I can’t hear the susurration of the trees…

‘His own name, pronounced in the utmost compression of susurration, they say, he catches at a quarter furlong interval.’ – Charles Lamb

‘If he had read his Biffin he would have known that the correct terms are a ” susurration of sparrows” and a “pop of weasels.”‘ Punch – or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 9, 1914
Various

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