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    Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia
    Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia
    Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia
    Ebook293 pages4 hours

    Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia

    By Charles Hodgson

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    About this ebook

    From head to toe to breast to behind, Charles Hodgson's Carnal Knowledge is a delightfully intoxicating tour of the words we use to describe our bodies. Did you know:

    -eye is one of the oldest written words in the English language?
    -callipygian means "having beautiful buttocks"?
    -gam, a slang word for "leg," comes from the French word jambe?

    A treat for anyone who gets a kick out of words, Carnal Knowledge is also the perfect gift for anyone interested in the human body and the many (many, many) ways it's been described.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 3, 2015
    ISBN9781466890435
    Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia
    Author

    Charles Hodgson

    CHARLES HODGSON is the author of Carnal Knowledge—A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia published by St. Martin’s Press. He also writes, hosts and produces Podictionary—the podcast for word lovers. Charles is an Electrical Engineer by training, an entrepreneur and marketer by experience, and a word lover by habit. Since 2002 he has indulged his love for words and their fascinating histories by dedicating all his working time to this passion. As a result his podcast Podictionary has accumulated hundreds of entertaining episodes that have attracted approximately 4.5 million downloads from faithful listeners. Writing for Podictionary, he has amassed more than 160,000 words of text in addition to the 70,000 written for Carnal Knowledge.

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    • 5/5
      I literally just finished this book and I was nicely surprised! It's a great book to pick up at any page and read, or just read from start to finish. I've already started saying to my friends "did you know that...". When I first heard of the book I thought it would be slightly boring because it deals with the history/meaning of words but it's really interesting and sometimes downright funny.This is a book that features almost every single word you can think of that is part of the human body (ie. ring finger, dimple, widow's peak, etc.) and details what it means and where it originated from. For instance, your Annulary is your ring finger, which was also known as a 'physician finger' because that's where they leeched blood from in the old days. They did this because the ring finger vein was thought to have a direct connection with the heat. "The supposed association between the heart and this finger is the reason that it is the finger we honor with our wedding rings." (p.9). This is a fun read. I really enjoyed finding out why we call certain parts of our bodies certain things. Like where the word "adam's apple" came from. We take the words we use to describe body parts for granted and never really think of when/where the words originted and their significance or evolution. This is a great book for anyone who is interested in random trivia, the meaning of words, and anatomy.

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    Carnal Knowledge - Charles Hodgson

    one

    ARMS AND HANDS

    ANNULARY • Your annulary is your ring finger. The word comes from the Latin annulus, meaning ring. Annulary entered English in 1623 from a French translation of The theatre of honour and knighthood; or, a compendious chronicle and historie of the whole Christian world, by Andrew Favine. This same document tells us that this same finger was once called the physician finger, from the Latin digitus medicus, and that it was also called the leech finger, since doctors were known as leeches before they were called physicians. Curiously, both doctors who drew blood and creepy little blood-sucking invertebrates were known as leeches from since around the year 900, yet quite probably each came to this name from different root words. The phrase physician finger came about because the ring finger was thought to be home to a particularly good vein for bloodletting, one that communicated directly with the heart. If you possess visible veins on the back of your hand, you will notice that one of the most obvious ones does line up roughly with the ring finger. The supposed association between the heart and this finger is the reason that it is the finger we honor with our wedding rings.

    APOLLO • In palm reading, the ring finger is associated with the Greek god Apollo and is supposed to signify generosity and sense of self. A ring finger that is too long is believed to indicate a feeling of superiority that leads to interpersonal conflict; too short a ring finger is supposed to indicate a lack of trust in others. Apollo was a good-looking god but not a very steadfast one. For instance, having kidnapped and seduced (today we might call it raped) a young Athenian princess named Creusa, he then abandoned her and the child she bore him—despite the fact that Apollo’s sister Artemis was supposed to be the special protector of young women. Then again, in those days it was pretty common for gods to act like total inconsiderate jerks even while they were performing miraculous acts such as seeing into the future or slaying giant magic pythons. In spite of Apollo’s bad conduct, today the term Apollonian means harmonious and well-balanced.

    ARM • In his book The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson explains that many words in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) were pushed into obsolescence by Norse and Norman words during the first thousand years of the development of English. He estimates that only about 1 percent of the words contained in The OED are from that original Old English stock but asserts that these surviving words are the most fundamental in the language. Arm is one of them. It goes back to Old English, first appearing circa 950 in the Lindisfarne Gospels, arguably one of the most beautiful documents in existence. (See breast.) The relevant line reads, He onfeng him on armum his, which is to say, He took him up in his arms, referring to Simeon’s recognition of the baby Jesus as the Messiah. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) created a famous sketch, known as the Vitruvian Man, showing that the spread of people’s arms almost exactly equals their height. The name came from the fact that the first recorded observation of this relationship occurred in a book on architecture by the Roman Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (circa 90 to 20 BCE). The word arm reaches back to an Indo-European root meaning join or fit together. The same root led to arm in a military sense. One English-Latin dictionary lists sixty-three entries containing some form of the word arm, and all but four have a sense related to military matters. The army is armed with armaments, covered in armor, and fights with the armada, hoping for an armistice. In days of old, knights sometimes wore a cloth coat over their metal armor to protect it. This coat of arms had an added advantage: colors and a crest on the coat made the knight known to his followers, which was especially helpful during the confusion of battle. Over time the crest itself came to be known as the coat of arms.

    ARMPIT • Called the armpit since about 1400, the space under the shoulder where the arm folds down against the chest has only been called the underarm since 1933. Several sources claim that underarm rose to popularity due to its use by admen, advertisers, who saw an advantage in referring to this unsavory body part euphemistically. In medicine the armpit has been known as the axilla since 1616.

    BASILIC VEIN • Usually just out of sight in the crook of your elbow, the basilic vein runs up the inside of the arm near the ribs. Basilic means royal; the word comes from Greek. Because of the mistaken belief that the basilic vein of the right arm was connected directly to the liver and that of the left arm to the spleen, the veins became main sites for bloodletting; hence, the sense of importance reflected in basilic. A church or the main room within a church is sometimes called a basilica. This is because in Rome the emperor sometimes donated imperial buildings (particularly halls of justice) to the Church. In the book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the monster lurking in the subbasement of the school is a basilisk. This word also comes from Greek; it means kinglet. This giant snake, which was hatched out of a cock’s egg and could kill merely by looking at its victims, was called a basilisk because it had a sort of crown mark or growth upon its head. This creature was not the product of the prolific imagination of author J. K. Rowling. The basilisk has been around in English literature since about 1300 and appeared long before that in ancient tales. In the Harry Potter film the basilisk’s crown is represented by several hornlike growths on the top of its head.

    BEAU’S LINES • Sometimes fingernails appear to have lines on them. The lines that run in the direction of nail growth are fine, but the lines that run across the nail are bad. Beau’s lines were named in honor of Joseph Honoré Simon Beau, who described them in 1846. These are the lines that cross the nail. They are formed when there has been such a severe and prolonged problem with a person’s health that his or her nails stop growing from time to time. Diabetes, measles, mumps, heart attack, or psoriasis (the skin disease) can cause Beau’s lines. History isn’t always fair, and although the Frenchman Beau’s name is usually applied to these lines, in fact the German Johann Christian Reil documented them in 1796, fifty years prior to their discovery by Beau. The lines that run parallel to the fingers are actually representations of the underlying nail bed, and they are completely normal.

    BICEPS • When you flex your muscles in the mirror, it is the biceps bulging above your arm (with any luck) that make you feel empowered. The proper term for this muscle is biceps brachii; the term for the muscle inside your thigh is biceps femoris—but that muscle is hard to catch in the mirror. Biceps means two-headed, from bi-, meaning two, and caput, meaning head. The biceps brachii forks to connect with the shoulder at two points and thus qualifies for its name. Knowing this, you should not be surprised to learn that the muscle on the backside of the arm, opposite the biceps, is called the triceps because it has three points of attachment, and that its counterpart on the front of the thigh has four such points and is called the quadriceps.

    CEPHALIC VEIN • When you look at the back of your hand, you can sometimes see veins just under the skin. When the weather is hot, when you are working hard, or when your hands are hanging down, these veins usually bulge out. These are not cephalic veins. Rather, they go by the name dorsal metacarpal veins and are a network of veins bringing blood from your fingers to veins going back up your arm. One of these is the cephalic vein, sneaking around the side of the wrist behind the thumb and occasionally visible near the skin surface. It reappears at the crook of your elbow, continues up your arm, and plunges deep just below your collarbone. The strange thing is, cephalic means concerning the head, and this vein doesn’t go into the head. However, physicians of days gone by used to open this vein in hopes it would assist them in curing ailments of the head—a practice no longer recommended. Another bloodletting practice involved a vein on the back of the hand near the little finger; this vein was once known as the salvatella vein because it was supposed to save you from whatever it was that made you unwell, salvatella meaning roughly small salvation in

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