Oh…K
The letter K is somewhat underused in English. Its sound is often usurped by a hard C and even, in some cases, X. The K section of dictionaries is one of the thinner chapters. There are nevertheless some interesting words lurking in there. One of the best is also one of the most obscure, as it seems to appear in only one dictionary: A Browser’s Dictionary, written by John Ciardi in 1980.
A Browser’s Dictionary isn’t an attempt to create a complete dictionary, nor would it be used to look up the spelling of “rutabaga” — in fact, it’s mostly a “dictionary” at all in the sense that its title includes that word. It’s really a collection of interesting and unique words and the stories behind them.
Ciardi was an etymologist and translator, but he was also a poet, and many of his poems show a bit of whimsy, like this bit from Why Nobody Pets the Lion at the Zoo:
“…
But if you look him in the eye
You’ll find the Lion’s rather shy.
He really wants someone to pet him.
The trouble is: his teeth won’t let him.
He has a heart of gold beneath
But the Lion just can’t trust his teeth.”
When Ciardi was working on his dictionary, he noticed that the sequence right in the middle of it — “klmnop” — had exactly ten letters before and after, and explained that while this was completely irrelevant, he had always dreamed of creating his own word. So he did, and it was inspired by that sequence of letters. The word is kelemenopy, and it means “a straight line through the middle of everything, leading nowhere”.
Since the need to describe that sort of line doesn’t seem to arise particularly often in day to day conversation, “kelemenopy” has never really caught on. Ciardi suggested that it could be applied to politics, saying that “Teddy Kennedy’s career has been the classical kelemenopy of the American twentieth century.” And the word has appeared in at least one book: Red Zen: A Novel of Extreme and Bizarre Adventure In Which a Mystical Book on Buddhism Changes the Hero’s Life, written by Jason Earl in 2007. It’s just the sort of…um…novel, I guess…that would include a word like “kelemonopy”. Here’s the synopsis from Amazon:
“Saul Summerblend has a bizarre memory problem. And his Zen master, Bodhee, says he should travel to the dwarf planet Ceres to fix it. Along the way Saul meets a thirty-foot magic square whose diagonals and rows sum to 666, encounters a group of drunken Vikings and evil dwarves, works some campy mathematics and overhears amusing CB radio conversations, fights a visionary with a penchant for wrestling masks and flipping off cars all day on main street, invents neologisms like deemkrite and freeganidge. He also learns of a mystical book called ‘Red Zen: Way of the Butterfly’ and attempts to solve a few koans about kangaroos, split toe nails, and carts filled with hatchets. Will Saul fix his strange memory problem? Will he even make it back to Earth alive?”
Earls has published other books, including Cocoon of Terror and The Underground Guitar Handbook. Probably not a body of work that could be described as a kelemenopy.
