Words can have more than one meaning, of course, and sometimes the different meanings are astonishingly different. Take, for example, “patibulary,” a very obscure word derived from the Latin “patibulum.” In Roman times a patibulum was a Y-shaped device that was used to restrain criminals; it was a yoke fastened around their necks in some way.
When “patibulary” entered English around the 1600s, things got even worse; it didn’t refer just to a prisoner’s restraint — “patibulary” had to do with a gallows. On the other hand, most of the times that the word was used, it tended to be humorous. You sort of get that sense from Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World from 1762: “One was charmed with the unwashed beauties of Dung; another was captivated with the patibulary aspect of Turnip.”
“Patibulary” is still around, just barely. It appeared in a 1913 book titled Bedouins, and looks like it had lost its association with wit by then: “Slowly across the sombre velvet stretched in patibulary attitude a human skeleton.” But then the word appeared in 1983, in Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. Helprin even defined it — but that definition is not even slightly related to prisoners, hangings, or anything of the sort. In Winter’s Tale, patibulary meant “delicate in motion, graceful and muffled as in the quiet sound made by ballet slippers.” It was also “only to be used in winter and at night.”
Another oddity of “patibulary” is that dictionaries are in some disagreement about the word. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the word with only one definition — the one related to gallows. The Oxter English Dictionary also lists “patibulary” with only one definition — but it’s the one Helprin used (or, possibly, made up himself). It might also be instructive that “Oxter English Dictionary” was the title used only in the US. Elsewhere in the world — and later on in the US, too — that book was called The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Words.
