Tap-tap-tap. Class, pay attention. I’m going to teach you a new word today. It’s called “gavage.” Say it out loud. No, not like “savage,” Little Jimmy. It’s pronounced like “garage.” That’s right, Mary: guhvahzh. Really resonate that last syllable in your mouth. What? No Patty, “garvage” is not a word.

Gavage. Do any of you know what it means?

No, Jimmy, it’s not the trash you run over in your garage.

No, Mary, it’s not a battlefield dressing invented during the French revolution.

What’s that, Patty? No. Absolutely not. That’s not even humanly possible.

Take notes, class. “Gavage” is a French term for “force-feeding.” Surely your mommies and daddies have forced you to finish your dinner at one time or another, but it’s not quite that. Gavage is what people do when they insert a tube down another person’s throat and — often with a funnel — pour food and liquid down into the gullet.

Um…yes, Mary?

I don’t know what a beer bong is, but I highly doubt it. Gavage is a technique used in emergency rooms, not pubs. A gavage can save the life of the malnourished. On the other hand, it has also been used for despicable reasons. Does anyone here know what foie gras is?

No Jimmy, it’s not frog water.

No, Mary, it’s not force feeding people frog legs in France.

Yes, Patty! My gosh, you’re right! It’s the liver of a goose that has been force fed grain over and over again — through gavage — until the organ is bursting with rich, buttery flavor! I had no idea you were such a gourmet!

Because it relies on gavage, foie gras is extremely controversial. Animal rights activists protest the cruel practice, while some chefs argue that all the animals we feed on already are subject to…

[Sigh.] Yes, Patty? What’s that? You call it “moi gras“? I’m not sure what that means, but see me after class, please.

Okay, everyone. Let’s move to the next lesson. Open your books to page 96, “Slaughterhouse Law.”

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Related Reading:
History of gavage:
“La Gavage” Restaurant
“Delicacy of Despair”

It’s funny: when I turn to my dollar-store dictionary for advice on the correct way to pronounce “offal” it says “awful”! I thought so. There’s nothing wonderful about offal: it’s all awful, even in its very utterance.

Offal is butcher’s term for the “less valuable edible parts of a carcass” — which is another way of saying the “guts” that are left over after the “meat” has been cleaved into muscular, familiar chunks. But the important thing to remember is that while these aren’t worth much, they’re still “edible.”

I think horror writers often use the thesaurus to look up synonyms for gut-terms. I know I do, and end up spending hours giggling as I turn through the pages (“ocular jelly”…tee-hee-hee…or in the right circumstance, “BInocular jelly”…har-har-har…or given the right animal, “RHINOCULAR JELLY”…bar-rar-rah!). But if a writer says “offal” when they really mean “entrails” or “intestines” then you have to wonder: did they just yank that word from a thesaurus or do they REALLY intend to suggest that their character’s bowels are edible?

Consider this test case from an imaginary story:

She swiped her sharpened plastic credit card across his belly and the line it cut proceeded to split open and charge his account with a massive withdrawal of blood and entrails. He scooped his arms around his waist to collect his offal but it spit and spooled out from his gashed abdomen like so many coins from a slot machine, and as the disemboweled man fell into the brackish puddle of his own innards, she chuckled to herself: “I told you: it pays to Discover!”

A-hem. “Offal” might sound like the right word choice in this context, but the term is incredibly out of place, because it refers more to food than currency. This murderer is not a crazy cannibal, just a crazy consumer. If she wants offal, she’ll spend her Payback Bonus Award on a proper tripe dinner at a fancy restaurant (where the waiter better be nice).

But to be fair, my research, albeit scant, on the derivation of the term “offal” reveals that it comes from the Middle English “af vallen” which quite literally translates as to “fall off” — ergo, “afval” was the name given to anything that fell off the butcher’s block. Thus, I stand corrected.

Fine: “Offal” can refer to any body parts that “fall off,” whether edible or not.

But with one caveat. The five-second rule still applies.

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Related Reading: A Head-to-Tail Meal

“Funicular.” It starts with fun, so it can’t be bad, right? Wrong. That would be like sticking your head in a raging furnace, hoping to see a fern. 

Chances are 80-20 that if something is “-icular” it is going to be nasty. You know what I mean:  cancerous prefixes like “test-” or “mast-” — and manslaughtery ones like “vehi-” or “curr-” — all leap immediately to mind.

But to be “funicular,” in particular, is to be ropey and nasty.

The root of the word is “funicle,” which in botany is a term that refers to the stalk of an ovule or seed. In anatomy, it’s any corded tissue, like a bundle of nerves, or that weird stuff that connects back to a placenta. Thus “funiculus” is a synonym for an umbilicus, only less umbly.

In less scientific — but no less geeky — parlance, “funicular” is simply an adjective pertaining to a rope, a cord, or its tension. “Funiculus” is Latin for “slender rope.” Thus we have “funicular railways” that run cable cars. But to me, “funicular” still sounds like a “funny collar,” and I don’t know many of those made of rope, except when you’re hanging a clown.

This looks academicular.
This looks funicular.
And this is just a funny collar.

“Squalid” refers to something filthy and repulsively foul — like the living conditions of a cat collector with an affinity for gourmet cheese — but to me it sounds even worse. When I hear the word “squalid” the very sound of the letters makes me think of a “squid” with a “wall” in the middle of it — the wall of a nasal cavity. It also sounds sort of square, sort of solid, but not quite either of those — more lumpy and slumping like some lesser Lovecraftian monstrosity. Yeah, Squalid is the younger brother of Nyarlathotep, but he isn’t quite so scary — he just sits on the couch all day, playing X-Box, festering in a pile of cookie crumbs and black ooze, sickly digging into an economy sized bag of Ctheetos every minute or two with a soiled tentacle, wiping the combined orange residue and ichor of his suction cups all over the arms of the sofa. As you can imagine, Squalid — like most young tentacled creatures — kind of smells bad, too.

His older brother, “squalor” is much smarter, an honor’s student at Miskatonic U, majoring in Home Ick, and he’s even currently on the Dean’s List.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that “suppurate” described the after-effect of a satisfying dinner. A term for how you satisfied, sated, and sedated you feel when you sit on the couch after, say, a Thanksgiving meal, opening your belt. But no: “suppurate” is the fancy word we reserve to describe pustular discharge. Slimy, often freakishly yellow, leakage. The putrid rot that spills from a burst boil or infected blister.

It comes from the Latin term “puris” which means “pus” though there’s nothing pure about it, since pus is surely disgusting. I have a friend who once argued with me that “pus” is incorrect; that it’s actually spelled “puss.” I asked him how his cat was doing. He said “Fine, she’s even purring on my lap right now.” If I was smart, I would have replied “Sup-purr-ating, maybe.”

Scab. Rabid. Scabrid.

This word sounds like it belongs on a t-shirt worn by an angry kid with a purple Mohawk and spiked leather wristbands. And like many punk rock band names, it is, in fact, lifted straight out of the medical dictionary: “scabrid” typically refers to skin (or other tissue) that is scaly or rough to the touch. Often the flesh is rough, delicate, exhibiting irregular projections, lesions, bumps, knobs, or disgusting little follicles. Caress Tommy Lee Jones’ right cheek and perhaps you’ll feel something scabrid.

Since plants are more often scaly than humans, Scabrid is a term probably used more frequently by botanists than celebrity dermatologists. A synonym for scabrid is scabrous. Its antonym? Glabrous, which sounds happy, and happily it is just as fun to say with your mouth full.

It is sometimes used to mean “difficult” or “knotty,” as in the sentence, “I do say, good sir, your choice of noose is particularly scabrid…would you mind removing it from my neck before I develop a nasty rash?”

Nope: this adjective has absolutely nothing to do with Barry Gibb, though it may be associated with a “night fever” of another kind, since the term is often used to describe the moon. A “gibbous moon” is what you call it when the lunar disc is more than halfway illuminated, but not yet full. It is the “pregnant moon” — the one that frustrates werewolves and geeky lunar eclipse aficionados everywhere.

“Gibbous” also more generally describes an oddly convex shape, a lumpy bulge…anything grotesquely tumescent or otherwise odd-shaped and resembling the head of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy. Gibbous comes from the Latin word “gibbus” which literally means “hump” and the term has been employed to malign hunchbacks by foppish aesthetes everywhere since the 18th century. I hereby propose we deem Wednesday of the work week “Gibbous Day” (instead of the colloquial “Hump Day,” which always sounds nastier than it ever is).

Of course, in “first person shooter” games, any splort of blood or flesh blown off a person’s face is called a “gib”…but this term likely comes from “giblet,” not “gibbous,” as any chicken farmer who has read his HP Lovecraft certainly would know.

Though you’re likely to drool when you pronounce the word carefully, the term “lugubrious” doesn’t have as much to do with loogies, goo, grubs, or brie as you might assume. “Lugubrious” describes maudlin mourning, exaggerated sorrow, excessive gloominess…or simply the emotional state of mankind in the year 2006. It should be an emo metal band; I’d like to see Lugubrious written in drippy letters on a soiled black t-shirt. “Bela Lugubrious” would also make a good title for either a Bauhaus song or a splatterporn actor. And anyone named Lou Gubrias should sue his parents for libel.

Today’s word is “serpiginous” (pronounced “sir-pijin-us”). This pretentiously bizarre adjective actually means “creeping from one part to another” or “having a wavy border” and is often applied by medical doctors to refer to visual skin disorders, like ringworm, snaking lesions, or drunken tattoos. Example: “Her serpiginous freckles run in an S-shape down her back like shizophrenic bird droppings down the sidewalk.” Note that “serpiginous” is not to be confused with “serpentine”– for the former clearly involves a snake-eating pigeon while the latter refers to a snake with a strange affinity for turpentine. Nevertheless, both terms work equally well in limericks and are especially funny when slurred by the mouths of tippling drunks. Some Satanists debate about whether or not the Great Dark One is “serpentine” or “serpiginous” — but the answer is obviously neither, and they really ought to look these words up in the Satanic Collegiate Dictionary before uttering them so carelessly. After all, I’ve heard the Great Dark One is notoriously litiginous.

Today’s word is “squeg” (pronounced “skweg”). To “squeg” generally means “to oscillate in an irregular fashion.” My fan squegs when the gears need oil. Squegging is what a volume meter does when a singer bumps into the microphone. Waves squeg when someone drops a body in the ocean. Pencils get all squeggy when you do the old “rubber pencil” trick. I squeg back and forth when I drink brandy and walk on ice. “Squeg” is not to be confused with “squegg” which means to either be disinterested in gender or to try to freak someone out. Squeg has no relation to Squiggy, Square Peg, Egg Squirts, or Queequeg from Moby Dick. Squeg was not invented by the authors of the Scrabble dictionary. Squeg would be a good name for a baby, but only last until age 21.