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July 07, 2002
My fab friend Jen has
My fab friend Jen has certain skills. She can give blood without getting woozy, her hair is worthy of poetry, and she always makes me cheer up when I talk to her. As far as I can tell, she is also my muse of vaguely disgusting ideas. I'm not sure where, when, or why, but she brought the vocabulary word 'sebum' to my attention. Considering my head is shaved, I should certainly have already learned this word. Sebum is an oily substance secreted by the sebaceous glands that lubricates the hair and skin and gives some protection against bacteria. In other words, it's what makes my shiny head shiny. This would have been a momentary distraction of adding new vocabulary to my lexicon of strange words, except this word has other great features, at least in my opinion. Onomatopoeia. Just say it, it sounds almost primal, like om. Sebum. When I say it, I can almost imagine that my scalp produces extra sebum in some kind of autonomic response. Maybe there is some Tibetan shaman who can not only control his body temperature, but also produce lots of extra sebum. I bet the locals call him the shiny shaman and provide him with gifts of moist towelettes. I also love to look at words backwards, and sebum is up at the top of the pile along with words like murmur, oops, Evian, and Naomi.
I also like etymology. Until this weekend, I had no idea that the root for vaccination is vacca, which means cow. This is because smallpox, the first disease effectively treated with immunization, was treated with cowpox, a similar virus transmitted by cows to dairy maids. It's a bit sad that I can remember bits of information like this, but keep forgetting where I left my coffee.
Posted by G at July 7, 2002 03:44 PM