Aurorarama

When we first sent Jean-Christophe Valtat‘s Aurorarama to the copy editor the manuscript came back with a number of flagged words. Williwaw? Demiurge? Picnoleptic? They didn’t appear in the copy editor’s Webster’s. Surely they weren’t English? Perhaps Valtat, a Frenchman, had become confused? It turns out Valtat, a scholar of Victorian literature, Arctic exploration, and early English vernacular, knew more than most of us, and the words were all ones he had discovered in his literary research. Valtat’s vocabulary, it turns outs, is as lush, strange, and intoxicating as his fiction.

We recruited one of the multi-talented Melville House interns to unearth the meaning of the delightful but arcane language of the novel. Now that Valtat has arrived to tour the U.S. we will be running a series of posts to illuminate the meaning and etymology of the language of Aurorarama…

Without further ado I present to you our very first word: pandiculate. For anyone who has taken Latin this word might not be so mysterious, as it comes directly from the Latin word pandicultus, past participle of pandiculari, meaning “to stretch oneself.” To pandiculate, therefore, means:

Polar Bear Pandiculation

1. to fully stretch the torso and upper limbs, typically accompanied by yawning.

You can use the word, as Jean-Christophe does, to say that someone has “pandiculated on the sofa.” According to Jean-Christophe, when a friend taught him the word it evoked the image of, “an inarticulate puppet hanging ridiculously.”