'Fussy, Fastidious, Prim; Neat'

“It’s always a pleasure to discover a new word, especially if it denotes something for which no word seemed to exist.”

 

Nige is right. We don’t see things and certainly don’t begin to understand them until we can name them. A word somehow personalizes its referent, makes it ours. In my case, the classic example is aglet, something I had seen all my life without ever thinking it might have a name. Only twenty years ago I learned it. The OED is pedantic for so small and insignificant a thing, as a dictionary ought to be: “a tag attached to the end of a lace, originally of metal and now also of plastic, intended primarily to make it easier to thread through the eyelet holes, but also developed as an ornament.” Somehow, tag doesn’t seem quite right, though I can’t come up with a better word. Cap or end won’t do. I know many are suspicious of language. I trust it.  

 

In Vol. II, Chap. XI, “L’Hôtel du Mont Blanc,” of his memoir Praeterita (1885), John Ruskin writes of an old friend, Eliza Fall, that she “remained an entirely worthy and unworldly girl,” and goes on: “She wrote far better verses than ever I did, and might have drawn well, but had always what my mother called ‘perjinketty’ ways, which made her typically an old maid in later years.”

 

Perjinketty, from its context, is open to many interpretations. The OED settles it, citing Ruskin: “exact, precise, extremely accurate. Also: fussy, fastidious, prim; neat.” With one word, we come to an understanding of poor Eliza Fall, though Ruskin may not be the most reliable source in all things feminine.   

 

Another new word in Praeterita, in Vol. II, Chap. V, “The Simplon”: “. . . in steady slope of garden, orchard, and vineyard – sprinkled with pretty farm-houses and bits of chateau, like a sea-shore with shells; rising always steeper and steeper, till the air gets rosy in the distance, then blue, and the great walnut-trees have become dots, and the farmsteads, minikin as if they were the fairy-finest of models made to be packed in a box.” Ruskin is describing a Swiss landscape. Minikin? No, not an undersized relative, though obviously suggesting something small. OED: “of a person or thing: diminutive in size or form; miniature; tiny.” Even better, I find a bonus among the citations for minikin, from Part 2, Chap. 2 of Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). This is from Van Veen’s interpolated science fiction novel, Letters from Terra:

 

“After beaming to Sig a dozen communications from her planet, Theresa flies over to him, and he, in his laboratory, has to place her on a slide under a powerful microscope in order to make out the tiny, though otherwise perfect, shape of his minikin sweetheart.”