DIGRESSING DOWN A RABBIT HOLE…

A Sausage by Any Other Name…

A Single Word Can Change the Narrative

Let’s talk about toxins.

To walk, to write, to operate machinery like cars require balance. If the left leg moves faster than the right leg, one will move in a circle. Cook a HotPocket too long and the cheese becomes liquid hot magma. Not enough time and the middle will be an icy brick. It’d be fair to say that the daily lives and lifelong pursuits of today’s human people are characterized by the struggle to establish, regain, or maintain balance.

For me, balance is achieved by means of botulinum toxin, or “Botox” as it is often referred to in medical jargon…

***WRRRRR***^

I muddled through the introduction you just muddled through for about a week when I decided that it wasn’t cutting the mustard. It was missing something. I tried and tried to bring it around to the balance created by essentially poisoning spastic muscles with botulinum toxin.

How?

How does a toxin bring balance?

Thought I in the tumultuous wilderness of words.

“Hmmm… ’botulinum” is a funny word, why not start there?”

replied a disembodied voice from the aether.

Thus, I set about the task of uncovering the origins of that curious term.

Botulinum is a term that, along with the humdinger clostridium, lends itself to one of the three bacteria that cause botulism. I searched and searched for a translation of clostridium. Alas, I was consistently humbled by failure. I was able to learn that botulism is derived from botulinus, which is derived from botulus. “Botulus” is a Latin word for “sausage”, “the first identified source of the disease.”

But what of “clostridium”?

Surely, it’s a word denoting catastrophic diarrhea or violent projectile vomit.

I took my translation woes to my dear younger sister, the same one who, in league with the evil Joker, grounded my beloved batwing. Read more here –

You see, aside from dispatching my cherished toys (dispatching with extreme prejudice *sob*), my younger sibling traffics in verba et locutiones Latinã Linguã as a teacher of the defunct, yet the still vital language of Ancient Rome. The best she could come up with was “bolt for door, door/barrier”. She added “it appears to be one of those words that are Latin, but only medically.

I persisted.

I squeezed Google until it regurgitated something other than its connection to botulinum. My tenacity paid off when Google spewed forth the assertion that the root clostrid comes from the Greek kloster, or “spindle”. I’m not sure about that translation. The important thing is this — during my conversation with my sister, I mentioned that botulinum is derived from a word that ultimately means “sausage”.

Her reply was swift and confident. “Maybe, but I teach a different word for ‘sausage’”. I asked her to produce the combination of sounds that signify the term. Conforming to the dictates of civil discourse, she told me. Her throat produced a sound that her pliant lips and a nimble tongue sculpted into the following sound –

“Farcimen”

One more time, with gusto -

The mouthpiece on my sister’s phone captured this gnarly conglomeration of rimes and onsets and ferried it across an invisible sea of information. That ferry docked with my phone and bade the passenger disembark by means of my earpiece. In so doing, “farcimen” tickled my tympanic membrane in a manner that allowed me to hear the verbal equivalent of a giraffe wearing roller skates.

If the humdinger that is “farcimen” hasn’t jingled your joybox, it’s probably because -

1. You haven’t tried to say it out loud.

2. You’re pronouncing it incorrectly.

Either way, this soundbite will set you on the path to mirth and joy that only phonetic ballyhoo can provide. Or if you’d rather, here is the pronunciation in written form: farˈkiː.men.

The Balance

This is supposed to be the part where I connect clostridium botulinum to living a balanced life. Funfortunately (I’m sad that I wasn’t able to make the connection, but I had such fun saying and spreading the word “farcimen”).

In essence, I have no meaningful advice concerning balance, but I can advise those seeking meaning to be prepared to dig deep and go far…cimen.

^ that’s the sound of the needle sliding off/scratching a record. It doesn’t translate well, so…