Two Unrelated Pingos

Aha, I thought a day or two ago: I have found a new word. I was driving through our nearby market town, and saw a sign advertising one of those establishments where you can get a ring put through your nose or a dragon tattooed on your back. And the word that stood out in big letters was PIGMENTAL. I chuckled. Must be some enterprising little business that invents new terms to make its services seem more subtle and professional than their rivals. Pigmental, indeed !

But I find, to my chagrin, that the word was first recorded in the 19th century - as an adjective based (obviously) on the noun pigment. Who would have used it, though ? Artists ? "I have had some pigmental problems today", Toulouse-Lautrec or one of his mates may have written in his diary. But my first thought about the word as I rolled it round my tongue was that it was one of those words like dog-tired or bird-brained. "That traffic warden (or that shop assistant, or that referee or that neighbour) is plain pig-mental", I could hear myself saying.

"Silly old sow", Alf Garnett might have muttered.

As for the word pigment itself, it was in use in the scriptoria of medieval monasteries, and was based on the Latin verb pingo* (pingere, pinxi, pictum) meaning to paint; and so is related to our words depict, pictorial, picture and so on.

*Our E noun 'pingo', though, is not derived from Latin, and is not even mentioned in my SOED of 1955; but the latest edition tells us that it is a 20th century Englishing of a word in the Eskimo Inuit language. It refers to a mound or hollow formed in times of permafrost by the accumulation and expansion of underground ice, or its subsequent thawing and subsidence. There are ex-pingos in some parts of the west of Norfolk, my own home county, and I have been to look at them. Not spectacular, but interesting curiosities.

Two Unrelated Pingos