August 28 Word of the Day: Vellichor
Today’s word will be unfamiliar to you, very
likely, arriving via a library e-list in England and Marion Smith: vellichor.
Marion is responding to posts about the Tyndale Bible, but specifically about
the olfactory atmosphere of rare books rooms in general. Marion herself must be
a librarian but, in the nature of e-lists, due to their olfactory remoteness
and social obliqueness, all we learn is about her enthusiasm for the newly
discovered word vellichor, which she had heard for the first time on a radio
program. She provides a link to a website called The Perfume Society, devoted
to every kind of smell, with emphasis on the nice smells, and an article by the
well-informed Suzy Nightingale. Clicks to Suzy Nightingale deliver a 404 Oops
page so we hope Suzy is real; she is certainly the full bottle on perfumes.
Suzy’s article directs her nosy readers via link towards her article entitled ‘A
Shiver of Vellichor : On the Satisfaction of Finding New Words’, once more an
Oops moment, making one wonder if The Perfume Society is in the business of
leading readers astray. Never mind, because Suzy, if she exists, also tells us
that vellichor is a coinage of John Koenig in his ‘The Dictionary of Obscure
Sorrows’. The link to which takes us to an Amazon page for this work, so it
probably exists. Searches for this work deliver snazzy promotions for Koenig’s
book, but not a definition of vellichor. Fortunately, Suzy helps us by writing expansively,
outside the dictates of dictionary definitions: “Specifically, the word
‘vellichor’ sketches the overwhelming wistfulness that can engulf us when we
enter an antiquarian bookshop or library, and are plunged into an olfactory
sensation far beyond smelling the paper, leather and dust. Just as the olfactory
word it was inspired by – petrichor – is larger than the sum of its parts;
so vellichor conjures a fragrant universe far beyond the smell of a room lined
with leather-bound tomes, ‘which are somehow infused with the passage of time.’
We feel nostalgia for our own past, for the memories instantaneously triggered
when we pick up a particular book, for that comfort the very act of reading and
escaping to another world can bring.” In other words, the coinage vellichor is
precisely about the smell of old books. Vellichor, a celebration of decayed
wood pulp, appears to be an invention using vellum + ichor, which is to say
calf-skin + the liquid flowing in the veins of the gods. While Koenig’s coinage
expresses an experience pleasurable to many millions of people, it exists
imaginatively in that period in early printing when paper succeeded vellum as the
main stationery for book production. The autumnal new word’s presence is as
fleeting as an e-list entry, a 404-page, an Amazon sale, a website bio-line, or
the smell of a room full of antique books. Further searches explain that Suzy does
in fact live and breathe, in fact writes exclusively and in depth for The
Perfume Society and gets flowery and grand on such ephemeral outings as
Instagram, her breathing being the entire time in and out through the mouth
and, significantly, through the nose.
