A frabjous day to you, lingual listeners! And welcome to this episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. It might be time to plug your nose, and light that strong smelling candle your Aunt Judy gave you for your birthday, even though you’re not really a fan of the scent. It’ll be better than what’s coming, because today’s word is: jumentous.

Jumentous means ‘resembling horse’s urine’ or ‘smelling strongly like a beast of burden’. Ew! I know. But allow me to explain. It comes from the Latin ‘jumentum’, which the the Oxford English Dictionary explains as a ‘yoke-beast’, which in turn comes from ‘jugum’, meaning ‘yoke’. And that’s ‘yoke’ as in ‘a wooden crosspiece that is fastened over the necks of two animals and attached to the plough or cart that they are to pull’, not ‘yolk’ like ‘the yellow bit of an egg’. Stay with me, folks.

Though this ‘yoke’ might be referring to oxen, the Oxford Latin Dictionary notes that in Roman times it usually meant horses or mules, not cattle. Similarly, the word ‘jument’, from the same source, could mean any beast of burden, but was most often applied to a horse or donkey. In French, ‘jument’ means ‘a mare’. And thus, we have jumentous, a way to tell someone, rather rudely and snobbily, that they smell like horse pee. 

The first known appearance of jumentous is found in a report of the symptoms of a sick person from the British Journal of Homoeopathy in 1801. It states: ‘No motion of the bowels; urine very scanty, red with a jumentous and lateritious sediment, also great thirst, great dryness of mouth and tongue, which were covered with a dirty white covering.’ You can’t say it’s a particularly desirable feature. 

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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