Tippins

As a young girl, right around the time she was betrothed - at seven - to Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, Matilda (or Maud) (or Maude) invented the game of Tippins, later employed on a wide scale and for unnumbered centuries by Royal subjects on the occasion of the monarch's birthday. Matilda's reign, though lasting only eight months in the year 1114, incited the ire of Britannia, who believed her haughty, too-foreign, and generally ill-tempered. The game of Tippins was taken up en masse explicitly to mock the Empress Matilda (even now, her name is often omitted from Britain's royal chronology), whose authorship of Tippins they ostensibly believed precious, and whose continued fancy for it they seemingly took as evidence of a delusional mind. The rules of the game itself are completely lost to history. We know only that it revolved around the acquisition of pieces of string beaded with small, wafer-heavy handmade objects (or tippins), and that its popular variant was almost never joined without accompanying volumes of English ale; alas, this no doubt contributes to the historical obliteration of the game's rules. There did endure, however, until very recently, a vocabulary of Tippins, involving such turns of phrase as seen in this gem from an anonymous, untitled tract found scribbled over the faded newsprint of a Piccadilly Picayune from 1842:

"Oy, Mary's all Tucked. It's thrice Tippins to you she's truced or I'm squabbled. "

Among the detritus found elsewhere in the written word's effluvial outpour scattered amongst 21st C.E. England, I have stumbled upon references to "the Tippins trapeze" and "triumph Tippins!" The former seeming to indicate the treacherous skirting of dire straits, the latter a rousing and final success. 

Plizvit

During a period of approximately three years in the first decade of the 20th century, Berlin's Jewish community was entranced by the image of one of its own: Yehuda Plizvitz, a young playboy considered by one and all to be the most dapper, dashing fellow born in generations. The sartorially resplendent Plizvitz enjoyed a fame, for three brief years, the likes of which could only be appreciated by the still-to-come Holy Triumvirate of Houdini, Chaplin and Einstein. Then, almost overnight, the people whose adoration had elevated him to a messianic fever of celebrity and renown came to the sudden realization that, as a matter of fact, Yehuda Plizvitz was only marginally attractive and that he didn't even wear matching clothes. He became the embarrassment of his culture, and his name, in Yiddish slang, synonymous with someone incapable of wearing matching colors. Note the feminine: plizvitza. Morton Schlomz, protagonist in the high modern, Jewish-American novelist Schlomo Mortonfeld's final book, Fishmonger's Song, described a tryst with "a funny-smelling plizvitza what couldn't evidently remember a color as long as it took to look from one sock to the next." 

Alas, no pictures remain of Yehuda Plizvitz. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that they were incinerated and quick.

Deadly Milkwaist

In the Autumn of 1756, Lady Marjorie Parks-Sand, a botanist accompanying an expedition through the Alps, discovered the milkwaist, a species of flower belonging to the exceedingly rare dioecious population in which all plants are either androecious (male, pollen producing) or gynoecious (female, seed producing). It is not known how Lady Parks-Sand settled on the name for this beautiful and almost impossible-to-find flower - indeed very little is known of her relationship to her discovery, as she was also the first victim of the male of the species, the deadly milkwaist, whose pollen contains a poison fatal to humans. The benign female, however, thrived for a brief period as an exorbitantly expensive delicacy popular especially among the Romanov's ruling house of Russia. As with many other bourgeoise appetites, the harvest of milkwaists was repressed by the Bolsheviks and since all but forgotten. For a time, however, the peculiar nature of the plight of the milkwaist had a foot in the verse of not insignificant poesy, as this sample taken from H. Robert Mendel's 1914 elegy, "O, Unanswering Night" shows:

My woman, my delicate one, uprooted...

May they in their heaven dine on yours,

whilst I like deadly milkwaist await revenge,

plotting amidst a legion of widowers. 

Chargerine

Pronounced "care-a-geen" by the Australian Aborigines and rhymed with "margarine" in American English, chargerine is a spice derived from certain coral rocks found predominantly in the Pacific Rim, off the shores of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Australia, and in the Caribbean. Lately fallen into fashion among the eco-hungry crowd, chargerine is purchased as small rocks and then ground. Added to seafood - especially Creole cuisine - it is a potent, spicy, salty mineral. According to Aboriginal legend, the eldest son of a dead patriarch eats, at the occasion of the latter's funeral, a meal heavily seasoned with chargerine, and in so doing channels the best parts of the departed soul. In Aboriginal lore, the souls of men wade into the sea, while women's congregate under trees.

Braythistle

The braythistle is a larger-than-average chocolate brown bird with iridescent blue spots. A desert bird and herbivore, the braythistle has a high-pitched staccato call and survives almost exclusively on the milk of cacti. Once a staple of cowboy poetry, the braythistle symbolized proximity to water. Curiously, braythistle was also a word denoting an architectural feature of medieval fortresses, in which spike-studded iron lattice-works were used to brace windows against attack.