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The Learning Kingdom's Cool Word of the Day for August 17, 1999
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pilgarlic [n. pil-GAR-lik]
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This obsolete word almost always appears after "poor." It's an
expression of false pity or amused contempt for someone with a bald
head. Example: "Lost in the muddy back alleys of London, Friar
Marlson thought, 'How did such a poor pilgarlic as I get into such a
mess?'"
The connection with baldness has to do with the origin of the word.
Literally, it means "peeled garlic," since pil was the ancestor of
today's peel. So a poor pilgarlic is someone whose head resembles a
peeled garlic clove.
The dark side of the word is that the original meaning also included
the sense of how the man's head became bald: through the ravages of
the pox, a deadly disease. In time, the connection with disease was
lost, and by the end of the eighteenth century the phrase itself was
falling out of use.
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