Word Nerd Wednesday: Rattapallax

Wallace Stevens did not concern himself solely with the content of his poetry, nor its emotional impact, but also with how it sounds. This concern shaped Stevens' word choice – not only for meaning, but also for sound – and led him to invent remarkable words, onomatopoeias mostly, for use in his poetry. One such word is "Rattapallax", which appears only in his 1922 poem, “Frogs Eat Butterflies, Snakes Eat Frogs, Hogs Eat Snakes, Men Eat Hogs”:

It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,

Tugging at banks, until they seemed

Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,

The breath of turgid summer, and

Heavy with thunder's rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted

This field, and tended it awhile,

Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days,

Grotesque with this nosing in banks,

This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,

As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves

While they went seaward to the sea-mouths. 

"Rattapallax" doesn't have a dictionary definition, nor does it need one. We understand it solely by its sound. It is the sound, the sensation, and the feeling of thunder. The poem leads us to understand rattapallax in contrast to somnolence. Rattapallax is full of energy; it has an alert quality, yet a quintessential summer storm will have both qualities – both somnolence and rattapallax.

Prompt:
Is there are feeling you can't quite capture? A sensation you don't quite have a word for? Make one up! Work it into your works the way Stevens uses "rattapallax" or Hobbes uses "snorky", "brambish," and "brunky". Share your results with Floodmark!

Image courtesy of Bill Watterson, via Arnold Zwicky

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