Mark Joseph Jochim

Word of the Week is a bookish meme hosted by The Plain-Spoken Pen on Mondays in which participants share a word that they find entertaining, enlightening, edifying, or just plain fun to say! Share your own word on your blog, then help us grow the meme and come share it with us!

I teach English as a Second Language to Kindergarteners in Thailand. I guarantee that none of the Words of the Week that I share here will ever leave my lips in my classes over here.

Our word this week is:

Pronunciation: /vek-si-lah-lê-jee/

Part of Speech: Noun, mass

Meaning: The study of flags including the history, symbolism and usage of flags or, by extension, any interest in flags in general.

Words with v’s and x’s reel me in every time, particularly if they are in the same word. There aren’t many but offhand I can think of glovebox, vexed and vixen. These are great for points in Scrabble, by the way.

Thus, I was thrilled when vexillology showed up in Dr. Goodword’s Daily Good Word email a few weeks back. I am more of a vexillophile (a general admirer of flags) than a full-fledged vexillologist and I am also a vexillographist, the latter coming from vexillography — the designing of flags. Yes, I have designed my own flags including one for my province of Phuket in southern Thailand as seen below:

This week’s word has an interesting history and has only been around since the 1950s with its first appearance in print coming in 1959. It was created by Whitney Smith by combining the Latin word vexillum (which refers to a kind of square flag which was carried by Roman cavalry) and the Greek suffix -logia (“study”). Smith designed an early version of what became the flag of independent Guyana, known as the Golden Arrowhead, while he was a student at Harvard University and went on to publish The Flag Bulletin and found several flag organizations including the International Federation of Vexillological Associations (known by its French acronym FIAV).

According to Dr. Goodword, vexillum is a diminutive of velum “sail, cloth, curtain”. Velum came to Latin from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) weg-l– a suffixed form of weg- “to weave”, which also lurks behind Irish figh “to weave”, Welsh gweu “to knit”, and English wick. English veil came from Old North French veil “kerchief” (Modern French voile), which French made from Latin vela, the plural of velum. The video below gives a good overview of vexillology:

My nearly 50 years as a stamp collector helped to fuel my interest in flags, particularly those of what we term “Dead Countries”, those territories or nations that once issued stamps under different names. They no longer do so usually as a result of gaining independence or otherwise changing governmental status. For example, British Honduras becoming Belize necessitated a flag change with the former relegated to “Dead Country” status. I enjoy seeing stamps depicting flags and have long obtained patches of flags during my travels. Some of my most popular lessons with students here in Thailand have been those involving flags and I have amassed a fairly substantial collection of hand-held flags (and a few large ones, too!).

Vexillology was a natural for a “Word of the Week” and future words will probably include a few of my other hobbies such as philately and deltiology.

Do you have any nifty words to share this week? Leave a comment and then share the meme on your blog!