Word from the Archives: Genial

Hailstones had begun to pelt the high windows of the Scriptorium as I perused Volume III of The Lost Tribes of America beside a roaring fire.

For the benefit of our dear Reader(s), I should perhaps offer something in the way of explication: Lorimarr Sedgewick was an itinerant anthropologist who spent more than two decades in the early twentieth century criss-crossing North America searching out, interviewing and documenting indigenous peoples previously unacknowledged as having existed on that continent’s soil. He finally published The Lost Tribes of America – four volumes of his findings – in 1936. The following year he was arrested, charged with treason and incarcerated in the newly built prison on Alcatraz, where he died in 1953. All copies of the Lost Tribes were seized and destroyed, the US Government having declared it unconstitutional.

This edition, which found its way into our Scriptorium via a flea market in Beirut, is thought to be the only one in existence. We believe all four volumes were smuggled across the Mexican border by Sedgewick’s Aunt Mabel in the rectum of her pet mule in 1937.

Such fascinating anthropological encounters revealed themselves on every page as I flicked through: the wailing Britnaticus tribe of the Pacific coast, with their shaven heads; the Bushaby tribe of Texas, a warring, stunted, ape-like people; the Clintongantuans of the deep South, a priapic tribe hungry for power at any cost…

‘Got it!’ exclaimed Mr Bennett from distant bookstacks. ‘Well remembered, Mr Teed, it was Genial’.

He returned to the fireside with the giant Index open at the relevant leaves:

Genial (adj.): Of or relating to the chin; situated
on or arising from the chin.

This entry was catalogued as ‘Lex 5; published 5 Oct 04’. There was a penciled marginalium: Sedgewick III.496.

I turned to page 496 in the volume that had so recently dented my sternum and located the following passage:

Barely twenty miles into Iowa, we came across the first of the Wobegone tribe. With their oddly sprouting genial appendages, they were – contrary to one’s expectations – quite literally most friendly and welcoming.

‘One will recall from one’s Greek studies, of course’, I mused, ‘that genus means jaw, and hence genial – rhyming with denial – was invented in the nineteenth century to mean ‘of the chin’. Genial, rhyming with venial, comes of course from the Latin genialis, relating to birth or marriage’.

‘Indeed, Mr Teed, indeed. Quite a disturbing one though, all the same’, noted Mr Bennett. ‘Gives me the creeps a bit – which is saying something, since I was the one who drew it’.