Snaste
I’m a sucker for an arcane word, and I recently learned a real good one. Quoting from Merriam Webster:
snaste (noun, obsolete):The wick of a snuffed candle
What I love about this word is how it conjures up feelings that could only have existed in the past.
I might read about changing technology, how in the past light-after-sunset was an expensive luxury and a messy, sooty, stinking affair. I might imagine the advent of clean-burning oil or electric light, or examine graphs of economic indicators and see how they track the adoption of new modes of lighting.
But none of that could make me look at a snuffed out candle and appreciate it as something with parts that I’d care about enough to call by name. It wouldn’t occur to me to differentiate a wick from a snaste, but somebody did, which means they were thinking about candles a whole dang lot. I can imagine, vividly, the feeling of picking up a taper and finding the wick broken, and exclaiming, “a pox on thee Jeremy, thou hast marred my snaste and now my taper is all jacked up.”
The past is always more complicated and more remote than you think. How lucky to glimpse it, even fleetingly.