Notes on "Mucilage."

“Mucilage” is a word whose sound is wildly inappropriate to its meaning. In the world of adhesive nomenclature, “paste” is good and “glue” is even better. Trisyllabic mucilage ought to denote something far more serious -- perhaps a problem involving waste disposal ("OK, we've rescued the elephants, but what are we going to do with all that mucilage.")

In my life, mucilage made its mark long before glue arrived on the scene. In Brooklyn (and perhaps elsewhere) 1940s schoolchildren were issued small curvy bottles of the yellow stuff, each fitted with a red-rubber tip which was slit so that a drop or two of mucilage could be emitted when the bottle was pressed to the surface of your construction-paper or doily project. Actually, the slit regularly became caked and occluded and the hardened mucilage had to be scraped off with your fingernails. It was a lot like nose-picking.  

LePage’s Mucilage, I believe it was called. We said Page as "page" but surely LePage's Mucilage if pronounced Frenchly (le pahje) would be far more euphonious. Some claim that if you were building a model airplane, you would use mucilage on your fuselage, but I believe such an assertion to be the kind of persiflage at which I take umbrage. 

And yes, the word is a descendant and cousin of Latin mucus, meaning mucus.

Unbeknownst to 1940s me, mucilage has a life outside the bottle. It is a glycoprotein and exopolysaccharide found in most plants where it helps to store water and thicken membranes. I have now learned that the sticky stuff on the leaf tips of the insect-catching sundews that live at the edge of our pond is a form of mucilage. 

I would be curious to know from what plants William Nelson LePage distilled the vast vats of mucilage that were diluted and parceled out to schoolchildren, who then spent the hour after "Arts and Crafts" removing nasty mucilage scale from their fingers. But I do now know why schools loved the stuff  -- because vegetable mucilage is, if not exactly edible, not poisonous either. No hoofs were harmed during its production.

Once having established the mucilage monopoly, Mr. LePage must have brought home zillions. And if his descendants were as sticky-fingered as I suspect they must have been, they will be enjoying the profits on their yachts or in their Manhattan penthouses to this day while we 1940s pupils are left with only memory-traces of mucilage's peculiar feel and odor.  

Other words of my life:

slouch,

cishet,

yips

ramps

jot and tittle

worship

hack

 

Comments

[James Johnson]

Spot on!

[Joe Forbrich]

Hilarious and well written

[Randal Strauss]

Radar O’Reilly impersonating Humphrey Bogart: “If I had wanted mucilage I’d have ordered mucilage!”

[Jane]

Now THIS was worth reading - if only for the exultantly mucilagenous term "percilflage".

[Simone C.Broussard-Williams]

Now the memory of turned up nose, shoulders erect, hands at your sides, feet together, soundless and motionless position of thirty-six children standing next to a highly utilitarian wooden desk waiting for further instructions before sitting down to the resounding word that was to be given, deep breath… and BEGIN!

[Don LeMerde]

Now THIS was worth reading - if only for the exultantly mucilagenous term "percilflage".

("I think he means "persiflage," replied Vivian.)

[Robert]

Though now discontinued, I've learned thaf LePage mucilage was in fact made from fish bones and scales.