Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Od & Oe

Od

Od—’The Odic force’; a hypothetical vital energy that powers all living things. Originally coined by Baron Carl von Reichenbach in 1845, od is what happens when you combine a belief that there must be something special about the magic that is life with a failure of scientific principles.

Not just bad science, mind you. This may be some of the worst science in human history. Which is an absolute tragedy, considering Reichenbach’s station and influence. He was already independently wealthy due to the numerous factories he owned pumping out a number of his own discoveries, including paraffin wax, pittacal (the first synthetic dye), carbolic acid, creosote, as well as perfecting kerosene.

But in the latter half of his life, Reichenbach used his wealth to fund a number of experiments to discover something that’s plagued mankind since the dawn of philosophy. How are we alive? What force gives living things energy, and gives us drive, which leads us to reproduce, and how come that same energy can’t be found in mineral compounds.

Reichenbach felt he was in a unique position to tackle this problem, due to his wealth, keen imagination, and willingness to experiment. So he tinkered on the problem. And this is where everything falls apart. Because in order to discover the purest form of kerosene, it’s a reasonable plan to try a bunch of different things, throw away what isn’t working, focus on what does work, postulate, and run more trials. But when Reichenbach chose to tinker with the question of vitalic forces, he strayed from the field of chemical compounds and wandered into the minefield of human psychology.

Based on his interviews with supporters of vitalic force theorists, Reichenbach believed there was a force that emanated from living things, which he dubbed ‘od’, and that certain people could see it given the right set of circumstances. Which brings us to Reichenbach’s first error. He had no control group. He, himself, did not see od. No experiments were run on people who did not see od. All his discoveries were helped along by a small group who claimed they could. Not all the time, mind you. In order to see od, these subjects needed to be kept in pitch black isolation.

So what happens when you take a ready group of sensitive test subjects who could use the money or attention, tell them before they are tested that you’re looking for people who can see emanations, isolate them, ask them what they ‘see’, and eliminate anyone from the test that sees nothing? You get exactly what you’re looking for. Reichenbach’s decade long foray into od was extensive, with each year sending him further and further, deep into the wilderness of faulty assumptions. He filled journals, and his book, Researches on Magnetism, Electricity, Heat and Light in their relations to Vital Forces delved into years of his labor. But whenever a scientist attempted to replicate his process, they failed. Or, to be more precise, they failed, assuming the subject was never told what they should be looking for.

And thus od was labeled quackery. It didn’t help Reichenbach’s case that powerful condenser lenses for microscopes were developed in the latter half of the 19th century that allowed people to witness chemical processes in cells. And those experiments could be replicated. What’s probably the greatest shame of his experiments is that, had he stopped tinkering and relying on lucky trial and error, and instead scrutinized his own process and the nature of his observers, he might have discovered a number of interesting things about the power of suggestion and human imagination decades before the advent of modern psychology.

Oe

Oe—A small island. Oe is a word borrowed from the Danes, via Scotland and northern England. That said, it was never used with any popularity, and most often seen by modern readers in 19th century poetry.

You know how there are certain words that only seem to pop up in crossword puzzles for people who play crossword puzzles to know and use, but only to use them in crossword puzzles? There’s actually a word for that; it’s called crosswordese. Well there are also words in poetry used by poets for people who read poetry. The word ‘ere’ is a common culprit, since it means ‘before’, but you wouldn’t use ‘ere’ in a modern sentence; you only use it to sound pretentious or poetic since it’s an archaic word that many people just happen to know. Oe is another word like that. It’s chief use is to make lines rhyme or flow better when ‘islet’ will not do.

For an example of ‘oe’ in practice, let’s look at Harold the Dautless – Canto 3, by Sir Walter Scott. The fourth stanza of part X begins:

‘I love my father’s northern land, 
Where the dark pine-trees grow,
And the bold Baltic’s echoing strand
Looks o’er each grassy oe.

Using oe instead of island for rhyme and pacing admittedly feels like cheating to me. That said, the next stanza goes like this:

I love to mark the lingering sun, 
From Denmark loath to go,
And leaving on the billows bright,
To cheer the short-lived summer night,
A path of ruddy glow.

Scott is specifically talking about a Danish island, so oe becomes a reasonable choice. And if you think he shoved a reference to Denmark in his poem to sell us on one rhyme, then you should know the words ‘Denmark’ and ‘Danish’ appear three times separately in Canto 3 alone, and the word ‘Dane’ appears five times. And this isn’t even the Canto where Harold discovers his page is a crossdressing Danish woman who’s disregarding the norms of society to follow her love across the sea. Maybe his use of the word ‘oe’ is bogus, but if that’s the case then I have to admire his commitment to selling us on a single word.

Here’s a small bit of trivia before you go. The Faeroe islands, owned by Denmark, might literally translate to før öe or ‘sheep island’. It probably does not. It’s probably a case of Gaelic people calling the land fearrann, meaning ‘land’ to the Nords who attached the Nordic word oyar which means ‘islands’ to it. And because those words are meaningless to our English ears, we slapped the word ‘islands’ on the back, giving us the ‘land islands islands’. As funny as that is, I still prefer sheep island. Even if the origin is a bit wooly.