A Fourth Essay of Words Beginning with P

In this essay I plan to explore piedra, pipa, piepowder and piperazine. Piepowder has replaced planchet because I have already written on planchet. Then, I think I will need to do a Latin/Greek root essay on "pand/pend," before leaving the "p's" for a long time.

1. When I first saw the word piedra in a freerice.com list, I immediately thought of the Spanish word for "stone" and looked for that definition. Of course, it wasn't in the list, and I got the word wrong. So, I had to search it out. It is a technical term relating to the colonization of the hair shaft that results in firm, irregular nodules. Ah, so those are the little "stones" or "pebbles." If the nodule is dark, it is called "black piedra," due to Piedra (ia)hortae, an ascomycetous fungus; if white, it is called "white piedra," and indicates the presence of Trichosporon beigelii." Here is an article. And here is a blowup picture of a hair shaft with a black piedra. This article tells of a study conducted on some children with white piedra in New England (the study says that the condition is rare in America). Rather than shaving the head in order to get rid of the condition (the former remedy), the article contends that piedra can be eliminated by an "oral azole antifungal" and some "azole antifungal shampoo." Good to know...

3. Piperazine is, in a word, an anthelmintic, or a substance that kills and helps expel worms from the body. The word goes back to the late 1880s in English, though piperine is yet older. I go back to piperine because the root of the word has to do with "pepper," and there isn't an obvious reason why piperazine relates, in some way, to pepper. Its molecular structure is different, etc. But the definition of piperine is "a strongly basic liquid with an unpleasant odor whose molecule is a saturated six-membered ring." Ah, so that is the key--it smells unpleasant, sort of like pepper. By the way, the word piperitious means "peppery" or "pungent." It is synonymous with piperaceous, though piperaceous now more commonly describes the pepper family (Piperaceae), comprising aromatic, herbaceous shrubs, plants, lianas and small trees which produce products used as pungent spices. [A liana by the way is a climbing and twining plant abounding in tropical forests. Oh, a good synonym for something "climbing" is scandent. Here is a picture of a cultivated liana from Cairns, Queensland, Australia, which has an intriguing woody stem.] Here is a brief page on piperazine, which tells us that it is used to treat common roundworms (ascariasis) and pinworms (enterobiasis; oxyuriasis). Oh, by the way, the Greek word for "worm" is helmins, from which we get the word anthelmintic--something that stands "against the worms." Sometimes a person needs just that..

3. The word piepowder, a last minute replacement for planchet, which I have already described, takes us back to the medieval merchant law of Englan. Actually, the concept, though flourishing 700-900 years ago, is undergoing a re-evaluation in 2008, so you can get in "on the ground floor," so to speak, of this fascinating word. The word is derived from the Old French piepoudreux, a stranger, peddler or hawker who attends fairs. Underlying this word are the French words for "dusty foot," a word suggested because of the dust which would normally accompany these itinerant sellers, on their feet as well as the rest of their bodies. Indeed, the Scots developed the term dustyfoot around 1400 to describe a "wayfarer, traveller, esp. a travelling pedlar or merchant." In one usage it could even apply to Death personified.

So, a piepowder was, originally, an itinerant merchant or trader. He participated in commerical fairs all over England and Europe to sell wares. But disputes arose all the time in these fairs, and there was need for quick adjudication of the disputes. So, a Court of Piepowders was set up, to give summary justice at the fairs. Thus, the term piepowder justice emerged to describe a kind of summary adjudication that, probably, was not too "just."

I mentioned that the term and court has received a lot of attention in scholarship of late. Why? Because the traditional view of these courts has come under increasingly effective attack of late. The "traditional" view is that the Courts of Piepowder were more like arbitral forums than what we think of as courts. They dispensed what was called the "lex mercatoria" or merchant law, which this older theory saw as a collection of unwritten, international customary practices that helped resolve disputes at fairs. The "romantic" notion of such a court, and fair, then, was that it was a largely unregulated phenomenon (i.e., the "state" or "town" didn't intervene in it) that was only controlled by the itinerant judges of this mercantile court. Merchants, thus, solve their own problems. This is, as I said, a rather romantic notion, and it has been seriously called into question by a fascinating law review article: "From St. Ives to Cyberspace: The Modern Distortion of the Medieval 'Law Merchant," 21 AmU Int'l L R 685 (2006) by Mr. Stephen E. Sachs. Sachs looks closely at the surviving documents describing one of the most popular of these medieval fairs, at St. Ives, and concludes that rather than being sort of "free flow" activities, guided only by some unwritten customary law of the evolving merchant guilds, it was, in fact, a highly-regulated entity, regulated mostly by the town in which it took place. This, of course, blows out of the water those corporate types in 2008 who would like to draw on the "Court of Piepowder" and the experience of the romantic "Lex Mercatoria" to justify a hands-off approach to the market today. Fascinating all around, isn't it?

I still have pipa, to do, and I might as well find a few other "p" words--but not today. Thanks for joining me.

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