4 June—An op-ed I read the other day promoting the presidential candidacy of the autocratic, authoritarian, crypto-fascist incumbent governor of Florida made me think of meconium. No, that’s not a typo for encomium.

Monitor readers may know that meconium, from the Greek μηκώνιον (mekonion) meaning little poppy, is an older word for opium—the coagulated juice of the poppy—and, more likely, a somewhat newer word for the earliest excrementitious substance (a.k.a. stool) passed by an infant after birth, before the newborn brat has had a chance to experience the pleasures real food and drink.

Since it consists solely of the neonate’s pre-parturition intrauterine diet of intestinal epithelial cells, mucus, amniotic fluid, bile, water, and lanugo, meconium is viscous, sticky, and dark—rather like tar. It’s also almost odorless. Remember?

(If you’ve observed the progress of neonatal poop, you may recall that within a few days of birth the tarry meconium evolves into a malodorous yellow mess. That’s the milk or formula doing its thing. But I digress.)

As for lanugo, then, it’s from the Latin lana, meaning wool, and is the ultra-soft, ultra-fine hair, down, or fuzz that covers, say, a peach and—more specifically—a fetus.

Now for some (more) fun. Shuffle the first five letters of meconium and you find yourself with encomium. English gets the word unaltered from the Latin, which gets it from the Greek ἐγκώμιον (enkomion) meaning praise. That’s precisely what it means in English, although it’s normally construed to mean high praise.

Thus, what meconium and encomium have in common—in addition to their letters, of course—is the purely, intensely fecal nature of both, especially the perfidious meconial encomium in support of political candidates . . .