The poet John Dryden wrote, “Words are but pictures of our thoughts,” and a couple of new ones – pogonotomy and xylarium – recently roused some mental illustrations.  A xylarium is a library of wood as described by the Australian Broadcasting Company in a cleverly titled article, “Growing Interest in Wood Libraries Sees Tree Lovers Converge at Local Branches.”  “The Australia National University has a leading xylarium in its Fenner School of Environment & Society that’s been growing for the past century.”  One of its prime objectives is supporting world-wide efforts to control the illegal timber trade since “wood identification is central to determining whether timber is the timber it’s being sold as.”  The xylarium itself “can be viewed as a giant library of world timbers.  Samples from around the globe were sourced during its establishment and each room has been given a regional name based on its materials. English oak was selected for the British room, while the Californian room was mainly built from redwood.”

Let’s clear up potential confusion surrounding the term pogonotomy.   Some rock music fans agree with Webster’s definition of “pogo” as an intransitive verb dating from 1977 that means “to dance by hopping up and down” as in “punk rockers pogoing madly.”  The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) agrees but adds a noun definition: “a recreational device on which a person can jump,” while older casual observers might suspect that the word refers to the comic strip Pogo no longer appearing in newspaper funny pages.  However, Webster’s says “pogo” meant “beard” in Greece and pogonotomy actually means “the cutting of a beard, shaving.”  The Online Etymology Dictionary (another OED) takes it further, saying the noun pogo, as in the toy, dates to 1921 and was “originally a registered trademark (Germany, 1919), of unknown origin, perhaps formed from elements of the names of the designers.”  The bouncing device was patented by two Germans, Max Poling and Ernst Gottshall, in 1920.  They’d doubtlessly be thrilled to know about Extreme Pogo, a modern “action sport which involves riding and performing tricks on extreme pogo sticks, defined as such by their durability and potential for height.”  Extreme sticks forego steel springs for pneumatic technology and “giant rubber elastomers.”  Consequently, the durability record is  20 hours and 13 minutes of continual bounces (206,864 total), and the Pogopalooza World Championship website reported that Dalton Smith, considered by many fans to be “the greatest pogoer of all time,” reached 12 feet in the air in 2021.

The etymological OED definition of pogo included the “newspaper comic strip of the same name, featuring Pogo Possum … by Walt Kelly, debuted in 1948 and ran daily through 1975.”  For Americans who lived in that era, the word pogo still brings to mind Kelly’s classic comic strip.  The Britannia says Pogo “was exceptionally well-drawn, and the text material was witty and highly literate. Kelly frequently included animal characters that closely resembled prominent political figures of the day.”  Did he ever!  Comic Book Resources, which calls Pogo “one of this century’s most influential comic strip series,” and noted that it’s “set in the Okefenokee Swamp, the … entire cast of characters were never-aging, anthropomorphic animals, ranging from possums and alligators to porcupines and tigers.”  As described by Wikipedia, the main characters included “Pogo Possum (An amiable, humble, philosophical, personable, everyman opossum),” “Albert Alligator (An exuberant, dimwitted, irascible, and egotistical alligator … often the comic foil for Pogo),” “Churchy LaFemme (A mud turtle by trade; he enjoys composing songs and poems, often with ridiculous and abrasive lyrics and nonsense rhymes. His name is a play on the French phrase Cherchez la femme, ‘Look for the woman’),” and “Miz Mam’selle Hepzibah (A beautiful, coy French skunk modeled after a woman who later became Kelly’s second wife”).

The characters based on real people set Pogo apart and made it so topical: “Tammananny Tiger (A political operator, named in allusion to Tammany Hall, which was represented as a tiger in 19th-century editorial cartoons by Thomas Nast),” “Wiley Catt: A wild-eyed, menacing, hillbilly bobcat who smokes a corncob pipe, carries a shotgun, and lives alone in a dilapidated, Tobacco Road-type shanty …. During the ‘Red scare’ era of the 1950s, he temporarily morphed into his ‘cousin’ Simple J. Malarkey, a parody and caricature of Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy”), and “Miss Sis Boombah (A matronly, cheerleading Rhode Island Red hen, who is a gym coach and fitness enthusiast usually attired in tennis shoes and a pullover. Boombah arrives at the swamp to conduct a survey for ‘Dr. Whimsy’ on ‘the sectional habits of U.S. mailmen,’ a neat parody of The Kinsey Reports.”  Kelly was raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the town takes great pride in that.  The Bridgeport Public Library’s biography of him noted that “[t]hough by 1970 Pogo had fallen somewhat out of style, it experienced a revival of sorts when environmentalists organizing the first Earth Day adopted as one of their own the most famous line from the strip: ‘We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us.’”

Pogonotomy evokes razors, including the philosophical short-cut kind.  Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”) has been mentioned in this space recently, and like many other similar “razors,” it was inspired by William of Ockham (AKA Occam) whose famous razor boils down to “The simplest explanation is usually the best one.” In his A.Word.A.Day blog article on Occam’s Razor, Anu Garg wrote, “Why razor? Because Ockham’s razor shaves away unnecessary assumptions. Ockham’s razor has applications in fields as diverse as medicine, religion, crime, and literature. Medical students are told, for example, ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’.” Occam lived in the early 1300s and so did Walter Chatton, his primary philosophical nemesis.  According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Chatton responded to Occam with an Anti-Razor: “If an explanation does not satisfactorily determine the truth of a proposition, and you are sure that the explanation so far is true, some other explanation must be required.”  In other words, seek more evidence instead of less.  Moreover, “it is common to find Chatton … criticizing Ockham using the same sorts of semantic ideas that Ockham himself popularized. His unyielding attacks on Ockham bore him fruit intellectually and otherwise: we have evidence of Ockham changing his mind on several seminal issues as a direct result of Chatton’s critiques.” 

Such razors abound, including those in “11 Philosophical Razors to Simplify Your Life” by Chris Meyer at mindcollection.com, such as Hitchen’s Razor is “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence,” Riker’s Razor is “If someone’s incompetence is too staggering to be true, they’re most likely faking it and you should find out why,” and Jung’s Razor is “If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences — and infer the motivation.”  A personal favorite is Feynman’s Razor, named after Nobel laureate Richard Feynman who “was known for his exceptional ability to explain complex scientific ideas with clarity: “If you can’t explain something simply, then you don’t really understand it.”   Carl Sagan didn’t have a razor, but he did have “Sagan’s Standard”: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  Meyer noted that “Sagan also put together the Baloney Detection Kit, a set of critical thinking tools that go well with Sagan’s Standard …. an informal set of thinking tools and techniques for evaluating arguments and detecting falsehoods.”  These consist of “Cognitive Tools” such as “Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the ‘facts,’” “Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view,” and “Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.”  Sagan also cited Occam’s Razor and a long list of “Logical fallacies” (“ad hominem … attacking the arguer and not the argument,” “appeal to ignorance —the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa,” and “observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses.”   

Words can be used for good and evil.  The introduction to the 1953 volume of the Pogo strips, R.C. Harvey wrote how this was when Senator Joe McCarthy’s political power and communist witch hunts were peaking. He “was a genius at manipulating the news media …. when some allegation of his was proven completely wrong, McCarthy simply shifted his attack and targeted a new victim.”  That’s why we need all the razors available to us, for as Pogo said, “Now is the time for all good men to come to.”