“During the fruit season, we carry the fruits and bring them into the house. We carry, bring the fruits into the house, and eat them as usual. We bring them into the house…from each of these seven, seven, seven; from each species seven seeds are taken. One closes the skin; it is empty inside, since the seed has already been eaten…about a half an hour passes…earlier we had eaten the seeds; now the seeds have returned, the fruits have become hard. We eat again, swallowing the seeds once again.”

“As a result, this verb is considered a hapax legomenon, a word that occurs only once in a text, an author’s oeuvre, or a language’s entire written record.

The Satyricon contains a number of hapaxes, including “bacalusias” (possibly “sweetmeat” or ”lullabies”) and “baccibalum” (“attractive woman”).

The Song of Songs, which is the last section of the Tanakh and part of the Christian Old Testament, contains an especially high number of hapax legomena, forcing scholars to rely on the Greek version for translation hints. The Song of Songs is, at the surface, a story of love between a man and a woman, in which they describe their passion for each other. It has the greatest number of hapaxes in the Bible, rendering the book enigmatic and mysterious. For instance, in 4.13, the male compares the lady’s “selahim” to an orchard. The term is a hapax, but scholars have suggested “branches” as a translation, such that the text describes the woman’s body:

Your breasts are two fawns,

twins of a gazelle,

grazing in a field of lilies.

…

Your navel is the moon’s

bright drinking cup.

May it brim with wine!

…

Your vulva a rounded crater”

“At her hob or her table, hospitality often holds hands with its brother word hostility. Both are birthed from ghos-ti, their ancient Indo-European root, which meant host, guest and stranger—the trio of roles through which we shift all our lives. So apt that this inescapable flux was once contained in a single word.”