Proprioception [ˈpɹopɹiːoˌsɛpʃən], from Latin proprius (one’s own) and perception = the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body.

I came across the word proprioception while reading Richard Robinson very interesting book, Why the toast always lands butter side down – the Science of Murphy’s Law. Proprioception involves knowing where your limbs are, he explains, vital information that enables us to walk, run and stand upright. Apparently if you proprioception malfunctions, you might believe that one or more of your limbs belongs to someone else rather than you.

The book contains some interesting suggestions about how our brains process information – most of the data we receive from our senses is ignored by our concious minds and we construct our experience of the world largely based on past experience, guess work and emotion. So we generally see what we expect to see, hear what we expect to hear, and so on.

This suggests to me that one reason we may find the foreign languages difficult to understand is that we’re less able to rely on the past experience and guess work, as we would in our native tongue.

Today’s word, moustache, (mustache in American English) comes via the French moustache, the Italian mostaccio or the Spanish mostacho, from the Medieval Greek moustakion, a diminutive of mystax, “upper lip, moustache”, which is related to mastax, “jaws, mouth”, lit. “that with which one chews”.

This week there have been quite a lot of blokes with huge beards or impressive moustaches wandering round town. I’ve been wondering why – ZZ Top aren’t performing here, as far as I know. Today I discovered the reason – the World Beard and Moustache Championship is currently being held at the Brighton Centre (I kid you not). I saw some impressive beards and moustaches (attached to their owners, of course) when I went past earlier.

Here are a couple of facial hair-related factoids for you: shaving become general among the Romans in 450 BC, partly to avoid being held by the beard during close combat, and ever since Pope Leo III shaved off his beard in 795 AD, most Roman Catholic clergy have been clean shaven.

Source: Online Etymology Dictionary

Today’s word, oology, refers to the study of eggs, especially bird’s eggs. It also covers the collecting of bird’s eggs and the study of their breeding habits, and their nests, a practice sometimes known as caliology.

Oology is sometimes written oölogy, comes from the Greek ōion, egg, plus ology, a back formation from words like biology.

I came across this word in Jasper Fforde’s wonderfully silly book The Big Over Easy, which centres around the mysterious death of Humpty Dumpty – did he fall or was he pushed?. Oologists are consulted during the investigation.