Today's Word I'll Be Lucky to Use before I Die

Rictus (RICK tus), "a gaping grin or grimace," "an open mouth," primarily used (according to Merriam-Webster) for the gape of a bird's mouth. From Latin ringi, "to open the mouth."

Roger Ebert managed to find a use for it in his review of the new Phantom of the Opera movie. I have to admit the movie looks execrable to me, but the word is well used by Ebert to describe Lon Chaney's character in the original film version of the tale:

"Lon Chaney's Phantom in the 1925 silent had a hideously damaged face, his mouth a lipless rictus, his eyes off-center in gouged-out sockets. When Christine tore off his mask, she was horrified, and so was the audience."

The word's cursory morphological similarity to "rectum," which actually has no etymological relation to "rictus," imparts a usefully distasteful undertone to the word.

"Rectum" instead is a truncation of intestinum rectum, or "straight intestine," so named in contrast to the convolution of the rest of the intestinal tract.

"Gape" is from Old Norse gapa, "to open the mouth," and has cognates in other West Germanic languages.

"Execrable," I am surprised to learn, comes from Latin execrari, "to curse, to hate," instead of being related to "excrement" as I had erroneously presumed. Merriam-Webster reports the spelling of this etymon as exsecrari, while the Online Etymology Dictionary spells it execrari. I couldn't find a preference one way or the other in an online search, and some sources listed both spellings. I'll have to burrow into my sister's Latin dictionaries over the Holiday and look it up, but as the Online Etymology Dictionary notes, the word comes from ex–, "out of," and secrari, "to consecrate, to make holy."

NOTE: Ebert also uses the word "Neurasthenic" in the review. Perhaps he, too, is a reader of Incongruous Juxtaposition Between Adjective & Noun.

RANDOM OBSERVATION:Holy cow did Lon Chaney make a lot of movies in a 17-year career.