Abarat Island Name Meanings
I recently learned that “ninnyhammer” was a real word, so of course I had to go look the rest of them up. About half were nonsense from what I could tell, but here are the ones I did find. Someone let me know if they know more about these or the other ones!!
Definitions from dictionary.com, island descriptions from here.
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2:00 AM – Idjit = idiot: “an utterly foolish or senseless person.” Exactly the person to visit an island which “encourages excessive behavior and a kind of happy foolishness”.
9:00 AM – Qualm Hah = qualm: “a sudden feeling of apprehensive uneasiness; misgiving.” The feeling you would experience traveling from the busy side of the island to the empty one, perhaps.
10:00 AM – Spake: “Speak, verb, spoke or (Archaic) spake”. This island is known for holding “performances of every kind”, including, I’m sure, many spoken ones.
11:00 AM – Nully = null: “without value, effect, consequence, or significance.” Perhaps a commentary on how the objects in the Repository of Rememberance, once held dear, are now useless and worthless?
3:00 PM – The Nonce: “the present, or immediate, occasion or purpose (usually used in the phrase for the nonce).” I’m sure many people stop on this “beautiful, lush, dreamy island” “for the nonce”, especially since its description mentions that the number of people who take naps here “is quite high”.
4:00 PM – Gnomon: “The raised part of a sundial that casts the shadow.” Not so sure of the connection here, except for the general themes of time. More interestingly: “3. Geometry . (formerly) The part of a parallelogram that remains after a similar parallelogram has been taken away from one of its corners.” Soma Plume used to be part of Gnomon but was taken away.
5:00 PM – Soma Plume: This is just a thought, but “Somatic: adjective. Of the body; bodily; physical.” Soma Plume is a burial ground…
6:00 PM – Babilonium = Babylon: “1. An ancient city of SW Asia, on the Euphrates River, famed for its magnificence and culture: capital of Babylonia and later of the Chaldean empire. 2. Any rich and magnificent city believed to be a place of excessive luxury and wickedness.” Yep.
7:00 PM – Scoriae: ”Scoria: noun, plural scoriae. 1. Metallurgy. The refuse, dross, or slag left after melting or smelting metal; scum. 2. Geology. A cinderlike basic cellular lava.” Makes sense for “a mass of lava rock and black dust, with the still active volcano Mount Galigali at its center”.
8:00 PM – Yebba Dim Day: Just that “dim day” is appropriate for 8pm when the sun is just done setting and the day is dimming into night.
10:00 PM – Ninnyhammer: “a fool or simpleton”. Probably a reference to Wolfswinkel.
11:00 PM – Jibarish = Gibberish: “meaningless or unintelligible talk or writing.” An appropriate name for "a place of paradoxes"