Knister
And Other Invented Words

I don’t remember coming up with these words, or where these made-up words to describe what I saw or felt or chewed or disliked came from.

“Knister” was my word for the marks that the perhaps a little-too-tight elastic bands in my socks left on my legs when I (or Mom) took them off. Sort of a skin-indentation—a little rough-edged circular ravine around the ankle or calf. Knister.

They’re sometimes called sock marks in English, actually a sign (at least in adults) of edema. As a kid, with no excess water in sight, they meant that the elastic bands in my socks were simply a little too tight.

Leaving knister.

I had completely forgotten this (and never would have remembered on my own) when Mom Lisbet told me not long before she died that I used to come up with words, often very good ones, she added, for things. Knister was the best. I was fourish at the time.

 “Degkött,” she said, was another one.

Degkött translates to “dough meat” in English, and it was my name for a certain kind of meat (boiled meat, in some sort of stew, as I recall and now get an image of along with an unpleasant taste of in my long-time vegan mouth as I write this) that no matter how much you chewed it, the meat would not reduce in size but remain this big, doughy lump that you chewed away on since it was (and insisting on remaining) too large to swallow. After a hundred or so mastications the doughmeat had lost all traces of flavor as well—not by any stretch my favorite food.

At times I spit it back out onto my plate. “Ulf,” Lisbet would growl, “Manners.”

“Can’t help it,” I’d complain. “I can’t swallow it.”

“Well, cut it up into smaller pieces then.”

“All right.”

And eventually, coaxed and coached parentally, I’d get it down. There was never any question of not having to eat it. Money and food cost was still an issue in 1950s Sweden.

This one, doughmeat, I do remember. At nine or so, living in our little northern Swedish cottage, I’d come home from school and ask Mom what she’d cooked for dinner. She’d tell me. Degkött, I’d answer. Yes, she agreed. I don’t remember what she called the dish but, as I said, not my favorite. Dad must have liked it though for we had it often enough; either that or it was cost-effective—cheap meat, in other words.

I did stage a protest once: refused to eat it. Mom took a philosophical stance. “All right,” she said. “You don’t have to eat it, but you can’t leave the table until you do.” Dad nodded in agreement. There was no leaving the table until my plate was clean. Parental agreement. Doomed.

Oh, man. And as the doughmeat got colder and colder it, naturally, grew less and less appetizing. So there I sat. Watching it grow colder. If memory serves I lasted about two hours before—by a Gargantuan act of will—I did indeed cut the thing up into very small pieces and one by one swallowed them to clean my plate.

“Good job,” said Mom, keeping a straight face.

Dad had long since left the kitchen.

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Much later in life—Los Angeles in the 1990s—I made up another word. This was the name of the star that in two of my songs had been my childhood sun. Casting about for a good name for this star I simply grabbed a word out of the air: Aldebar. Aldebar. It felt right, sounded right. And it was my word, an Ulf-Word, a word which I for a few years afterwards remained absolutely sure was an Ulf original. Until.

Until.

One day, and for no reason I recall, I decided to Google it: “Aldebar”. Just for the hell of it, I guess.

“Aldebaran”, answered Google. “A red giant, cooler than our sun with a surface temperature of 3,900 K, but with a radius of about 44 times the sun’s it is over 400 times more luminous.

“It spins very, very slowly and takes 520 of our days to complete one single rotation.”

“Oh, my God.” Reading this sent shivers through my body. I knew for a fact that I had never, ever, in this life, come across Aldebaran, and I remember very clearly fetching Aldebar, my childhood sun, not out of memory but out of that much larger satchel we call imagination.

Well, I realized (with another shiver), past-life memory must have leaked. It’s one of those incidents that keeps life interesting.

As a really cool aside, the belt of Orion (my favorite constellation that also happens to house Betelgeuse—my for-a-long-time favorite star), this belt, I later discovered, if extended draws a line straight up to Aldebaran (which is almost as bright as Betelgeuse).

Yeah, how cool is that?

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