Supernumerary

Señora and I spent the Fourth of July day floating in the pool of some friends and munching between dips. As people are wont to do under these pleasant circumstances, aided by the benumbing influence of a warm sun and cold libations to the deity of summer, our conversation ranged over a wide range of topics.  Basically anything that popped into our minds. Ms. Sikeston related a story about a male relative that had 3 nipples.  For obvious reasons, he was somewhat embarrassed to go to the beach.

I then began to harp on a pet peeve of mine. There are at least two movies I know of with characters with extra nipples/breasts. One is the James Bond film, The Man With The Golden Gun, the other being the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, set in part, on Mars, Total Recall. In the Bond movie, James is tracking an assassin for hire.  The only data he has about him, besides gender, is that he has a third nipple.  Bond goes as far as to have Q create a prosthetic nipple for him to use in an attempt to impersonate the villain.  In Total Recall, due to poor screening of solar radiation in part of the Mars colony, there is a community of humans with various mutations.  One of these is a prostitute – with a heart of gold, I am sure – with 3 breasts.

My pet peeve is this.  Almost always, if not always, when humans have extra nipples/breasts they are along the milk line.  Think of cats and dogs with multiple nipples.  They are in bilateral lines, nipples parading one after the other from the anterior to the posterior portion of the animal. In the Bond movie the villain’s third nipple is on level with the normal nipple, but towards the centerline of the body.  In Total Recall, the prostitute’s third breast is slightly below her normal complement, but directly in the centerline of her body. In all probability, facts that bother no one on this planet of nearly 8 billion souls… except me.

In the middle of my rant, I used the phrase supernumerary nipples, a word no one there had heard before… supernumerary, silly, not nipple. Señora, challenged me on the authenticity of the word,  a privilege she is able to enjoy for a little while longer. I foresee this SCOTUS regressing us to a time when the female of the species owed absolute and unquestionable obedience to their husbands. But I digress. She asked me to spell it.  At that point I became a little flustered as the term had just flowed out of my memory banks.  I began to spell extranumerary which is a synonym sometimes used for supernumerary, but is not in the ole Merriam-Webster.

I am reasonably sure that I did not convince anyone there to board this particular car of my unending train of pet peeves.

The term supernumerary is also often applied to other body parts in excess such as  teeth, digits, etc.

And now that you have spent six paragraphs of your precious time reading about my pet peeve, here is the dictionary definition of supernumerary:

1. 1. 1. Entry 1 – adjective
         • exceeding the usual, stated, or prescribed number as in – a supernumerary tooth
         • not enumerated among the regular components of a group and especially of a military organization
         • exceeding what is necessary, required, or desired
         • more numerous
      2. Entry 2 – Noun
         • a supernumerary person or thing
         • an actor employed to play a walk-on

I had thought I would do supernumerary as a Word of the Day, but then I would have had to jump through hoops to share my pet peeve with the world.

And so it goes.

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