To be told that onycha is made of opercula is not always helpful. ‘Take unto thee sweete spices, Stacte, and Onicha, and Galbanum,’ says the Bible (Exodus, xxx 34). The words are poetic, as referring to something oriental that we don’t know from everyday life.
Perhaps that is why Edith Sitwell used onycha towards the end of her poem ‘Long Steel Grass’: ‘she/ Heard our voices thin and shrill/ As the steely grasses’ thrill,/ Or the sound of the onycha/ When the phoca has the pica.’ Not much assistance, as far as sense goes, can be expected there, since a phoca is a kind of seal, and the pica is a kind of bulimia, taking its name from the magpie. But Dame Edith probably remembered onycha from the Bible, which gives it a resonance useful to her kind of poetry.
It is the dictionary that tells us that onycha is an ‘ingredient of incense consisting of the opercula of marine molluscs’. My husband knew that operculum means ‘lid’, as in the name for the bony cover that fish have for their gills. I knew it meant ‘lid’ because I have a copy of that engaging book Opercula by Shephard Thomas Taylor (under the pen-name Aesculapius Junior), a collection of sketches of London coal-hole plates made in the 1860s by a medical student.
This knowledge did not tell either of us that the opercula of certain marine molluscs emit a penetrating aroma when burnt. Is there still a trade in them? Some Spectator reader must know. The Greek word onycha is the same as the word for ‘onyx’, but in the ‘mollusc’ sense it was adopted because of the resemblance of the operculum to a fingernail. The Latin Vulgate Bible gives ungula, ‘claw’, for onycha in one place.
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