I was rereading a Nero Wolfe mystery recently, and the word “rigmarole” jumped off the page at me. Every once in awhile that happens; I notice a word in a way I never did before, become curious about it, like it. It’s similar to the experience we’ve all had, of writing down a word so many times that it begins to look wrong to us no matter how we do it and we begin to be insecure about spelling.

You don’t hear rigmarole often in colloquial speech. When you do, it has four syllables instead of its visible three. Like “Tijuana,” the word somehow acquired an invisible short “a” as a second syllable. I’m sure that insertion is about our mouth physiology; it’s just plain easier to say these words with the extra vowel. Okay. I note that New Yorkers make two syllables out of “museum” (museem) and one out of “ruin” (rune). I heard a flight attendant recently, and she managed one syllable out of “carry-on” (kyon) and “oxygen” (unspellable). Obviously this syllable quantity issue is flexible.

It’s easy to find the definition of rigmarole, online or in print, but its origin doesn’t pop right up. That’s because it didn’t start out as a word but as a phrase: ragman roll. Rigmarole now means a long unintelligible story; loose, disjointed talk or writing; incoherent harangue; nonsense.

According to my brief research, a “ragman roll” denoted a legal document recording a (presumably long) list of offenses.