2. Charles Kinbote on John shade: "He wore snowboots, his vicuña collar was up, his abundant gray hair looked berimed in the sun."
Vicuña is a relative to the camel and the alpaca and by 1960 it was close to extinction. Why would Nabokov have stressed Shade's non-ecological tastes? Were vicuña collars fashionable then?

 

The word I was exploring was "collar,"  related to "clavicle," "torquated beauty," "ruff," "frill," "necklace" -  but "dewlap" "vicunã" and "berimed" deserved an additional google-search.  Results (inconclusive):

 

collar 
c.1300, from O.Fr. coler "neck, collar" (12c., Mod.Fr. collier), from L. collare "necklace, band or chain for the neck," from collum "the neck," from PIE *kwol-o- "neck" (cf. O.N., M.Du. hals "neck"), lit. "that on which the head turns," from base *kwel- "move round, turn about" (see cycle). As a verb, from 1550s, "to grab (someone) by the collar or neck;" meaning "to capture" is attested from 1610s. In figurative senses, white-collar is first attested 1919; blue-collar from 1950.
collar 
The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English | 2006 | © The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English 2009, originally published by Oxford University Press 2009.

 

col·lar / ˈkälər/
• n. 1. a band of material around the neck of a shirt, dress, coat, or jacket, either upright or turned over and generally an integral part of the garment.; 
a band of leather or other material put around the neck of a domestic animal, esp. a dog or cat ; a colored marking resembling a collar around the neck of a bird or other animal; a heavy rounded part of the harness worn by a draft animal, which rests at the base of its neck on the shoulders. 2. a restraining or connecting band, ring, or pipe in machinery. 3. Bot. the part of a plant where the stem joins the roots.• v. 1. [tr.] put a collar on. 2. [tr.] inf. seize, grasp, or apprehend (someone): police collared the culprit. approach aggressively and talk to (someone who wishes to leave): he collared a departing guest for some last words.

As long as it has been in English the word collar has meant something that went around people’s necks, usually as part of their clothing. That was about 600 years ago. We got it from French and the French in turn got it from Latin; the usual old story. But the Romans built the word collar from something else, even though they usually wore togas which didn’t have collars. The reason Romans chose this word for something that went around the neck was was because their word for “neck” was collum.
Now it may seem that a person’s neck holds up their head just as a column does the roof of an old Roman building, but the two words are different and come from different roots.
The collum that gave us collar came from roots in Indo-European that meant to “turn around.” So it’s because we can turn our heads on our necks that the neck got called the collum. This idea that the neck might be named because of its ability to turn isn’t unique to Latin. In Old English one of the words for “neck” was hales. That word also derives from the same Indo-European root related “to turn” and in fact is also related to the word wheel.
The word neck did exist in Old English as hnecca but it really referred to the back of the neck, just as the throat might be thought of as referring to the front of the neck today.
The all time champion at turning heads—its own head anyway—is the owl. An owl seems able to turn its head almost like a Barbie doll. Our vertebra have a bunch of little pokey parts sticking out that interlock with the bones above and below in the spinal column to prevent us turning our heads too much and damaging the nerves inside. But an owl needs to be able to turn its head more than we do because it can’t actually turn its eyes in its sockets. An owl’s eyes aren’t round. So an owl has twice as many vertebra in its neck to give it that extra twisting action.
Now an owl doesn’t wear a collar, but dogs do. A quote by that Scottish poet Robbie Burns relates. He wrote:
His locked, letter’d, braw brass collar
Shew’d him the gentleman and scholar.
The “gentleman and scholar” Burns is talking about is a dog and dog collars have been called collars in English just about as long as people’s collars. The first citation though wasn’t for a dog, but for a cat. This was in the 1300s and the cat’s collar was to have a bell. But these were not to be placed on the cat’s neck, but instead on his hals. There’s that Old English “neck” word again and it shows that even well after William the Conqueror’s invasion of 1066, Old English persisted. In fact the cat-collar citation is in a sentence that’s full of Old English alphabetical characters that we don’t recognize anymore; characters not as recognizable as A and B but instead called thorn and yogh. Trying to read it kind of makes your head spin  collar – podictionary 602

 

 

COLLARBONE is related to the scapulae (omoplates) and externum, thanks to the turning of the clavicle
In human anatomy, the clavicle or collar bone is a small bone that serves as a strut between the scapula and the sternum. It makes up part of the shoulder and the pectoral girdle and is palpable in all people, and, in people who have less fat in this region, the location of the bone is clearly visible as it creates a bulge in the skin.
It receives its name from the Latin: clavicula ("little key") because the bone rotates along its axis like a key when the shoulder is abducted.

 

 

1145: wench, marrie she had a better Loue to berime her: Dido

—Romeo and Juliet (1623 First Folio Edition) 

Webster's Online Dictionary

Definition: berimed

Part of Speech	Definition
Verb Past Tense	1. Seldom used past tense conjugation of the verb berime.[Eve - graph theoretic]
Verb Base (berime)	1. To berhyme.[Websters]. 2. Seldom used base verb from the following inflections: beriming, berimed, berimes, berimer, berimers, berimingly and berimedly.[Eve - graph theoretic]
Sources: compiled from various sources, (under license) copyright 2008.

 

 

Computed Synonyms: berimed

Rank  Intensity   Word  Synonyms  Synonyms of synonym  1   4.3397   berimed     berhymed     versed, poetized, chanted, rhymed, rimed     2   4.2095   berimed     poetized     poeticized, versed, rhymed, composed, berhymed     3   2.5097   berimed     rimed     hoared, gelled, jellied, rimmed, iced     4   2.2096   berimed     versed     poemed, rhymed, expert, experienced, skilled     5   1.3095   berimed     rhymed     versed, poemed, rhyming, jingled, lined     6   1.2094   berimed     carolled     chanted, warbled, hymned, chirped, anthemmed     7   1.2094   berimed     chanted     descanted, tuned, carolled, chant, chanting     8   1.2094   berimed     hymned     anthemmed, psalmed, carolled, lauded, praised     9   1.2094   berimed     metricized     metricated     10   1.2094   berimed     tuned     barreled, casked, butted, accommodated, placed     11   1.2093   berimed     descanted     tuned, chanted, aired, strained, trebled     12   1.2092   berimed     lampooned     satired, pamphletted, squibed, libelled, pasquinaded

frill

noun

plural noun

Link to this page:

 

 

frill   (frl) n. 1. A ruffled, gathered, or pleated border or projection, such as a fabric edge used to trim clothing or a curled paper strip for decorating the end of the bone of a piece of meat. 2. A ruff of hair or feathers about the neck of an animal or a bird. 3. A wrinkling of the edge of a photographic film. 4. Informal Something that is desirable but not a necessity; a luxury. See Synonyms at luxury. v. frilled, frill·ing, frills v.tr. 1. To make into a ruffle or frill. 2. To add a ruffle or frill to. v.intr. To become wrinkled along the edge. [Origin unknown.] frilli·ness n. frilly adj.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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frill [frɪl]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

 

Century Dictionary (2 definitions)

1. Having or wearing a torque.
2. In zoology, same as torquate.

–adjective
1. Having or wearing a torque, or neck chain.