Panjam, a male idol of the Oroungou tribes of Africa; his wife is Alēka, and his priests are called panjans. Panjam is the special protector of kings and governments.
Panjandrum (The Grand), and village potentate or Brummagem magnate. The word occurs in S. Foote’s farrago of nonsense, which he wrote to test the memory of old Macklin, who said in a lecture “he had brought his own memory to such perfection that he could learn anything by rote on once hearing it.”
He was the Great Panjandrum of the place.—Percy Fitzgerald.
*** The squire of a village is the Grand Panjandrum, and the small gentry the Picninnies, Joblillies, and Garyulies.
Foote’s nonsense lines are these:
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. “What! no soap?” So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber! and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heel of their boots.—S. Foote, The Quarterly Review, xcv. 516, 517 (1854).
Pan´ope (3 syl.), one of the nereids. Her “sisters” are the sea-nymphs. Panopê was invoked by sailors in storms.
Sleek Panope with all her sisters played.
Milton, Lycidas, 95 (1638).
Pansy Osmund, daughter of Mr. Osmund and Madame Merle, but ignorant who her mother is. After her father’s second marriage, the girl, who has been brought up by the nuns, is extremely fond of her step-mother, and when she grows under her fostering care into a lovely woman, becomes attached to Edward Rosier, a man of small fortune. Her father, cold and hard as stone, decrees that she shall marry an English lord, and upon her refusal, sends her back to the convent.—Henry James, Jr., Portrait of a Lady (1881).
Pantag´ruel´, king of the Dipsodes (2 syl.), son of Gargantua, and last of the race of giants. His mother, Badebec, died in giving him birth. His paternal grandfather was named Grangousier. Pantagruel was a lineal descendant of Fierabras, the Titans, Goliath, Polypheme (3 syl.), and all the other giants traceable to Chalbrook, who lived in that extraordinary period noted for its “week of three Thursdays.” The word is a hybrid, compounded of the Greek panta (“all”), and the Hagarene word gruel (“thirsty”). His immortal achievement was his “quest of the oracle of the Holy Bottle.”—Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, ii. (1533).