Desquamation has always been one of my
favorite words. I first encountered it as a young
lad while reading the paperback edition of the 1986
Guinness Book of World Records. It appears there several times, most always as part of the
caveats accompanying
World Records having to do with being
under water for
a very long time.
The Guinness caveats were extremely entertaining; legal manueverings to avoid being sued if someone, say, attempted to best the record for stacking cinder blocks on his/her head.
I always assumed desquamation meant something like "being waterlogged to death" or "drowning through the skin". I had visions of people playing Monopoly under water for a week...and just as they were about to collect someone's final dollar as rent, desquamation! They swell up like sponges, skin splitting; a fatal case of prune hands right in front of the horrified eyes of Guinness arbitrators. Now this was World Record breaking at it's best: risking exotic and horrible death for the sake of bragging rights.
It wasn't until many years later that I discovered that desquamation meant "having your skin peel off". That, while certainly gross, is comparatively lacking in the drama department.
Maybe the "loss of innocence" that marks the transition from child to adult is, at its core, a matter of vocabulary. The mundane natures of treasured words are revealed, and the world loses a bit of its magic.
Thanks to the Guinness Book of World Records for making an eight-year-old kid see the world as a thing of endless wonder.