pajlo

Pajlo is the dry stalk left after the grain is threshed out: the bedding, the thatch, the stuffing. It is not the drinking straw, which is a trinkotubeto, and it is not hay. Hay is fojno, cut green grass grown to be eaten. The distinction is invisible to most city speakers of any language and completely obvious to anyone who has had to buy either, and Esperanto keeps it as carefully as English does.

The scarecrow finally gets his stuffing. This course built a birdotimigilo at rank 2180 and gave it a whole graded reader, La birdotimigilo, back in chapter 23. The one thing the story could not say was what the thing was made of, because the word for it sat 259 ranks above that story's ceiling of 2,200, and a story that reaches past its ceiling is not a graded reader any more. So the scarecrow stood in its field with a hat, a coat and a discreet silence about its insides. It is stuffed with pajlo, and now the sentence exists: birdotimigilo plena de pajlo.

That is what the rank bands actually feel like from the inside. You do not run out of ideas, you run out of permitted words, and the chapter that unlocks one of them quietly finishes a sentence somebody wrote three chapters earlier.

The adjective and the family. Pajla means made of straw or straw-coloured, which is a pale yellow: pajla ĉapelo a straw hat, pajlaj haroj straw-blond hair. A single stalk is a pajlero, using the -er- suffix for one piece of a mass, and it is the word in the Esperanto rendering of the proverb about the last straw, la lasta pajlero. Pajltegmento is a thatched roof. Pajlamaso is a haystack, or rather a strawstack, and the pedants will tell you so.