When my father once brought up the "gay downfall of Rome" hypothesis, I pointed out that it made much more sense to blame the downfall of Rome on the Christians. After all homosexuality had been celebrated in Rome for centuries, but it wasn't until the Empire became officially Christian that things fell apart completely.
Slovenia is where Italian cuisine meets the German/Austrian and Croato-Bosno-Serbian (i.e. Turco-Balkan) cuisines, with a splash of Hungarian goulash from the country's easter borderlands. So we should be able to find something tasty!
This sounds like a name in a Marx Bros. movie. (Though I must say Walloon sword has a certain something. Isn't CharlesFerdinand our resident Walloon? – If he's not a Habsburg archduke in disguise!)
I poked around the Slovene dictionary and discovered that škarp is there, marked as "usually pl." (i.e. škarpi) and "low vernacular" (code for "people say this at home but don't you dare use it in formal writing"), with the meaning "an old, worn-out shoe" or sometimes (dialectically), just any old shoe.
But next to it was the word škarpa, which is a perfectly respectable word that means "a wall between two different heights of land, to prevent erosion or landslide"; in other words, a scarp or (more commonly) escarpment, which my English dictionary tells me comes from the Italian word scarpa. I think this solves the mystery. When you're soaking up the sauce with you're bread, what you are doing is making a "little scarp", just like on Chained_Bear's beloved fortresses. So you're not doing scarpetta; you are making (i.e. constructing) a scarpetta.
Edit: The escarpment has been repaired. Thanks, Bil!
A low-budget Biblical feature Starring Carlton Feston as the prophet who delivers the message of the not-so-Almighty: "It'd be really nice if thou didst not, y'know like, kill, take things that don't belong to thee, and all that other bad stuff."
Now, let me see if I understand: Czechs find Spanish villages baffling, Germans find Bohemian (i.e. Czech) and Spanish villages baffling, and Anglos find Greek baffling. Very interesting. Slovenes, by the way, also say, To je zame španska vas ("It's a Spanish village to me") to mean "I don't understand a thing about it". (German villages, of course, are typically well-organized and not in the least baffling.)
Interesting citation, Yarb. Gibbon must be using the word in the sense of "disobedient" or perhaps "unruly", if not in the more archaic sense of "wicked".
break (prelom kosti, "break in a bone", prelom besede, "breaking of one's word"); edge, cusp (kmetija na prelomu doline, "a farm at the edge/cusp of the valley"); in printing: page layout (i.e., making the column and page breaks).
So I want to know about the word itself (sorry, guys, that's just the way I am). One translation tool tells me that scarpa means "shoe" in Italian. So when I sponge up the leftover sauce with my bread, am I "doing/making the little shoe"?
I was surprised when I saw the picture, C_b, because I was expecting to see people throwing jelly beans at each other or in some way fighting over jelly beans. I took me a second to realize what you meant by row.
It is a bit of textual gristle, but I had no problem understanding it. A comma might help, as Q. suggests, but I don't think it's necessary. "Espy" is pretentious-cute here, I think. I'd rewrite it this way: "not so much seeing the art galleries or mountain ranges or rivers as seeing the places where cherished friends…" "Espying" could also be replaced by "noticing", which would probably have cleared up any confusion in the first place.
*has to stop self from editing things that no one has asked or is willing to pay to be edited*
… and dykes on bikes! and PFLAG (who always get the loudest cheers)! and leather boys!
*trying to calm down and remember that we're supposed to be post-gay and want houses in the suburbs and official marriages and the right to be open in the army and not just fantasize about men in uniform – but damn, some of those stereotypically queer exuberances are fun*
Yeah, I know June is Gay Pride Month, or if we're being PC, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Month (is that on your list, Rt?), but there's still nothing like looking forward to Pride Day, the parade, and remembering the dramatic events of June 28, 1969. ("You bet, we're revolting!") I can't believe it's been 40 years!
Ha! "Sangfroid the Sanguine" sounds like the name of one of CharlesFerdinand's kings: "In the days of Sangfroid the Sanguine, the country remained at peace for none of his neighbors was able to provoke him to war."
Thanks, Kind-Heartedness! I enjoy your Greek-outs. I have come across (maybe in Heidegger?) the notion of truth as "unconcealedness", and it is interesting, and seems psychologically right, to think of truth as the "opposite" of forgetting.
The art was still valued in certain parts of the US at least as late as the 1970s. I remember going with my parents in 1972 or so to visit relatives in Danville, Virginia, and really enjoying listening to the way people told stories. There was a certain gentility in the way they referred even to things like someone's senility ("she's getting a bit feeble in the head") or alcoholism ("he still likes to take a nip or two now and then"), and I could sense the way they really enjoyed words and the different shades of meaning and emotion that could be conveyed. They were as much concerned with how something was said, and the pleasure they could give their listeners, as with what was being said.
Thanks, C_b! I wonder if other people feel like the art of (face-to-face) conversation is going the way of reading novels and poetry out loud to each other as a form of entertainment and socializing.
A gaffe is a general term for saying something one shouldn't say, something that is a social blunder. It might be something in poor taste, or it might just be the result of ignorance or insensitivity or not thinking before you open your mouth. For example:
"I was so delighted to hear that your son is getting married next month. We all thought he was a 'confirmed bachelor', you know. Who is the lucky girl?"
"His name's Joe, and he's a wonderful young man."
"Oh, I see. Well, times have changed… Excuse me, but I just saw the Cohens and simply must wish them a Merry Christmas."
I am not certain about the value of the Old Slavic ǫ – it's been decades since I studied these things – but I think it was essentially a nasalized o, more or less like the French vowel.
An anecdotalist is someone who is known for telling (hopefully, entertaining) anecdotes. It is a perfectly good word. I don't know how long it has been in English, but it reflects a time, which may seem like ancient history now, when people used to meet face to face and entertain each other by telling amusing stories and having interesting conversations (a person who knew how to keep up their end of a conversation was called a good conversationalist). People do something similar on social-networking sites today, except that they usually don't know who it is they are conversing with and skills at things like conversation and telling amusing anecdotes are not highly valued. Today, it seems, people prefer to tweet at each other.
One who has mastered the art of bullshitting is known as a bullshit artist. Seanahan has given you the proper term for one who is renowned for making up words, but if you are looking for the word for someone who generally makes up stories, you might try fabulist or (if it's a pathological tendency) mythomaniac. I am not sure what you are trying to say by suggesting the word "inpoortatalist". I expect there is a good word for someone who likes to tell stories that are in poor taste (if that is what you are looking for), but it escapes me at the moment.
How cultures interpret words like this is fascinating. In French, sangfroid and, in Russian, хладнокровие (khladnokroviye) are good qualities in a person, both conveying the sense of "cool-headedness"; in English, however, cold-bloodedness is definitely not something you want to encounter. I tend to associate sanguine with sangfroid. I pronounce the word in a way that almost rhymes with penguin (another cool character), so Cole Porter would have to change his tune to make this word fit for me.
No, it's not related to rog (horn). In Slovene, the nasal rounded back vowel of Old Slavic ǫ (which probably sounded like the vowel in the French word mon), developed into o, whereas in the other South Slavic languages (and in East Slavic, too), it developed into u. Compare words like Slovene roka / SBC ruka (arm and hand), Slovene pot / SBC put (path, journey), Slovene posoda / SBC posuda (dish), and many more. The Old Slavic word *rǫg probably meant "ridicule" and is also the origin of the modern Slovene word režati se (to laugh boisterously, guffaw).
Oh, I love this word, just like I love all the words still in use that hark back to medieval concepts about the mind-body-elements-planets relationships: bilious, choleric, melancholic, humorous, saturnine, jovial, mercurial, etc. And I don't think sanguine is pretentious when it's used to mean "optimistic, positive, cheerful, unruffled". Its synonyms don't really convey so directly the same sense that the attitude so discribed relates to something inherent in a person's character. I also like the fact that it comes from a word for "blood" and that it has as a much darker, tragic cousin in the word sanguinary.
Ron Wagner, that may be a quip (though I don't get the joke), but it surely is not an anecdote, which implies a brief story, the recounting of an incident, usually but not necessarily with a humorous "punch line". He used to regale his friends with anecdotes about his college days, but then they all started to avoid him. He wasn't the anecdotalist he thought he was.
Did you make this up, Inked Polyglot? Irregular verbs are only "irregular" in that they follow different rules from the majority. In English, this usually means that there is an alteration in the vowel to indicate the past instead of the addition of the -ed morpheme (and often with the morpheme -en in the past participle. Hence, the sequence twilve, twolve, twilven, modeled perhaps on the verb drive, might be more in keeping with the patterns of English. But I am just a rank amateur when it comes to these things, and I expect (and hope) my colleague Qroqqa might have something to add or correct.
to tell someone something to their face directly, "without beating around the bush"
The same expression is used with such verbs as lagati (se) (to lie), smejati se (to laugh: Punca se mu smeje v brk, "The girl is laughing in his face"), and rogati se (to mock).
"to express in a clear, blunt way one's negative, disapproving attitude toward someone, usually by using words with positive content" (SSKJ) – i.e. to mock, make fun of.
Examples: ti si pa res junak, se mu je rogal; zani�?ljivo se rogati: "You're a real hero," he mocked him; to mock disdainfully.
Having to do with confection made from honey, nuts, and egg white. Having eaten the whole box of candy, she was in a nougatory daze and couldn't understand what he was saying to her.
It's sometime in the mid-'70s and I am sitting in a circle of about 10 people, all much older than me (I'm in my late teens) in a side-room of our evangelical Presbyterian church. I don't really remember now what the occasion was, but the man leading the discussion asks us to state something we like about ourselves. Someone says, "I'm a people person," and then everyone else in the group says the same thing: "I'm a people person too." This surprises me a little. I am not really sure I know what people people are, but am pretty certain I'm not one. When it comes my turn, I say, "I know how to listen," which is true. The man leading the group compliments me on my answer.
"active intellect" sounds plausible, though I would hope most people's intellect would be active, to some degree at least (I know, I know, I'm living in a world of illusion).
I hear this being said by a teacher about a pupil to indicate that the child asks question, is curious about things, and tries to figure things out in logical ways. Another possibility would be a "lively intellect".
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine a bunch of sitcom writers sitting around a table and saying things like, "Maybe we need to stick an analepsis in here. And then here we'll do a prolepsis and show them in a retirement home." These words are good for rhetoricians and literary theoreticians, and they are lovely words, but this parenthetical "(also called…)" leaves open the important question, "By whom?"
From the French word chagrin, but originally from a Turkish word shagri. Apparently, in French, chagrin, in the sense of "embarrassment" is a figurative use of the word, which means, originally, "untanned or rough leather".
One day soon, I fear, someone will name a girlchild this. And her brother will be Liaison. But then at some point she will write her name Li-Aise or Li-Ayse or Li-Ayze, with hearts over the eyes.
I'm pretty sure Roald Dahl is weird. But then, I've always had a thing for Patricia Neal and can't help but take her side.
Gloaming is a wonderful, evocative word that wears its heart on its sleeve. And while it's all about a quality of light, it's connection with darkness and mystery is inescapable. After all, it's twilight – duality, inbetweenness, borderline.
The curious thing about this slang phrase (in Slovene, Croatian, and other Slavic languages) is that the English phrase (if I remember right) is happy ending, not happy end. In other Slovenglish words, the -ing (properly pronounced /-ink/), e.g. miting and filing, so why not here?
I like this. It sounds sort of New Agey: "old awareness", like the awareness of an "old soul", awareness of things we experienced in past lives, awareness of ancestors and their knowledge. I definitely want to celebrate old awareness! And not only for a month!
Thanks, Pro, for your comment on my Slovene idioms list. By the way, if on your travels you ever plan or want to visit Slovenia (just to the east, north, and south of Trieste), let me know!
A resident of the Greek island of Hasbos, known in antiquity as an important source of asbestos (orig. "hasbestos"). Pseudo-Pausanias records that the Hasbian poetesses were said to conduct rituals in which they danced in the flames with one another in fireproof garments and mimicked the rites of Sappho's followers, only to emerge unscathed, much to the chagrin of the poetesses of neighboring Lesbos.
And it's correlative? Discontent inflation – the noticeable increase in frustration caused by not being able to find the information you want on the Internet due to the proliferation of so many idiotic videos, social networking sites, games and blogs. Eventually, you just say, "Geez! I may as well go to the library and look it up in a book! It would take less time."
This is not spam, but a public service to Wordies who collect compendia of unusual words (that is all of us more or less). Grant Barrett is making his Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (2006) available for free as a downloadable .pdf file. Just check out his blog The Lexicographer's Rules.
Interesting, Pro! It does not surprise me that many expressions in Slovene might come from Italian. The Italian influence is still strong in the southwestern and extreme western parts of the country, which were for centuries ruled by Venice. A part of Friuli, where there is still a Slovene-speaking minority, is still called the "Slavic Veneto" (Slavia Veneta) or in Slovene, Beneška Slovenija (Venetian Slovenia).
Thank you, thank you, everyone. To the Irish Fox, it's true: I couldn't have done it without you. Your graciousness in conceding this minor defeat in a truly impressive career of superlative Wordie divertissements is entirely in character. Bilby, you are one of the inspiring spirits of the Wordie aether, and I humbly acknowledge my debt to you. Chained_Bear, it was an honor to limericize your beloved Clovis; may he rest in peace with his gerbilline fore_bears. And to the Archduke Karl Ferdinand (my suspicion is well known that his Excellency has assumed a rather flimsy Belgian incognito), thanks for starting things off with the list of his illustrious Frankish ancestors.
Thanks for your patience, CF (and everyone), with my abnormal Slavophilia. I will try to keep it under control. You're right, Archduke (sorry, I can't resist calling you that – after all, I do live in Carniola). The 5th century is a little too early for at least West Frankish-Slavic interaction. But there was plenty of interaction with other Germanic types, as can be seen by all the Germanic borrowings in Old Slavic.
I second C_B's laughter and appreciation of the list, CF.
(But to return to, um, words, I'm still wondering: if Chlodo- is Germanic, how did it get impaled on the Slavic -mir? Is it possible that the Franks registered the Vlado- as their own beloved Chlodo-?)
Sigh. I guess rogue is another word that joins the "Overused to the point of meaninglessness thanks to its wildfire dash through the Internet" list (one I don't feel like making). Btw, I sort of like the word malware (if it means what I think it does).
I'm guessing those old Franks had trouble with the initial vl- cluster and this was the best they could do with the Slavic name Vladomir ("Ruler of peace").
Delicious, if somewhat turd-looking, Bosno-Serbian minced-meat kebabs, popular as a fast food throughout the former Yugoslavia. The alphabet is a little simpler in Slovenia – no confusing soft ć's – so in Slovene they are spelled �?evap�?i�?i.
Herminafrid! If it's a girl. The name Hermina is still around in Slovenia; it makes the cutest diminuative forms: Minca (the "c" is pronounced like "ts") and Min�?i ("�?" pronounced like "ch"). Minchie Bearspawn!
From the English word suffer. It is used as a noun to mean "misery, the pits." Often used with the verb furati ("to do, engage in, go through") (itself a borrowing from the German führen) to mean "to feel awful" (emotionally, not physically):
Ne vidim ve�? razloga da bi nekdo “fural safr�?, �?e pa to stvar lahko sprejmeš in vidiš, da je vse to�?no tako kot mora biti. ("I don't see a reason anymore why someone should 'go through safr' so long as you can accept the situation and see that everything is just the way it should be.")
A tragic example (and a cautionary one for the United States) of how the image of a particular culture can be entirely altered. A hundred years ago, if you asked non-German Westerners what the sound of German connoted to them, they would have said music and philosophy.
Can you tell us something more, C_B, about these curious records? Are these the (perhaps altered) names of immigrants to the US? Or do you mean that your eyes deceived you? (19th-century handwriting can be very hard to decipher.)
Of course you do, Yarb. But turdiform has been taken, and I'm sure you don't want Reesetee to send a flock of thrushes your way. Just ask Tippi Hedren what that's like. You might try fecaloid, coprolithic, or stercoraceous. But I suspect you just like the sound of turd. Am I right?
Actually, the word you want here is new agey, which means "relating to the New Age movement" (which was very popular in North America in the 1980s). "Agey" by itself doesn't make sense in this context.
In the 8th and 9th centuries, the first vowel in the word svat ("holy") would have been a nasal front vowel, probably pronounced something like the sound in the French word vin, which is why the Franks spelled it -en-. It evolved differently in different Slavic languages, turning into something we usually transliterate as "ja" or "ya" in Russian (e.g. �?в�?той = svjatoj, "holy" – though it's more complicated than that), an a or á in Czech (compare the names Václav and Wenceslaus), the nasal sound iȩ in Polish (święty means "holy"), and a high front e in the South Slavic languages (svet means "holy" in both Slovene and Serbo-Bosno-Croatian).
The second part of the name would in Old Slavic have originally been pronounced more or less pulk (rhyming with the English word hulk), where the "u" stands for a short schwa sound. This meant something like "host" or "army" ("a mass of people"). It is actually a borrowing from a Germanic root that has developed today into folk in English and Volk in German (which makes the Franks' hearing it as a different Germanic word somewhat ironic). This word also developed differently in the different branches of Slavic: polk in East Slavic (e.g. Russian) and South Slavic (e.g. Slovene), and pluk in West Slavic (e.g. Czech).
C_b, I expect your Friend only used "thee". At some point, Quakers stopped saying "thou" and started using "thee" for both the subject and the object of the sentence, I think with the ø-ending form of the verb: Why are thee taking the car to Meeting? It's only a ten-minute walk! Don't thee know how much gas costs? Not surprisingly, the influence of the double-duty you (as both subjective and objective) is pretty strong. It was pretty jarring when I first heard Quakers talking like this, and it was hard not to "correct" them.
This is actually an important word for Slovenes, and there is even a restaurant in Ljubljana's Old Town that goes by this name. The Protestant leader Primož Trubar's Abecedarium (an ABC book to teach people how to read) was one of the first two books printed in Slovene, in 1550. The restaurant is located in a building ("the oldest house in Ljubljana") where Trubar once lived.
Meter of course is helpful for memorizing text, which is certainly a major reason why poets have used it at least since Homer. We shouldn't forget that before the 20th century, poetry was written as more to be performed than read silently. People used to entertain themselves by reading things to each other out loud, whether this was poetry or a serialized novel. To enjoy a writer like Byron, you need to hear his work, and not merely see it on the page.
Don Juan is a long poem (Byron may have called it a novel in verse), not a play, so there are no stage directions. Read a little of it out loud and try to imagine the words being spoken by a brilliant young man, as famous as a rock star and with about as much humility, who wants to overturn all the conventions and expose the hypocrisy of his time, and you might start to get an idea of what it's about.
@ Seanahan – I never said the commas did disturb the flow; that was Mollusque. I agree with you that they don't.
You make a good point about Betty. Either way there could be ambiguity, especially if we replace "Catholic" with "Episcopalian" and "maid" with "writer". But it also matters whether or not we know the author of text does or does not use serial commas:
A. They went to Oregon with Betty, a writer and an Episcopalian priest.
B. They went to Oregon with Betty, a writer, and an Episcopalian priest.
In A, they could have gone to Oregon with 1 (Betty, who is both a writer and a priest) or 3 persons, if we know the text does not use serial commas; but with only 1 person (the admirable Betty), if we know the text always uses serial commas consistently.
In B, they have definitely gone to Oregon with 2 people, if we know the text does not use serial commas; or with either 2 or 3 people, if we know the text always uses serial commas.
So both systems leave room for ambiguity. Life is like that. That is what house styles are for.
I wondered this, too, Nux. But apparently any Mediterranean country can participate. Morocco has been in Eurovision too, and theoretically so could Libya, Syria, and Algeria.
The "rules" of meter may be clearcut enough, but the variations in how poets follow them, or choose to break them, to create the effects they want, are countless and fascinating.
Byron was brilliant in being able to use plain, chatty English, often with great comic effect, as in Don Juan (the name should be pronounced to rhyme with "Ewan"), but he could also write lovely "poetic" poetry, as in "She walks in beauty like the night".
You sound a bit like an old fogey, myth, who complains that poets (i.e. rappers) these days are "massacring" words because they write "gonna" and "witya" instead of "going to" and "with you".
Moll, it seems like you're arguing in favor of inconsistency, i.e. use the Oxford when you need it to clarify the meaning, but otherwise don't use it. And personally, that seems like a reasonable practice to me. As does its reverse: always use the Oxford except in cases where using it confuses the meaning. The only problem is that people usually want rules to live by, write by, and edit by, and the cases where the Oxford confuses things are probably much fewer than where not using it confuses things. So "always use the Oxford comma" seems a better rule than "never use the Oxford comma" and is easier to follow than "use it only when it helps" (because you don't have to figure out when it helps and when it doesn't). I like to avoid Emersonian hobgoblins myself, so inconsistency doesn't usually upset me if I see the reason for it, but for many people these little fellows seem to make good friends.
Contractions like e'er and o'er, as well as spellings like the monosyllabic heav'n and giv'n should not be taken as indications of poets "cheating" or trying to fit square pegs into round holes. For one thing, poets like Byron knew exactly what they were doing when it came to prosody; they dreamed in iambic pentameter in a way few of us can imagine.
As such they were very familiar with the concept of the reduced syllable – a nearly ellided syllable that should not be given the weight even of the unstressed beat in the iambic foot. Often two syllables could be counted as one; this could be indicated with a contraction such as e'er or even (e'en) to th'. The fact that the v sound is involved in a number of these contractions may also tell us that this sound had various qualities to it and could be pronounced differently in different contexts or by different speakers; historically, after all, the letter v represented both a consonant and a vowel (u).
Today many poets no longer count syllables the way they used to (and many still do but don't want us to think they do).
Sadly, I'm not sure people expect anything of poetry these days, or rather, if they do, they expect it to be sentimental or inspiring and so don't really "get" what contemporary poets are writing (as with modern art, they think, "jeez, I could have written that! It doesn't even rhyme!"). Probably a lot of people would love it if more poets were more "poetic".
Myth, don't give up on Shakespeare, Byron, or anyone else just because they don't write as if they were born in 1970. Try to learn their language first (and don't assume it has to be the same as yours), before you judge them. They still have a lot of amazing things to tell us, even though (or perhaps because) they are centuries away from us.
While I probably like commas more than most, I don't hold with the practice of putting them in just because you want to take a breath, or conversely, the idea the you have to take a breath whenever you see a comma. Not all commas are breath-taking. In the case Molly mentions, there is no need to "break the flow" in the sentence "Tom, Dick, and Harry all ordered bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches." I would read this the same way with or without the serial commas. The commas before the ands are merely there because the writer (or editor) finds such commas useful and wants to be consistent. In this particular sentence the serial commas could easily be removed without the ceiling caving in. But I'd keep them because I like the principle of the serial comma. In the sentence, "Tom, Dick and Harry, Mary Jo and Martin, and Bart all went to Des Moines for Frank and Herb's wedding," the Oxford comma helps keep the relationships, well, straight (or not).
Here's a joke Slovenes tell when they want to illustrate the attitude toward neighbors in their country.
Bog vprasa slovenca, "Kaj bi rad? Dam ti kar hoces, s tem, da bo tvoj sosed dobil dvakrat toliko." Slovenec malo pomisli pa rece, "Bogec, iztakni mi oko."
God asks a Slovene, "What would you like? I'll give you whatever you want, only know that your neighbor is going to get twice as much of the same thing." The Slovene thinks a bit, then says, "Okay, Lord, pluck out one of my eyes."
Basically, this word refers to the expression on one's face. But it can also be used as a verb to mean "to allow, to accept" a certain behavior. In this meaning, it is often used in the negative: She could not countenance her husband's gambling. These two meanings are connected if you think that, when you accept something, you can look at it calmly, without getting upset.
I might suggest a few from the Slavic side of things:
- vozhd (or Cyrillically, вождь), which is what adoring fans called Stalin; like Führer, it means "leader", but unlike the German word, it really is reserved for the Great Leader.
- vojvoda or vojevoda or voyevoda (or more Englishy, voivode), the Slavic "duke" (lit., "war-leader" or "warlord") and the origin of the toponym Vojvodina.
– you have tsar, but what about the tsarina (I'm assuming you are eschewing the unchewable cz- spellings).
And a couple obvious ones from across the Adriatic that seem to have escaped: il Duce (last seen in Salò) and the doge, in the company of Mrs. Doge, a.k.a. the dogaress or in Venetian, dogaressa, both fleeing incognito in a gondola.
Yes, you're right, of course, Upper Carniola, to be specific. And I love your list!
But why is this "Stara Kranjska"? The people who lived in the March of Carniola (Kranjska krajina/Krainmark), didn't call it "Old", did they? Or is this a different region from Kranjska?
Slovenes look back to Carantania (independent or semi-autonomous from the late 7th to about the 10th century) as an almost mythic land. This, they say, was the last time the Slovene nation ruled itself until Slovenia gained independence in 1991. In a kind of political nationalist romanticism, they often speak of the 1000-year yoke under the Germans (Austrians).
This still very much exists, both as an Austrian Land (Kärnten) and a Slovene region (Koroška). All of these names come from the long-gone Carantania (in Old Slovene Korotan, which was an autonomous or semi-autonomous Slavic state from the late 7th to about the 10th century.
I don't believe I've ever heard anything other than /ˈbɔɪənt/ (I grew up in the US). My only strong opinion is that one shouldn't pronounce this as spelled, with three syllables: /bu'ɔɪjənt/.
I know this is a fairly common complaint (especially from Vanished One), but can something be done about the excessive tagging on word pages such as admire? This particular case seems to be the result of spamming, but other words are given ridiculously long tags (i.e. whole definitions) or a ridiculously large number of tags out of ignorance from people new to the site, who then simply vanish after making their mess. Can we develop a reasonable protocol for cleaning these pages up a bit?
More specifically, it's a present participle, which is why the dictionaries list it under the verb mesmerize. Today it is probably most often used as a modifier, though sentences such as "Her singing mesmerized the audience" are common enough.
ne- (not) -iz- (out) -pod- (under) -bit- (hit, beat, knock) -en (adj. suffix, here meaning something like -able): unable to have its base knocked out from under it.
There is a transparency to the Slavic languages that I find incredibly beautiful.
*apologizes in advance to Ms. Chained_Bear, for whom I have the greatest respect, and assures her that I would never dream of trying to chew anything the least bit ursine*
You can find this word listed in Middle English Dictionary (U. of Mich. Press, 1997), which you can see via Google Books. There are several citations from between 1200 and 1500. Other spellings are oughten, ohtoun, and uhhtenn, which may give you some idea of how the -ugh was pronounced. Of course, it wasn't pronounced ugg-, but perhaps with a vowel as in bout, and a velar fricative like the ch in the Scottish loch; it seems to rhyme with the Middle English past participle foughten (see below).
It sounds rather nice to me, especially in the cited phrase bothe even and oughten, meaning literally "both evening and morning" and idiomatically "at all times of the day" as in the following couplet:
I think it is probably true that in modern English, the colloquial style, perhaps especially a kind of non-localized, perhaps American-leaning style with certain colloquial markers (like don't) but not others (like the verbal hiccups like, y'know, etc. or highly marked colloquialisms from specific speech communities) is encroaching on the written language. But I am not sure if this is a natural process. To some degree, perhaps. Over the past few decades, especially since the '70s, literary and journalistic writing has become more focused on a personal, first-person voice, which naturally relies on colloquialisms. This may be because postmodernism (and specifically deconstructionism) has seriously put into question any attempt to convey an impersonal, disinterested, objective viewpoint. In the past, authors usually tried to sound authoritative; today they try to sound approachable. This is to a large degree a matter of taste and the Zeitgeist, and it could well change.
"Whom" may well be on its way out, but it's taking its time leaving the language. These things happen over generations. Yarb, you mention the familiar second person singular (thou, thee, thy). Back in the '60s, when I was just a child, my grandparents' generation regularly used thou-forms when addressing God in prayer, but I don't think my parents did, probably because they felt insecure about it (when do you say thou, when do you say thee, and what are we supposed to do with ye?). Back then, most church-goers still used the King James' Version, though there were bands of RSV-users in the congregation. Then, God help us all, sometime in the early '70s the Living Bible reared its modern paraphrasing head, and the colloquial Good News Bible (New Testament only) came on the scene with doodle-like drawings meant to appeal to the guitar-strumming crowd. Times had changed. I looked for thee in the wilderness, but thou wast not to be found, and whom was fighting for its very life.
By the way, I don't think I agree that colloquial speech is necessarily the defining form of language (and I am not sure I know what you mean by "defining form"). That may be increasingly the case with English, at least when it comes to contemporary linguistic scholarship, but it certainly hasn't always been the case (and it is not true of Slovene or, until quite recently, of Russian). There is also a strong conservative undertow in language change, which is created by the written language, particularly as used by writers in the cultural canon, and reinforced by schoolteachers, editors of various kinds, and probably others too, and this is necessary if we are to be able to read and understand the writings of the past, as well as to understand even our contemporaries outside our immediate linguistic community. And I should ask the nasty, though obvious question: which colloquial speech is defining for the language? My Baltimorese? Someone else's Cockney? Another person's Yorkshire speech? Bilby's Strine?
Pleth, it sounds like your flat is proof that you agree with my father's guiding principle (unfortunately for domestic bliss, my mother didn't). Words, thankfully, don't take up as much space as the things my father gathered around him.
Like I said, this could be a generational thing. I agree that it is rarely used in colloquial speech (though it probably is not out of place, and may even be required, in formal speech, such as a commencement address). Of course it is still used in serious writing, especially when the speaker does not want to sound colloquial, where the speaker wants to convey the sense "these are important issues." Colloquial speech is not the only acceptable style in language.
"Whom" has been hanging on by its fingernails for a couple of generations at least, and it has not been helped by stodgy grammarians who insist on its use in places where the common tongue prefers "who", but I think it will survive precisely because it is sometimes needed as the object of a preposition and saying "about who" or "from who" usually sounds as wrong as saying "about he" or "from they".
Then, of course, words like "whom" can also be useful when you want to play the class card. Someone who asks on the telephone: "To whom am I speaking?" may well be sending a slightly different message than the person who asks, "Who am I talking to?"
My father always told me, "Never throw anything away because there may come a time when you'll need it." I believe this applies to words too.
John66bessa, you are confusing two different words. Ingenious means "clever, showing great intelligence or insight." It easy to confuse this with ingenuous because of the noun ingenuity, which does not mean the quality of being ingenuous (that's ingenuousness), but the quality of being clever and inventive (and thus is closer in its meaning to "ingenious").
Ingenuous has nothing to do with ingenuity, though as you suggest, it is related to the idea of being "genuine". Ingenuous people are by nature genuine, in that they do not know how to deceive or be other than they are. "Ingenuous" is a close synonym of "naive". Ingenuous people are honest, but not because they choose to be; it is simply their nature to be. They have not yet learned how to dissemble or lie. But worldly people, i.e. people who understand the way world works and who are not ingenuous, may also be genuine: they may be forthright and honest, but in this case, it is a conscious decision.
We say that someone is disingenuous when they pretend to be ingenuous, i.e. they pretend to know less than they actually do, to be more naive than they actually are. They are deceptive, but in the particular way of pretending to be innocent or ignorant of something.
Curiously, the words genius, ingenious, ingenuity, ingenuous, and genuine are all related in that they share the same Latin root -gen- ("relating to birth"), but they are not derived from or based on one another.
I should have been clearer. "Ask not for who the bell tolls" sounds wrong not only because this is a familiar quotation. "Don't ask who the bell tolls for" sounds perfectly fine to me, though it's lost its solemnity. There are times when we want to use a relative clause in which the relative pronoun follows a preposition – for example when we want to stress a point or add a note of solemnity or perhaps avoid a certain confusion: "This is the person I told you about" is fine, but if you want to say that you worked without complaint night and day for this person even sacrificing your weekends and never heard a word of thanks from him, you might not want to say: "This is the person I worked without complaint night and day for, even sacrificing my weekends, and never heard a word of thanks from." In this case, I would prefer: "This is the person for whom I worked night and day without complaint, even sacrificing my weekends, and from whom I never heard a word of thanks." When you need a form of who to follow a preposition, it will probably be whom. At least to my ear, for who …, concerning who …, with regard to who …, etc. all sound wrong. But I admit, this may be a generational thing.
C_b, I am really sorry to hear about your horrific experience. It is all too common. There was a time, and not very long ago, when the idea of husbands beating their wives provided a staple source of humor ("One of these days, Alice! Pow! Right to the moon!" says Ralph, as the audience explodes in laughter), but that was when the real violence was kept behind the closed doors women and children were always just happening to run into. Making light of such things, as in pseudo-clever slang terms for T-shirts and beer, is probably a way of distracting ourselves from the terrible reality. But I don't see how anyone with an awareness of the power of words can use such terms gleefully.
I sympathize, Rt. Although I find the development of this word's use fascinating, and I am happy to find any reason to research pictures of the young Marlon Brando in a tight-fitting, torn, and rain-drenched T-shirt, I am disturbed by the commercial callousness of this word. I was shocked to find many websites where clothing companies were selling these tank tops as "wifebeaters", often with young female models sporting them with a smile. I find it hard to imagine a young woman saying, unwincingly, to another young woman, "I found a great wifebeater at Macy's today!" But I'm sure it happens all the time. Can you imagine, say, Ray-Ban selling a particlar style of sunglasses as "childmolesters"? "We offer you an extensive sellection of elegant childmolesters!" It's a sickening thought, but no more so than companies proudly selling "wifebeaters".
Lit., "early wound", though in Slovene this sounds a little archaic or poetic, since modern Slovene would say "zgodnja rana". See also oprosti mi moja rano rana.
The varieties of SBC stress, with their different pitches, are worse than Slovene, where no one much cares about pitch anymore (though long v. short still applies).
Thanks for the explanation, MM!
If I wanted to translate this in a way that would make sense to English speakers, I might say: "Forgive me, wound of my young heart" or "... my young heart's wound".
I'm trying to figure out the grammar here. I know that rana rana means early wound" (an etymological curiosity, as Sarra would say: the adj. ran, -a, -o, -i, "early", and the noun rana, "wound", derive from different IE roots). But I don't know which is which here, or why one ran- ends in -o and the other in -a.
Is "rano" the fem. noun "wound" in the vocative case? Which would mean that "rana" is a postpositional adjective. Is the vocative case for adjectives the same form as the nominative? Help me out.
As to the meaning, it does sound strange in English, until you remember all those songs where love is described as a wound. It's really the "early" part that seems odd. Is the idea that the woman is the wound of the speaker's youth?
Correction: Brando wasn't actually wearing a tank top in the movie. But it was a snug white T-shirt with very short sleeves that showed off his fit form and biceps. But Brando's look and performance, which completely redefined the notion of the male sex symbol, did wonders for the allure of the humble white undershirt (especially when it was torn and drenched as he wailed in the rain), and I expect it did influence the name of the tank top.
"23 squidoo" is a silly, squiddy allusion to 23 skiddoo, which was a silly thing people used to say in the 1920s and became an emblem of the decade, as groovy did for the 1960s. I sort of understand the "skiddoo" part here (related maybe to skip and almost certainly to skedaddle), but I have no idea why the number 23 became attached to it.
A nice case of double metonymy: The white tank top worn by Marlon Brando as the violent Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire became so identified with Brando in this role that, in the US, it became known as a "wifebeater". Brando as Kowalski also became famous for crying, "Stella!" (his wife's name); hence the wifebeater tank top became connected with the name Stella, as in the beer.
Actually, I would take this to mean "your breath smells quite nice."
"not half" means "a fair amount of whatever is opposite": "You know, your singing's not half bad" = "You sing rather well." Usually, I think, "not half" is used in a compliment, i.e. with a quality that is considered negative. It is a form of understatement and suggests the speaker's mock surprise at discovering some positive quality in a person. "You know, you're not half dumb." = I'm surprised to discover that you are really rather smart.
I associate this expression in particular with the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. It's the kind of thing Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard would say.
Like I said, I'm not crazy about this word, because at first glance it seems to mean "different from what is normative" (compare heterodox v. orthodox), but I wouldn't out-and-out attack it, since the social theoreticians who use it understand what it is supposed to mean. The idea it describes is not hard to grasp, since almost all of us encounter it everyday: the assumption that the heterosexual model of society is properly privileged (if not the only acceptable model).
Slovene, of course, has a perfectly good word for "friend": prijatelj. But if you want to sound young and hip, you'll say moj frend, moja frendica (fem.), and moji frendi (pl.).
This is a useful term for theoreticians, and there is no reason to disdain it, any more than one would disdain specialized nautical terminology. It's curious the way people seem to admire the specialist jargon from certain fields (military, medical, astrophysical), but get upset when they hear words that convey nuanced notions from the humanities and social sciences (social theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, anthropology, etc.), perhaps from a kind of anti-intellectual populism. The scholars in these fields study ordinary things, like family structure, social prejudices, the workings of the imagination, and while it is true that everyone deals with such things, and hence in a way are also experts on them from a practical perspective, very few people think about these things with any depth or rigor. Those who make it their business to understand the workings of such phenomena do need to develop special terms. I would be the first to agree that these special terms can get out of hand, turning into abstractions that seem to lose all connection with the reality they seek to describe, but in many cases they are useful. I prefer simple, understandable words, but as K&P points out, words like heteronormative are a succinct way to express a fairly complex concept.
I am not a big fan of this word, particularly because here the prefix hetero- means "heterosexual" not "differing" (just as homo- in "homophobia" means "homosexual" not "same"). But within the discipline of cultural theory, this has become an acceptable use. I would, at least in some contexts, prefer the word heterosexualist, but heteronormative has the advantage of sounding neutral, whereas heterosexualist is a more loaded term.
I don't think you all are taking this month seriously enough. We need a time of year to remember the many great sarcasticists who have risked their reputations to make the country safer for smug, shallow, and self-indulgent humor.
Good question, Lea. I don't think there is any difference at all. The New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (which dictates OUP practice) gives "for ever" as an alternative to "forever". But in US English, I think "for ever" is rare. I almost always write this as one word, forever. The only time I can think of when I would write it as two words would be "for ever and ever", where the second ever is just for emphasis.
Rt, you're welcome to visit anytime! There's always a polka music program somewhere on TV here, and that's not counting the cable station TV Golica devoted 24/7 to Slovene polka music and scantily clad big-breasted Slovene farm girls, with a dash of yodeling.
If I remember correctly (from my experience as the editor of a gay and lesbian newspaper), this word first emerged among lesbians in the early or mid-1990s as a way to describe women who at one time identified themselves as lesbians, perhaps for political reasons, or because it was the thing to do at whatever college they went to, but then eventually "came out" as heterosexual, often leaving their lesbian friends feeling betrayed and hurt (and maybe broken-hearted). The word is not meant to imply that lesbians can be "converted", or even that the "hasbian" was ever really a lesbian. The word carries a large dose of bitterness, I think. It may also reflect the unwillingness of many in the gay and lesbian community to truly accept the idea of bisexuality, particularly before the mid-1990s, which was when bisexual groups began to get organized and demand recognition from lesbian and gay organizations.
The word started as a kind of joke, and I think it is OK to use on that level, but as with many such words, it says as much about the one who uses it as it does about the person who is described by it.
Anna Freud is hired by the King of Siam to psychoanalyze his many children, and in the process learns something about her own animal nature. The musical is known for such hits as: "Getting to know me! Getting to know all about me!" and "Shall We Transfer?"
Classy, in the sense of "stylish" has been around in American English at least since the 1940s. The book British and American English since 1900 by Eric Partridge and John Williams Clark, published in 1951, notes: "British swanky more or less equals American classy" (and that was all I was shown in the snippet view of Google Book Search). But there are lots of examples.
My mother was from Virginia and would say things like "raise a furor" (though she'd pronounce it /fyoo-rah/) and she wasn't talking about bringing up Adolf.
Normally this word means "hike" or, in military usage, "campaign". But recently I have noticed it in news reports in the phrase "strelski pohod", which should be translated as "shooting spree" (strelski means "shooting adj.").
I am not a native German, but I just did a Google search (confined to German pages) for "der Fürher" and nearly all hits were about Hitler, but I did find a Web page for a company that bills itself as "der Führer der Antiquitätenhändler" ("the leader of antiques dealers"), with no obvious National-Socialist connotations, and when I went on to do a search for "der Führer des" ("the leader of the"), I came across many references to leaders of countries, movements, and political parties, including "der Führer des Likud" (which must sound strange to many). And I got over 100 hits for "der Führer der sozialdemokratischen" ("the leader of the Social-Democratic…" So my guess is the "Führer" is still alive and kicking in German. After all, not only does the word "simply" mean "leader", it is also the simplest word for saying "leader", since it derives from the verb führen ("to lead").
But I'd be interested in hearing from a native German.
Doesn't kara mean black in Turkish? (The Serbian nationalist leader who led the first Serbian revolt against the Turks and founded modern Serbia's royal dynasty was called "Karadjordje" – "Black George".) Perhaps that is the origin of the word. I don't think it's Slavic.
Etymologically, this means "one who delights." A nice concept, I think. In this time of ubiquitous professionalization and ultra-specialization, we need more dilletantes to delight us.
By a quirk of etymology, this word in Slovene means not only blue, but also "wise" (in the neuter singular). In Slovene the nasal o of Proto-Slavic evolved into the simple o, whereas in other South Slavic and East Slavic languages, it became u. Hence, "wise" (n.sg.) in SBC is mudro, in Russian, мудро (mudro). Perhaps this is one reason why Slovene and SBC both borrowed the German word blau, reshaping it as plav.
I agree, seanahan, but I can't remember whether taking someone out to the woodshed has to do with sex or punishment (maybe both for some). Can you enlighten me?
I'd love to see more SCBM (BSCM/CSBM/CBSM?) words on Wordie (like mrš!). It's a language I'm picking up in bits and pieces, partly because it occasionally crops up in Slovene texts (often in the form of swear words, which Slovenes claim all derive from army Serbian).
Or perhaps some lesbian Wordie-er. I believe this is a fairly old term among lesbians for a homosexual woman who is attracted to "butch" women (i.e. women who to some degree adopt or possess traditionally masculine gender attributes in manner and dress) but who herself acts and dresses in ways that are considered traditionally feminine. A related term, originating in the late 1980s or early 1990s, is "lipstick lesbian" but I think this has different, and more political, connotations.
A nice tradition. This reminds me of the little dish they have at some checkout counters, "Give a penny, take a penny", though of course that's not really about charity.
You're right that the word "pomo�?nica" means "female helper", but the Marian title in English is "Our Lady, Help of Christians" (see here). Her full title in Slovene is actually "Marija pomo�?nica kristjanov", but people usually just say, "Marija pomagaj", which actually means "Mary, help!"
Also, "Marija pomagaj". One of the most common Slovene titles for the Virgin Mary, represented in a said-to-be-miraculous painting (1814) by Leopold Layer in the Basilica of St. Vitus (St. Guy, Sveti Vid), in Brezje, near Radovljica, in Upper Carniola. In English, this title translates as Our Lady, Help of Christians.
I don't think there is any paradox involved. The word "meaningless" has meaning as a word: "lacking meaning". Hence, it is clearly heterological, because its meaning cannot be applied to the word itself, just as the meaning "long" cannot be applied to the word "long" (because it has only four letters).
And here I thought this was some piece of gossip that, when it gets passed around, people know right away who started it. "You're telling me you heard he's acing the class because he's doing the professor? Oh, I know who's telling those tales. That dish has Miss Sour Grapes' name written all over it!"
Not everything is meaningful, therefore, "meaningless" is meaningful and not autological. But meaning depends on the code being used, and it is human to seek meaning, and therefore to presume the existence of codes we can understand. No one who did not believe in the Virgin Mary or in the ability of spiritual entities to manifest themselves physically in quotidian objects would ever see the BVM in a certain configuration of pancake syrup, which would then be for them meaningless, despite the best efforts of the Mother of God. I am a devout believer in the meaning of "meaningless".
If one finds meaningful patterns in something, how can that something be called meaningless? Is meaning exclusively the product of intention, or do we create meaning by perceiving? If a person sees the image of the Virgin Mary in the syrup on a pancake and takes that as a sign of grace, which subsequently transforms this person's life, was the configuration of the syrup meaningless?
Personally, I don't like the word patternicity, which from the -ic-ity suffixes one would expect to mean the property of tending to possess pattern, not that of tending to perceive pattern.
I'm surprised that cognitive psychologists don't have a term for this notion, since pattern perception is such an intrinsic part of learning. Or perhaps they prefer to use words that are simpler but clearer, if less arcane, like "the tendency to perceive patterns." Or perhaps, they just call it something cumbersomely German, like Gestaltwahrnehmungsfähigkeit.
"In the case of the common word нега, Nabokov has surpassed himself in oddity. It is true that нега has two distinct nuances: voluptuous languor and simple enjoyment; but, instead of using any of the obvious equivalents, Mr. Nabokov has dug up from the dictionary the rare and obsolete mollitude, a word which his readers can never have encountered but which he uses for the first of these meanings; and for the second he has discovered dulcitude. One wonders how Nabokov would translate the last line of Pushkin's famous lyric, published after his death, 'Пора, мой друг, пора'...'В обитель дальную трудов и чи�?тых нег.' 'To a faraway haven of work and pure mollitudes'? 'dulcitudes'?"
– Edmund Wilson, in a scathing review of Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin, "The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov," The New York Review of Books 4, no. 12 (July 15, 1965).
Nabokov seems to have developed his own meaning for the word "mollitude", which dictionaries indicate mean "softness, effeminacy, weakness"; he seems, in the quote from Ada, or, Ardor, cited by Yarb, to have in mind something more like the Russian word нега (nega), which in Russian romantic poetry usually refers to sensual pleasure.
Thanks, for the suggestions, MM and C_B, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that James and John's surname, however delightful, became a common word.
In French, wouldn't a douchebaguette (or more properly, douche-baguette) be a long narrow loaf of bread that one showered with (or perhaps a baguette-shaped sponge)? Could be fun.
I'm part of the generation of gay men who came of age in the early '80s, which is certainly partly why I deplore such sanguine use of the word. But mainly it is because I feel that writers should be aware of the metaphors they play with. I have no objection to the phrase "viral marketing" because it reflects the insidious, parasitical, and ultimately mind-destroying nature of such covert advertising. If the people who do this want to compare their activity to pathological processes, that's fine by me; I see their work as being pathological. What bothers me is the implied celebration of the pathological, especially by someone like this NYT writer who doesn't seem to realize that that is what she is doing. If someone wants to say, "We're dangerous, we're gonna get you, we're viral!", well, that's OK, too; that's just recycled 1970s punk. What bothers me are middle-class writers and businessmen using the word as something positive.
Alternatives? For the meaning, the NYT writer wanted, I'd suggest widespread, inundating, wildfire (also a bad thing to have happen to you, but at least it's out in the open), fast-spreading.
It occurs to me that it is not so much the metaphor itself that bothers me; I'd have no problem if she had written "contagious", for example, though that also implies disease. I suppose it's that for me, viral is still firmly tied to viruses, and I think I want it to stay tied to them.
"The viral popularity of the site propelled the blog’s creators onto the radar of the publishing industry. 'From the first day, we were getting calls from agents,' said Jessica Amason, one of the founders."
– Jenna Wortham, "Public Provides Giggles; Bloggers Get the Book Deal," New York Times, 17 April 2009, here.
A curious use of the word viral to mean "fast-spreading." I know this is a very trendy use, but I find it jarring here. Viruses are something undesirable, something we try to eradicate, whether the issue is physical health or the functioning of a computer program. It seems meretricious to use the word in a context where this negative connotation does not come into play.
Technically, this word refers merely to the quality of wishing something for someone else, but in practice it refers to wishing evil on someone. Not an exact schadenfreude alternative, I know, but it's close.
Bacchanalia, you probably want to put these comments on the appropriate word page (e.g. chode, usa – just click on the word), and not on the list page.
The Slovene version of Schadenfreude, it translates literally as "harm-wishfulness". This is not exactly the same as Schadenfreude, but it generally serves the same purpose. A related word is privoš�?ljivost, which the Dictionary of the Slovene Standard Language describes as the quality of "wishing something on someone, usually something bad or evil."
Just a note on the pronunciation of this Slovene exclamation (which is probably borrowed from English, btw, via the globalization of American television): the letter v in Slovene is often a semi-vowel, and the spelling av represents the diphthong ow, as in the English words how, now, cow and, yes, wow. The initial u- is the best Slovene spelling can do to represent the w sound. You can also occasionally hear people say this word as two syllables, especially when they want to underscore their excitement: oo-OW, which is sort of cute.
I think the proper Italian name might be girasole (apparently it means "sunflowers" and that is what it looks like). The package I bought it in puts an -i on the enc, but then, it's in Slovene. We should ask Prolagus.
I had a stuffed pasta tonight (pre-packaged) that was called girasoli, shaped like silver-dollar-sized suns and filled with basil, mozzarella and tomato (a little caprese salad). This was new to me, but it was very good.
There is always a note of facetiousness in these words with the prefix uber, or more properly, über, or so it seems to me. If not said with irony, they merely betoken a certain naïveté in the speaker. Anything that is truly chic has no need of overstatement, it makes its own case without the aid of prefixes.
Unlike some other primates, lemurs do not have prehensile tails (they cannot hang by their tails from trees like monkeys) but they do have long, wet noses.
In the US, I think this word always refers to an old man, not just any man, and underscores this person's unattractiveness because of his age: How could a babe like Catherine Zeta-Jones marry a geezer like Michael Douglas?
But I have been out of the US for a number of years and watch a lot of British TV, so I'm never 100% about the more subtle cross-pond (transpond?) distinctions.
Hybridity is hardly a shortcoming in this post-postmodern age, and many modern words are macaronic, e.g. television, cyberspace, and many more. But that does not mean hybridity should be encouraged, especially in such a geezer as mesonoxian, which I suspect was invented by some seicento wit for the purpose of displaying his pseudo-erudition or, perhaps, merely to garner guffaws (not unlike the madeupicals of many Wordies). While I am willing to accept this as a word (not that I have any lexicographic authority in the matter), I would caution against its enthusiastic use, and urge instead the simpler and more elegant adjectival use of the word midnight in its place.
And I should point out to Alsanch1 that crepuscular (a fine word, though one to be used sparingly) has nothing to do with midnight, unless of course one is referring to the the subarctic regions at midsummer); it means "relating to twilight".
A friend of mine today forwarded an email to me from someone who was trying to get in touch with me. He had written to my friend this message:
Could you please make sure Rolig gets the following. I sent it earlier, but the internet "MAILER-daemon" said the address wasn't properly configured. I resent it, but please make sure he gets this.
I told him there was no need for resentment just because of some email glitch.
Brings back painful memories. When I lived in Leningrad in the mid-80s, I made a mental list of all the possible public facilities – туалеты (tualety) – (in "foreigner" hotels, certain better restaurants, academic libraries) throughout the center of the city that were acceptable in an emergency. Train station washrooms, however, did not make the list. And I of course I never went anywhere without toilet paper.
Cheboksary? Isn't that the capital of some Finno-Ugric-language-speaking "autonomous republic" (Mari? Komi? – can't remember). What was the bilby doing there?
I agree that it's probably borrowed from a Germanic language; there are quite a few Proto-Slavic words that were borrowed from Germanic (I assume Gothic), e.g. *kъnęgъ, which produced the noble titles кн�?зь (knjaz') in Russian ("prince") and knez in Slovene ("prince" or "duke"), as well as the Czech kněz ("priest"). The Germanic source, *kuningaz, yielded of course the German König and the English king.
One of the leading Slovene pharmaceutical companies is called "Lek", an old Slovene word that means "medicine", and the Slovene word for pharmacy is lekarna. In Russian, лекарь (lekar') is an old word for "doctor", лекар�?тво (lekarstvo) means "medicine", and there is even a verb лечить (le�?it') (showing the usual k > �? palatalization), which means "to treat a disease with medicine". Given the general distribution of this root throughout the Slavic languages (and Slovene and Russian are about as far apart as Slavic languages get in terms of non-Slavic influences), I had always assumed this was a Slavic root. Marko Snoj, in his Slovene Etymological Dictionary, confirms that the word *lek ("medicine") is indeed a Proto-Slavic word, but then writes that it is "usually considered a borrowing from Germanic (compare the Gothic lekeis 'doctor', lekkinon 'to treat with medicine' …), which was itself borrowed from Celtic (compare the Middle Irish líaig 'doctor')."
By the way, in English, you can still come across the word "leech" in the sense of "doctor" in older texts (I think even as late as the 19th century).
What I find curious about this word is that in German it means "ornament, jewelry/jewellery" – a very different connotation indeed from its use in modern American English. I wonder if its establishment in Yiddish as "penis" was the result of a euphemism, like we say "the family jewels".
1992 is nothing compared to the date of the quote I added "about 1 year ago", which was the first use of "nabob" that ever stuck in my then-young mind. (Gosh, I'm old!)
I'm so glad you saw the beautiful Peabody Library. I used to live just a couple blocks away. Too bad about the weather, though. But South Baltimore and Fells Point can be a lot of fun.
I am so pleased, Pro, that my native town could provide you with this hybrid punctuation mark. Baltimore's an interrobangish place, filled with lots of surprises and questions that are always getting mixed up together. I hope you had a good time!
1. to affect powerfully (inspire sorrow, pity; inspire wonder, admiration)
2. to overcome, suffuse, e.g. nova mo�? presunila njeno telo = a new strength flowed through her body; presunil ga je strah pred ljudmi = he was overcome with a fear of people
3. arch. to penetrate, pierce, run through (as with a sword)
Related words
presunljív - 1. moving, pitiful, inspiring (close synonym: ganljiv) 2. penetrating (predirljiv): presunljiv krik = a piercing scream; presunljiv pogled = a penetrating gaze)
This word works only with the main stress on the final syllable and secondary stress on the first syllable, and I would recommend a hyphen: Jewish-ish, pronounced /ˌdʒu�?ɪʃ'ɪʃ/.
The word I prefer (because it better conveys the notion of punishment and not just moving from one status to another) is defrock (and the corresponding verbal noun defrocking). Though perhaps we should worry about priests accused of child molesting being stripped of their frocks.
I often come across the same problem in my editing. One of the people I work with (a Slovene artist) occasionally will refer to to deconstructing buildings, when what she means is pulling them down. I try to explain that the only way to deconstruct a building is to theorize about it (or perhaps build a new construction that in some way analyzes, questions and exposes the underlying structure of the first building). The problem becomes more interesting because my colleague also discusses in her work the deconstruction of modernism, and here, of course, she is talking about deconstruction.
Aw, gee! Thanks, f.a.! And by the way, I particularly enjoyed your strip today, and I don't even know who Gerry Spence is (but I'm glad he's out there).
I haven't compared Onegin translations in a long time, but the last time I did (back in the '80s), Johnston's was by far the best in capturing the spirit of the text. Nabokov's translation is scrupulously accurate as to the concrete meaning of the text, but it is often very idiosyncratic in its word choice and at times rather flat. Nabokov smugly eschews any attempt to convey the original's rhyme scheme or even its meter; I think he secretly wanted to keep the "real" Pushkin to himself. But his two-volume commentary to the text is fascinating and indispensable for any serious Pushkin-lover. I'd recommend Johnston (whose translation came out after Nabokov's and so was spared the Nabokovian disdain he decanted on Walter Arndt, Babette Deutsch, and other predecessors).
Found in a comment by "craig o'donnell" on John McIntyre's copy-editing blog You Don't Say. The point is that mistakes in newspapers are short-lived (newspaper = fishwrap), whereas those in blogs stick around.
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I imagine Ferry felt it was important to preserve Horace's pun, which an English reader with a little knowledge of Latin roots (i.e. ped- = "foot") would easily get (helped along, as in my case, by the semantic and formal resemblance to obsequious). In the following line, of course, "following foot for foot one foot at a time" refers to metrical (iambs, trochees, dactyls, etc.) not anatomical feet. Horace is recommending that poets choose a noble if familiar subject, such as the Trojan War, and then make their own mark on it by doing new things with the poetic form. I wonder if he is talking especially about those Latin poets who were producing more or less free translations from Greek poetry and yet were trying to render the Greek meters as closely possible. Sort of like the many translations of Pushkin I've seen that make this incredible poet sound like some jingle-writer because the translator is applying all sorts of silly tricks to preserve the rhyme scheme and the meter. (Charles Johnston's 1977 translation of Eugene Onegin is a felicitous exception.)
But I (typically) digress. Given the rough tertiary meter of Ferry's verse (and this particular line is a standard amphibrachic in Latin, short-long-short, or in English, unstressed-stressed-unstressed tetrameter), I would expect pedissequous to be pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, with a short i as in disc, roughly /pɛ'dɪsəkwəs/.
John, perhaps I.M. Pei's name has become a byword for modernist architect, as in: "Our architecure program has produced quite a few Peis and a couple of Mieses, too." A more likely plural, however, would be if Pei is understood metonymically: "While everyone else was getting excited about deconstructivist architecture, she devoted herself to the buildings of late modernism and traveled the world photographing Peis and Safdies." Well, it's possible. I guess all I am saying is, give Peis a chance.
Thanks, all. And John's "Son of Samovar" is deliciously psychopathic enough to deserve its own page. John, nobody is listing Son of Samovar. Why don't you?
Jokes are fine, and I know that words change meanings as they migrate. I just hadn't realized samovar had turned into a generalized hot-beverage dispenser. Many borrowings, and samovar is one of them retain their foreignness. I may be out of it, but I find it hard to think of anything as a samovar, except facetiously, unless it is more or less directly associated with the Russian samovar. If there is humor for me in the excerpt John cited (and 30 Rock has not yet reached my Central European hideaway, so I am not familiar with any of the characters), then it is that Toufer himself doesn't know what a samovar is, though he smugly thinks he does. I suspect, however, that the intention was simply to show Toufer's nerdishness in using unusual words. In this case "samovar" actually means "a word only elitists or eggheads use." Which would be OK if the elitist/egghead used it correctly. But this is the kind of faux populism I hate about TV writing, because they usually get it wrong. The other day, for example, in some TV drama, someone who was supposed to be a born-again Christian said something like: "Jesus said" followed by a familar quotation from one of Paul's letters (e.g. "It is more blessed to give than to receive"). A born-again Christian would know this came from Paul and not from Jesus speaking in the Gospels. But the lazy-ass TV writers couldn't be bothered to look it up because they don't really care about accuracy or even about what born-again Christians would really say; they just want a snappy line.
Sorry for the digression. And thanks, Sionnach and Reesetee, for the vote of support.
Sionnach, did you grow up saying (and hearing people say) one-syllable forte? I wonder if the one- vs. two-syllable divide is based on class distinctions or perhaps on the transatlantic rift, or both?
Well argued, Q.! I am an overly educated guy who is thought to be quite articulate and knowledgeable about languages, and I have always said this word with two syllables, with the stress on the first. But a couple of months ago someone whose opinion on such matters I respect said that it should be pronounced as one syllable when it meant "area of particular strength". But I don't believe that I have ever heard anyone say the word that way in the past thirty years. And I am sure that I and my educated friends have all said it disyllabically. Thanks for the confirmation.
But this makes me wonder: is this campaign to get people to say forte monosyllabically a recent fad? Is this a new bugbear?
Samovars dispensing coffee? I think not. Traditional Russians make their coffee the Turkish way, in a little pot over a flame. Samovars are used only for tea.
Sorry for the confusion. The Slovene verb cucati (pronounced /TSU-tsa-ti/) means "to suck"; the label juv. ("juvenile") indicates that it is usually used by or with young children.
"He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness."
– W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, tr. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 161.
Strictly speaking, they mean different things, though it's true that we often condemn things we contemn. To condemn something or is to declare it bad, wicked, etc.; to contemn something is to express disdain for it, to hold it in contempt (which derives, in fact, from the past participle of the Latin verb contemnere, "to scorn", which gives us "contemn").
But you should note that "contemn" is not often used anymore (the Oxford American Dictionary marks it as "archaic"), probably because of this very confusion with "condemn".
No, Maya and Maksim are fairly common Russian names, though the surname Kulpa is unusual. But such things do occur. I have a good friend in Ljubljana named Tadej (the Slovene version of Thaddaeus), which is pronounced a lot like the English word "today". His sister's name is Tamara, with the stress on the second syllable.
I enjoyed the video very much, and it's nice to hear your voice – "fecal carnage" is an interesting, if disturbing phrase. I am not very good at spotting accents, in fact, unless they are rather broad, but I thought your voice sounded American. Maybe it was the way you pronounced the r. I thought Irish accents generally used more of a trilled r.
I once had a friend in St. Petersburg whose name was Maya Kulpa (Ма�? Кульпа), and her brother was Maksim Kulpa (Мак�?им Кульпа). It was hard to resist the temptation to refer to them collectively as Mea Maxima Culpa.
Chained_bear, you loved and cared for her and gave her a home when she felt most abandoned. Wherever she is now, I am sure that love remains for you (with you) and, possibly, for her too.
Yes, in Brazil. I came across this name in a piece I was editing about indigenous communities in the Brazilian state of Acre. The word was written as cupuaçu, but I wondered if there was an English equivalent. And I found cupuassu on Wikipedia (which I don't usually have much confidence in).
My condolences, Chained_bear. It may seem weird, but when my amazing cat Nastasya died a few years ago, I somehow felt that she was now in some way able to look out for me just I had looked out for her.
DJ, what's a theoretical band? Do you perform recitations of Foucault and Žižek? That could be interesting. And I'm also curious about your semi-retired poet status. Do you get semi-retirement benefits? Health care? Is there a semi-retirement poets' community? Twenty-five seems a young age to retire from anything, even semi-retire.
Doesn't it seem likely that Shakespeare was making a joke? Instead of saying simply "Great Ones" (which I think was a set phrase then, as it still is today, for the privileged in society), he was poking fun at such folks by appending the suffix -yer, as if being a Great One was not about character or moral stature, it was simply a profession, like that of lawyers and sawyers. In other words, might not oneyer be a Shakespearean madeupical?
I think I understand, though it's surprising that the adjective humanly has appeared so rarely since Caxton, for it follows the same pattern as godly, womanly, and manly, and indeed, the adjectival suffix -ly seems fairly productive, e.g. a person can act in a doctorly manner; one may look for cousinly support; a woman may show wifely devotion; members of the Religious Society of Friends encourage Quakerly behavior; etc.
Thanks, C_b and ext11, for the sympathy. But this loss occurred a quarter-century ago, so I am no longer grieving, though I am still grateful for this cat's devotion.
Strange. I'm sure I have been hearing people use the phrase "humanly possible" all of my life (and I met Abraham passed 50 a couple of years ago, as Slovenes say). So is this really a "new" word?
I lived with, and learned from, Muffin II, many more years than I had with Muffin, his predecessor, who sadly died from injuries sustained in a road accident at the young age of 3. Nevertheless, he also taught me a thing or two.
Muffin, the first of the name in our household (see Muffin II for his successor), was with us for only a few years. I was seven when we adopted him as a kitten, and he died after sustaining injuries in a road accident (my grandmother suspected the culprit was a motorcyclist) when he was only three. My memories of Muffin are vague, but I know I loved him and was deeply distressed by his passing. He inadvertantly challenged my young belief in the Judeo-Christian god, as taught by my Presbyterian Sunday School, but that is another story.
Prolagus has the right idea. Muffin II was a cat with whom I lived from the age of 10 to 18, and intermittantly after that, until his death at the age of 15 (when I was 25 and in graduate school). Much of what I know about forebearance, loyalty and contemplation I learned from Muffin II.
Thank you, Reesetee, for posting Soto's poem about his dog! I have loved Smart's poem ever since I first came across it some thirty years ago. It has to be the finest thing ever written about a cat; it percolates with love, wonder, and attentive observation.
This list, by the way, is dedicated to the feline members of my own little family, Aglaja and Erazma, each a mixture of gravity and waggery.
Thank you for this, Reesetee. You have inspired me to make a Poetrie with Christopher Smart's ode to his cat Jeoffry. It wouldn't surprise me if Smart's work was what prompted Soto to write this lovely poem to his dog; the two works have a lot in common.
Perhaps the worst thing about this faux pas was not that the word was wrong (actually it's the kind of mistake I would expect a truly diplomatic Russian to overlook, since it's very understandable why someone, even with a good general knowledge of Russian, might think that peregruzka meant "reset" – and in "lazy" or colloquial Russian, people do say peregruzka to mean reboot; Lavrov was being an asshole), but that the word was written in the Latin alphabet, not in the Cyrillic. This is truly disrepectful of Russian as a language. For more on peregruzka / перегрузка v. perezagruzka / перезагрузка, see the discussion at Language Log, to which yours truly made a modest contribution.
Thanks for your suggestion (a week and a half ago!) regarding my question about how to refer the "singular" of a pluralis tantem. I think I understand the notion of a "bound base", but I am not sure that applies to units like *scissor, *hijink, and *trouser, since the -s in the pluralis tantum is not really an affix in the way that dis- is in discombobulate, but a grammatical ending (or perhaps this distinction is irrelevant?). In other words, when we remove the ending from scissors, we still have a hypothetical noun that acts like real nouns in certain ways, notably, it can serve as a verb ("She scissored her way through the crowd") or a modifier ("The scissor pieces lay on the table, waiting to be assembled"). Would lexeme work in such cases?
Nice list! Just what I want first thing in the morning (or afternoon, as the case may be). I see you are already listing the Slovene and BCSM (Bosno-Croato-Serbo-Montenegrin) kava (sans accent), though Serbians seem to prefer kafa (or кафа in Cyrillic spelling). In Russian, coffee would be кофе (transliterated kofe). Also, my friends in Maryland fondly refer to this beverage as java (no matter where the beans originate).
In low-colloquial Slovene, this means "coffee." It almost certainly comes from the German Kaffee by way of the Carinthian dialect, where /a/ tends to be pronounced more or less /o/.
"Glede izjave predsednika Zveze borcev za vrednote NOB Slovenije Janeza Stanovnika, da povojnih pobojev niso izvedli partizani, ampak Jugoslovanska armada, je Drobni�?, sicer �?lan Nove Slovenske zaveze, poudaril, 'naj se Stanovnik ne spreneveda'."
Latin: "the body of offense". In law, this refers to the facts and circumstances constituting a breach of the law. In popular usage, however, this can mean the concrete evidence, such as a corpse.
a somewhat old-fashioned word for an ankle-boot, though in vernacular usage it can also mean any shoe. From the Hungarian csizma (dial. csizsma or Serbian �?izma, both derived from Turkish çizme "boot".
Oh of course actuaries. But what about spammers? What about telemarketers? What about advertisers in general? You know, anyone who tries to convince you to buy something you don't need and don't really even want? Who tries to convince you that you're somehow deficient unless you have their overpriced product that is guaranteed to wear out/run out/break down/go out of style in less than a year so you'll have to get the new and improved version? I have my doubts.
What a silly word. For one thing, these are not "almost enclaves"; they are almost exclaves (unless I've misunderstood what belongs to what). And for another thing, it's ridiculous to use the obscure "pene-" prefix when there are established ways of indicating such things. I would call these "near-exclaves" or, if you insist on a fancy prefix, "quasi-exclave". We don't, for instance, call it a "pene-victory" when a candidate loses by a few votes, or a "pene-fatality" when someone is almost killed.
"And when we were down twenty points in the summer, all the pundits and all the smart folks, they were saying, 'OK, his only chance now is he's got to knee-cap her; he's got to do a Tonya Harding on the frontrunner.'"
– Candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008.
a small lizard, especially the kind found sunbathing on rocks in gardens. Slovenes say things like, "Sedimo na soncu in se grejemo kot martin�?ki" ("We're sitting in the sun, warming ourselves like lizards"). The name of this beastie could be literally translated as "little Martin", and Slovene etymologist Marko Snoj says it is probably derived from the name "St. Martin," though the specific connection to the saint is not clear.
Dooty comes from doo-doo (a child's word for what doggies do on the lawn), which is a humorous euphemism for excrement. What Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer meant was "Horseshit!" (or more precisely, "Horse turds!").
There were signs that the country's armed forces were mobilizing along the Lebanese border. It would be a terrible mistake to assume the dictator's words were idle threats. The U.S. envoy's report made one thing repetitively clear: Syria's serious.
The word is real enough. An osphresiophilia is a strong (perhaps erotic) attraction to certain smells. For Wordizens, the prefix biblio- seems to be in order. While I may sometimes pooh-pooh a word, I would never poo-poo a fellow Wordie.
"Seasons in the Sun" is a bowdlerized English version of a fine, bitterly ironic song by Jacques Brel, "Le Moribond" (The Dying Man). There is a video of Brel singing this song on You-Tube (with English subtitles).
Perhaps putting "substantiality" in quotation marks would have made this clear, though that still leaves the question, "substantial" in what sense? In terms of length (a headline is not really "substantial" in that regard) or in terms of importance? If I quote only a single sentence, but it happens to be the sentence that carries the weight of the whole article, how does this excerpt rank in "substantiality"?
I can still see this being an eggcorn, at least in the mind of the bestower. I'm pretty sure that I used to think these were vocal chords because they're like the chords you play on a guitar. As the dictionary suggests, cord and chord have a long history of being confused. So what started as an eggcorn became, in some circles at least, an OK tree, while for others it still napped in the bud.
Pro, "funny bone" is the vernacular name for the olecranon, that part of the elbow which gives you a funny (wierd) feeling when you accidentally knock it against something.
Cat, you apparently didn't read VictoriaPL's citation from about 1 year ago. No need to repeat comments. By the way, do you like kippling? What about browning?
Oh, Joe! Well, he's another concrete thinker, despite being a lawyer – unlike his Antarctica-roaming wife.
By the way, I don't think I would ever interpret "imperfectible" as meaning "capable of being made imperfect" because there is no verb "to imperfect". I might say, rather, something like "blemishable" (a word that I doubt exists in dictionaries but is perfectly understandable).
"Helmet" has military connotations. "Hard hat" primarily means the headgear worn by construction workers as protection from things falling on them from above. Why did "hard hat" evolve in this context instead of "helmet", since they both mean essentially the same thing: "hard headgear worn as protection"? I suppose it's because workers used to always wear a kind of hat (e.g. to keep dust out of their hair), but in certain areas where there was a chance of things falling from above, they were required to exchange their soft-material hat for a hard hat. People didn't think of calling it a "helmet" because helmets were associated with military combat and sports (another kind of combat), areas very different from labor.
A curious pair: unperfectability and imperfectibility. The first is non-standard, I think, and comes from the English verb "to perfect" (stress on 2nd syllable): perfect + -able (which can be added to almost any transitive verb to produce an adjective) + un- (which can negate pretty much any adjective in English).
In fact, you probably won't find the perfectly plausible perfectable in most standard English dictionaries, and that's because the Latinate perfectible is so well-established, that the -able ending registers as incorrect. Because it derives from Latin, "perfectible" yields the equally Latinate negative imperfectible and hence, imperfectibility.
The variant you suggest, Pro, is not implausible, but because it combines the handy English un- prefix with the Franco-Latinate -ibility suffixes, it seems strange.
Kushner's word unperfectability means essentially the same as imperfectibility, but it has a somewhat ad hoc feeling, representing an instantaneous thought process (is this Belize speaking?) that goes something like this:
1. No one can make the world perfect.
2. The world is not able to be perfected.
3. The world is not "perfect-able."
4. The world is un-perfect-able.
5. The world is characterized by unperfectability.
By having his character say "unperfectability" instead of the standard "imperfectibility", Kushner conveys that the character is thinking in concrete, rather than abstract Scholiastic, terms. Which is sort of the whole point of the Belize v. Louis contrast in the play.
The distinction Bilby suggests has merit, too, I think. The word "imperfectible" probably developed in medieval religious thinking with regard to the question of the perfectibility or imperfectibility of man, given the doctrine of Original Sin. So it does point to an inherent deficiency. "Unperfectability", on the other hand, is, as I suggest, an ad hoc term related to concrete thinking ("Can we perfect this situation? No? Well, okay. How about this other situation then? Maybe we can perfect that. Let's give it a try.") and is not really concerned with inherent deficiencies, only with possibility or impossibility at the moment.
"The shootings of seven people marred Fat Tuesday as ear-piercing gunfire set revelers ducking for cover and brought the final stream of truck floats to a horrifying halt."
From the caption on a Guardian photo showing a utility truck cleaning up after New Orleans' Mardi Gras celebrations.
Somehow this was not the use of "ear-piercing" I was expecting in a report on Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Very sad.
I love the image of this: As you're leaving some scintillating Parisian salon, descending the grand staircase to your waiting coach outside, it hits you: you know just how you should have responded, the perfect, most brilliant retort, to the Chevalier de la Foue's insinuations about your last play (or was he perhaps referring to your relations with that promising young actor at La Comédie française?). But it is too late…
TBT, you would probably have some idea about how the word is spelled, wouldn't you? Often the problematic part of the word comes in the middle or the end (e.g. -able or -ible, -ant or -ent), so you know enough to look the word up and discover the correct spelling. If the word starts in a quirky way, like the name of our friend pterodactyl, then you might indeed be stumped, but after a while you may even start recognizing some of these deceptive spellings, and know that if the word isn't spelled one way then it is probably spelled another way. Most people, I suspect, use dictionaries to confirm or correct spellings they think they know.
God, I hate marketing lingo, especially when it usurps a wonderful, vivid word like turnkey. In my view, this self-promotional usage, and the marketeers who came up with it, are shovel-ready. Do any of these people read books?
*feels himself turning into a curmudgeon; sort of likes it, sort of doesn't*
Zizoo, there are plenty of mismatched (i.e. Greek + Latin elements) words that have been established in contemporary English (e.g. hypersensitive), so hypoflexive has lots of company, however scruffy such company might seem to etymology mavens like me (and, I presume, Qroqqa). If you want to be consistent (though some hold that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, of course), you could use the Latin prefix sub-, which would give you (I think) sufflexive. Or you could search out the Greek root for "bend" (Qroqqa could help, I bet).
Old-fashioned Oxford University Press prefers the etymologically grounded -ize/-ization (not an Americanism, but in use since the 16th century) to the French-influenced -ise spellings.
"Nižje pogovorno" is a designation Slovene lexicographers give to non-"formal" words that are widely used and understood in conversation (i.e. "pogovorno" – "colloquial") but that indicate a lower level of education or social status (i.e. "nižje" – "lower" or perhaps "vulgar" in the classic sense). In fact many of these words are used by everybody, even university professors, in relaxed, informal settings. Slovenes often refer to such words as doma�?e – "domestic, for the home" – which is a little ironic since the vast majority are German imports (e.g. štant, "a stand or booth", from das Stand), whereas the formal Slovene (Slavic-root) word (here, stojnica) is often less widely used and can sound official and stilted.
In Slovene classes, of course, they never teach you these "low-colloquial" expressions. And in Slovene schools, children are reprimanded when they use them, which, unsurprisingly, has its effects on the character.
Here is the interesting discussion of the word in the 19th-century Century Dictionary. It's worth quoting at length, I think. The dictionary provides the following citation from Chaucer:
"I am, til God me bettere mynde sende,
At dulcarnon, right at my wittes ende."
Quod Pandarus, "Ye, nece, will ye here?
Dulcarnon called is 'flemyng of wreches';
It semeth hard, for wreches wol nought lere,
For veray slouthe, or other wilful teches."
Troilus, iii. 931.
The dictionary also explains the word's application to Alexander the Great:
Dukarnon represents the Arabic dhu 'l karnein, 'lord of the two horns,' a name applied to Alexander, either because he boasted himself the son of Jupiter Ammon, and therefore had his coins stamped with horned images, or, as some say, because he had in his power the eastern and western world, signified in the two horns. (Selden's Preface to Drayton's Polyolbion.)
And adds that:
But the epithet was also applied to the 47th proposition of Euclid, in which the squares of the two sides of the right-angled triangle stand out something like two horns. This proposition was confounded by Chaucer with the 5th proposition, the famous pons asinorum. This, for some reason, was in the middle ages termed Elefuga, which is explained as meaning 'flight of the miserable,' or, as Chaucer renders it, 'flemyng of wreches.' Ele was supposed to be derived from elegi, meaning miserable, and this latter was itself derived from elegia, meaning sorrow. The passage from Chaucer was first thus explained in the London Athenaeum, Sept. 23, 1871, p. 393.
You might be interested in the use of Paphian by Byron and the Russian romantic poet Yevgeny Baratynsky to refer to prostitutes (see my comments on the word). And I would expect the Biblical harlot to be on this list.
No one said you were a crock, Kostya, only that your definition was. But then you went ahead and demonstrated that you were hotheaded, inarticulate, unimaginative, and indeed, probably a crock, too. You're certainly welcome to rebut Sionnach's narrow definition of the word (and a lively and interesting discussion would probably ensue, which is what Wordie is all about), but petty name-calling is just juvenile.
I guess I should say something since it was my comment that started this particular contretemps about tagging. There is certainly nothing wrong with Ms. Bear (or anyone) tagging as many words as she pleases "unremarkable." That in itself is an unremarkable tag (unlike others that have become objects of controversy), and I certainly did not mean to upbraid the tagger. I understand, I think, why she considers they an unremarkable word in the bigger scheme of things, or in a set of lists with such truly remarkable words as those collected by Ms. Bear. But from a different angle, no word is actually unremarkable, the most common words least of all, since they have centuries if not millennia of history behind them and can at times be all the more surprising because we tend to take them for granted. They in particular is a word of complex meaning, as the comments on this page indicate. That was the only point I wanted to make. There was no need to "expose" the tagger, who did nothing wrong.
Vanished, you should tell EFF who "we" are. It sounds a little ominous the way you put it: "Misspelt words … get tagged misspelling or typo when we come across them."
But it is a little mean, isn't it?, to name a flightless bird "Ascension". Sort of like calling the fat kid "Slim" or the kid with Coke™-bottle glasses "Hawkeye".
Could this be the flightless crake from Ascension Island? Or perhaps it can fly or glide but can't manage an ascension flight (so this shoud really be the "ascension-flight-less crake"). But I'm going with the toponymic interpretation.
According to Dictionary.com, it's a variant of etrog, which they define as "a citron for use with the lulav during the Sukkoth festival service." Now what's a lulav? (Generally, I find The Free Dictionary to be most helpful and easiest to use.)
Russian: transliterated zloradstvo, pronounced /zlah-RAHT-stvuh/. A calque on the German sch-word, this might be reasonably translated as "spiteful joy".
Whichbe, the post about My Little Pony Built My Hotrod is hilarious. I laughed out loud at the seriously affronted post by moderator Princess Biscuit:
"Your picture of Stalin riding a 3 year limited edition of Starflower inside a German concentration camp was both upsetting and historically inaccurate."
And this, from MLP-lover Pony FAP:
"The first generation of MLPs were made by Hasbro, not the Khmer Rouge. And Hasbro hasn't made toys out of human skulls since the 1960's."
Hate to quibble, Sionnach (well, I don't hate quibbling all that much), but the "y" in "aye" is not silent; it's working with the "a" to produce the diphthong we call "long i". One could perhaps make the argument that the "y" in "key" is silent, since one might reasonably pronounce "ke" as "kee" (cf. "me").
As for a silent "v", there is one in the French surname Le Febvre, but I can't think of any common nouns with a silent "v".
Gexe, what you added as a tag is really a comment. Tags are generally used for grouping words, e.g. "French", "misspelling", "technical term". If you want to say something about a word, that should go in the comment box.
The real question here should be, why is this extraordinary word tagged "unremarkable"? Not only is they spelled with an e where one might expect an a, it is a personal plural pronoun that might refer to no one in particular, or everyone (e.g. "well you know what they say"), and even to singular persons of indefinite gender (e.g. "everyone should fill out the form they received in the mail"; "if someone did this on purpose, they should apologize"). And in fact, it may even refer to non-animate things (neuter gender): "She threw out his clothes because they were to painful to look at." Unremarkable, indeed!
I expect that "lyfull" (lyf"life + full) meant "full of life (i.e. the life force)", and therefore "life-giving" ("quickening"), and not "lively", at least not in our modern sense of the word ("vivacious, energetic, spirited").
Not only is this word the name of a Slovene cheese and a fairly common male name (I have two friends named Luka), it is also one of the Slovene words for "port" (as in shipping, not the wine).
In Slovene (and other Slavic languages – cf. Russian дух), this word, pronounced with a long u (oo) and a voiceless velar fricative at the end (-kh), means "spirit" or "ghost".
By the way, in the part of the US where I come from, we call this beetle a ladybug. The "lady" in both words is, of course, the one Catholics call "Our Lady" (Notre Dame, for you college football fans).
Not really, ReeseTee. All he/she indicates in the list description is a reluctance to utter these words. There is no reflection on why the lister/tagger finds these words, and pamphlet in particular, ugly and unutterable. Is this the result of some childhood trauma? A bad experience with door-to-door proselytizers? Is it the rare appearance of the sequence -mphl-? Or the sound /-mfl-/? Is it the perhaps unexpected realization that the two p's are pronounced so differently? I have no problem with someone finding this or any other word "ugly" and even tagging it accordingly (and not only "ugly" but also "ugliest"!), but it would be good if they could provide some explanation for such strong antipathy, or at least indicate their own bewilderment over it, such as by saying, "I don't know why, but I just hate this word!" That might precipitate a discussion that could well prove profitable for the tagger him-/herself.
Nate, I think Bilby's question was alluding to the misplaced apostrophe in the title of this list. The plural of "one" is "ones," without the apostrophe. As it is, the present title means "One is to remember," implying that all the other items in the list can be safely forgotten.
For the American Wordies, the VAT (value-added tax) is one of the facts of life in Europe. It is similar to the sales tax levied by US states, but I think the econmic mechanism works a bit differently.
(Of course, Ragnvaeig's definition is the more traditional one.)
"We picked up one excellent word – a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice, limber, expressive, handy word – 'lagniappe.' They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish – so they said."
Why do people find this word "ugly"? I think that if you are going to express such a strong opinion through a tag ("ugliest", "ugly"), you should at least explain why you think it deserves such a label.
This word, by the way, comes into English from the name Pamphilet, an adaptation of the name of a popular love poem, written in Latin, from the 12th century, Pamphilus, seu de Amore ("Pamphilus, or, On Love"), which circulated through Europe as a small booklet, so that eventually any small booklet became known as a pamphlet. The name Pamphilus, a compound of the Greek elements pan- and -phil, means "loved by all". Apparently the word he gave his name to isn't.
Hi, Qroqqa! I am looking for a way to refer to the hypothetical singular form of a pluralis tantem, e.g. *scissor, *underpant, *hijink. Are these lexemes? I figured that you would be the Wordie to ask about this.
Another thing that Wordie novices tend to do is copy and paste dictionary definitions into the comment box. This makes sense only if the word is very obscure or foreign or the specific definition is not to be found in one of the standard online dictionaries. So it might be a good idea to have a line below the dictionary icons saying, "The above icons link to online dictionaries and reference tools, where you might find a definition of this word."
I would like to encourage people to either leave an interesting citation for the word or to in fact comment on the word ("I like this word because…"), and not just quote some dictionary.
Mcritz, I apologize if it sounded like I was getting on your case about the word (b)icicle, and I somehow completely missed your pronunciation guide to the word. The technique of inserting elements in parenthethes as a way of making a pun happens to be something that just gets on my nerves: overused in literary theory by American deconstructionists since at least the 1980s, this is a typographical conceit that usually cannot be aurally conveyed. If I heard your suggested pronunciation for "(b)icicle", I might easily assume it was spelled "b'icicle" or "ba'icicle"; there would be no reason for me to think of parentheses. The pun works visually, but not aurally. I have the feeling that ever since schoolchildren stopped learning how to recite poetry and other texts, the art of reading with the ears, and not only the eyes, has been dying out.
I agree, Rt. The caption on the picture Sionnach linked to says this crater is still unnamed. I find that amazing, too. Obviously it's Happy Face Crater!
I hope so too, Pro. You have no idea how complicated the issue of word-stress is in Slovene, especially with this class of feminine nouns (stress caused by stress!). So this list actually helps me a lot.
may be declined either as masc. (sg gen lákta; pl nom lákti, pl gen láktov) or fem. (sg gen laktí; pl nom/acc laktí). Only the masc. noun, however, can refer to a former unit of measure (about 77 cm or 30 1/3 in), and, as an archaism, the elbow (mod. Slovene: komolec).
This is the word used in the Slovene subtitles to Austin Powers to translate mojo. An informal colloquial word, it may come from the German word schmachten "to yearn for, pine after".
For me, if you are going to name generations, it makes most sense to name them either by the major international events or important sociological phenomena that shaped their character (e.g. the WWII Generation, the Television Generation, the Internet Generation) or by the decade in which they came of age and made their mark (e.g. the Sixties Generation, the Millennial Generation).
This term, by the way, was popularized by Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), though the term actually goes back to a 1964 British sociological study of teenagers (in the mid-1960s, so this was the first wave of the Baby Boom generation), written by Jane Deverson and Charles Hemblett and also called Generation X, I'm guessing because the post-WWII generation seemed like such a mystery to their elders.
These terms - Generation X, and Generation Y (Why?), and now Generation Z – seem so contrived to me, quite patronizing (they are all essentially marketing labels), and, needless to say, so unimaginative that I feel sorry for the people who assume these terms for themselves.
Since no one is listing it, this could simply be a "ghost". Perhaps, someone intended to write Grimaldi (the name of the princely family of Monaco) and hit the return too soon, then deleted the word from their list.
A popular celebrity tourist destination in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this Czech spa resort lent its name (in the better-known German version) to a couple of cities and some famous caverns in the Southwest United States: Carlsbad.
I should have added this a couple of days ago, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, which marks the liberation of the infamous Nazi concentration camp in this town, which is best known as Auschwitz.
Wait, "commode" in what sense? That was the euphemism my mother (a polite and gracious lady from Danville, Va.) would use for the toilet basin. The Citiboobs bought an antique, $35,000 toilet? On legs?
Hi, Mechano, welcome to Wordie! I just want to point out a couple of things about the site.
First, there is a row of icons under each word which will take you to a definition of that word from several online dictionaries, so for ordinary words found in most dictionaries (e.g. voluptuary), you really don't need to provide a dictionary definition in your comment – unless of course, there is something special about your definition. It will probably be more helpful, to you and everyone else using the site, to provide a quotation showing the word being used, or perhaps your own personal thoughts (reactions, questions) about the word.
The second thing (which I almost forgot) is that you may want to skim through the other comments on a word page before adding your own; you might find them interesting, or not, and have something new to add, and you will avoid repeating what has already been said.
Feel free to ask my or anyone else for tips about using Wordie. And have fun!
But how do you pronounce this, McRitz? "He discovered … his open-parentheses-bee-close-parentheses icicle in a snow bank"? "… his bee-icicle …"? Doesn't really work for me. Words should have sounds, and not only symbols (cymbals).
I am truly honored, but since I speak Slovene with a distinct American accent, I am probably not the right person to memorialize the pronunciation of these words in the public squares of Forvoland.
Mechanolatry, you probably meant to put your comment on the word kernkompetenz (just click on the word itself and you'll see how to do it) and not on the list.
I looked this up in the Century Dictionary Online (thanks again, Sionnach) and was a little surprised to find that this word really does refer simply to a place on the back that is unscratchable (which is exactly what the Greek origin of the word means); it's not a rash or some other skin condition (as one might think from its first four letters). I just refers to a place on the body, which may in fact be completely itch-free.
What's curious about this name is that jednota is not actually a Slovene word; it's Serbo-Croatian. The Slovene cognate is enota, and both mean "entity" or "unit", derived from jedna (S-C) / ena (Slo.), "one" (the number). The Slovene society's name translates as "Slovene National Support Unit" (not as nice-sounding in English as "Benefit Society").
Thanks for this, Reesetee! I didn't know about it at all.
The meaning of waffle as a verb that I am most familiar with is "to waver, keep changing one's mind," which sort of fits Weirdnet's definition. The verb waffle has become part of the US political jargon; candidates are fond of accusing their opponents of "waffling" on certain issues – which often refers to their opponent taking a more nuanced position on a complex and controversial subject rather than simply making an absolute ideological pronouncement. Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential campaign was regularly accused of waffling on the issues, which led to Gary Trudeau using a floating, wobbly waffle (with various amounts of butter on it) as his cartoon icon for Bill Clinton in the Doonesbury comic strip.
Bilby, I'm not familiar with the phrase "to waffle on" in the sense of "to be verbose". Is this the same as saying "to ramble on" – to talk on and on without making a lot of sense?
Bilby, I love your vanilla memory (in your comment on teleiophile)! Of course, vanilla is delightful and aromatic. Unfortunately perhaps, in America the word "vanilla" has gained the connotation "plain, simple" and even "boring", thanks largely, I suppose, to the efforts of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream company, who from the 1970s on, with their much-taunted "31 flavors" (they have many more now), sought to convince the American public that there was more to frosty creamy goodness than vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, the holy trinity of American ice cream parlors since at least the 1930s. Vanilla, being white and all, consequently got the rep of being plain, unadventurous, WASPy, middle-class, grandmotherly, infantile, etc. The concept was then transferred to sexual taste, especially perhaps in the gay community, so someone who was unwilling to be bound and gagged, wear a leather harness, have hot wax dripped on his nipples, assume various specific roles and dress in the appropriate garb, etc., was said to be "vanilla" or into "vanilla sex".
Curious, though, that the word shares an etymology with vagina.
You are right. According Dahl, щавель (shchavel') is Rumex acetosa - common sorel. The Slovene definition I looked up just described the plant as a "low, wild, densely growing vegetation of little value", which I took to mean "weeds". But when I now checked a Slovene-English dictionary, š�?avje is translated as "sorrel, dock". I must say, I am not familiar with that sense of "dock".
Curious. Do you know the origin of this word? In Slovene, š�?avje (pronounced "shchau-ye") refers to weeds or other low-growing dense wild growth, so I'm wondering if this word (and perhaps the soup) is of Slavic origin.
Bilby, the word vanilla has a long history (in the gay community at least) of describing "plain" (i.e. non-kinky) sex. If your point was that vanilla sex can often be wonderful and so should not be disparaged, I agree.
Yes, but unfortunately, that source does not reference the Douglass quote. I may be wrong, but it seems strange that Douglass would misspell the word this way. If anything, educated former slaves, especially when they were public figures, tended to be overcareful about things like spelling and grammar. The last thing they wanted was to appear illiterate. The word is, of course, properly spelled "oftenest".
In the grocery store today, I thought of this list when I saw the squash, and nearby the staff was cleaning up a tomato that had gotten squashed on the floor. As I stood in line for the till, I realized that I hadn't given much thought to such covergences till recently. Thanks, Sarra!
Another one is the tetrasemantic dock: 1. pier, 2. deduct, 3. enclosure for the accused in court, 4. a kind of weed.
Thanks for noticing, Rt! I had thought that maybe some chorus would perform this song at the Inauguration. Then when the Rev. Lowery opened his prayer as he did, I found it so moving, that I had to share it with Wordie.
OK, Scion, I've read all the quotes and was duly amused/disturbed at the notion of such AI developments, but I still have no idea what is meant by kurzweiliana. I know the German word kurzweilig ("entertaining") and I know the great composer Kurt Weil (and was sort of hoping this page referred to Kurt-Weiliana), but I am clearly missing something here. Please enlighten.
Even when referring to the imperative, Artoparts was not wrong in what he/she wrote. It is still the 2nd person plural (or formal) form. The imperative mood also has person as a category, including 1st and 3rd persons (though these are usually expressed in English with the verb "let"): "Let's go!" "Let them rejoice!"
The first line of the third verse of "Lift Every Voice and Sing", commonly known as the Negro National Anthem. This verse was use by the Rev. Joseph Lowery in his benediction at the Inauguration of President Barack Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.
legomenon? You know, of course, that neither of Obama's parents was Hawaiian, either ethnically or residentially. His mother was born and grew up in Kansas. His grandparents later moved to Hawaii, which is where he was raised while his mother remained in Indonesia. Neither of his parents, by the way, were mixed-race.
There was a cheese I used to buy in Toronto that was called simply Friulano. But when I asked for it recently at a well-stocked cheese counter in Ljubljana (and Slovenia is right next-door to Friuli so I was hopeful), they didn't seem to know what it was. Perhaps I should have asked for asin?
I know next to nothing about cheesemaking. Are other animal byproducts (e.g. fats other than milk fats) besides milk usually involved in making cheese?
Aren't you thinking of the word mysterious? With an "e"? Also, in the words mysterious, mystery, mystic, etc. my- is part of the root (-myst-), not a prefix.
What do you mean by "vegetarian" here? If you understand "vegetarian" loosely (meaning without meat), then all cheeses are vegetarian, but if you understand the word to exclude all animal byproducts, then this cheese would not be made from milk. Is it made from vegetable fats? *Puzzled.*
Would a Wordie "Tutorial" page be a good idea to supplement the faq page? Some people seem to be finding it hard to figure out Wordie, probably because it is so unexpectedly simple. A few pointers might be in order. I seem to recall that when I started on Wordie, there was such a page, wasn't there?
The song is about being "drifters off to see the world." In Mark Twain's novel, Huckleberry and Jim run away from home and travel down the Mississippi on a raft, and a number of entertaining adventures ensue. So in the song, "huckleberry" means "free-spirited, adventurous, open to new things, exploring the world".
This is also a useful term in writing about literature to refer to phenomena that enter a fictional or poetic text but derive from the common everyday life of the intended readership, for example, references to nailclippers or McDonald's. I first encountered it in Russian, as реали�? (realiya), when I was studying Russian literature, so I am not certain it is widely used in English-language literary criticism. But it ought to be.
ugh. I hate such seemingly clever yet totally tonedeaf shorthand coinages. To my ear, this means "teacher-taker", since the French element -preneur comes from prendre, "to take". Also, it betokens a certain lethargy or, conversely, affected hurriedness (and hence affected importance), as if saying, "I'm too l lazy or too busy to say/write the whole word 'entrepreneur', so I'll just say '-preneur' and hope you dunderheads get my meaning."
To live with someone as a couple without the sanction of marriage is "to shack up" with that person. That at least is the first use of the verb "to shack" that comes to mind. The Weirdnet definitions are weird to me also.
Telofy, in colloquial American speech the subjunctive mood is slowly dying out in such constructions. In the sentence, "Every night I start talking as if I knew things", knew is the subjunctive form of the verb. It may look like the past tense, but there is nothing past about it here; it's clearly referring to the ongoing, recurring present. One could even use it in the future: "In three years, Colbert will still be talking as if he knew things." For the verb "to be", the subjunctive form is "were", for all persons: "Every night I start talking as if I were knowledgeable"; "Every night Colbert starts talking as if he were knowledgeable." For earlier generations, these were the only permissible forms in such constructions. But in America, at least since the 1960s (and some more knowledgeable Wordie linguist like qroqqa or sarra could probably give you more exact information), the subjunctive has been deteriorating in colloquial speech (and more and more in formal writing too), so that today you are probaly more likely to hear and read "as if I know things; as if I am knowledgeable". But the meaning is the same.
I'm impressed already by your energy and enthusiasm at adding words. I don't know if you realize it, however, but a few people have been offering you suggestions, for example, on the word meshugana. Basically, they are pointing out (and I agree) that you really don't have to copy and paste (or retype) dictionary definitions in the comment box, since there is already a row of icon-links to various English dictionaries right beneath the word itself. Also, next to the word, there is a feed from Wordnet providing definitions, though these, alas, are sometimes strangely written (hence many of us call this Weirdnet). Of course, if your word is very strange and unlikely to be found in one of these dictionaries, then a definition is most welcome, though speaking for myself, I usually prefer personal comments or observations about words, or paraphrases of dictionary definitions. But everyone discovers over time what works best for her or him with Wordie.
Also I am wondering why you put so many of your definition-comments in bold? It's a bit annoying (both on the home page where the comments appear to everyone and on the word page), so I am wondering if you have a good reason for it.
A lot of people when they first come to Wordie have questions, so feel free to ask me or anyone of the other more active Wordies. Also, you can find answers and discussions about some Wordie issues at the word faq.
Please continue having fun with Wordie! By the way, you've got a wonderful name!
In photography: adj. & adv. with the sun or other light source behind the subject (French, meaning "against the daylight"); in English we would call this backlighting.
"hummingbird" (in Slovene and other languages), from a now extinct Caribbean language. It came into Slovene via German and French. Marko Snoj, in The Slovene Etymological Dictionary (2003), writes: "borrowed from a Caribbean language, perhaps from the language of the inhabitants of the island Cayenne, in which colib(a)ri means 'shiny surface'. If the supposition is correct, then the hummingbird is named for the shiny color of its plumage."
"The Yantra Mandir (commonly known as the Jantar Mantar) is an equinoctial dial, consisting a gigantic triangular gnomon with the hypotenuse parallel to the Earth's axis. On either side of the gnomon is a quadrant of a circle, parallel to the plane of the equator. The instrument is intended to measure the time of day, correct to half a second,citation needed and declination of the Sun and the other heavenly bodies."
– from the Wikipedia article (17 Jan 2007)
There were five such "dials" built by the Maharaja Jai Singh II of Jaipur in the 1720s and 1730s. The most famous ones are in Jaipur and Delhi. The word means "calculation instrument" (also from Wikipedia).
You know, I misread the original comment and, misled by Bilby's interpretation of the word, really did think this meant "walking backwards" and couldn't understand the "suffering" part of it. But now I see it describes what in English we might call comeuppance or just deserts.
Well, at least it's heartening to see that representatives of epileptics and others with mental illnesses think that this is being overly sensitive. Isn't bending over backwards to avoid offending particular groups in itself offensive? I mean, it seems to imply that such groups have an extremely thin skin (I hope putting it that way isn't offensive to the PDD community – People with Dermatological Disorders). I can understand going out of your way not to offend the MPWA community (Murderous Psychopaths With Axes), but otherwise, a little reason is called for (by saying that I don't mean to offend the PIRW community - People Incapable of Reasoning With).
Really, S.? I relate it to mutual, a rather nice word, which I suspect it is related to, though I'm not sure how it's used – sounds like a word French social philosophers (Badiou? Bourdieu?) might use.
A second suggestion about lists – one that perhaps someone has already brought up: Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow group lists together (at least our own lists), or put our lists in folders (e.g. "vocab-building", "history", "reading", "fun stuff", "Wordie-specific")?
I appreciate your point, Ptero, and I think there are a lot of cases where "to not X" may mean something different from "not to X". In the example of not eating dinner, the two meanings are entirely different ("avoiding dinner" v. "having improper table manners"), but usually a much more subtle is involved: (1) "I told you not to say that!" is different from (2) "I told you to not say that!", where we can imagine that the speaker's original instructions in (1) were simply "do not say this but rather this" and in (2) were more specifically disuasive: "I know you want to say this (or usually would say this, or are expected to say this), but in this case you must not say this." I think this is the same kind of difference as with "I told you not to come" and "I told you to not come" – essentially, this is a difference in the degree of forcefulness of the negative command.
The same way? You mean to describe somebody whose walking backward, weeping, with their face turned in the direction they're walking. Does this happen a lot in Italy?
Very interesting, and thanks, Sumit, for supplying the gallery. One of my favorite public sculptures in Ljubljana is the monument to the Slovene novelist and playwright Ivan Cankar, which stands in front of the Cankar Cultural Center. Designed by the sculptor Slavko Tihec, it is in the shape of a cube. On the front and the back, if you look at it directly, you see what looks like wavy vertical grooves, but if you look at it slightly from an angle, you see the writer's face. I have always thought this was a brilliant way to present in bronze the idea of reading: you don't always get the meaning until you find the right angle from which to approach it.
Here's another great word for your wonderful list, the etymological triplet smelt (smelled; meld metals; little fish). Also, bale (bundle; menacing evil).
Now this could be a useful word: "This is giving me a serious attack of rectalgia." Or perhaps especially in its adjectival form, rectalgic: "my rectalgic boss/client/employee/coworker".
Recently, I have been seeing this word used to mean "to not be of the opinion": "I disbelieve that the Obama stimulus package will succeed." This usage seems strange to me and, as I said, fairly recent. Normally, I would say, "I do not believe" or "I disagree that". I am used to the sense, "doubt the veracity" of someone or something: "She disbelieved his protestations of love." But even that sounds strange to my ear (compared with "She did not believe ..."). To use "disbelieve" with a "that" subordinate clause seems really unusual to me. Have I been too long outside English-speaking lands?
Along with the common meaning indicated by Wordnet ("a bale of hay"), this word has an interesting etymological distinct archaic meaning, "destructive evil", which gives us the word baleful, "menacing; having a harmful effect".
senozornik - July - the first part of this name, seno-, means "hay", and -zor- means something like "the radiance of the sky at dawn or sunset", so we might say this is "hay-dawn month".
cherven' - June - This word comes from the Slavic word cherv', "worm", which evolved to mean also "red" in some dialects (chervonnyy, chervlennyy), so I would guess that this means "red month" and not "worm month" (though that is possible too).
berezozol - April - the first part of this word, berezo- means "birch tree", and -zol means "evil" in modern Russian, but I am not sure that is what it means here. I need to do more research.
Technically, the US president is not "our commander in chief" unless "we" are members of the US Armed Forces. The president is the servant and employee, not the commander, of U.S. citizens, which is a concept Bush never really understood.
The problem could be my system, C_b. Your second handbag link ("here's") worked, and it had a little arrow, but the other one ("here it is again"), sans arrow, just took me to the same gibberish.
But the handbag I could see is a beauty, with all the colors of the Bearish rainbow!
I went to a Quaker school and for a number of years attended a Quaker meeting (i.e. what Quakers call church), and I never met a Friend who was offended by the word. They even use it regularly themselves, though Friend is the preferred term. Still, I have heard Friends speak of "Quakerly" behavior or "Quakerly" ways of doing things. The organization's website, www.quaker.org is here, and they use the word throughout. Also Quaker blogs are to found at Planet Quaker. So I think you can use "Quaker" safely, but somewhere in the text it should be made clear, as reesetee says, that this term refers to a member of the Religious Society of Friends".
Well, I overstated the problem of course. It could be a New Dawn, too, since now it's so easy to access reliable reference tools, if you know which ones they are. But a lot of people still don't think to look words up in dictionaries even, and user-created databases, while endlessly useful and often very amusing, do not really attempt (with a few exceptions like the Wikipedia folks) to provide reliable information. They operate on the theory that people will correct each other. Which is fair enough. But still it means that there is a ton of incorrect, misleading, self-serving, facetious and specious information out there online. Words like "authoritative" (and indeed even "author") seem to be falling into disrepute. But it's not all so bad, and I'm probably being too pessimistic. Things do tend to right themselves (and write themselves). So calm down, my friend.
*offers reesetee a cup of comforting camomile tea*
I know, Rt. It's so sad. English took hundreds of years to come up with a more or less standardized spelling and grammar, and in a generation all that work is becoming unraveled. More and more, I think the Internet age risks becoming the New Dark Ages.
With verbal jests of this sort, context is everything. I can easily imagine some dear friends of mine, who are lesbians, good-naturedly calling another lesbian friend a "troglodyke" because she chooses not to have an active social life. Personally, I don't think there is anything inherantly offensive in the word or even in the jocular definition Hernesheir has provided. But like many things online, the context is so nebulous that interpretation can become quite difficult. Here, as in countless other things, the virtual world falls far short of the real one. We wouldn't have these problems, probably, if we were all just yakking in some real-life café.
I don't mean ordering lists according to when I made the list (which I know I can do now), but ordering lists according to when I last added a word to the list (i.e. more active or less active lists). I don't think we can do this - yet - can we? But I have unlimited faith in John's programming powers/prowess.
Prolagus, "a hundred-grand garret" would be a loft apartment that cost 100,000 dollars (or pounds?) to buy. I'm not sure what the song wants to imply. Usually the word "garret" is associated with poor artists or writers living in a cheap rented attic space that has been converted into a makeshift apartment. Garrets can be nice, though. I lived in one for six years in Toronto.
Old Slovene name for February. In the 15th century, February was called se�?an, which may come from an IE root meaning "dry" or from the Slavic root sek-, meaning "chop" (Choppingmonth). The -v- probably was added under the influence of the religious holiday sve�?nica, "Candlemas", on February 2.
Old Slovene name for January. The word most likely comes from Old Slavic prosinǫti, "to shine through", perhaps because in this month the sun begins to shine through the clouds more strongly. Hence, this means "Shinethroughmonth".
The western part of Slovenia is, literally, pitted with caves, sinkholes and disappearing rivers, and it was here, in this region called Kras in Slovene (Karst in German and Carso in Italian), that this particular limestone geology was first systematically investigated. The name of the region, however, is ancient and predates the arrival of the Slavs in the 6th century CE.
Here's an idea: What about being able to order (at least) our own lists according to how recently we added words to them (i.e. according to degree of activeness). This would make it easier when we return periodically to work on older lists, which now end up buried a few screens down.
Author of such works for the stage as Uncle Van and One Sister (who was always dreaming of going to the medium-sized town of Mosc), as well as The Cher Orchard, a sci-fi play about a mad gay scientist who makes a gaggle of replicants based on the object of his obsession. Unfortunately, Anton never made it big, perhaps because it's hard take seriously someone whose last name sounds like you're clearing your throat.
I agree with you, C_b; that's something I deal with a lot as a copy-editor. But of course, when "only" begins a clause, it can also mean "were it not for the fact that":
She would have turned around and walked out there and then, only he told her he loved her.
Actually, I think, Knickerbocker was first used (after Washington Irving's fictional persona Dietrich Knickerbocker) to refer to the Dutch descendents of the original settlers of the state, who lived not only in the city but also along the Hudson River Valley.
Another, rather facetious suggestion for the inhabitants of NY State would be Empiricists.
Pleth, in the phrase "star-spangled banner", "spangled" is a form (participle) of the verb "to spangle". But of course you know that. One could argue that this represents a use of the verb.
My first association with this word is the National Anthem of the United States of America (I'm a Baltimore boy, after all), hence my question to Whichbe: Why do you hate freedom?
Why so perplexed, Tectquix? Peritus's meaning is correct, although I have more commonly encountered the form centauromachy, but both are correct and equally valid. The battle between the centaurs and the Lapiths, at the wedding feast of Pirithous, was a well-known theme in Greek art, most notably on the frieze of the Parthenon in Athens. Wikipedia offers this article about the battle.
Another curious word, which goes along with Sionnach's foxy suggestion, is thrush, which is not only a bird but also (with a different etymology entirely) a mouth infection.
The Oxford American also gives the past participle as stridden. I probably wouldn't say "stridden" (and would rarely say "stride" or "strode"), but I suppose I could imagine a context in which I would write it: "He had stridden the whole length of the field, as the angel had instructed, when he came upon a simple wooden chest on the lid of which were engraved four strange symbols, which he thought might be runes." I doubt if any reasonably educated English speaker would be flummoxed by the word "stridden" in this sentence, even if it's not commonly used in the present-day conversational language.
Probably you're thinking of Pollyannaish, from the name Pollyanna, an unfailingly optimistic character in the children's books of Eleanor Hodgman Porter and the Disney movies based on them.
I too wish to extend my thanks to whichbe for such masterful organizing/juggling of phrases, lists, tags and words in a stunning display of the very opposite of multislacking. And congranulations and hippy birchday to our award-winging lastmaker Sionnatch! And congrats also to the_grene_kni3t, who first listed the WWOTY08 but seems to have been doing some multislacking of her/his own in the past couple months. And to Ms. C._Bear for her indefatigable defense of freedom in first listing the WPOTY08.
I would think that, if we wanted one, femmage would make a good counterpart to homage, i.e. as an artistic or literary tribute specifically to a woman as opposed to one honoring a man.
I like contranyms, if the opposing meanings are truly well established and especially if they are etymologically distinct (like, I think, "cleave", the classic example of a contranym), or if they separated so long ago that their common origin is essentially forgotten, or when a certain use of a word is so counterintuitive as to be remarkable (e.g. the use of "commencement" to refer to a ceremony that marks the completion of one's education).
When you search for something on Google and find thousands hits but the one you want is nowhere in the first 10 pages of hits. Also known as searching for a needle in a Googlestack.
Things may have been more difficult, but not all difficulties are bad. On the Internet, you may discover, after a number of wild Google chases, that the restaurant you were hoping to go to has closed, but before the Internet, you would call them on the telephone and either get the message that the phone number no longer exists, or be redirected to another phone number (and perhaps the new restaurant the owners had opened). You might even end up talking to a real person. Or you would just go there and discover that there was a different restaurant in the old location (maybe), and maybe you would try that one and it would become your new favorite restaurant. In any case, you would have gotten out of the house and off your butt.
No, I am not convinced that things were better before the Internet. Some things were easier, but ease also comes with a price.
I don't see (pun intended) "transparent" as being contranymic or autantonymous. The core notion of transparency is that something becomes invisible so that something else can be visible. Etymologically, the word means "appearing through". When we say, "The negotiations should be transparent", we are using a kind of metonymy: the transparency refers to the framework of the negotiations, which should be "invisible" (not opaque), allowing us to see what is actually happening. To call the word "transparent" contranymic seems to flatten it into two opposing meanings, whereas it actually conveys a single metaphorical meaning that is whole, if complex.
I like this list a lot! But I am wondering what dear is doing here. Isn't the meaning "cherished" just an extension of the meaning "expensive (valuable, rare)"? In French, cher does similar double duty, as does дорогой / dorogoy in Russian.
Another word I might suggest would be slough (meaning 1. "swamp", and 2. "shed dead skin"). And now that I think of it, also shed. And then there's the triple-duty row (1. "operate a boat using oars", 2. "a straight line of something", 3. "a quarrel"). There appear to be many such homographs in English.
Prolagus is right (and we also say "a bolt of lightning"), but you do not necessarily need to translate this expression. Although not common, the phrase coup de foudre, which is found in English dictionaries, could be used as it is in a sophisticated English text just as we use other French expressions (e.g. pièce de la résistance, coup de grâce, par excellance) in English.
Chiming in here, it's interesting how various processes have combined to create pairs of such participial adjectives in English, where both words are spelt the same and mean the same thing, but are pronounced differently in different contexts:
blessed ("blessed /blest/ bread") v. blessèd (which is sometime used as a substitute for "damned": "Get your blessèd things out of my house!")
aged ("an aged /'eɪdʒd/ wine") v. agèd (= very old, "an agèd man")
learned ("learned /lərnd/ behavior") v. learnèd (=erudite, "a learnèd professor").
For #28, I had guessed "Judges" because I was assuming you meant the books of the Bible, which in my Protestant tradition are ordered as follows: ... Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, I & II Samuel, I & II Kings ... Thus, Judges is the third book after Numbers, and Kings is the third book after Judges. In the Catholic Vulgate Bible, however, the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings are grouped together as I, II, III & IV Kings, so if this is what you have in your Irish mind, then perhaps the answer you are looking for is Joshua, since then this mega-Kings would be the third book after Joshua. This would also hold true for the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible), in which, though Samuel is preserved as a separate entity in the section called Nevi'im (Prophets), Ruth is relegated to another section, the Ketuvim (Writings). So let's go with Joshua (Y'hoshua).
I like, no, love, the simplicity of Wordie, though as I write this I realize that as a value, "simplicity" can be understood two ways, either as being easy for me to do everything I want to do, from making vocab lists to making friendships, or as being elegantly constructed, without any extraneous bells, whistles, coaxings, suggestions, autoblather, etc. Wordie balances both of these meanings nicely. I have always liked Wordie the way it is, even as it has changed, and that is because I think John has a very clear vision of the kind of site he wants Wordie to be and the kind he does not want it to be. I have even come to like the constraints of Wordie, such as the forced public nature of nearly everything that goes on here (except for the fairly new development of private notes). It is not hard, for example, to find out if someone is online (or has recently been): just click on their name somewhere to get to there profile page, and check their recent activity, or if this is not available, check their last comment. If they are online and haven't been commenting, well, maybe they're doing their own Wordie-work (tidying lists, adding words) and don't feel like socializing.
You've got me thinking again, after many years, about Owen Barfield and his book Poetic Diction, which examines myth and metaphor as being at the root of language.
I see you have my grandmother's name already, only she spelled it Zylpha. She was the daughter, or perhaps granddaughter, of German immigrants, so I assume this name is related to the German word Sylphe ("sylph"), where the initial consonant is pronounced /z/.
On cumyxaphile v. cumyxaphilist, my assumption was based on the fact that one who enjoys bibliophily is a bibliophile. With matchbox collecting, it seems, for quick and primitive Google checks, that both -phile and -philist are used, but "cumyxaphile" gets 212 hits, as opposed to 5 for "cumyxaphilist".
Btw, I applaud Mollusque for figuring out cumyxaphily, but without taking anything at all away from that triumph, I should point out the closer parallel to numismatist would be cumyxaphile.
I did a couple of Google searches, but couldn't find anything about the linguistic origin of this word. I did discover, however, that in Russian this word is written цварнохарно, which would be transliterated, using one of the more common and more user-friendly systems, as tsvarnokharno; in the "scientific" system, this would be cvarnoharno or cvarnoxarno. The z spelling, most likely, is based on German, where the letter z is pronounced /ts/. I doubt the word has Slavic origins; my guess would be that, given Gurdjieff's own nationality, it's Armenian. But sadly, I know nothing of Armenian.
For me the most wonderful word I learned on Wordie in 2008 was mono no aware. I fully agree with Mollusque about the horrible, snicker-inducing, bartesque word hork.
I wonder if "Mele Kalikimaka" is really a translation. I would guess that it rather represents the rendering of the English words "Merry Christmas" into Hawaiian phonology, with the r-sound turning into the l-sound, /s/ turning into /k/ and the insertion of extra vowels to keep consonantal sounds apart. Similarly, though with different rules, the Polynesian toponym Kiribati derives from Gilbert.
The choral piece in #37 is beautiful but unknown to me. I can't wait to find out the answer!
Can the answer to #25 really be as simple as "Duchamp"? Marcel Duchamp is the author of the painting Nude Descending a Staircase just as Jasper Johns is the author of the flag painting. Or am I missing something?
Slovene slang, borrowed from Italian. Literally it means "an evil hour", but would commonly be translated as "hell": Naj gre v maloro! = "May he go to hell!"
It is also used in the sense of "failure, a big mess": Če ni�? ne ukrepamo, bo gospodarstvo šlo v maloro. = "If we don't do anything, the economy will tank."
I assume you are mainly interested in recent borrowings, from the last two hundred years or so, and not those that go back to the Norman Conquest, which would be a hefty chunk of the vocabulary of Modern English.
I was going to suggest this should be deprefixation, but as reesetee points out, it's a madeupical word anyway. Also, I wondered if the spelling was intentional, to form a portmanteau from deprivation + prefix.
Thanks for the explanation, all! I suspect people will keep on using "quantum leap" to mean a significant, world-altering change, and physicists will keep arguing over whether such popular use is valid. Unfortunately, people like cliches, and more to the point, we love cliches that make us sound smart.
Sadly, this is the defense used by some men charged with rape: "If she was wearing that dress, she obviously wanted it!" And appallingly, it sometimes works.
C_b, I was going to say that it shouldn't be used except facetiously, but then when I thought about it, I realized that even the facetious use of this word makes me groan. I want to ask, "You couldn't come up with anything better than that to make your ironic/facetious point?!"
Do people today really use "methinketh"? Oh, dear.
I wasn't saying the word was cutesy in the 16th century or earlier. But to use it today is cutesy, not to mention affectatious. What's interesting to me about the OED's citations are those from the 17th and 18th centuries for the past tense form, where the writers are using "methoughts". This shows that even by that time, this word was no longer standard, since they are adding the present tense ending to a past tense form. In 21st speech and writing, "methinks", "methought", and, God help us, "methoughts", should all be avoided.
My mother used to say this word when I was growing up (back in the 1960s), which was curious because I was very much into reading Arthurian romances (especially the collection by Sidney Lanier) where the characters were always saying, "Methinks,..." Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that my mother's usage probably derived from 1940s women's college slang.
Personally, I don't like "methinks"; it's much too cutesy-quaintsy for me. Having said that, however, I find myself wondering what this word actually means. Considering its 3rd-person singular form (the ending -s) and objective form of the pronoun (dative, perhaps), I gather that this meant originally not: "In my opinion" or "My view is that", but "The idea occurs to me that...": "It thinks to me..." Such passive impersonal constructions are widespread, by the way, in Russian and other Slavic languages.
Northwestern New York bison whom (other) northwestern New York bison intimidate intimidate (yet other) northwestern New York bison whom (other) northwestern New York bison intimidate.
I like this very much! But I am curious about the "instructive" case. With Slavic languages, which also have a case to indicate means, this is called the "instrumental" case.
The name of the most recent corrupt Illinois governor appears to be well on its way to becoming a byword. Taking off from David Letterman's coinage of the verb "to blagojevich" (he said the governor was charged with "one count of bribery, one count of fraud and one count of Blagojeviching"), the Chicago Tribune has this suggestion:
"We can come up with a working definition: Blagojevich (bluh-GOY-uh-vich) noun. a scandalous person —verb 1 to damage or cheapen 2 to complain —adj., adv. (Vulgar Slang) 1 bleeping. But would anyone use it?"
This joke won't work for most USAmericans. For years after moving to Europe and watching the BBC regularly on cable, I had no idea why a popular cooking show was called "Ready Steady Cook!" I kept hearing "steady cook" as a noun phrase. Where I come from, we say, "On your mark, get set, go!"
The ridiculous way I remember this name is to think of a TV commercial where you're offered a chance to "save on a roll of" toilet paper! Somehow it's appropriate, I think, though I'm not sure why.
This question may have already been brought up, but I was wondering if it was possible with a list of more than 100 words to view all the words in alphabetical order. Now, when you click on alpha order, you can view the first 100 in alpha order, but this ability is lost with the next page of words. Can this be fixed?
Comments by rolig
Show previous 200 comments...
rolig commented on the word polish
Named after the infamous Felix Dzerzhinsky (Dzierżyński).
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word gay downfall of the roman empire
When my father once brought up the "gay downfall of Rome" hypothesis, I pointed out that it made much more sense to blame the downfall of Rome on the Christians. After all homosexuality had been celebrated in Rome for centuries, but it wasn't until the Empire became officially Christian that things fell apart completely.
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word krofi
Slovenia is where Italian cuisine meets the German/Austrian and Croato-Bosno-Serbian (i.e. Turco-Balkan) cuisines, with a splash of Hungarian goulash from the country's easter borderlands. So we should be able to find something tasty!
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word krofi
OK, no krofi then!
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word financial tsunami
Now, this is two words, Skip, and you know it.
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word web 2.0
It depends on your definition of word. But this is really sad, I think. I might just have to stay in bed today.
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word is the pope a catholic
Isn't hey for horses?
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word pappenheimer
This sounds like a name in a Marx Bros. movie. (Though I must say Walloon sword has a certain something. Isn't CharlesFerdinand our resident Walloon? – If he's not a Habsburg archduke in disguise!)
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word july
If you've spent all your Julies in Reykjavik, don't worry. Iceland is so broke I hear they're accepting Pennies now.
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?, š, and ž
Absolutely.
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word lake bled
Click on image search to make sure.
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word oklahomo!
I swear I didn't know about that. But of course it's obvious.
June 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word fata morgana
One of my favorite passages from Pasternak, from the poem that begins "Се�?тра мо�? — жизнь…" ("My sister – life…"):
Мига�?, морга�?, но �?п�?т где–то �?ладко,
И фата–морганой любима�? �?пит
Тем ча�?ом, как �?ердце, плеща по площадкам,
Вагонными дверцами �?ыплет в �?тепи.
And here's a more or less serviceable translation:
Winking, blinking, people sleep sweetly somewhere,
and my love, like a fata-morgana, sleeps,
while my heart, splashing across train platforms,
scatters carriage doors over the steppe.
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word naughty
Right, C_B, but not to be confused with "Atta Xerxes!", which is how the Old Persians praised their kids and dogs when they did something clever.
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word scarpetta
I poked around the Slovene dictionary and discovered that škarp is there, marked as "usually pl." (i.e. škarpi) and "low vernacular" (code for "people say this at home but don't you dare use it in formal writing"), with the meaning "an old, worn-out shoe" or sometimes (dialectically), just any old shoe.
But next to it was the word škarpa, which is a perfectly respectable word that means "a wall between two different heights of land, to prevent erosion or landslide"; in other words, a scarp or (more commonly) escarpment, which my English dictionary tells me comes from the Italian word scarpa. I think this solves the mystery. When you're soaking up the sauce with you're bread, what you are doing is making a "little scarp", just like on Chained_Bear's beloved fortresses. So you're not doing scarpetta; you are making (i.e. constructing) a scarpetta.
Edit: The escarpment has been repaired. Thanks, Bil!
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word scarpetta
Thanks, Pro! We're counting on you.
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word the silence of the lamps
A Beat poet burns the midnight oil but still finds he has nothing to say.
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word arsy-versy
Also arsy-varsy.
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word from hare to eternity
An animated bio-pic about a lowly tortoise who wins immortality by beating an overly confident lagomorph in a race.
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word the tin commandments
A low-budget Biblical feature Starring Carlton Feston as the prophet who delivers the message of the not-so-Almighty: "It'd be really nice if thou didst not, y'know like, kill, take things that don't belong to thee, and all that other bad stuff."
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word das sind für mich böhmische dörfer
Now, let me see if I understand: Czechs find Spanish villages baffling, Germans find Bohemian (i.e. Czech) and Spanish villages baffling, and Anglos find Greek baffling. Very interesting. Slovenes, by the way, also say, To je zame španska vas ("It's a Spanish village to me") to mean "I don't understand a thing about it". (German villages, of course, are typically well-organized and not in the least baffling.)
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word scarpetta
By the way, "arsiversy", Yarb? Is this a synonym for bass-ackward? (Though I would make it arsiverse as an adjective.)
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word naughty
Interesting citation, Yarb. Gibbon must be using the word in the sense of "disobedient" or perhaps "unruly", if not in the more archaic sense of "wicked".
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word prelom
break (prelom kosti, "break in a bone", prelom besede, "breaking of one's word"); edge, cusp (kmetija na prelomu doline, "a farm at the edge/cusp of the valley"); in printing: page layout (i.e., making the column and page breaks).
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word scarpetta
So I want to know about the word itself (sorry, guys, that's just the way I am). One translation tool tells me that scarpa means "shoe" in Italian. So when I sponge up the leftover sauce with my bread, am I "doing/making the little shoe"?
June 10, 2009
rolig commented on the user Prolagus
Seriously, Pro, you're invited to visit anytime.
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word bush-hogging
Brilliant idea, Ithaca!
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word scarpetta
Absolutely, Pro! I just have to figure out how to say this in Slovene.
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word immanent
Not to be confused with imminent.
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word scarpetta
I always do scarpetta, if the sauce is tasty. Why should it be considered rude?
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word titmouse
Sounds to me like an urban legend in the making.
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word that's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind
Yes, quite.
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word the bards
Horror ensues when a peaceful town on Bodega Bay is attacked by poets.
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word dial r for murder
The perfect murder backfires when the man Tony hired to kill his wife proves to be dyslexic.
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word nigella
Madmouth, you should put "if the internet can't give it to you, you've gotta give it to the internet!" on a T-shirt!
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word jelly bean row
I was surprised when I saw the picture, C_b, because I was expecting to see people throwing jelly beans at each other or in some way fighting over jelly beans. I took me a second to realize what you meant by row.
June 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word na zdravje
What Slovenes say to a sneeze (and also as a toast). "To health!"
June 8, 2009
rolig commented on the word sidecar
It's much better than having the Village People cavort there.
June 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word sidecar
Some of these cocktails I recognize from old movies (now hearing Carole Lombard in my head).
June 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word espy
It is a bit of textual gristle, but I had no problem understanding it. A comma might help, as Q. suggests, but I don't think it's necessary. "Espy" is pretentious-cute here, I think. I'd rewrite it this way: "not so much seeing the art galleries or mountain ranges or rivers as seeing the places where cherished friends…" "Espying" could also be replaced by "noticing", which would probably have cleared up any confusion in the first place.
*has to stop self from editing things that no one has asked or is willing to pay to be edited*
June 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word machediting
I just added a new tag.
June 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word λάθε βιώσας
Greek-out is Milo's description, for the record. But I'll be happy to tag this page as such.
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word machediting
I suspected something like that. Did you explain this on the word page for flaggot, Pro? If not, you should.
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word bimarian
Cool!
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word machediting
I'm not sure I know what that means, Pro. It's been some eight years since I last attended a Pride Parade in the US.
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word λάθε βιώσας
I hesitate to comment further on this motto, thus contributing to its rise to the top of the list, which would be ironic, to say the least.
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word bimarian
I believe this refers to a heresy in which Mary Magdalene is accorded equal status to Mary, the mother of Jesus.
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word λάθε βιώσας
Yay! Let's hear it for multialphabeticalism!
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word machediting
*smacks lips* Thanks, Rt!
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word machediting
… and dykes on bikes! and PFLAG (who always get the loudest cheers)! and leather boys!
*trying to calm down and remember that we're supposed to be post-gay and want houses in the suburbs and official marriages and the right to be open in the army and not just fantasize about men in uniform – but damn, some of those stereotypically queer exuberances are fun*
Yeah, I know June is Gay Pride Month, or if we're being PC, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Month (is that on your list, Rt?), but there's still nothing like looking forward to Pride Day, the parade, and remembering the dramatic events of June 28, 1969. ("You bet, we're revolting!") I can't believe it's been 40 years!
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word nonchalant
Only oxymoronically, I suspect.
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word machediting
With pencils that are all the colors of the Rainbow Flag, of course! (Only 26 more days till Gay Pride Day!)
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word machediting
Is this short for "macho editing"?
(Now I've done it. The Village People are cavorting in my head.)
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the list onomatopoeia-that-best-describes-you-greatest-hits-vol1
I still have my pride, Rt. (I think, er, hope, um, somewhere… *grits teeth*)
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the user reesetee
Welcome back, Rt! You were missed!
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word sanguine
Ha! "Sangfroid the Sanguine" sounds like the name of one of CharlesFerdinand's kings: "In the days of Sangfroid the Sanguine, the country remained at peace for none of his neighbors was able to provoke him to war."
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word anecdotalist
That's something I have always loved about the South.
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word λάθε βιώσας
Thanks, Kind-Heartedness! I enjoy your Greek-outs. I have come across (maybe in Heidegger?) the notion of truth as "unconcealedness", and it is interesting, and seems psychologically right, to think of truth as the "opposite" of forgetting.
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word anecdotalist
The art was still valued in certain parts of the US at least as late as the 1970s. I remember going with my parents in 1972 or so to visit relatives in Danville, Virginia, and really enjoying listening to the way people told stories. There was a certain gentility in the way they referred even to things like someone's senility ("she's getting a bit feeble in the head") or alcoholism ("he still likes to take a nip or two now and then"), and I could sense the way they really enjoyed words and the different shades of meaning and emotion that could be conveyed. They were as much concerned with how something was said, and the pleasure they could give their listeners, as with what was being said.
June 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word λάθε βιώσας
Just curious: is láthe related to Lethe, the river of oblivion?
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word anecdotalist
Thanks, C_b! I wonder if other people feel like the art of (face-to-face) conversation is going the way of reading novels and poetry out loud to each other as a form of entertainment and socializing.
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word λάθε βιώσας
Uav! I like this.
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word down
And in faux manor names such as "Upson Downs" (as in Auntie Mame).
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word anecdotalist
A gaffe is a general term for saying something one shouldn't say, something that is a social blunder. It might be something in poor taste, or it might just be the result of ignorance or insensitivity or not thinking before you open your mouth. For example:
"I was so delighted to hear that your son is getting married next month. We all thought he was a 'confirmed bachelor', you know. Who is the lucky girl?"
"His name's Joe, and he's a wonderful young man."
"Oh, I see. Well, times have changed… Excuse me, but I just saw the Cohens and simply must wish them a Merry Christmas."
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word aghast
So, then, this word must be related to ghastly. But probably not to ghost, I would guess. Verrry interrresting.
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word anecdotalist
Hmm… wouldn't a gaffeur (which I like!) be someone who is known for making gaffes? (Joe Biden comes to mind.)
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word i had not thought death had undone so many
So was Ciardi borrowing from Eliot, who may have been thinking of the line in Dante?
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word rogati se
I am not certain about the value of the Old Slavic ǫ – it's been decades since I studied these things – but I think it was essentially a nasalized o, more or less like the French vowel.
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word anecdotalist
An anecdotalist is someone who is known for telling (hopefully, entertaining) anecdotes. It is a perfectly good word. I don't know how long it has been in English, but it reflects a time, which may seem like ancient history now, when people used to meet face to face and entertain each other by telling amusing stories and having interesting conversations (a person who knew how to keep up their end of a conversation was called a good conversationalist). People do something similar on social-networking sites today, except that they usually don't know who it is they are conversing with and skills at things like conversation and telling amusing anecdotes are not highly valued. Today, it seems, people prefer to tweet at each other.
One who has mastered the art of bullshitting is known as a bullshit artist. Seanahan has given you the proper term for one who is renowned for making up words, but if you are looking for the word for someone who generally makes up stories, you might try fabulist or (if it's a pathological tendency) mythomaniac. I am not sure what you are trying to say by suggesting the word "inpoortatalist". I expect there is a good word for someone who likes to tell stories that are in poor taste (if that is what you are looking for), but it escapes me at the moment.
June 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word sanguine
How cultures interpret words like this is fascinating. In French, sangfroid and, in Russian, хладнокровие (khladnokroviye) are good qualities in a person, both conveying the sense of "cool-headedness"; in English, however, cold-bloodedness is definitely not something you want to encounter. I tend to associate sanguine with sangfroid. I pronounce the word in a way that almost rhymes with penguin (another cool character), so Cole Porter would have to change his tune to make this word fit for me.
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word rogati se
No, it's not related to rog (horn). In Slovene, the nasal rounded back vowel of Old Slavic ǫ (which probably sounded like the vowel in the French word mon), developed into o, whereas in the other South Slavic languages (and in East Slavic, too), it developed into u. Compare words like Slovene roka / SBC ruka (arm and hand), Slovene pot / SBC put (path, journey), Slovene posoda / SBC posuda (dish), and many more. The Old Slavic word *rǫg probably meant "ridicule" and is also the origin of the modern Slovene word režati se (to laugh boisterously, guffaw).
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word conflabbit
What in tarnation is that young'un going on about with these words old people use?
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word sanguine
Oh, I love this word, just like I love all the words still in use that hark back to medieval concepts about the mind-body-elements-planets relationships: bilious, choleric, melancholic, humorous, saturnine, jovial, mercurial, etc. And I don't think sanguine is pretentious when it's used to mean "optimistic, positive, cheerful, unruffled". Its synonyms don't really convey so directly the same sense that the attitude so discribed relates to something inherent in a person's character. I also like the fact that it comes from a word for "blood" and that it has as a much darker, tragic cousin in the word sanguinary.
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word cosset
Poor lamb!
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word rogati se
Certainly not. I rarely mock, and then only in the nicest sort of way.
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word anecdotalist
Ron Wagner, that may be a quip (though I don't get the joke), but it surely is not an anecdote, which implies a brief story, the recounting of an incident, usually but not necessarily with a humorous "punch line". He used to regale his friends with anecdotes about his college days, but then they all started to avoid him. He wasn't the anecdotalist he thought he was.
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word twilve
Did you make this up, Inked Polyglot? Irregular verbs are only "irregular" in that they follow different rules from the majority. In English, this usually means that there is an alteration in the vowel to indicate the past instead of the addition of the -ed morpheme (and often with the morpheme -en in the past participle. Hence, the sequence twilve, twolve, twilven, modeled perhaps on the verb drive, might be more in keeping with the patterns of English. But I am just a rank amateur when it comes to these things, and I expect (and hope) my colleague Qroqqa might have something to add or correct.
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word v brk povedati
lit. "to tell someone something to their mustache"
to tell someone something to their face directly, "without beating around the bush"
The same expression is used with such verbs as lagati (se) (to lie), smejati se (to laugh: Punca se mu smeje v brk, "The girl is laughing in his face"), and rogati se (to mock).
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word rogati se
"to express in a clear, blunt way one's negative, disapproving attitude toward someone, usually by using words with positive content" (SSKJ) – i.e. to mock, make fun of.
Examples: ti si pa res junak, se mu je rogal; zani�?ljivo se rogati: "You're a real hero," he mocked him; to mock disdainfully.
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word conflabbit
Do old people use only one word, Flannelophile?
June 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word nougatory
Bilby, our brilliance crossed paths at the same moment, it seems.
May 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word nougatory
Having to do with confection made from honey, nuts, and egg white. Having eaten the whole box of candy, she was in a nougatory daze and couldn't understand what he was saying to her.
May 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word megaflicks
An excellent example of how the font you choose can make all the difference.
May 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word people people
The plural of people person.
May 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word people person
It's sometime in the mid-'70s and I am sitting in a circle of about 10 people, all much older than me (I'm in my late teens) in a side-room of our evangelical Presbyterian church. I don't really remember now what the occasion was, but the man leading the discussion asks us to state something we like about ourselves. Someone says, "I'm a people person," and then everyone else in the group says the same thing: "I'm a people person too." This surprises me a little. I am not really sure I know what people people are, but am pretty certain I'm not one. When it comes my turn, I say, "I know how to listen," which is true. The man leading the group compliments me on my answer.
May 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word intellect
"active intellect" sounds plausible, though I would hope most people's intellect would be active, to some degree at least (I know, I know, I'm living in a world of illusion).
I hear this being said by a teacher about a pupil to indicate that the child asks question, is curious about things, and tries to figure things out in logical ways. Another possibility would be a "lively intellect".
May 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word a baa fetched finny ring roll romp
I love it! But I can't get the words out of my head that seem to rhyme with this: 'Tis a far far better thing I do …
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word analepsis
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine a bunch of sitcom writers sitting around a table and saying things like, "Maybe we need to stick an analepsis in here. And then here we'll do a prolepsis and show them in a retirement home." These words are good for rhetoricians and literary theoreticians, and they are lovely words, but this parenthetical "(also called…)" leaves open the important question, "By whom?"
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the list my-modern-job-in-the-past
Darjeeling, darling? Or maybe something stronger?
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word shagreen
From the French word chagrin, but originally from a Turkish word shagri. Apparently, in French, chagrin, in the sense of "embarrassment" is a figurative use of the word, which means, originally, "untanned or rough leather".
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word hoyden
This word may be related, etymologically, to heathen. Very interesting.
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word darjeeling
Tea is an expression of endearment! Especially on the Porch!
Darjeeling, darling? With honey, sweetie? Or would you rather have camomile, мила�??
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word liaise
One day soon, I fear, someone will name a girlchild this. And her brother will be Liaison. But then at some point she will write her name Li-Aise or Li-Ayse or Li-Ayze, with hearts over the eyes.
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word gloaming
I'm pretty sure Roald Dahl is weird. But then, I've always had a thing for Patricia Neal and can't help but take her side.
Gloaming is a wonderful, evocative word that wears its heart on its sleeve. And while it's all about a quality of light, it's connection with darkness and mystery is inescapable. After all, it's twilight – duality, inbetweenness, borderline.
*hurries off to start a new list*
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word hepi end
The curious thing about this slang phrase (in Slovene, Croatian, and other Slavic languages) is that the English phrase (if I remember right) is happy ending, not happy end. In other Slovenglish words, the -ing (properly pronounced /-ink/), e.g. miting and filing, so why not here?
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word old awareness
See Old Awareness Month.
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word old awareness month
I like this. It sounds sort of New Agey: "old awareness", like the awareness of an "old soul", awareness of things we experienced in past lives, awareness of ancestors and their knowledge. I definitely want to celebrate old awareness! And not only for a month!
May 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word fufluns
Fufluna is only 6 1/2 hours away from me! (Etruscan Fufluna is Italian Populonia.) I've got directions and I'll soon be on my way.
May 27, 2009
rolig commented on the user zaggan
I was referring to your comment on my profile page ("wow thaz cool"). But ice cubes are nice too.
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the user Prolagus
Thanks, Pro, for your comment on my Slovene idioms list. By the way, if on your travels you ever plan or want to visit Slovenia (just to the east, north, and south of Trieste), let me know!
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the user zaggan
What's cool, Zag (if I may call you Zag)?
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word objection
The opposite of subjection.
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word hasbian
A resident of the Greek island of Hasbos, known in antiquity as an important source of asbestos (orig. "hasbestos"). Pseudo-Pausanias records that the Hasbian poetesses were said to conduct rituals in which they danced in the flames with one another in fireproof garments and mimicked the rites of Sappho's followers, only to emerge unscathed, much to the chagrin of the poetesses of neighboring Lesbos.
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word content inflation
And it's correlative? Discontent inflation – the noticeable increase in frustration caused by not being able to find the information you want on the Internet due to the proliferation of so many idiotic videos, social networking sites, games and blogs. Eventually, you just say, "Geez! I may as well go to the library and look it up in a book! It would take less time."
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word time flies like an era
© rolig 2008.
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word flies
Or as I like to say: Time flies like an era.
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word oklahomo!
Your standard boy-meets-boy plot set in the cornfields: Oh, what a beautiful morning!
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word unofficial english
This is not spam, but a public service to Wordies who collect compendia of unusual words (that is all of us more or less). Grant Barrett is making his Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (2006) available for free as a downloadable .pdf file. Just check out his blog The Lexicographer's Rules.
May 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word insomnia
That reminds me of Anna Akhmatova's poem, "The Cellar of Memory" (Подвал памяти, 1940), which concludes:
Well, let's go home!
But where's my home and where's my reason?
Ну, идем домой!
Но где мой дом и где рассудок мой?
(A note for clarity: "reason" here means the capacity for rational thought, not "a reason to do something.")
May 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word bamf!
*ducks at the sound of saurian wings*
May 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word brez dlake na jeziku
Interesting, Pro! It does not surprise me that many expressions in Slovene might come from Italian. The Italian influence is still strong in the southwestern and extreme western parts of the country, which were for centuries ruled by Venice. A part of Friuli, where there is still a Slovene-speaking minority, is still called the "Slavic Veneto" (Slavia Veneta) or in Slovene, Beneška Slovenija (Venetian Slovenia).
May 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word brez dlake na jeziku
lit. "without a hair on the tongue"
used with verbs of communication, this means "without mincing words": frankly, directly, forthrightly
May 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word mallee bull
That bull is rather, um, well bolloxed.
May 25, 2009
rolig commented on the list onomatopoeia-that-best-describes-you-greatest-hits-vol1
You're absolutely right. Thanks. *still resisting it*
May 25, 2009
rolig commented on the list onomatopoeia-that-best-describes-you-greatest-hits-vol1
I am resisting the urge to change my "onomatapoeia" entry just so I can get on this list.
May 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word x-sampa
I can't help but think of Kafka.
May 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word carrefour
@ Poetche - it's the right use if you don't want people to know where you live. Otherwise, intersection would probably be the more effective choice.
May 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word chlodovech
Thank you, thank you, everyone. To the Irish Fox, it's true: I couldn't have done it without you. Your graciousness in conceding this minor defeat in a truly impressive career of superlative Wordie divertissements is entirely in character. Bilby, you are one of the inspiring spirits of the Wordie aether, and I humbly acknowledge my debt to you. Chained_Bear, it was an honor to limericize your beloved Clovis; may he rest in peace with his gerbilline fore_bears. And to the Archduke Karl Ferdinand (my suspicion is well known that his Excellency has assumed a rather flimsy Belgian incognito), thanks for starting things off with the list of his illustrious Frankish ancestors.
May 24, 2009
rolig commented on the list merovingians
Better not tell Hermina, Pro.
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word chlodovech
*bows to the left* *bows to the right* *bows to the middle*
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word chlodovech
Well, this is more Bilby's thing. But here's a first attempt:
I once had a gerbil named Clovis
whose passion for Hovis cake drove us
mad till we bought him
a cookbook and taught him
to make it: He knows where the stove is!
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word chlodovech
*grooaaan* Hovis - proboscis?! I think you should check the date on your license, Fox.
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?evap�?i�?i
The Slovene spelling of the Bosno-Serbian ćevap�?ići, from the same Turkish root as kebab.
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the user madmouth
Congratulations on reaching 1000 comments! And in such a short time! Your contributions are much appreciated and enjoyed.
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the list words-i-needed-at-the-time
Then you should be just fine on Wordie, Middlesmith.
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word chlodomir
Thanks for your patience, CF (and everyone), with my abnormal Slavophilia. I will try to keep it under control. You're right, Archduke (sorry, I can't resist calling you that – after all, I do live in Carniola). The 5th century is a little too early for at least West Frankish-Slavic interaction. But there was plenty of interaction with other Germanic types, as can be seen by all the Germanic borrowings in Old Slavic.
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word crazy rasberry ant
This reminds me of my Great Aunt Ellie and her bizarre homemade preserves (a.k.a. Ellie's jellies) that made you wonder where she picked her berries.
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word chlodomir
I second C_B's laughter and appreciation of the list, CF.
(But to return to, um, words, I'm still wondering: if Chlodo- is Germanic, how did it get impaled on the Slavic -mir? Is it possible that the Franks registered the Vlado- as their own beloved Chlodo-?)
May 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word mr ass itch
What's that tag someone (Reesetee?) uses to warn people to look away? Definitely applies here.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word malware
A rare case where contemporary coinage corresponds with traditional morphemes: mal- ("evil, bad") + -ware ("articles for sale, commodities").
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word rogue anti-virus software
Sigh. I guess rogue is another word that joins the "Overused to the point of meaninglessness thanks to its wildfire dash through the Internet" list (one I don't feel like making). Btw, I sort of like the word malware (if it means what I think it does).
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word hoe
Very funny. But my hoe seems rather slow today, or no wait, that's my brain.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word chlodomir
I'm guessing those old Franks had trouble with the initial vl- cluster and this was the best they could do with the Slavic name Vladomir ("Ruler of peace").
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the list merovingians
I thought chilperic was one of those ingredients in Indian food that gave you gastrointestinal woes.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word ćevap�?ići
Delicious, if somewhat turd-looking, Bosno-Serbian minced-meat kebabs, popular as a fast food throughout the former Yugoslavia. The alphabet is a little simpler in Slovenia – no confusing soft ć's – so in Slovene they are spelled �?evap�?i�?i.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the list merovingians
Herminafrid! If it's a girl. The name Hermina is still around in Slovenia; it makes the cutest diminuative forms: Minca (the "c" is pronounced like "ts") and Min�?i ("�?" pronounced like "ch"). Minchie Bearspawn!
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word jeopardy
Could you put that in the form of a question, Q?
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word drogo
Yo mama's so ugly St. Drogo turned in his halo.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word safr
From the English word suffer. It is used as a noun to mean "misery, the pits." Often used with the verb furati ("to do, engage in, go through") (itself a borrowing from the German führen) to mean "to feel awful" (emotionally, not physically):
Ne vidim ve�? razloga da bi nekdo “fural safr�?, �?e pa to stvar lahko sprejmeš in vidiš, da je vse to�?no tako kot mora biti. ("I don't see a reason anymore why someone should 'go through safr' so long as you can accept the situation and see that everything is just the way it should be.")
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word koljeno
This is curious. I wonder if the linking idea is that of turning. Compare the Slavic root for "wheel" (kol-).
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the list blitzkrieg
A tragic example (and a cautionary one for the United States) of how the image of a particular culture can be entirely altered. A hundred years ago, if you asked non-German Westerners what the sound of German connoted to them, they would have said music and philosophy.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word far niente
"To do nothing" (Italian). See Pushkin quote on inutility.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word euroturds
Are you talking about ćevap�?ići, by any chance? I always thought they looked a little fecaloid.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word whensoas
No, Sean, he's the one looking out.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word shewhore
But where does she sell seashells?
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the list merovingians
I don't know. Gogo Bearspawn sounds pretty good to me.
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word drogo
He is also a hobbit, and more specifically the father of Frodo!
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word buttasorry
Butta noa needa to apologiza!
(Sorry, Pro, no offense intended. For the record, I have the utmost admiration for Italian culture and the Italian people.)
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word shazam
It was Gomer's favorite, too!
May 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word woodwose
@ Ptero, thanks for the chuckle. There was always something a little eerie about Mr. Wilson.
@ Qroqqa: so if a wizard's magic involved torching a statue to bring it to life, we could say: He burned the statue alive. Interesting.
@ Bilby, I'll keep my thoughts to myself about that.
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the list italian-names-i-really-thought-i-saw-when-scanning-200-year-old-handwritten-vital-records
Can you tell us something more, C_B, about these curious records? Are these the (perhaps altered) names of immigrants to the US? Or do you mean that your eyes deceived you? (19th-century handwriting can be very hard to decipher.)
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word quell
What a lovely word. It magnificently holds inside itself the quiet it seeks to establish.
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word fecaloid
Copromorphic! Shit-shaped! But not and never ever turdiform. That has been reserved.
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word pitta sordida
And to the honor of such a nomination all I can say is: Uav!
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word hmla
The Russian word is мгла (mgla). Slovenes "cheat" and stick in a vowel: megla, as do the Croats, Bosnians, and Serbs: magla.
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word pitta sordida
What did Mr. T have against this little fellow? He was always calling these birds "fools".
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word turdiform
Of course you do, Yarb. But turdiform has been taken, and I'm sure you don't want Reesetee to send a flock of thrushes your way. Just ask Tippi Hedren what that's like. You might try fecaloid, coprolithic, or stercoraceous. But I suspect you just like the sound of turd. Am I right?
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word features
Maybe newbies shouldn't be allowed to tag words until they have gone through a tagging tutorial with VanishedOne.
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word turdiform
Try turd-shaped or turdlike, yarb. Turdiform is for the birds!
May 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word woodwose
I see your point, but still, it's curious that "burned alive" = "burned to death".
May 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word woodwose
Isn't it curious that when we say that someone was burned alive we mean that they died.
May 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word agey
Actually, the word you want here is new agey, which means "relating to the New Age movement" (which was very popular in North America in the 1980s). "Agey" by itself doesn't make sense in this context.
May 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word hermitary
Thanks for pointing me to this website, Nuxiy.
May 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word spelling
Gosh, remember when there used to be copy-editors?
May 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word swentibold
In the 8th and 9th centuries, the first vowel in the word svat ("holy") would have been a nasal front vowel, probably pronounced something like the sound in the French word vin, which is why the Franks spelled it -en-. It evolved differently in different Slavic languages, turning into something we usually transliterate as "ja" or "ya" in Russian (e.g. �?в�?той = svjatoj, "holy" – though it's more complicated than that), an a or á in Czech (compare the names Václav and Wenceslaus), the nasal sound iȩ in Polish (święty means "holy"), and a high front e in the South Slavic languages (svet means "holy" in both Slovene and Serbo-Bosno-Croatian).
The second part of the name would in Old Slavic have originally been pronounced more or less pulk (rhyming with the English word hulk), where the "u" stands for a short schwa sound. This meant something like "host" or "army" ("a mass of people"). It is actually a borrowing from a Germanic root that has developed today into folk in English and Volk in German (which makes the Franks' hearing it as a different Germanic word somewhat ironic). This word also developed differently in the different branches of Slavic: polk in East Slavic (e.g. Russian) and South Slavic (e.g. Slovene), and pluk in West Slavic (e.g. Czech).
May 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word whom
C_b, I expect your Friend only used "thee". At some point, Quakers stopped saying "thou" and started using "thee" for both the subject and the object of the sentence, I think with the ø-ending form of the verb: Why are thee taking the car to Meeting? It's only a ten-minute walk! Don't thee know how much gas costs? Not surprisingly, the influence of the double-duty you (as both subjective and objective) is pretty strong. It was pretty jarring when I first heard Quakers talking like this, and it was hard not to "correct" them.
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word abecedarium
This is actually an important word for Slovenes, and there is even a restaurant in Ljubljana's Old Town that goes by this name. The Protestant leader Primož Trubar's Abecedarium (an ABC book to teach people how to read) was one of the first two books printed in Slovene, in 1550. The restaurant is located in a building ("the oldest house in Ljubljana") where Trubar once lived.
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word boys in the bandwagon
Some really enthusiastic twinkies, perhaps.
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word swentibold
Too bad the name never caught on in the West. I think it means something like "Holy Army".
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word e'er
Meter of course is helpful for memorizing text, which is certainly a major reason why poets have used it at least since Homer. We shouldn't forget that before the 20th century, poetry was written as more to be performed than read silently. People used to entertain themselves by reading things to each other out loud, whether this was poetry or a serialized novel. To enjoy a writer like Byron, you need to hear his work, and not merely see it on the page.
Don Juan is a long poem (Byron may have called it a novel in verse), not a play, so there are no stage directions. Read a little of it out loud and try to imagine the words being spoken by a brilliant young man, as famous as a rock star and with about as much humility, who wants to overturn all the conventions and expose the hypocrisy of his time, and you might start to get an idea of what it's about.
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word swentibold
Interesting that they should have taken a Slavic name.
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word oxford comma
@ Seanahan – I never said the commas did disturb the flow; that was Mollusque. I agree with you that they don't.
You make a good point about Betty. Either way there could be ambiguity, especially if we replace "Catholic" with "Episcopalian" and "maid" with "writer". But it also matters whether or not we know the author of text does or does not use serial commas:
A. They went to Oregon with Betty, a writer and an Episcopalian priest.
B. They went to Oregon with Betty, a writer, and an Episcopalian priest.
In A, they could have gone to Oregon with 1 (Betty, who is both a writer and a priest) or 3 persons, if we know the text does not use serial commas; but with only 1 person (the admirable Betty), if we know the text always uses serial commas consistently.
In B, they have definitely gone to Oregon with 2 people, if we know the text does not use serial commas; or with either 2 or 3 people, if we know the text always uses serial commas.
So both systems leave room for ambiguity. Life is like that. That is what house styles are for.
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word study ball
Apalling. Just what kids need to encourage them to love learning. What a ball!
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word stolon
I wonder if the Russian word �?твол (stvol), meaning "tree trunk", is related to this.
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word eurovision
I wondered this, too, Nux. But apparently any Mediterranean country can participate. Morocco has been in Eurovision too, and theoretically so could Libya, Syria, and Algeria.
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word rolig
That's me!
May 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word eurovision
Not ugh, Nux. Ughten. A new day dawns.
May 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word eurovision
Nux, the Beatles-mad gangerh is playing with you.
May 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word e'er
Thanks, Qroqqa! Clear and informative comments, as always.
May 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word e'er
The "rules" of meter may be clearcut enough, but the variations in how poets follow them, or choose to break them, to create the effects they want, are countless and fascinating.
Byron was brilliant in being able to use plain, chatty English, often with great comic effect, as in Don Juan (the name should be pronounced to rhyme with "Ewan"), but he could also write lovely "poetic" poetry, as in "She walks in beauty like the night".
You sound a bit like an old fogey, myth, who complains that poets (i.e. rappers) these days are "massacring" words because they write "gonna" and "witya" instead of "going to" and "with you".
May 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word membritude
French is so analytic (linguistically speaking)!
May 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word oxford comma
Moll, it seems like you're arguing in favor of inconsistency, i.e. use the Oxford when you need it to clarify the meaning, but otherwise don't use it. And personally, that seems like a reasonable practice to me. As does its reverse: always use the Oxford except in cases where using it confuses the meaning. The only problem is that people usually want rules to live by, write by, and edit by, and the cases where the Oxford confuses things are probably much fewer than where not using it confuses things. So "always use the Oxford comma" seems a better rule than "never use the Oxford comma" and is easier to follow than "use it only when it helps" (because you don't have to figure out when it helps and when it doesn't). I like to avoid Emersonian hobgoblins myself, so inconsistency doesn't usually upset me if I see the reason for it, but for many people these little fellows seem to make good friends.
May 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word eurasia
That's an awful lot of people to be at war with.
May 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word hazmat
This word, by the way, has always sounded like Turkish to me.
May 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word hazmat
"booger hooks"?
May 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word debase
Nice, Mediagrey, but I think you mean "the debased direction". "Debase" is a verb, not an adjective.
May 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word berlin
First we take Manhattan; then we take Berlin!
– Leonard Cohen
May 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word eurasia
Eurasia stretches from Portugal to Korea. So who is "we"?
May 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word e'er
Contractions like e'er and o'er, as well as spellings like the monosyllabic heav'n and giv'n should not be taken as indications of poets "cheating" or trying to fit square pegs into round holes. For one thing, poets like Byron knew exactly what they were doing when it came to prosody; they dreamed in iambic pentameter in a way few of us can imagine.
As such they were very familiar with the concept of the reduced syllable – a nearly ellided syllable that should not be given the weight even of the unstressed beat in the iambic foot. Often two syllables could be counted as one; this could be indicated with a contraction such as e'er or even (e'en) to th'. The fact that the v sound is involved in a number of these contractions may also tell us that this sound had various qualities to it and could be pronounced differently in different contexts or by different speakers; historically, after all, the letter v represented both a consonant and a vowel (u).
Today many poets no longer count syllables the way they used to (and many still do but don't want us to think they do).
Sadly, I'm not sure people expect anything of poetry these days, or rather, if they do, they expect it to be sentimental or inspiring and so don't really "get" what contemporary poets are writing (as with modern art, they think, "jeez, I could have written that! It doesn't even rhyme!"). Probably a lot of people would love it if more poets were more "poetic".
Myth, don't give up on Shakespeare, Byron, or anyone else just because they don't write as if they were born in 1970. Try to learn their language first (and don't assume it has to be the same as yours), before you judge them. They still have a lot of amazing things to tell us, even though (or perhaps because) they are centuries away from us.
May 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word oxford comma
While I probably like commas more than most, I don't hold with the practice of putting them in just because you want to take a breath, or conversely, the idea the you have to take a breath whenever you see a comma. Not all commas are breath-taking. In the case Molly mentions, there is no need to "break the flow" in the sentence "Tom, Dick, and Harry all ordered bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches." I would read this the same way with or without the serial commas. The commas before the ands are merely there because the writer (or editor) finds such commas useful and wants to be consistent. In this particular sentence the serial commas could easily be removed without the ceiling caving in. But I'd keep them because I like the principle of the serial comma. In the sentence, "Tom, Dick and Harry, Mary Jo and Martin, and Bart all went to Des Moines for Frank and Herb's wedding," the Oxford comma helps keep the relationships, well, straight (or not).
May 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word stara kranjska
Wikipedia is changeable (check it again) and not to be trusted.
May 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word iztakniti
to pull out; to unplug; to pluck out (an eye).
Here's a joke Slovenes tell when they want to illustrate the attitude toward neighbors in their country.
Bog vprasa slovenca, "Kaj bi rad? Dam ti kar hoces, s tem, da bo tvoj sosed dobil dvakrat toliko." Slovenec malo pomisli pa rece, "Bogec, iztakni mi oko."
God asks a Slovene, "What would you like? I'll give you whatever you want, only know that your neighbor is going to get twice as much of the same thing." The Slovene thinks a bit, then says, "Okay, Lord, pluck out one of my eyes."
May 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word oxford comma
Useful, efficient, and clear.
May 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word pue
stinky jargon
May 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word countenance
Basically, this word refers to the expression on one's face. But it can also be used as a verb to mean "to allow, to accept" a certain behavior. In this meaning, it is often used in the negative: She could not countenance her husband's gambling. These two meanings are connected if you think that, when you accept something, you can look at it calmly, without getting upset.
No, the word has nothing to do with counting.
May 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word appropriciate
I think the word you are looking for is "appropriate" – which means "correct, suitable, right".
May 16, 2009
rolig commented on the list take-me-to-your-whosit
I might suggest a few from the Slavic side of things:
- vozhd (or Cyrillically, вождь), which is what adoring fans called Stalin; like Führer, it means "leader", but unlike the German word, it really is reserved for the Great Leader.
- vojvoda or vojevoda or voyevoda (or more Englishy, voivode), the Slavic "duke" (lit., "war-leader" or "warlord") and the origin of the toponym Vojvodina.
– vladika, the title of the Prince-Bishop of the Principality of Montenegro.
– you have tsar, but what about the tsarina (I'm assuming you are eschewing the unchewable cz- spellings).
And a couple obvious ones from across the Adriatic that seem to have escaped: il Duce (last seen in Salò) and the doge, in the company of Mrs. Doge, a.k.a. the dogaress or in Venetian, dogaressa, both fleeing incognito in a gondola.
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word stara kranjska
Yes, you're right, of course, Upper Carniola, to be specific. And I love your list!
But why is this "Stara Kranjska"? The people who lived in the March of Carniola (Kranjska krajina/Krainmark), didn't call it "Old", did they? Or is this a different region from Kranjska?
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word membritude
So what do people say when they want to express the idea that, for instance, a club has a limited membership?
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word korotan
See comments on Koroška and Carantania.
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word carantania
Slovenes look back to Carantania (independent or semi-autonomous from the late 7th to about the 10th century) as an almost mythic land. This, they say, was the last time the Slovene nation ruled itself until Slovenia gained independence in 1991. In a kind of political nationalist romanticism, they often speak of the 1000-year yoke under the Germans (Austrians).
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word koroška
This still very much exists, both as an Austrian Land (Kärnten) and a Slovene region (Koroška). All of these names come from the long-gone Carantania (in Old Slovene Korotan, which was an autonomous or semi-autonomous Slavic state from the late 7th to about the 10th century.
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word membritude
In what language, CF?
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word spona
used in the plural, spone, this means "constraints, bonds, strictures, limitations, confines, etc."
administrativne, politi�?ne, duhovne spone ("administrative, political, spiritual constraints")
osvoboditev od spon trga ("liberation from the constraints of the marketplace")
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word stara kranjska
Where I call home! (Kranjska, or Carniola, that is.)
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word styria
and the English name of a Land in present-day Austria (Steiermark) as well as a region in Slovenia (Štajerska).
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word buoyant
I don't believe I've ever heard anything other than /ˈbɔɪənt/ (I grew up in the US). My only strong opinion is that one shouldn't pronounce this as spelled, with three syllables: /bu'ɔɪjənt/.
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word regret
No, that was Frank.
May 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word che palle
What bollocks! (Would that work?)
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word opportunity
When opportunity knocks, you shouldn't ask questions!
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word bugs
I know this is a fairly common complaint (especially from Vanished One), but can something be done about the excessive tagging on word pages such as admire? This particular case seems to be the result of spamming, but other words are given ridiculously long tags (i.e. whole definitions) or a ridiculously large number of tags out of ignorance from people new to the site, who then simply vanish after making their mess. Can we develop a reasonable protocol for cleaning these pages up a bit?
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word gagster
Don't you mean, "it feels good to be a gangsta" (i.e. the rap spelling for "gangster" – someone who is part of a crime gang)?
A gagster is someone who tells or writes jokes (gags).
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word opportunity
knock, knock
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word amatuer
Vary sadd. Capturing data, indeed, no mind whether people can read what you write. Here's a sweet tooth fairy for them: ama-tuer les mots
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word regret
I did what I had to do, and did it all to get attention.
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word regret
Regrets? I have a few, but then again, too few to mention.
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word fear and lathing in las vegas
A journalist and lawyer go wild with woodworking as they explore the grotesque heart of the American dream by making furniture.
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word sulless
soulless perhaps?
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word thougtless
should be thoughtless
May 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word mesmerizing
More specifically, it's a present participle, which is why the dictionaries list it under the verb mesmerize. Today it is probably most often used as a modifier, though sentences such as "Her singing mesmerized the audience" are common enough.
May 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word neizpodbiten
You found me out, B.
May 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word neizpodbiten
It's quite logical when you break it into parts:
ne- (not) -iz- (out) -pod- (under) -bit- (hit, beat, knock) -en (adj. suffix, here meaning something like -able): unable to have its base knocked out from under it.
There is a transparency to the Slavic languages that I find incredibly beautiful.
May 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word grisly gristly grizzly
a horrific and unchewable piece of ursine meat
*apologizes in advance to Ms. Chained_Bear, for whom I have the greatest respect, and assures her that I would never dream of trying to chew anything the least bit ursine*
May 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word chequered past participle
I know a few of these. And they know who they are.
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the list gas-music-from-jupiter
Great list title, yarb!
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word apple shampoo
Peach shampoo would make sense though. Or kiwifruit shampoo. Or perhaps here "apple" is a euphemism for a certain part of the male anatomy.
*Wonders if someone makes a special shampoo for that area*
*Hopes my suggestion might restore reesetee's taste for apples*
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word ughten v matinal crepuscule
See discussion at ughten.
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word ughten
You can find this word listed in Middle English Dictionary (U. of Mich. Press, 1997), which you can see via Google Books. There are several citations from between 1200 and 1500. Other spellings are oughten, ohtoun, and uhhtenn, which may give you some idea of how the -ugh was pronounced. Of course, it wasn't pronounced ugg-, but perhaps with a vowel as in bout, and a velar fricative like the ch in the Scottish loch; it seems to rhyme with the Middle English past participle foughten (see below).
It sounds rather nice to me, especially in the cited phrase bothe even and oughten, meaning literally "both evening and morning" and idiomatically "at all times of the day" as in the following couplet:
Thretti dayes … he had foughten
With-outen rest bothe euen & oughten.
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word cricket
That's not cricket, CF!
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word neizpodbiten
irrefutable, unshakable: neizpodbitna resnica – "irrefutable truth"
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the list wildfeed
Whichbe, thanks for this! I love the cats!
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the user rolig
Thanks, Pro! I wasn't really paying attention. I have no idea when I hit my fourth chiliad.
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word organized crime against nature
Obviously, the collective activities of the Velvet Mafia.
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word crime against nature
No prob, Pro! It's the least I can do for the Family (a.k.a. the Velvet Mafia – which has given me the idea for a new sweet tooth fairy).
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word ughten
Agreed, MM. But what about matinal crepuscule?
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word gegenstand
That's why we call them objects!
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word brinner
Perhaps the three-in-one combo should be brunner? (I'll let someone else add it.)
May 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word apple shampoo
Why would anyone want to shampoo apples? Or is this some sort of synthetic manure (sham poo) for apple orchards?
May 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word ughten
Curious word. Where does it come from? I wonder how it's pronounced, OOH-ten? UF-ten? It probably sounds nicer than it looks.
May 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word velutinous
Lovely word, Yarb! And a great quote!
May 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word whom
I think it is probably true that in modern English, the colloquial style, perhaps especially a kind of non-localized, perhaps American-leaning style with certain colloquial markers (like don't) but not others (like the verbal hiccups like, y'know, etc. or highly marked colloquialisms from specific speech communities) is encroaching on the written language. But I am not sure if this is a natural process. To some degree, perhaps. Over the past few decades, especially since the '70s, literary and journalistic writing has become more focused on a personal, first-person voice, which naturally relies on colloquialisms. This may be because postmodernism (and specifically deconstructionism) has seriously put into question any attempt to convey an impersonal, disinterested, objective viewpoint. In the past, authors usually tried to sound authoritative; today they try to sound approachable. This is to a large degree a matter of taste and the Zeitgeist, and it could well change.
May 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word whom
"Whom" may well be on its way out, but it's taking its time leaving the language. These things happen over generations. Yarb, you mention the familiar second person singular (thou, thee, thy). Back in the '60s, when I was just a child, my grandparents' generation regularly used thou-forms when addressing God in prayer, but I don't think my parents did, probably because they felt insecure about it (when do you say thou, when do you say thee, and what are we supposed to do with ye?). Back then, most church-goers still used the King James' Version, though there were bands of RSV-users in the congregation. Then, God help us all, sometime in the early '70s the Living Bible reared its modern paraphrasing head, and the colloquial Good News Bible (New Testament only) came on the scene with doodle-like drawings meant to appeal to the guitar-strumming crowd. Times had changed. I looked for thee in the wilderness, but thou wast not to be found, and whom was fighting for its very life.
By the way, I don't think I agree that colloquial speech is necessarily the defining form of language (and I am not sure I know what you mean by "defining form"). That may be increasingly the case with English, at least when it comes to contemporary linguistic scholarship, but it certainly hasn't always been the case (and it is not true of Slovene or, until quite recently, of Russian). There is also a strong conservative undertow in language change, which is created by the written language, particularly as used by writers in the cultural canon, and reinforced by schoolteachers, editors of various kinds, and probably others too, and this is necessary if we are to be able to read and understand the writings of the past, as well as to understand even our contemporaries outside our immediate linguistic community. And I should ask the nasty, though obvious question: which colloquial speech is defining for the language? My Baltimorese? Someone else's Cockney? Another person's Yorkshire speech? Bilby's Strine?
May 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word whom
Pleth, it sounds like your flat is proof that you agree with my father's guiding principle (unfortunately for domestic bliss, my mother didn't). Words, thankfully, don't take up as much space as the things my father gathered around him.
May 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word whom
Like I said, this could be a generational thing. I agree that it is rarely used in colloquial speech (though it probably is not out of place, and may even be required, in formal speech, such as a commencement address). Of course it is still used in serious writing, especially when the speaker does not want to sound colloquial, where the speaker wants to convey the sense "these are important issues." Colloquial speech is not the only acceptable style in language.
"Whom" has been hanging on by its fingernails for a couple of generations at least, and it has not been helped by stodgy grammarians who insist on its use in places where the common tongue prefers "who", but I think it will survive precisely because it is sometimes needed as the object of a preposition and saying "about who" or "from who" usually sounds as wrong as saying "about he" or "from they".
Then, of course, words like "whom" can also be useful when you want to play the class card. Someone who asks on the telephone: "To whom am I speaking?" may well be sending a slightly different message than the person who asks, "Who am I talking to?"
My father always told me, "Never throw anything away because there may come a time when you'll need it." I believe this applies to words too.
May 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word ingenuous
John66bessa, you are confusing two different words. Ingenious means "clever, showing great intelligence or insight." It easy to confuse this with ingenuous because of the noun ingenuity, which does not mean the quality of being ingenuous (that's ingenuousness), but the quality of being clever and inventive (and thus is closer in its meaning to "ingenious").
Ingenuous has nothing to do with ingenuity, though as you suggest, it is related to the idea of being "genuine". Ingenuous people are by nature genuine, in that they do not know how to deceive or be other than they are. "Ingenuous" is a close synonym of "naive". Ingenuous people are honest, but not because they choose to be; it is simply their nature to be. They have not yet learned how to dissemble or lie. But worldly people, i.e. people who understand the way world works and who are not ingenuous, may also be genuine: they may be forthright and honest, but in this case, it is a conscious decision.
We say that someone is disingenuous when they pretend to be ingenuous, i.e. they pretend to know less than they actually do, to be more naive than they actually are. They are deceptive, but in the particular way of pretending to be innocent or ignorant of something.
Curiously, the words genius, ingenious, ingenuity, ingenuous, and genuine are all related in that they share the same Latin root -gen- ("relating to birth"), but they are not derived from or based on one another.
May 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word whom
I should have been clearer. "Ask not for who the bell tolls" sounds wrong not only because this is a familiar quotation. "Don't ask who the bell tolls for" sounds perfectly fine to me, though it's lost its solemnity. There are times when we want to use a relative clause in which the relative pronoun follows a preposition – for example when we want to stress a point or add a note of solemnity or perhaps avoid a certain confusion: "This is the person I told you about" is fine, but if you want to say that you worked without complaint night and day for this person even sacrificing your weekends and never heard a word of thanks from him, you might not want to say: "This is the person I worked without complaint night and day for, even sacrificing my weekends, and never heard a word of thanks from." In this case, I would prefer: "This is the person for whom I worked night and day without complaint, even sacrificing my weekends, and from whom I never heard a word of thanks." When you need a form of who to follow a preposition, it will probably be whom. At least to my ear, for who …, concerning who …, with regard to who …, etc. all sound wrong. But I admit, this may be a generational thing.
May 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word agnostic
I just don't know.
May 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word whom
It's hardly defunct, and there are contexts where it is still unavoidable. "Ask not for who the bell tolls" just doesn't work.
May 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word acquiese
But I don't. Because it should be spelled acquiesce.
May 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word wifebeater
C_b, I am really sorry to hear about your horrific experience. It is all too common. There was a time, and not very long ago, when the idea of husbands beating their wives provided a staple source of humor ("One of these days, Alice! Pow! Right to the moon!" says Ralph, as the audience explodes in laughter), but that was when the real violence was kept behind the closed doors women and children were always just happening to run into. Making light of such things, as in pseudo-clever slang terms for T-shirts and beer, is probably a way of distracting ourselves from the terrible reality. But I don't see how anyone with an awareness of the power of words can use such terms gleefully.
May 8, 2009
rolig commented on the word rana rana
@ MM: Yes, "stara rana" (lit. "old wound") is a set phrase for what in English would be "a sore point".
@ the Archduke Karl Ferdinand: I think the common frog is Ribbet ribbet.
May 8, 2009
rolig commented on the list savage-love--2
Did you catch this week's Savage Love, where Dan suggests a definition for between the hedges?
Great list, btw! You might also want to include some of Savage's abbreviations, e.g. GGG, DTMFA, etc.
May 8, 2009
rolig commented on the word wifebeater
I sympathize, Rt. Although I find the development of this word's use fascinating, and I am happy to find any reason to research pictures of the young Marlon Brando in a tight-fitting, torn, and rain-drenched T-shirt, I am disturbed by the commercial callousness of this word. I was shocked to find many websites where clothing companies were selling these tank tops as "wifebeaters", often with young female models sporting them with a smile. I find it hard to imagine a young woman saying, unwincingly, to another young woman, "I found a great wifebeater at Macy's today!" But I'm sure it happens all the time. Can you imagine, say, Ray-Ban selling a particlar style of sunglasses as "childmolesters"? "We offer you an extensive sellection of elegant childmolesters!" It's a sickening thought, but no more so than companies proudly selling "wifebeaters".
May 8, 2009
rolig commented on the word rana rana
Lit., "early wound", though in Slovene this sounds a little archaic or poetic, since modern Slovene would say "zgodnja rana". See also oprosti mi moja rano rana.
May 8, 2009
rolig commented on the word wifebeater
So what does he wear when he beats her? (Sorry, gangerh, I couldn't resist.)
May 8, 2009
rolig commented on the word oprosti mi moja rano rana
The varieties of SBC stress, with their different pitches, are worse than Slovene, where no one much cares about pitch anymore (though long v. short still applies).
Thanks for the explanation, MM!
If I wanted to translate this in a way that would make sense to English speakers, I might say: "Forgive me, wound of my young heart" or "... my young heart's wound".
May 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word oprosti mi moja rano rana
I'm trying to figure out the grammar here. I know that rana rana means early wound" (an etymological curiosity, as Sarra would say: the adj. ran, -a, -o, -i, "early", and the noun rana, "wound", derive from different IE roots). But I don't know which is which here, or why one ran- ends in -o and the other in -a.
Is "rano" the fem. noun "wound" in the vocative case? Which would mean that "rana" is a postpositional adjective. Is the vocative case for adjectives the same form as the nominative? Help me out.
As to the meaning, it does sound strange in English, until you remember all those songs where love is described as a wound. It's really the "early" part that seems odd. Is the idea that the woman is the wound of the speaker's youth?
Fascinating.
May 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word wifebeater
Correction: Brando wasn't actually wearing a tank top in the movie. But it was a snug white T-shirt with very short sleeves that showed off his fit form and biceps. But Brando's look and performance, which completely redefined the notion of the male sex symbol, did wonders for the allure of the humble white undershirt (especially when it was torn and drenched as he wailed in the rain), and I expect it did influence the name of the tank top.
May 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word wifebeater
No need to bellow. Here you go. *hands C_b a beer* And come on in out of the rain, f'godsake.
May 6, 2009
rolig commented on the user jfk
"23 squidoo" is a silly, squiddy allusion to 23 skiddoo, which was a silly thing people used to say in the 1920s and became an emblem of the decade, as groovy did for the 1960s. I sort of understand the "skiddoo" part here (related maybe to skip and almost certainly to skedaddle), but I have no idea why the number 23 became attached to it.
May 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word wifebeater
A nice case of double metonymy: The white tank top worn by Marlon Brando as the violent Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire became so identified with Brando in this role that, in the US, it became known as a "wifebeater". Brando as Kowalski also became famous for crying, "Stella!" (his wife's name); hence the wifebeater tank top became connected with the name Stella, as in the beer.
May 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word not half
How do you Brits keep all your halves sorted? And are we supposed to know who Alan Freeman is? Is he fluffy? A fluffer?
May 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word shambulls
Stock market rallies that turn out to be blips before another steep decline (i.e. sham bulls that are really bears).
May 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word not half
"Suddenly / I'm not half the man I used to be" = "I am not at all the person used to be" = "I am a completely different person."
May 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word not half
Interesting, yarb. The Oxford American says of the expression "not half":
1. not nearly: he is not half such a fool as they thought. which I take to mean he is not the fool they thought he was
2. INFORMAL not at all: the players are not half bad. which I take to mean the players are very good
I suspect that you are right that this is a US/Brit distinction (not sure where Canada falls in this).
May 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word not half
Actually, I would take this to mean "your breath smells quite nice."
"not half" means "a fair amount of whatever is opposite": "You know, your singing's not half bad" = "You sing rather well." Usually, I think, "not half" is used in a compliment, i.e. with a quality that is considered negative. It is a form of understatement and suggests the speaker's mock surprise at discovering some positive quality in a person. "You know, you're not half dumb." = I'm surprised to discover that you are really rather smart.
I associate this expression in particular with the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. It's the kind of thing Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard would say.
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word heteronormative
Like I said, I'm not crazy about this word, because at first glance it seems to mean "different from what is normative" (compare heterodox v. orthodox), but I wouldn't out-and-out attack it, since the social theoreticians who use it understand what it is supposed to mean. The idea it describes is not hard to grasp, since almost all of us encounter it everyday: the assumption that the heterosexual model of society is properly privileged (if not the only acceptable model).
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word frend
Slovene, of course, has a perfectly good word for "friend": prijatelj. But if you want to sound young and hip, you'll say moj frend, moja frendica (fem.), and moji frendi (pl.).
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word keš
Slovene slang for "money" (< Eng. "cash").
"Maš keš, nimaš keš, to je pomembno. Kao. Ampak �?e ne znaš živeti, ti ne pomaga ves keš tega sveta."
– Renata Ažman, Japajade (Ljubljana: Tuma, 2005), 14.
"You have money, you don't money – that's important. Maybe. But if you don't know how to live, not all the money in the world will help you."
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word fer
In Slovene, you'll hear: "To ni fer!" (That's not fair.)
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word bed
In Slovene slang, this means "bad".
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word frendica
A female frend.
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word lajf
Commonly heard in the phrase: "To je lajf!" (That's life!)
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word cotton pickin'
Interesting phrase. Any idea where it comes from?
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the list etymological-curiosities
Sarra! Nice to see you back here. I thought you had abandoned this list, which is one of my favorites.
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word heteronormative
This is a useful term for theoreticians, and there is no reason to disdain it, any more than one would disdain specialized nautical terminology. It's curious the way people seem to admire the specialist jargon from certain fields (military, medical, astrophysical), but get upset when they hear words that convey nuanced notions from the humanities and social sciences (social theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, anthropology, etc.), perhaps from a kind of anti-intellectual populism. The scholars in these fields study ordinary things, like family structure, social prejudices, the workings of the imagination, and while it is true that everyone deals with such things, and hence in a way are also experts on them from a practical perspective, very few people think about these things with any depth or rigor. Those who make it their business to understand the workings of such phenomena do need to develop special terms. I would be the first to agree that these special terms can get out of hand, turning into abstractions that seem to lose all connection with the reality they seek to describe, but in many cases they are useful. I prefer simple, understandable words, but as K&P points out, words like heteronormative are a succinct way to express a fairly complex concept.
I am not a big fan of this word, particularly because here the prefix hetero- means "heterosexual" not "differing" (just as homo- in "homophobia" means "homosexual" not "same"). But within the discipline of cultural theory, this has become an acceptable use. I would, at least in some contexts, prefer the word heterosexualist, but heteronormative has the advantage of sounding neutral, whereas heterosexualist is a more loaded term.
May 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word national sarcastics awareness month
I don't think you all are taking this month seriously enough. We need a time of year to remember the many great sarcasticists who have risked their reputations to make the country safer for smug, shallow, and self-indulgent humor.
May 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word for ever
Good question, Lea. I don't think there is any difference at all. The New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (which dictates OUP practice) gives "for ever" as an alternative to "forever". But in US English, I think "for ever" is rare. I almost always write this as one word, forever. The only time I can think of when I would write it as two words would be "for ever and ever", where the second ever is just for emphasis.
May 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word scrapple
They used to serve this to us in my elementary school. It always managed to make a bad day worse.
May 3, 2009
rolig commented on the list weird-names-for-common-things
Micturition.
May 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word national accordion awareness month
Rt, you're welcome to visit anytime! There's always a polka music program somewhere on TV here, and that's not counting the cable station TV Golica devoted 24/7 to Slovene polka music and scantily clad big-breasted Slovene farm girls, with a dash of yodeling.
May 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word fashion vasion
Sure it does: azure.
May 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word national accordion awareness month
In Slovenia, it is National Accordion Awareness Month every month of the year.
May 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word june is turkey lovers' month
Istanbul is particularly lovely in June.
May 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word celibacy awareness month
Once when I asked a friend how his love life was, he replied: "Celibate."
I was surprised: "Celibate?" I asked.
"Sure," he said. "You know. Sell a bit, give a bit away."
May 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word hasbian
If I remember correctly (from my experience as the editor of a gay and lesbian newspaper), this word first emerged among lesbians in the early or mid-1990s as a way to describe women who at one time identified themselves as lesbians, perhaps for political reasons, or because it was the thing to do at whatever college they went to, but then eventually "came out" as heterosexual, often leaving their lesbian friends feeling betrayed and hurt (and maybe broken-hearted). The word is not meant to imply that lesbians can be "converted", or even that the "hasbian" was ever really a lesbian. The word carries a large dose of bitterness, I think. It may also reflect the unwillingness of many in the gay and lesbian community to truly accept the idea of bisexuality, particularly before the mid-1990s, which was when bisexual groups began to get organized and demand recognition from lesbian and gay organizations.
The word started as a kind of joke, and I think it is OK to use on that level, but as with many such words, it says as much about the one who uses it as it does about the person who is described by it.
May 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word national bird feeding month
American birds (or rather, bald eagles as the national bird) get only one month to be fed in?!
April 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word the king and id
Anna Freud is hired by the King of Siam to psychoanalyze his many children, and in the process learns something about her own animal nature. The musical is known for such hits as: "Getting to know me! Getting to know all about me!" and "Shall We Transfer?"
April 30, 2009
rolig commented on the list new-and-unholy-coinage
Classy, in the sense of "stylish" has been around in American English at least since the 1940s. The book British and American English since 1900 by Eric Partridge and John Williams Clark, published in 1951, notes: "British swanky more or less equals American classy" (and that was all I was shown in the snippet view of Google Book Search). But there are lots of examples.
April 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word findguru
Smells like spam to me.
April 29, 2009
rolig commented on the list new-and-unholy-coinage
It's about time someone made this list. Thanks, MM! (Though some of these – e.g. hubby, classy, celeb – are probably a little old for this list.)
April 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word housewife
That's sweet. We love you, too, Bilby. And in Slovenia we would vote for you.
*relieved that the chocolate is being handed out and not, um, dispensed.*
April 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word führer
My mother was from Virginia and would say things like "raise a furor" (though she'd pronounce it /fyoo-rah/) and she wasn't talking about bringing up Adolf.
April 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word pohod
Normally this word means "hike" or, in military usage, "campaign". But recently I have noticed it in news reports in the phrase "strelski pohod", which should be translated as "shooting spree" (strelski means "shooting adj.").
April 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word führer
When I heard this word as a child, in movies or on TV, I always thought people were saying "the Furor", which makes sense of course.
April 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word housewife
Are you voting (Slovene) or loving (Serbo-Bosno-Croatian), Bil?
April 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word führer
I am not a native German, but I just did a Google search (confined to German pages) for "der Fürher" and nearly all hits were about Hitler, but I did find a Web page for a company that bills itself as "der Führer der Antiquitätenhändler" ("the leader of antiques dealers"), with no obvious National-Socialist connotations, and when I went on to do a search for "der Führer des" ("the leader of the"), I came across many references to leaders of countries, movements, and political parties, including "der Führer des Likud" (which must sound strange to many). And I got over 100 hits for "der Führer der sozialdemokratischen" ("the leader of the Social-Democratic…" So my guess is the "Führer" is still alive and kicking in German. After all, not only does the word "simply" mean "leader", it is also the simplest word for saying "leader", since it derives from the verb führen ("to lead").
But I'd be interested in hearing from a native German.
April 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word gara
I expect the Hindi word you mention has the same Turkic origins, via the Moguls.
April 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word pickle
Weirdnet Definition No. 4 is a bit overstated, I think. How do they come up with these things?
April 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word gara
Doesn't kara mean black in Turkish? (The Serbian nationalist leader who led the first Serbian revolt against the Turks and founded modern Serbia's royal dynasty was called "Karadjordje" – "Black George".) Perhaps that is the origin of the word. I don't think it's Slavic.
April 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word speech
There's a problem with your link, Rt.
April 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word dilettante
Etymologically, this means "one who delights." A nice concept, I think. In this time of ubiquitous professionalization and ultra-specialization, we need more dilletantes to delight us.
April 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word aretha apithy
How can anyone be apithetic about the Queen of Soul?
April 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word smrt
Oh, that could be fun.
April 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word smrt
I'm not sure I'd want to get on a transit system called SMRT.
April 27, 2009
rolig commented on the list the-quirks-of-sbc
Great list! Thanks!
April 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word probisvijet
Very cool.
April 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word modro
By a quirk of etymology, this word in Slovene means not only blue, but also "wise" (in the neuter singular). In Slovene the nasal o of Proto-Slavic evolved into the simple o, whereas in other South Slavic and East Slavic languages, it became u. Hence, "wise" (n.sg.) in SBC is mudro, in Russian, мудро (mudro). Perhaps this is one reason why Slovene and SBC both borrowed the German word blau, reshaping it as plav.
April 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word curses make the fox fat
That that there?
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word bunkica
a little bump
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word curses make the fox fat
Which that?
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word sex imagery probe may be extended
Sounds painful.
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word antidistablishantarianism
This is not what you think it is.
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word hissy-skip
What a seamstress throws when she really gets upset.
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word cocksbod
This must be revived.
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word woodshedding
I agree, seanahan, but I can't remember whether taking someone out to the woodshed has to do with sex or punishment (maybe both for some). Can you enlighten me?
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the user madmouth
I'd love to see more SCBM (BSCM/CSBM/CBSM?) words on Wordie (like mrš!). It's a language I'm picking up in bits and pieces, partly because it occasionally crops up in Slovene texts (often in the form of swear words, which Slovenes claim all derive from army Serbian).
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the list rabelation
I've danced around Rabelais since college, but you two have inspired me. He's going on my amazon list.
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word femme
Or perhaps some lesbian Wordie-er. I believe this is a fairly old term among lesbians for a homosexual woman who is attracted to "butch" women (i.e. women who to some degree adopt or possess traditionally masculine gender attributes in manner and dress) but who herself acts and dresses in ways that are considered traditionally feminine. A related term, originating in the late 1980s or early 1990s, is "lipstick lesbian" but I think this has different, and more political, connotations.
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word paracetamol
What Americans call acetaminophen.
April 26, 2009
rolig commented on the list stuffie-poetrie-tunie-listings
Added:
Poetrie: For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry…
Hymnie: Lift Every Voice and Sing
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word god's portion
A nice tradition. This reminds me of the little dish they have at some checkout counters, "Give a penny, take a penny", though of course that's not really about charity.
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word marija pomo�?nica
You're right that the word "pomo�?nica" means "female helper", but the Marian title in English is "Our Lady, Help of Christians" (see here). Her full title in Slovene is actually "Marija pomo�?nica kristjanov", but people usually just say, "Marija pomagaj", which actually means "Mary, help!"
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word marija pomagaj
"Our Lady, Help of Christians" (see Marija pomo�?nica).
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word marija pomo�?nica
Also, "Marija pomagaj". One of the most common Slovene titles for the Virgin Mary, represented in a said-to-be-miraculous painting (1814) by Leopold Layer in the Basilica of St. Vitus (St. Guy, Sveti Vid), in Brezje, near Radovljica, in Upper Carniola. In English, this title translates as Our Lady, Help of Christians.
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word hysterosalpingography
Ah, so salpingo- refers to the tubes.
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word hysterosalpingography
Hystero- means "uterus" and -graphy means "writing, or, record-making", but what does -salpingo- (from salpinx?) mean?
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word patternicity
I don't think there is any paradox involved. The word "meaningless" has meaning as a word: "lacking meaning". Hence, it is clearly heterological, because its meaning cannot be applied to the word itself, just as the meaning "long" cannot be applied to the word "long" (because it has only four letters).
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word signature dish
And here I thought this was some piece of gossip that, when it gets passed around, people know right away who started it. "You're telling me you heard he's acing the class because he's doing the professor? Oh, I know who's telling those tales. That dish has Miss Sour Grapes' name written all over it!"
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word patternicity
Not everything is meaningful, therefore, "meaningless" is meaningful and not autological. But meaning depends on the code being used, and it is human to seek meaning, and therefore to presume the existence of codes we can understand. No one who did not believe in the Virgin Mary or in the ability of spiritual entities to manifest themselves physically in quotidian objects would ever see the BVM in a certain configuration of pancake syrup, which would then be for them meaningless, despite the best efforts of the Mother of God. I am a devout believer in the meaning of "meaningless".
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word wikipodia
See wikipodium.
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word wikipodium
A Wikipedia entry which some anonymous Wikieditor uses (not always overtly) to put forward their personal beliefs. (pl.: wikipodia)
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word pinniped
*reciting:*
"We seek him here, we seek him there …"
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the list peach-plum-pear
Silly Piñata!
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word official wordie historian
What is this a euphemism for, C_B?
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word patternicity
If one finds meaningful patterns in something, how can that something be called meaningless? Is meaning exclusively the product of intention, or do we create meaning by perceiving? If a person sees the image of the Virgin Mary in the syrup on a pancake and takes that as a sign of grace, which subsequently transforms this person's life, was the configuration of the syrup meaningless?
Personally, I don't like the word patternicity, which from the -ic-ity suffixes one would expect to mean the property of tending to possess pattern, not that of tending to perceive pattern.
I'm surprised that cognitive psychologists don't have a term for this notion, since pattern perception is such an intrinsic part of learning. Or perhaps they prefer to use words that are simpler but clearer, if less arcane, like "the tendency to perceive patterns." Or perhaps, they just call it something cumbersomely German, like Gestaltwahrnehmungsfähigkeit.
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word seric
Compare serigraphy – silkscreening.
April 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word pinniped
Sometimes I wish English didn't fancy things up with Latinate words. How much better it would be if we called these animals finfoots.
April 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word chiasmus
But don't forget what Heraclitus said: "Character is destiny."
April 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word the sixth sensei
The Karate Kid sees dead people.
April 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word astasia
She's understated, moll?
April 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word mollitude
"In the case of the common word нега, Nabokov has surpassed himself in oddity. It is true that нега has two distinct nuances: voluptuous languor and simple enjoyment; but, instead of using any of the obvious equivalents, Mr. Nabokov has dug up from the dictionary the rare and obsolete mollitude, a word which his readers can never have encountered but which he uses for the first of these meanings; and for the second he has discovered dulcitude. One wonders how Nabokov would translate the last line of Pushkin's famous lyric, published after his death, 'Пора, мой друг, пора'...'В обитель дальную трудов и чи�?тых нег.' 'To a faraway haven of work and pure mollitudes'? 'dulcitudes'?"
– Edmund Wilson, in a scathing review of Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin, "The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov," The New York Review of Books 4, no. 12 (July 15, 1965).
Nabokov seems to have developed his own meaning for the word "mollitude", which dictionaries indicate mean "softness, effeminacy, weakness"; he seems, in the quote from Ada, or, Ardor, cited by Yarb, to have in mind something more like the Russian word нега (nega), which in Russian romantic poetry usually refers to sensual pleasure.
April 23, 2009
rolig commented on the list surprisingly-eponymous
Thanks, for the suggestions, MM and C_B, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that James and John's surname, however delightful, became a common word.
April 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word douchebaguette
In French, wouldn't a douchebaguette (or more properly, douche-baguette) be a long narrow loaf of bread that one showered with (or perhaps a baguette-shaped sponge)? Could be fun.
April 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word labiovelarize
I would say that the main stress falls on the fourth syllable, with the secondary stress on the first. It's a double dactyl to me:
' _ _ ' _ _
la-bi-o-ve-la-rize
April 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word alumnus
Qroqqa, do you have a list for these words where you contemplate their etymology?
April 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word viral
I'm part of the generation of gay men who came of age in the early '80s, which is certainly partly why I deplore such sanguine use of the word. But mainly it is because I feel that writers should be aware of the metaphors they play with. I have no objection to the phrase "viral marketing" because it reflects the insidious, parasitical, and ultimately mind-destroying nature of such covert advertising. If the people who do this want to compare their activity to pathological processes, that's fine by me; I see their work as being pathological. What bothers me is the implied celebration of the pathological, especially by someone like this NYT writer who doesn't seem to realize that that is what she is doing. If someone wants to say, "We're dangerous, we're gonna get you, we're viral!", well, that's OK, too; that's just recycled 1970s punk. What bothers me are middle-class writers and businessmen using the word as something positive.
Alternatives? For the meaning, the NYT writer wanted, I'd suggest widespread, inundating, wildfire (also a bad thing to have happen to you, but at least it's out in the open), fast-spreading.
It occurs to me that it is not so much the metaphor itself that bothers me; I'd have no problem if she had written "contagious", for example, though that also implies disease. I suppose it's that for me, viral is still firmly tied to viruses, and I think I want it to stay tied to them.
April 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word viral
Good point, Yarb!
But it's appalling nonetheless. And a thoughtful writer should reflect on the implications of such a term.
April 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word medel
Coincidentally, this adjective, which can mean "dull, confused" is pronounced a lot like the English word "muddle".
From the definition in the SSKJ:
dull, dim (medla lu�?); vague (neopredeljen, neizdelan: medla slutnja); confused (zmeden: medla glava, medla zavest); weak in health (slaboten); weak in force (medla dež, medel veter)
April 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word viral
"The viral popularity of the site propelled the blog’s creators onto the radar of the publishing industry. 'From the first day, we were getting calls from agents,' said Jessica Amason, one of the founders."
– Jenna Wortham, "Public Provides Giggles; Bloggers Get the Book Deal," New York Times, 17 April 2009, here.
A curious use of the word viral to mean "fast-spreading." I know this is a very trendy use, but I find it jarring here. Viruses are something undesirable, something we try to eradicate, whether the issue is physical health or the functioning of a computer program. It seems meretricious to use the word in a context where this negative connotation does not come into play.
April 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word black poodle
In Goethe's Faust, a black poodle is a manifestation of Mephistopheles. Do you think there's a connection?
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word fantolioni
Sorry about that. I've put in a different link, to the whole website and not just the image. Maybe that'll work. I'm not a pirate, really! Arrrrgh!
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word fantolioni
I fixed the link, c_b. Sorry about that. Give it another try.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word privoš�?ljivost
Technically, this word refers merely to the quality of wishing something for someone else, but in practice it refers to wishing evil on someone. Not an exact schadenfreude alternative, I know, but it's close.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the list jewels-in-your-mouth
Bacchanalia, you probably want to put these comments on the appropriate word page (e.g. chode, usa – just click on the word), and not on the list page.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the user madmouth
To madmouth: Fate is like that.
To C_B and Pro: I suppose my passions for Baltimoriana and Ljubljaniana (and more generally Sloveniana) can seem confusing.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word škodoželjnost
The Slovene version of Schadenfreude, it translates literally as "harm-wishfulness". This is not exactly the same as Schadenfreude, but it generally serves the same purpose. A related word is privoš�?ljivost, which the Dictionary of the Slovene Standard Language describes as the quality of "wishing something on someone, usually something bad or evil."
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word fantolioni
Brooding and sexy, like this.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word uav
Just a note on the pronunciation of this Slovene exclamation (which is probably borrowed from English, btw, via the globalization of American television): the letter v in Slovene is often a semi-vowel, and the spelling av represents the diphthong ow, as in the English words how, now, cow and, yes, wow. The initial u- is the best Slovene spelling can do to represent the w sound. You can also occasionally hear people say this word as two syllables, especially when they want to underscore their excitement: oo-OW, which is sort of cute.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word fagottini
Thanks, bil!
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word fagottini
I think the proper Italian name might be girasole (apparently it means "sunflowers" and that is what it looks like). The package I bought it in puts an -i on the enc, but then, it's in Slovene. We should ask Prolagus.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word depillatory
Very funny, molusqque!
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word squidoo
23 squidoo!
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word fagottini
I had a stuffed pasta tonight (pre-packaged) that was called girasoli, shaped like silver-dollar-sized suns and filled with basil, mozzarella and tomato (a little caprese salad). This was new to me, but it was very good.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word uber-chic
There is always a note of facetiousness in these words with the prefix uber, or more properly, über, or so it seems to me. If not said with irony, they merely betoken a certain naïveté in the speaker. Anything that is truly chic has no need of overstatement, it makes its own case without the aid of prefixes.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the user madmouth
No, I'm an American, but I live in Slovenia. Welcome to Wordie!
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word put a sock in it
You mean you're štumfed, don't you, strev?
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word štumf
The colloquial Slovene word for "sock", from the German Strumpf. In Standard Slovene, the word is nogavica.
April 18, 2009
rolig commented on the list things-that-roll-things-one-rolls-or-things-one-finds-in-a-roll
you gotta do better than that
*chuckles anyway*
April 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word mean people
I don't expect anyone will want to adopt this one.
April 17, 2009
rolig commented on the list things-that-roll-things-one-rolls-or-things-one-finds-in-a-roll
But not on demand.
April 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word tod
In Slovene: one of the three words for "there":
tam means "at that place": Tam so bili vsi njegovi prijatelji. ("All his friends were there.")
tja means "to that place": Gremo tja naslednji teden. ("We're going there next week.")
tod means "through that place, along that way": Vsak dan hiti tod mimo. ("He hurries past there every day.")
April 17, 2009
rolig commented on the user madmouth
Are you Croatian, madmouth?
April 17, 2009
rolig commented on the list disemvoweled
One of my favorite words, the soughing vrh means "summit" or "top" in Slovene, as well as in its cousin tongue, Croato-Bosno-Montenegro-Serbian.
April 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word pulchritude
Pulcher? I hardly know'er!
April 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word voilà
Similar to the wonderful Russian word вот (vot) and the colloquial Slovene evo (pronounced /'ɛvɔ/). The best English can do is there's/there're.
April 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word drower
It all sounds rather Kinbotish to me.
April 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word humuhumunukunukuapua'a
For the general enjoyment, the song mentioned below is here.
April 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word lanzallamas
And here I thought this was another one of those obscure Catholic holidays (maybe in honor of St. Mario Lanza?).
April 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word garrotte
No, I wouldn't to confuse these.
But I though you said you really enjoyed doing the gavotte!
April 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word vole
Not (necessarily) to be confused with love. Unless, of course, you happen to be a vole.
April 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word lemur
And then there's another big-eyed tropical species of lemur, the Lamour dorothia (see here and here).
April 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word chainik
*Singing to self:*
I'm a little chainik, short and stout!
Here is my handle, here is my spout!
When I get all steamed up, hear me shout!
Tip me over and pour me out!
April 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word lemur
Unlike some other primates, lemurs do not have prehensile tails (they cannot hang by their tails from trees like monkeys) but they do have long, wet noses.
– from the Lemurs.us website, "Lemur Basics".
April 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word lemur
I always defer to the lemur allure.
April 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word geezer
In the US, I think this word always refers to an old man, not just any man, and underscores this person's unattractiveness because of his age: How could a babe like Catherine Zeta-Jones marry a geezer like Michael Douglas?
But I have been out of the US for a number of years and watch a lot of British TV, so I'm never 100% about the more subtle cross-pond (transpond?) distinctions.
April 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word mesonoxian
I expect it does, C_b. As hybrid inkhorns go, an age of nearly four centuries seems to qualify this word as a geezer.
April 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word ira
The name of my housemate Jon's easy-going orange tabby in the late 1970s.
April 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word mesonoxian
Hybridity is hardly a shortcoming in this post-postmodern age, and many modern words are macaronic, e.g. television, cyberspace, and many more. But that does not mean hybridity should be encouraged, especially in such a geezer as mesonoxian, which I suspect was invented by some seicento wit for the purpose of displaying his pseudo-erudition or, perhaps, merely to garner guffaws (not unlike the madeupicals of many Wordies). While I am willing to accept this as a word (not that I have any lexicographic authority in the matter), I would caution against its enthusiastic use, and urge instead the simpler and more elegant adjectival use of the word midnight in its place.
And I should point out to Alsanch1 that crepuscular (a fine word, though one to be used sparingly) has nothing to do with midnight, unless of course one is referring to the the subarctic regions at midsummer); it means "relating to twilight".
April 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word raster
In Slovene: printmaking screen, hatching
April 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word resent
A friend of mine today forwarded an email to me from someone who was trying to get in touch with me. He had written to my friend this message:
Could you please make sure Rolig gets the following. I sent it earlier, but the internet "MAILER-daemon" said the address wasn't properly configured. I resent it, but please make sure he gets this.
I told him there was no need for resentment just because of some email glitch.
April 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word bizarre paschal ovine confectionery dispenser diorama
Is he grumpy because he has to wear a Santa cap on Easter, perhaps?
April 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word crastinate
I assumed WWFTD had something to do with flowers.
April 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word bumfuck nowhere
You're thinking of my "States of Mind" list. Added.
April 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word magnificent obsession
No pun necessary.
April 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word jesu, joey of man's desiring
Forget the 'roos.
I'm sure that back in the day Matt LeBlanc was the object of more than one man's desiring.
April 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word wile
"Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil."
– Ephesians 6:11 (KJV)
The Contemporary English Version (1999) renders this verse as follows:
"Put on all the armor that God gives, so you can defend yourself against the devil's tricks."
I prefer "wiles"; it's so much wilier.
April 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word bathroom v washroom v restroom v wc
Brings back painful memories. When I lived in Leningrad in the mid-80s, I made a mental list of all the possible public facilities – туалеты (tualety) – (in "foreigner" hotels, certain better restaurants, academic libraries) throughout the center of the city that were acceptable in an emergency. Train station washrooms, however, did not make the list. And I of course I never went anywhere without toilet paper.
Cheboksary? Isn't that the capital of some Finno-Ugric-language-speaking "autonomous republic" (Mari? Komi? – can't remember). What was the bilby doing there?
April 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word whipped cream
". . . Do you like cooking, Phil?" "Not really.
I can't abide its cruelty."
"Cruelty, Phil?" "Right—you don't merely
Pop corns, you beat eggs, wilfully
Stone cherries, whip cream, chop and skewer,
Are happier when cheese is bluer—
And then there's batter, rack of lamb,
And squash and mace. . . ad nauseam.
No. Violence and exploitation
Of co-comestibles would be
A sin. My conscience troubles me
With delicate denunciation:
Far better not to cook, and starve
In purity, than baste and carve."
– Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate, Ch. 8, stanza 12
April 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word rolig
Wow! (Or as Slovenes spell it: uav!)
I feel the love.
Thanks, Bilby and Sionnach! You guys are certainly two of the reasons I'm here!
April 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word leech
I agree that it's probably borrowed from a Germanic language; there are quite a few Proto-Slavic words that were borrowed from Germanic (I assume Gothic), e.g. *kъnęgъ, which produced the noble titles кн�?зь (knjaz') in Russian ("prince") and knez in Slovene ("prince" or "duke"), as well as the Czech kněz ("priest"). The Germanic source, *kuningaz, yielded of course the German König and the English king.
April 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word schmuck
That's hilarious, Sionnach!
April 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word leech
One of the leading Slovene pharmaceutical companies is called "Lek", an old Slovene word that means "medicine", and the Slovene word for pharmacy is lekarna. In Russian, лекарь (lekar') is an old word for "doctor", лекар�?тво (lekarstvo) means "medicine", and there is even a verb лечить (le�?it') (showing the usual k > �? palatalization), which means "to treat a disease with medicine". Given the general distribution of this root throughout the Slavic languages (and Slovene and Russian are about as far apart as Slavic languages get in terms of non-Slavic influences), I had always assumed this was a Slavic root. Marko Snoj, in his Slovene Etymological Dictionary, confirms that the word *lek ("medicine") is indeed a Proto-Slavic word, but then writes that it is "usually considered a borrowing from Germanic (compare the Gothic lekeis 'doctor', lekkinon 'to treat with medicine' …), which was itself borrowed from Celtic (compare the Middle Irish líaig 'doctor')."
By the way, in English, you can still come across the word "leech" in the sense of "doctor" in older texts (I think even as late as the 19th century).
April 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word schmuck
What I find curious about this word is that in German it means "ornament, jewelry/jewellery" – a very different connotation indeed from its use in modern American English. I wonder if its establishment in Yiddish as "penis" was the result of a euphemism, like we say "the family jewels".
April 9, 2009
rolig commented on the list whether-tis-nobler-words-from-hamlet
Other verbal Hamlet associations, at least for me, are:
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.
HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or like a whale?
POLONIUS: Very like a whale.
What a piece of work is a man … the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!
April 8, 2009
rolig commented on the word triaca
At your service.
April 8, 2009
rolig commented on the word blue
TBT, I think Ruskin was talking about the Deity, not some weight-loss method.
April 8, 2009
rolig commented on the word nabob
1992 is nothing compared to the date of the quote I added "about 1 year ago", which was the first use of "nabob" that ever stuck in my then-young mind. (Gosh, I'm old!)
April 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word interrobang
I'm so glad you saw the beautiful Peabody Library. I used to live just a couple blocks away. Too bad about the weather, though. But South Baltimore and Fells Point can be a lot of fun.
April 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word no glove no love
One I remember from Canada in the '80s is Don't forget to wear your rubbers!
April 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word interrobang
I am so pleased, Pro, that my native town could provide you with this hybrid punctuation mark. Baltimore's an interrobangish place, filled with lots of surprises and questions that are always getting mixed up together. I hope you had a good time!
April 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word sionnachern comfort
Added.
Have one on me, sionnach!
April 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word sionnachern comfort
Shouldn't they be serving this down at the Wordie Arms (or whatever the name of our tavern is – I'm blanking at the moment)?
April 6, 2009
rolig commented on the list yiddishkeit
I am so glad you made this list, John! Thanks!
April 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word noodnik
Also spelled nudnik (where you'll see my comment about it's Slavic roots).
April 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word nudje
This word has Slavic origins: see nudnik.
April 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word drevi
this evening being used less often today
Related word
drévišnji – this evening's
April 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word davi
this morning being used less often today
Related word
dávišnji – this morning's
April 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word chon
Also spelled jun: a monetary unit of North Korea (one 100th part of a won).
Also spelled jeon: a monetary unit of South Korea (one 100th part of a won).
April 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word sok
Actually, some Slovenes do use this word to mean "soft drink", though it's usually meaning is "juice" (as in most Slavic languages, I think).
April 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word 42
I see that there are only 12 days left. (Wordies, please! Try to control your asses!)
April 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word presuniti
1. to affect powerfully (inspire sorrow, pity; inspire wonder, admiration)
2. to overcome, suffuse, e.g. nova mo�? presunila njeno telo = a new strength flowed through her body; presunil ga je strah pred ljudmi = he was overcome with a fear of people
3. arch. to penetrate, pierce, run through (as with a sword)
Related words
presunljív - 1. moving, pitiful, inspiring (close synonym: ganljiv) 2. penetrating (predirljiv): presunljiv krik = a piercing scream; presunljiv pogled = a penetrating gaze)
April 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word jewishish
This word works only with the main stress on the final syllable and secondary stress on the first syllable, and I would recommend a hyphen: Jewish-ish, pronounced /ˌdʒu�?ɪʃ'ɪʃ/.
Bilby, that's just pure ridiculousiness.
April 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word engayify
I don't see any reason for the prefix here. Wouldn't gayify do just as well?
April 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word laicization
The word I prefer (because it better conveys the notion of punishment and not just moving from one status to another) is defrock (and the corresponding verbal noun defrocking). Though perhaps we should worry about priests accused of child molesting being stripped of their frocks.
April 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word deconstruction
I often come across the same problem in my editing. One of the people I work with (a Slovene artist) occasionally will refer to to deconstructing buildings, when what she means is pulling them down. I try to explain that the only way to deconstruct a building is to theorize about it (or perhaps build a new construction that in some way analyzes, questions and exposes the underlying structure of the first building). The problem becomes more interesting because my colleague also discusses in her work the deconstruction of modernism, and here, of course, she is talking about deconstruction.
April 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word pedissequous
Thanks, seanahan! If there's one thing I know, it's how to ramble on.
April 3, 2009
rolig commented on the user frogapplause
Aw, gee! Thanks, f.a.! And by the way, I particularly enjoyed your strip today, and I don't even know who Gerry Spence is (but I'm glad he's out there).
April 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word disgruntled employee benefits
good one, strev!
April 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word pedissequous
I haven't compared Onegin translations in a long time, but the last time I did (back in the '80s), Johnston's was by far the best in capturing the spirit of the text. Nabokov's translation is scrupulously accurate as to the concrete meaning of the text, but it is often very idiosyncratic in its word choice and at times rather flat. Nabokov smugly eschews any attempt to convey the original's rhyme scheme or even its meter; I think he secretly wanted to keep the "real" Pushkin to himself. But his two-volume commentary to the text is fascinating and indispensable for any serious Pushkin-lover. I'd recommend Johnston (whose translation came out after Nabokov's and so was spared the Nabokovian disdain he decanted on Walter Arndt, Babette Deutsch, and other predecessors).
April 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word frankly my deer
I don't give a ham (except in my acting, of course).
April 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word you can't wrap fish in a blog
Found in a comment by "craig o'donnell" on John McIntyre's copy-editing blog You Don't Say. The point is that mistakes in newspapers are short-lived (newspaper = fishwrap), whereas those in blogs stick around.
April 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word intense
*Chuckling* Thanks for the smiles.
April 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word bibliosphresiophilia
Attention all hi-tech-loving bibliopresiophiliacs! There's a new product on the market just for you!
"Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?
Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?
If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.
But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.
Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book."
Get it here!
April 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word supplanter
James comes from Jacob, who in the Bible (Genesis, ch. 27) supplanted his older twin brother Esau (it's a great story!).
April 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word pizda
Thanks for the explanation, artm!
April 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word pedissequous
I imagine Ferry felt it was important to preserve Horace's pun, which an English reader with a little knowledge of Latin roots (i.e. ped- = "foot") would easily get (helped along, as in my case, by the semantic and formal resemblance to obsequious). In the following line, of course, "following foot for foot one foot at a time" refers to metrical (iambs, trochees, dactyls, etc.) not anatomical feet. Horace is recommending that poets choose a noble if familiar subject, such as the Trojan War, and then make their own mark on it by doing new things with the poetic form. I wonder if he is talking especially about those Latin poets who were producing more or less free translations from Greek poetry and yet were trying to render the Greek meters as closely possible. Sort of like the many translations of Pushkin I've seen that make this incredible poet sound like some jingle-writer because the translator is applying all sorts of silly tricks to preserve the rhyme scheme and the meter. (Charles Johnston's 1977 translation of Eugene Onegin is a felicitous exception.)
But I (typically) digress. Given the rough tertiary meter of Ferry's verse (and this particular line is a standard amphibrachic in Latin, short-long-short, or in English, unstressed-stressed-unstressed tetrameter), I would expect pedissequous to be pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, with a short i as in disc, roughly /pɛ'dɪsəkwəs/.
April 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word pianistan
Brilliant, Bilb.
March 31, 2009
rolig commented on the word peis
John, perhaps I.M. Pei's name has become a byword for modernist architect, as in: "Our architecure program has produced quite a few Peis and a couple of Mieses, too." A more likely plural, however, would be if Pei is understood metonymically: "While everyone else was getting excited about deconstructivist architecture, she devoted herself to the buildings of late modernism and traveled the world photographing Peis and Safdies." Well, it's possible. I guess all I am saying is, give Peis a chance.
March 31, 2009
rolig commented on the word samovar
Thanks, all. And John's "Son of Samovar" is deliciously psychopathic enough to deserve its own page. John, nobody is listing Son of Samovar. Why don't you?
March 31, 2009
rolig commented on the word samovar
Jokes are fine, and I know that words change meanings as they migrate. I just hadn't realized samovar had turned into a generalized hot-beverage dispenser. Many borrowings, and samovar is one of them retain their foreignness. I may be out of it, but I find it hard to think of anything as a samovar, except facetiously, unless it is more or less directly associated with the Russian samovar. If there is humor for me in the excerpt John cited (and 30 Rock has not yet reached my Central European hideaway, so I am not familiar with any of the characters), then it is that Toufer himself doesn't know what a samovar is, though he smugly thinks he does. I suspect, however, that the intention was simply to show Toufer's nerdishness in using unusual words. In this case "samovar" actually means "a word only elitists or eggheads use." Which would be OK if the elitist/egghead used it correctly. But this is the kind of faux populism I hate about TV writing, because they usually get it wrong. The other day, for example, in some TV drama, someone who was supposed to be a born-again Christian said something like: "Jesus said" followed by a familar quotation from one of Paul's letters (e.g. "It is more blessed to give than to receive"). A born-again Christian would know this came from Paul and not from Jesus speaking in the Gospels. But the lazy-ass TV writers couldn't be bothered to look it up because they don't really care about accuracy or even about what born-again Christians would really say; they just want a snappy line.
Sorry for the digression. And thanks, Sionnach and Reesetee, for the vote of support.
March 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word forte
Sionnach, did you grow up saying (and hearing people say) one-syllable forte? I wonder if the one- vs. two-syllable divide is based on class distinctions or perhaps on the transatlantic rift, or both?
March 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word forte
Well argued, Q.! I am an overly educated guy who is thought to be quite articulate and knowledgeable about languages, and I have always said this word with two syllables, with the stress on the first. But a couple of months ago someone whose opinion on such matters I respect said that it should be pronounced as one syllable when it meant "area of particular strength". But I don't believe that I have ever heard anyone say the word that way in the past thirty years. And I am sure that I and my educated friends have all said it disyllabically. Thanks for the confirmation.
But this makes me wonder: is this campaign to get people to say forte monosyllabically a recent fad? Is this a new bugbear?
March 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word twelfth
It's three consonant sounds: /l/, /f/, and /th/; another ordinal with three consonant sounds is sixth: /k/, /s/, and /th/.
March 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word samovar
Samovars dispensing coffee? I think not. Traditional Russians make their coffee the Turkish way, in a little pot over a flame. Samovars are used only for tea.
March 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word cucati
Sorry for the confusion. The Slovene verb cucati (pronounced /TSU-tsa-ti/) means "to suck"; the label juv. ("juvenile") indicates that it is usually used by or with young children.
March 27, 2009
rolig commented on the list words-that-are-also-movies
Hitchcock had a predilection for one-word titles. I added a few of his. Didn't see that John had already listed Psycho. Sorry.
March 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word cucati
to suck juv.
March 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word cucek
cur
March 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word sinter
"He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness."
– W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, tr. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 161.
March 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word contemn
Strictly speaking, they mean different things, though it's true that we often condemn things we contemn. To condemn something or is to declare it bad, wicked, etc.; to contemn something is to express disdain for it, to hold it in contempt (which derives, in fact, from the past participle of the Latin verb contemnere, "to scorn", which gives us "contemn").
But you should note that "contemn" is not often used anymore (the Oxford American Dictionary marks it as "archaic"), probably because of this very confusion with "condemn".
March 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word marljiv
diligent, persistent
March 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word varljiv
deceptive, misleading
< varati, "to cheat"
March 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word s trebuhom za kruhom
lit. "with the belly after bread". This means "go abroad to make a living".
Ni mi bilo treba s trebuhom za kruhom. ("I didn't have to go abroad to make a living.")
March 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word erin go braugh
Not to be confused with the slogan of the 1970s Irish Feminist Action Committee, which was Erin Go Braughless!
March 18, 2009
rolig commented on the user nuxiy
No, I'm not Norwegian, and in fact, I didn't know that my handle meant anything in Norwegian until a couple weeks ago. But thanks for asking.
And welcome to Wordie! If you have any questions, just ask.
March 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word spectacles, testicle, watch 'n wallet
Nor does this person have an ear for dactyls.
March 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word mea culpa
I guess I attract them.
March 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word metaphier
Does this mean there is a verb "to metaphy"? Ugh. I always thought that "the thing known" was what we called the metaphor.
March 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word abraham
In Slovene, "to meet" or "see" Abraham (srečati/videti Abrahama) means to reach your 50th birthday.
March 15, 2009
rolig commented on the list happenstance-2
Nice list! I added a couple. But I'm curious about the word newton being here. Is this something to do with fortuitously falling fruit?
March 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word mea culpa
No, Maya and Maksim are fairly common Russian names, though the surname Kulpa is unusual. But such things do occur. I have a good friend in Ljubljana named Tadej (the Slovene version of Thaddaeus), which is pronounced a lot like the English word "today". His sister's name is Tamara, with the stress on the second syllable.
March 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word bizarre spheniscidine confectionery dispenser videorama
I enjoyed the video very much, and it's nice to hear your voice – "fecal carnage" is an interesting, if disturbing phrase. I am not very good at spotting accents, in fact, unless they are rather broad, but I thought your voice sounded American. Maybe it was the way you pronounced the r. I thought Irish accents generally used more of a trilled r.
March 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word irokeza
The Mohawk hairstyle is still popular in Ljubljana, only here it is called irokeza, from the word Irokez (Iroquois).
March 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word mea culpa
I once had a friend in St. Petersburg whose name was Maya Kulpa (Ма�? Кульпа), and her brother was Maksim Kulpa (Мак�?им Кульпа). It was hard to resist the temptation to refer to them collectively as Mea Maxima Culpa.
March 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word muffin ii
Chained_bear, you loved and cared for her and gave her a home when she felt most abandoned. Wherever she is now, I am sure that love remains for you (with you) and, possibly, for her too.
March 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word smu�?
ski (n.)
March 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word bizarre spheniscidine confectionery dispenser videorama
Was that your voice in the video, Sionnach? It didn't sound Irish.
March 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word cupuassu
Yes, in Brazil. I came across this name in a piece I was editing about indigenous communities in the Brazilian state of Acre. The word was written as cupuaçu, but I wondered if there was an English equivalent. And I found cupuassu on Wikipedia (which I don't usually have much confidence in).
March 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word muffin ii
My condolences, Chained_bear. It may seem weird, but when my amazing cat Nastasya died a few years ago, I somehow felt that she was now in some way able to look out for me just I had looked out for her.
March 13, 2009
rolig commented on the user djsalinger
DJ, what's a theoretical band? Do you perform recitations of Foucault and Žižek? That could be interesting. And I'm also curious about your semi-retired poet status. Do you get semi-retirement benefits? Health care? Is there a semi-retirement poets' community? Twenty-five seems a young age to retire from anything, even semi-retire.
March 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word cupuassu
Theobroma grandiflorum. Also known as (in Spanish) cupuasú, copoasú, cacao blanco, and (in Portuguese) cupuaçu, pupu, pupuaçu.
A tree (and its fruit) in the eastern Amazonian rain forest. See description here.
March 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word oneyer
Doesn't it seem likely that Shakespeare was making a joke? Instead of saying simply "Great Ones" (which I think was a set phrase then, as it still is today, for the privileged in society), he was poking fun at such folks by appending the suffix -yer, as if being a Great One was not about character or moral stature, it was simply a profession, like that of lawyers and sawyers. In other words, might not oneyer be a Shakespearean madeupical?
March 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word humanly
I think I understand, though it's surprising that the adjective humanly has appeared so rarely since Caxton, for it follows the same pattern as godly, womanly, and manly, and indeed, the adjectival suffix -ly seems fairly productive, e.g. a person can act in a doctorly manner; one may look for cousinly support; a woman may show wifely devotion; members of the Religious Society of Friends encourage Quakerly behavior; etc.
March 13, 2009
rolig commented on the list odorific
A couple more: earthy, musky. And two adjectives that mean "relating to the sense of smell" are olfactory (general) and osphretic (more technical).
March 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word muffin ii
Thanks, C_b and ext11, for the sympathy. But this loss occurred a quarter-century ago, so I am no longer grieving, though I am still grateful for this cat's devotion.
March 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word humanly
Strange. I'm sure I have been hearing people use the phrase "humanly possible" all of my life (and I met Abraham passed 50 a couple of years ago, as Slovenes say). So is this really a "new" word?
March 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word muffin ii
I lived with, and learned from, Muffin II, many more years than I had with Muffin, his predecessor, who sadly died from injuries sustained in a road accident at the young age of 3. Nevertheless, he also taught me a thing or two.
March 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word muffin
Muffin, the first of the name in our household (see Muffin II for his successor), was with us for only a few years. I was seven when we adopted him as a kitten, and he died after sustaining injuries in a road accident (my grandmother suspected the culprit was a motorcyclist) when he was only three. My memories of Muffin are vague, but I know I loved him and was deeply distressed by his passing. He inadvertantly challenged my young belief in the Judeo-Christian god, as taught by my Presbyterian Sunday School, but that is another story.
March 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word muffin ii
Prolagus has the right idea. Muffin II was a cat with whom I lived from the age of 10 to 18, and intermittantly after that, until his death at the age of 15 (when I was 25 and in graduate school). Much of what I know about forebearance, loyalty and contemplation I learned from Muffin II.
March 12, 2009
rolig commented on the list poetrie-for-i-will-consider-my-cat-jeoffry…
Thank you, Reesetee, for posting Soto's poem about his dog! I have loved Smart's poem ever since I first came across it some thirty years ago. It has to be the finest thing ever written about a cat; it percolates with love, wonder, and attentive observation.
This list, by the way, is dedicated to the feline members of my own little family, Aglaja and Erazma, each a mixture of gravity and waggery.
March 12, 2009
rolig commented on the list poetrie-nelson-my-dog
Thank you for this, Reesetee. You have inspired me to make a Poetrie with Christopher Smart's ode to his cat Jeoffry. It wouldn't surprise me if Smart's work was what prompted Soto to write this lovely poem to his dog; the two works have a lot in common.
March 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word slosh
"sloshing in his grave"? Was Amis buried in a swamp?
March 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word seriph
*sings to self: "… but I did not kill the cherubim …"*
March 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word you gave her the fish
I take it sanguinary revenge is quite different from sanguine revenge.
March 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word peregruzka v perezagruzka
See peregruzka for context.
March 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word peregruzka
Perhaps the worst thing about this faux pas was not that the word was wrong (actually it's the kind of mistake I would expect a truly diplomatic Russian to overlook, since it's very understandable why someone, even with a good general knowledge of Russian, might think that peregruzka meant "reset" – and in "lazy" or colloquial Russian, people do say peregruzka to mean reboot; Lavrov was being an asshole), but that the word was written in the Latin alphabet, not in the Cyrillic. This is truly disrepectful of Russian as a language. For more on peregruzka / перегрузка v. perezagruzka / перезагрузка, see the discussion at Language Log, to which yours truly made a modest contribution.
March 11, 2009
rolig commented on the list how-am-i-bored-let-me-count-the-ways
Some people say "I'm bored out of my skull." But I don't.
March 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word cowgirl, a long way from home
But apparently not in "afraid", at least not the first one.
March 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?uza
jail
syn.: je�?a, zapor
March 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word ploh
plank, board: "a rather thick, flat piece of wood from a tree trunk that has been sawed lengthwise" (SSKJ).
March 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word writing on the wall
Hurry up, Bilby! Others are waiting to use the loo!
March 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word seriph
But who shot the seraph?
March 10, 2009
rolig commented on the user qroqqa
Thanks for your suggestion (a week and a half ago!) regarding my question about how to refer the "singular" of a pluralis tantem. I think I understand the notion of a "bound base", but I am not sure that applies to units like *scissor, *hijink, and *trouser, since the -s in the pluralis tantum is not really an affix in the way that dis- is in discombobulate, but a grammatical ending (or perhaps this distinction is irrelevant?). In other words, when we remove the ending from scissors, we still have a hypothetical noun that acts like real nouns in certain ways, notably, it can serve as a verb ("She scissored her way through the crowd") or a modifier ("The scissor pieces lay on the table, waiting to be assembled"). Would lexeme work in such cases?
March 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word kafa
Coffee in Serbian (in Cyrillic: кафа).
March 8, 2009
rolig commented on the list coffee-house
I know. It's right up there with "Please" and "Thank you." Indispensable.
March 7, 2009
rolig commented on the list coffee-house
Nice list! Just what I want first thing in the morning (or afternoon, as the case may be). I see you are already listing the Slovene and BCSM (Bosno-Croato-Serbo-Montenegrin) kava (sans accent), though Serbians seem to prefer kafa (or кафа in Cyrillic spelling). In Russian, coffee would be кофе (transliterated kofe). Also, my friends in Maryland fondly refer to this beverage as java (no matter where the beans originate).
March 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word kofe
In low-colloquial Slovene, this means "coffee." It almost certainly comes from the German Kaffee by way of the Carinthian dialect, where /a/ tends to be pronounced more or less /o/.
March 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word kava
Accentless, this is coffee in Slovene, as well as in BCSM (Bosno-Croato-Serbo-Montenegrin).
March 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word sprenevedati se
to play innocent; be disingenuous
"Glede izjave predsednika Zveze borcev za vrednote NOB Slovenije Janeza Stanovnika, da povojnih pobojev niso izvedli partizani, ampak Jugoslovanska armada, je Drobni�?, sicer �?lan Nove Slovenske zaveze, poudaril, 'naj se Stanovnik ne spreneveda'."
Tj. L./STA, "Stanovnik: Poboji so se dogajali pod Titovim poveljstvom" Stanovnik: The massacres happened under Tito's command, Delo.si, 6 March 2009
Related words:
sprenevédav – disingenuous
sprenevéda – a false appearance of innocence, ignorance; disingenuity
Concerning the statement of the president of the Alliance of Fighters for the Values of the National Liberation Struggle of Slovenia, Janez Stanovnik, that it was not the Partisans who carried out the post-war massacres, but the Yugoslav army, (Anton) Drobni�?, a member of the New Slovenia Alliance, said emphatically, "Stanovnik shouldn't play innocent."
March 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word misled
Wait, wasn't Antietam a character in The Whyzard of Odds?
(I think wizened is standardly WIZZ-end.)
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the user Prolagus
Congratulations!
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the list •-don-t-mean-a-tingo
So none of these words or phrases got that swingo, is that what you're saying, Pro?
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word corpus delicti
Latin: "the body of offense". In law, this refers to the facts and circumstances constituting a breach of the law. In popular usage, however, this can mean the concrete evidence, such as a corpse.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word corpus delecti
It should be corpus delicti – Latin for "body of offense," used in law to mean the facts and circumstances constituting a breach of the law.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word ¡ cupcakes !
Oh my god. Sugar rush.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the user Prolagus
What recent achievement, Pro? Did I miss something? Are congratulations in order? On order? Out of order?
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?ižma
also �?ižem
a somewhat old-fashioned word for an ankle-boot, though in vernacular usage it can also mean any shoe. From the Hungarian csizma (dial. csizsma or Serbian �?izma, both derived from Turkish çizme "boot".
"U pizda. Sem ga le prizadel. Morda celo razmišlja, da bi mi �?ižmo zabil v ksiht." Oh fuck. Now I'd gone and hurt his feelings. Maybe he was even thinking about shoving his boot in my face.
– Zoran Ho�?evar, Za znoret (Ljubljana: DZS, 1999), 53.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the list lifeforms-with-which-id-like-to-communicate
Oh of course actuaries. But what about spammers? What about telemarketers? What about advertisers in general? You know, anyone who tries to convince you to buy something you don't need and don't really even want? Who tries to convince you that you're somehow deficient unless you have their overpriced product that is guaranteed to wear out/run out/break down/go out of style in less than a year so you'll have to get the new and improved version? I have my doubts.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word 'substantial doubt' for gm future
Whew! For a moment I thought this referred to Gay Male.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word button
Oh, wow. That's beautiful. A good choice for a first unequivocal word.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the list lifeforms-with-which-id-like-to-communicate
Did you not know, Lea, that the name "William Shatner" is merely code: Lama Silent Whir. That's powerful energy.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word mysterious maple syrup (smeared on head)
Right. And who do you think benefits most from global warming? They're already planning tourist resorts on Hudson's Bay.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word mysterious maple syrup (smeared on head)
It's another Canadian plot. Like Mary Pickford and Lorne Greene and SNL, not to mention gay marriage. Be warned.
March 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word impactful
This word always makes me think of car crashes.
March 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word pene-enclave
What a silly word. For one thing, these are not "almost enclaves"; they are almost exclaves (unless I've misunderstood what belongs to what). And for another thing, it's ridiculous to use the obscure "pene-" prefix when there are established ways of indicating such things. I would call these "near-exclaves" or, if you insist on a fancy prefix, "quasi-exclave". We don't, for instance, call it a "pene-victory" when a candidate loses by a few votes, or a "pene-fatality" when someone is almost killed.
March 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word tonya harding
"And when we were down twenty points in the summer, all the pundits and all the smart folks, they were saying, 'OK, his only chance now is he's got to knee-cap her; he's got to do a Tonya Harding on the frontrunner.'"
– Candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008.
March 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word pandiculate
My condolences to your feral dog, Jack-Joseph.
March 4, 2009
rolig commented on the user sionnach
Congratulations on your sesquidecamillennial* accomplishment!
*I have no idea if this is a real word, but it seems right.
March 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word brutus
Oh, crap, I meant to say, "But Bill is such an honorable man…" I got my Shakes_bear all mixed up.
March 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word pants
"The pants that can be explained are not the real pants."
March 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word brutus
But Frank is such an honourable man…
March 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word osmophobia
Something smells funny about that definition, Bilby.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word martin�?ek
a small lizard, especially the kind found sunbathing on rocks in gardens. Slovenes say things like, "Sedimo na soncu in se grejemo kot martin�?ki" ("We're sitting in the sun, warming ourselves like lizards"). The name of this beastie could be literally translated as "little Martin", and Slovene etymologist Marko Snoj says it is probably derived from the name "St. Martin," though the specific connection to the saint is not clear.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word shepherd's hut
Slovene style, see this and this from the mountain Velika Planina, near Ljubljana.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word brutus
Despite Weirdnet's second definition, it seems to me that Brutus's name has become a byword for a treacherous friend. Et tu, Brute?
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word sherris
Nice. This makes me wonder if sherry is a back-formation (from sherris, from vino de Jerez Xeres'>Xeres).
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word dooties
You might want to check out this clip. (I think the word is usually used in the plural; probably "doo-doos" became "dooties.")
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word dooties
What don't you get, Bilbo?
Dooty comes from doo-doo (a child's word for what doggies do on the lawn), which is a humorous euphemism for excrement. What Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer meant was "Horseshit!" (or more precisely, "Horse turds!").
Is this an Americanism?
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word syria's serious
There were signs that the country's armed forces were mobilizing along the Lebanese border. It would be a terrible mistake to assume the dictator's words were idle threats. The U.S. envoy's report made one thing repetitively clear: Syria's serious.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word osphresiophilia
Very nice. Horrible in its way, but very nice.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word open the door see mountain
This is nice. I might use this.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word mariquita
Lice R Uš!
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word osphresiophilia
A strong attraction to certain smells.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the list gil-blas
The word is real enough. An osphresiophilia is a strong (perhaps erotic) attraction to certain smells. For Wordizens, the prefix biblio- seems to be in order. While I may sometimes pooh-pooh a word, I would never poo-poo a fellow Wordie.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word apophasis
"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him . . ."
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word bibliosphresiophilia
A strong attraction to the odor of books. There is clear evidence that this is a chronic condition among Wordies.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the list gil-blas
The diagnosis, I believe, would be chronic bibliosphresiophilia. I'm not sure there's a cure.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word me and you and a dog named boo
The original Brel version is quite good. It's not an earworm to be afraid of.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word love
Lea, I just now noticed your pun! Voletile! Very nice.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word me and you and a dog named boo
"Seasons in the Sun" is a bowdlerized English version of a fine, bitterly ironic song by Jacques Brel, "Le Moribond" (The Dying Man). There is a video of Brel singing this song on You-Tube (with English subtitles).
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word boulder count
Somehow I am reminded of the bizarre ursine confectionery dispenser diorama.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word oldest english words
Especially if one has studied Anglo-Saxon. The BBC article makes it sound like 1000 years ago is as distant as 10,000 years ago.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the list jun-woo-2
If you are commenting about a word, the comment should be on the word page, not the list page.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the user jwsniper
TOO LATE?
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word love
calm and fun/nice, I like it. On the other hand, a Russian friend pronounces my name Ролик (Rólik), which means "ball bearing" in her language…
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word appendice
Brilliant suggestion, c_b! Maybe if it keeps on happening you could mutter, "dick… s," and then when challenged, explain (if you still have your job).
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word substantiality
Perhaps putting "substantiality" in quotation marks would have made this clear, though that still leaves the question, "substantial" in what sense? In terms of length (a headline is not really "substantial" in that regard) or in terms of importance? If I quote only a single sentence, but it happens to be the sentence that carries the weight of the whole article, how does this excerpt rank in "substantiality"?
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word love
I didn't know that, Lea, that's really nice!
Pro, I only said that for the joke. I do have a lovely boyfriend, who's not at all volish. But it's true about the cats. They're well-fed.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word substantiality
Terrible. I thought the NYT was one of the few papers left that still had copy-editors.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word viola del pensiero
How Petrarchian.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word appendice
grooaannn
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word love
I always get this confused with vole. No wonder it's so hard finding keeping a boyfriend. But on the other hand, my cats are well-fed.
*Sings: "Lookin' for vole in all the wrong places…"*
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word vocal chords
I can still see this being an eggcorn, at least in the mind of the bestower. I'm pretty sure that I used to think these were vocal chords because they're like the chords you play on a guitar. As the dictionary suggests, cord and chord have a long history of being confused. So what started as an eggcorn became, in some circles at least, an OK tree, while for others it still napped in the bud.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word vocal chords
According to the Oxford American Dictionary, the 2nd definition of "chord (2)" is:
ANATOMY: variant spelling of cord :: spinal chord.
And the etymological note reads:
ORIGIN: mid-16th century. (in the anatomical sense): a later spelling (influenced by Latin chorda 'rope') of CORD.
March 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word pansy
This is also called "stepmother" in Slovene: ma�?eha.
Edit: And in Russian, "Annie's little eyes": анютины глазки (anyútiny glázki)
March 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word kipple
Ah, but you will one day. We all will.
March 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word imaginary
Well, it can be done; it just takes some imagination.
The revery alone will do…
March 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word me and you and a dog named boo
Does this bring back any (painful) memories?
See the tree, how big it's grown,
But friend, it hasn't been too long
It wasn't big…
"Honey" would be my submission in this category.
March 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word olecranon
Pro, "funny bone" is the vernacular name for the olecranon, that part of the elbow which gives you a funny (wierd) feeling when you accidentally knock it against something.
March 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word kipple
Cat, you apparently didn't read VictoriaPL's citation from about 1 year ago. No need to repeat comments. By the way, do you like kippling? What about browning?
March 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word spheniscine
"Of or pertaining to the Spheniscidae; spheniscomorphic." – The Century Dictionary.
Penguin-like, penguinesque, penguiny, penguinish.
March 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word spheniscidine
I prefer the simpler spheniscine (from The Century Dictionary).
March 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word unperfectability
Oh, Joe! Well, he's another concrete thinker, despite being a lawyer – unlike his Antarctica-roaming wife.
By the way, I don't think I would ever interpret "imperfectible" as meaning "capable of being made imperfect" because there is no verb "to imperfect". I might say, rather, something like "blemishable" (a word that I doubt exists in dictionaries but is perfectly understandable).
March 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word phthisicky
Related to or affected by phthisis.
March 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word uš
louse: head lice (naglavne uši), pubic lice (sramne uši); also, any small leaf-eating garden pests (listne uši); a worthless, exploitative person
Related words:
ušiv – lousy, covered in lice
Expressions:
denarja ima kot bera�?/cigan uši - he's got money like a beggar/gypsy has lice
fant jé kot uš – the boy eats like a louse (he eats a lot)
March 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word thrush
Strange that Wierdnet cites the disease before the songbird.
March 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word febuary
Not to be confused with the very different Hamburger Universität für Wirtschaft und Politik (Hamburg University of Economics and Politics), which is now part of the University of Hamburg.
March 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word þ
Ouch! I think I've got one of these in my side!
March 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word see you next tuesday
Urban Dictionary provides a different definition.
March 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word hard hat
"Helmet" has military connotations. "Hard hat" primarily means the headgear worn by construction workers as protection from things falling on them from above. Why did "hard hat" evolve in this context instead of "helmet", since they both mean essentially the same thing: "hard headgear worn as protection"? I suppose it's because workers used to always wear a kind of hat (e.g. to keep dust out of their hair), but in certain areas where there was a chance of things falling from above, they were required to exchange their soft-material hat for a hard hat. People didn't think of calling it a "helmet" because helmets were associated with military combat and sports (another kind of combat), areas very different from labor.
February 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word unperfectability
A curious pair: unperfectability and imperfectibility. The first is non-standard, I think, and comes from the English verb "to perfect" (stress on 2nd syllable): perfect + -able (which can be added to almost any transitive verb to produce an adjective) + un- (which can negate pretty much any adjective in English).
In fact, you probably won't find the perfectly plausible perfectable in most standard English dictionaries, and that's because the Latinate perfectible is so well-established, that the -able ending registers as incorrect. Because it derives from Latin, "perfectible" yields the equally Latinate negative imperfectible and hence, imperfectibility.
The variant you suggest, Pro, is not implausible, but because it combines the handy English un- prefix with the Franco-Latinate -ibility suffixes, it seems strange.
Kushner's word unperfectability means essentially the same as imperfectibility, but it has a somewhat ad hoc feeling, representing an instantaneous thought process (is this Belize speaking?) that goes something like this:
1. No one can make the world perfect.
2. The world is not able to be perfected.
3. The world is not "perfect-able."
4. The world is un-perfect-able.
5. The world is characterized by unperfectability.
By having his character say "unperfectability" instead of the standard "imperfectibility", Kushner conveys that the character is thinking in concrete, rather than abstract Scholiastic, terms. Which is sort of the whole point of the Belize v. Louis contrast in the play.
The distinction Bilby suggests has merit, too, I think. The word "imperfectible" probably developed in medieval religious thinking with regard to the question of the perfectibility or imperfectibility of man, given the doctrine of Original Sin. So it does point to an inherent deficiency. "Unperfectability", on the other hand, is, as I suggest, an ad hoc term related to concrete thinking ("Can we perfect this situation? No? Well, okay. How about this other situation then? Maybe we can perfect that. Let's give it a try.") and is not really concerned with inherent deficiencies, only with possibility or impossibility at the moment.
February 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word ear-piercing
"The shootings of seven people marred Fat Tuesday as ear-piercing gunfire set revelers ducking for cover and brought the final stream of truck floats to a horrifying halt."
From the caption on a Guardian photo showing a utility truck cleaning up after New Orleans' Mardi Gras celebrations.
Somehow this was not the use of "ear-piercing" I was expecting in a report on Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Very sad.
February 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word l'esprit de l'escalier
I love the image of this: As you're leaving some scintillating Parisian salon, descending the grand staircase to your waiting coach outside, it hits you: you know just how you should have responded, the perfect, most brilliant retort, to the Chevalier de la Foue's insinuations about your last play (or was he perhaps referring to your relations with that promising young actor at La Comédie française?). But it is too late…
February 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word seán Ó duibhir an ghleanna
More lyrical, I think, only in its easy rhyme and dull meter; your first translation is much more moving and vivid.
February 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word vrniti komu milo za drago
to get even with s.o.
(lit.: "to give back sweet for dear")
February 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word dictionary
Very funny, Fox. Maybe s/he was being facetious, but I suspect the latter.
February 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word dictionary
TBT, you would probably have some idea about how the word is spelled, wouldn't you? Often the problematic part of the word comes in the middle or the end (e.g. -able or -ible, -ant or -ent), so you know enough to look the word up and discover the correct spelling. If the word starts in a quirky way, like the name of our friend pterodactyl, then you might indeed be stumped, but after a while you may even start recognizing some of these deceptive spellings, and know that if the word isn't spelled one way then it is probably spelled another way. Most people, I suspect, use dictionaries to confirm or correct spellings they think they know.
February 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word turnkey
God, I hate marketing lingo, especially when it usurps a wonderful, vivid word like turnkey. In my view, this self-promotional usage, and the marketeers who came up with it, are shovel-ready. Do any of these people read books?
*feels himself turning into a curmudgeon; sort of likes it, sort of doesn't*
February 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word hypoflexive
Zizoo, there are plenty of mismatched (i.e. Greek + Latin elements) words that have been established in contemporary English (e.g. hypersensitive), so hypoflexive has lots of company, however scruffy such company might seem to etymology mavens like me (and, I presume, Qroqqa). If you want to be consistent (though some hold that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, of course), you could use the Latin prefix sub-, which would give you (I think) sufflexive. Or you could search out the Greek root for "bend" (Qroqqa could help, I bet).
Edit: hypotropic?
February 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word marionberry
And the official berry of the US Southeastern state of North Carolina is, of course, the mayberry.
February 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word misspelling notices
With Wordie PRO!, if you happen to list a misspelling (e.g. synechdoche), you will receive a gentle notification, such as:
SYNECHDOCHE is a misspelling. Do you really want to list it?
(With Wordie EXECUTIVE, you will also be provided with the correct spelling.)
February 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word synechdoche
I suppose if one had WORDIE PRO, one might receive a gentle notice when one lists a misspelled word, to the effect:
"SYNECHDOCHE is a misspelling. Do you wish to continue listing it?"
February 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word recreance
ERASMUS
When he protested, not too solemnly,
That for a world's achieving maintenance
The crust of overdone divinity
Lacked ailment, they called it recreance;
And when he chose through his own glass to scan
Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly,
The monk within the cassock to the man
Within the monk, they called it heresy.
And when he made so perilously bold
As to be scattered forth in black and white,
Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled
Their inward eyes in anguish and affright;
There were some of them did shake at what was told,
And they shook best who knew that he was right.
– Edwin Arlington Robinson
February 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word brazilianisation
Old-fashioned Oxford University Press prefers the etymologically grounded -ize/-ization (not an Americanism, but in use since the 16th century) to the French-influenced -ise spellings.
February 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word šparati
The Slovene colloquial word comes from German, of course: sparen, "to save"
February 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word murinus
jerry-like
February 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word malifulous
Try again, TBT. Don't get in a sweat, be mellow, and use a dictionary.
February 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word špas
fun
February 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word šparati
to save (money), be thrifty
February 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word špricati
1. to spray
2. to play hooky (one who does this is a špricar)
from G. spritzen
pf.: špricniti
February 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word šravfati
to screw, from G. schrauben
February 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word paczki
Like this, Qroqqa? pączki
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the list slo-nižje-pogovorno-v-sskj
"Nižje pogovorno" is a designation Slovene lexicographers give to non-"formal" words that are widely used and understood in conversation (i.e. "pogovorno" – "colloquial") but that indicate a lower level of education or social status (i.e. "nižje" – "lower" or perhaps "vulgar" in the classic sense). In fact many of these words are used by everybody, even university professors, in relaxed, informal settings. Slovenes often refer to such words as doma�?e – "domestic, for the home" – which is a little ironic since the vast majority are German imports (e.g. štant, "a stand or booth", from das Stand), whereas the formal Slovene (Slavic-root) word (here, stojnica) is often less widely used and can sound official and stilted.
In Slovene classes, of course, they never teach you these "low-colloquial" expressions. And in Slovene schools, children are reprimanded when they use them, which, unsurprisingly, has its effects on the character.
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word stopinja
stopínja
footprint; step (in walking); degree (of temperature)
Not to be confused with:
stopnja (stôpnja) – stage, level; phase; extent, degree; power (in mathematics); degree (in grammar)
stopnica (stopníca) – step (in a flight of steps, stairs)
colloquial: štenga
stopniš�?e (stopníš�?e) - staircase
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word stopnja
stôpnja
stage, level; phase; extent, degree; power (in mathematics); degree (in grammar)
Not to be confused with:
stopnica (stopníca) – step (in a flight of steps, stairs)
colloquial: štenga
stopniš�?e (stopníš�?e) - staircase
stopinja (stopínja) – footprint; step (in walking); degree (of temperature)
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word stopnica
stopníca
step (in a flight of steps, stairs)
colloquial: štenga
Not to be confused with:
stopnišče (stopníšče) - staircase
stopnja (stôpnja) – stage, level; phase; extent, degree; power (in mathematics); degree (in grammar)
stopinja (stopínja) – footprint; step (in walking); degree (of temperature)
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word štenga
step (non-fig.)
standard Slovene: stopnica
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word štefnjati
to browse, rummage, search through
standard Slovene: stikati, iskati
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word šlic
fly (in pants)
standard Slovene: razporek
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word rukati
impf.
to shove, bump
pf.: rukniti
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word inactives
But, ECBrenner, I didn't send them any e-mail! Really! That must've been Mr. Bilby.
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the user whichbe
Good luck with your book, whichbe! By the way, are you writing it or merely authoring it?
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the list loaded-words-part-deux-two-words-that-together-make-one-load
From the 60s and 70s:
protest movement
flower power
me generation
generation gap
moral majority
enemies list
saturday night massacre
october surprise
And from the Cold War:
star wars
red scare
February 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word krucenal
also krucinál
February 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word dulcarnon
Here is the interesting discussion of the word in the 19th-century Century Dictionary. It's worth quoting at length, I think. The dictionary provides the following citation from Chaucer:
"I am, til God me bettere mynde sende,
At dulcarnon, right at my wittes ende."
Quod Pandarus, "Ye, nece, will ye here?
Dulcarnon called is 'flemyng of wreches';
It semeth hard, for wreches wol nought lere,
For veray slouthe, or other wilful teches."
Troilus, iii. 931.
The dictionary also explains the word's application to Alexander the Great:
Dukarnon represents the Arabic dhu 'l karnein, 'lord of the two horns,' a name applied to Alexander, either because he boasted himself the son of Jupiter Ammon, and therefore had his coins stamped with horned images, or, as some say, because he had in his power the eastern and western world, signified in the two horns. (Selden's Preface to Drayton's Polyolbion.)
And adds that:
But the epithet was also applied to the 47th proposition of Euclid, in which the squares of the two sides of the right-angled triangle stand out something like two horns. This proposition was confounded by Chaucer with the 5th proposition, the famous pons asinorum. This, for some reason, was in the middle ages termed Elefuga, which is explained as meaning 'flight of the miserable,' or, as Chaucer renders it, 'flemyng of wreches.' Ele was supposed to be derived from elegi, meaning miserable, and this latter was itself derived from elegia, meaning sorrow. The passage from Chaucer was first thus explained in the London Athenaeum, Sept. 23, 1871, p. 393.
February 23, 2009
rolig commented on the list where-s-my-cheap-slangshot
great list!
February 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word sacrebleu
It never occurred to me that "bleu" in this expression referred to the BVM. I always thought of it as relating to the sky, and therefore, to Heaven.
February 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word fiducial
See also fiducial mark.
February 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word fiducial mark
And here I expected something to do with outdated German currency. But then, I was thinking of fiduciary.
It's fascinating how scientists write sometimes. Mostly you get phrases like "thin-film local delamination processes", "superlayer indentation", and "to back calculate thin film adhesion", which require careful parsing (a few more hyphens would have helped) and mental gymnastics, but then you get something as plain as "are sucked into the crack tip"! Also, I take it that "telephone cord blister" is a specialized term?
February 21, 2009
rolig commented on the list boys-i-wouldn-t-go-out-with
well, a legless joke would be lame, wouldn't it? (ta-dum-dum)
February 21, 2009
rolig commented on the list boys-i-wouldn-t-go-out-with
Oh, I've been on dates with guys who ended up legless. Not much fun.
February 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word discernibly turgid
The actual draft of the law is funnier than the humorous website. And much scarier.
February 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word discernibly turgid
You know, don't you, Skip, that the website you linked to is a "humor" site. The tar and feathers proposal sort of gives it away.
February 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word denali
*really envious*
February 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word denali
Would people who insist on calling it Mt. McKinley be suffering from Denali denial?
February 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word anathema
This word is usually used without any article, so for the Studio 60 quote, I would say, "Quality is not anathema to profit."
February 16, 2009
rolig commented on the list jumbo-shrimp
The converse of the unusual routine would be the routine mishap.
February 16, 2009
rolig commented on the list fireships-and-fizgigs
You might be interested in the use of Paphian by Byron and the Russian romantic poet Yevgeny Baratynsky to refer to prostitutes (see my comments on the word). And I would expect the Biblical harlot to be on this list.
February 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word podstaviti komu nogo
to trip up
February 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word non-linear
No one said you were a crock, Kostya, only that your definition was. But then you went ahead and demonstrated that you were hotheaded, inarticulate, unimaginative, and indeed, probably a crock, too. You're certainly welcome to rebut Sionnach's narrow definition of the word (and a lively and interesting discussion would probably ensue, which is what Wordie is all about), but petty name-calling is just juvenile.
February 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word achthronym
See ethnophaulism.
February 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word ethnophaulism
I wonder if Mencken coined achthronym from "anthronym" + the German sigh of exasperation Ach!
February 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word they
I guess I should say something since it was my comment that started this particular contretemps about tagging. There is certainly nothing wrong with Ms. Bear (or anyone) tagging as many words as she pleases "unremarkable." That in itself is an unremarkable tag (unlike others that have become objects of controversy), and I certainly did not mean to upbraid the tagger. I understand, I think, why she considers they an unremarkable word in the bigger scheme of things, or in a set of lists with such truly remarkable words as those collected by Ms. Bear. But from a different angle, no word is actually unremarkable, the most common words least of all, since they have centuries if not millennia of history behind them and can at times be all the more surprising because we tend to take them for granted. They in particular is a word of complex meaning, as the comments on this page indicate. That was the only point I wanted to make. There was no need to "expose" the tagger, who did nothing wrong.
February 12, 2009
rolig commented on the list englishfolkfans-list
Vanished, you should tell EFF who "we" are. It sounds a little ominous the way you put it: "Misspelt words … get tagged misspelling or typo when we come across them."
February 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word ascension flightless crake
But it is a little mean, isn't it?, to name a flightless bird "Ascension". Sort of like calling the fat kid "Slim" or the kid with Coke™-bottle glasses "Hawkeye".
February 11, 2009
rolig commented on the word ascension flightless crake
Could this be the flightless crake from Ascension Island? Or perhaps it can fly or glide but can't manage an ascension flight (so this shoud really be the "ascension-flight-less crake"). But I'm going with the toponymic interpretation.
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word ethrog
According to Dictionary.com, it's a variant of etrog, which they define as "a citron for use with the lulav during the Sukkoth festival service." Now what's a lulav? (Generally, I find The Free Dictionary to be most helpful and easiest to use.)
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word злорад�?тво
Russian: transliterated zloradstvo, pronounced /zlah-RAHT-stvuh/. A calque on the German sch-word, this might be reasonably translated as "spiteful joy".
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the list my-little-phonies
Whichbe, the post about My Little Pony Built My Hotrod is hilarious. I laughed out loud at the seriously affronted post by moderator Princess Biscuit:
"Your picture of Stalin riding a 3 year limited edition of Starflower inside a German concentration camp was both upsetting and historically inaccurate."
And this, from MLP-lover Pony FAP:
"The first generation of MLPs were made by Hasbro, not the Khmer Rouge. And Hasbro hasn't made toys out of human skulls since the 1960's."
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word oko
sg.: neut. okó gen.: o�?ésa, … z o�?ésom;
pl.: fem. o�?i, o�?í, … z o�?mí
This word, meaning "eye", is neuter in the singular and feminine in the plural!
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word mo�?
mó�? fem., sg. gen.: mo�?í
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word zver
fem., sg. gen.: zverí
beast
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word zvrst
fem., sg. gen. zvrstí
genre, kind, type
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word klop
klóp, fem., sg. gen.: klopí
"bench"
klòp, masc., sg. gen.: klôpa
"tick"
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word windowspotting
This practice also suggests that such forms as *trainsp, *planesp, *bussp and *windowsp are meaningful lexemes.
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word kot gobe po dežju
"like mushrooms after it rains"
in huge numbers, everywhere
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word otrok
otròk
child
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word dež
dèž
rain
February 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word marysville
Oh my god! My condolences, bilby.
February 8, 2009
rolig commented on the list silence-is-golden
Hate to quibble, Sionnach (well, I don't hate quibbling all that much), but the "y" in "aye" is not silent; it's working with the "a" to produce the diphthong we call "long i". One could perhaps make the argument that the "y" in "key" is silent, since one might reasonably pronounce "ke" as "kee" (cf. "me").
As for a silent "v", there is one in the French surname Le Febvre, but I can't think of any common nouns with a silent "v".
February 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word they
In my dictionary (the Oxford American), grey is defined as "British spelling of gray." Maybe you read a lot of books printed in the UK, ReeseTee.
February 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word stoled
Gexe, what you added as a tag is really a comment. Tags are generally used for grouping words, e.g. "French", "misspelling", "technical term". If you want to say something about a word, that should go in the comment box.
February 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word they
The real question here should be, why is this extraordinary word tagged "unremarkable"? Not only is they spelled with an e where one might expect an a, it is a personal plural pronoun that might refer to no one in particular, or everyone (e.g. "well you know what they say"), and even to singular persons of indefinite gender (e.g. "everyone should fill out the form they received in the mail"; "if someone did this on purpose, they should apologize"). And in fact, it may even refer to non-animate things (neuter gender): "She threw out his clothes because they were to painful to look at." Unremarkable, indeed!
February 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word prst
(1) masc.; sg. gen.: pr'sta – Finger or toe.
(2) fem.; sg. gen.: prstí – Soil.
February 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word they
Bilby, you provocateur! Why do you hate freedom? There's no point stirring up old transatlantic conflicts.
February 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word lyfull
I expect that "lyfull" (lyf "life + full) meant "full of life (i.e. the life force)", and therefore "life-giving" ("quickening"), and not "lively", at least not in our modern sense of the word ("vivacious, energetic, spirited").
February 6, 2009
rolig commented on the list faerie-queene
Morgan, you probably want to put the comment on the word page itself. Just click on lyfull.
February 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word spoznavanje
cognition
Related words:
spoznaven: cognitive, cognitional, spoznavni proces – the cognitive process
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the user darqueau
Welcome back!
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word luka
Not only is this word the name of a Slovene cheese and a fairly common male name (I have two friends named Luka), it is also one of the Slovene words for "port" (as in shipping, not the wine).
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word duh
In Slovene (and other Slavic languages – cf. Russian дух), this word, pronounced with a long u (oo) and a voiceless velar fricative at the end (-kh), means "spirit" or "ghost".
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word ms
Surely this means manuscript (plural: mss.)!
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word groupization
What's wrong with grouping?
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word underyester
Notice the name of Bilby's list.
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word hrapav
hrápav
coarse, rough
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word kal
Slovene: (fem. n.) germ; bud
zatreti/zadušiti v kali: to nip in the bud
pognati kalí: to bud
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?ast
dignity, honor
February 5, 2009
rolig commented on the word zdrs
noun slip, slipping
Related words
zdr'sniti, zdr'snem pf.
zdrséti, zdrsím pf.
zdrsávati impf.
zdrsováti, zdrsújem impf.
zdrsen - slippery (i.e. able to cause one to fall): zdrsna cesta
February 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word elephant
Q., is eleph the source of the letter's name aleph (and hence, alpha)? Could the Elephant Man be an Alpha Male, etymologically speaking?
February 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word vas
Slovene: "village" (fem., sg gen: vasí).
February 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word tantalize
The short yet circuitous answer is: because some people are surprised to learn that this is an eponym.
The word comes from the Greek myth about Tantalus, whom the gods punished by tantalizing him for all eternity.
February 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word halitosis
I did not see that coming. Hilarious.
February 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word ladybird
Nor was Taylor, I reckon.
By the way, in the part of the US where I come from, we call this beetle a ladybug. The "lady" in both words is, of course, the one Catholics call "Our Lady" (Notre Dame, for you college football fans).
February 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word ootheca
The sound of the word is rather lovely, I think: o-ah-THEE-kah, like the name of some Achaean princess.
February 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word pamphlet
Not really, ReeseTee. All he/she indicates in the list description is a reluctance to utter these words. There is no reflection on why the lister/tagger finds these words, and pamphlet in particular, ugly and unutterable. Is this the result of some childhood trauma? A bad experience with door-to-door proselytizers? Is it the rare appearance of the sequence -mphl-? Or the sound /-mfl-/? Is it the perhaps unexpected realization that the two p's are pronounced so differently? I have no problem with someone finding this or any other word "ugly" and even tagging it accordingly (and not only "ugly" but also "ugliest"!), but it would be good if they could provide some explanation for such strong antipathy, or at least indicate their own bewilderment over it, such as by saying, "I don't know why, but I just hate this word!" That might precipitate a discussion that could well prove profitable for the tagger him-/herself.
February 4, 2009
rolig commented on the list spring--2
Nate, I think Bilby's question was alluding to the misplaced apostrophe in the title of this list. The plural of "one" is "ones," without the apostrophe. As it is, the present title means "One is to remember," implying that all the other items in the list can be safely forgotten.
February 4, 2009
rolig commented on the word ostalina
remnant, relic
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word samosvoj
unique, idiosyncratic, sui generis, distinctive
syn: svojevrsten, poseben
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the list david-s-books-about-words-and-language
Wow. This is fantastic, Sionnach. I don't know how I missed seeing this before now.
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word vaticide
For the American Wordies, the VAT (value-added tax) is one of the facts of life in Europe. It is similar to the sales tax levied by US states, but I think the econmic mechanism works a bit differently.
(Of course, Ragnvaeig's definition is the more traditional one.)
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word koprena
kopréna
veil
syn: tan�?ica, paj�?olan
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word regrat
régrat
dandelion
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word prestre�?i
"to make s.th. that flows or moves, collect somewhere" (SSKJ) - to catch, capture;
"to make s.th. that moves cease to move" (SSKJ) – to stop, staunch, check;
"to stop s.o. from falling on the ground" (SSKJ) – to catch
"(secretly, surreptitiously) to come to a message that is intended for s.o. else" (SSKJ) – to intercept
"to perceive using a suitable device … to perceive through hearing" (SSKJ) – to detect
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word v riti
vulgar, expressive in the pits; in terrible shape; screwed; in hell
literally: "in the ass"
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word lagniappe
"We picked up one excellent word – a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice, limber, expressive, handy word – 'lagniappe.' They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish – so they said."
– Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi"
(courtesy The Online Etymological Dictionary)
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word casu marzu
Interesting. Thanks, Pro! I am alway fascinated by how languages interact.
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word pamphlet
Why do people find this word "ugly"? I think that if you are going to express such a strong opinion through a tag ("ugliest", "ugly"), you should at least explain why you think it deserves such a label.
This word, by the way, comes into English from the name Pamphilet, an adaptation of the name of a popular love poem, written in Latin, from the 12th century, Pamphilus, seu de Amore ("Pamphilus, or, On Love"), which circulated through Europe as a small booklet, so that eventually any small booklet became known as a pamphlet. The name Pamphilus, a compound of the Greek elements pan- and -phil, means "loved by all". Apparently the word he gave his name to isn't.
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word casu marzu
Pro, are they speaking Sardu or Italian (or a Sardinian dialect of Italian)?
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word na licu mesta
right there; on the spot; without delay.
literally: "on the cheek/face of the place"
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word sauve qui peut
I suppose the English equivalent would be Every man for himself!
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word casu marzu
Fascinating. So basically, they said, "Go on, you sucker, eat it"? Hilarious.
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the user qroqqa
Hi, Qroqqa! I am looking for a way to refer to the hypothetical singular form of a pluralis tantem, e.g. *scissor, *underpant, *hijink. Are these lexemes? I figured that you would be the Wordie to ask about this.
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word zmes
n. fem. mixture, blend, mix
syn: mešanica
February 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word features
Bilby's suggestion is excellent.
Another thing that Wordie novices tend to do is copy and paste dictionary definitions into the comment box. This makes sense only if the word is very obscure or foreign or the specific definition is not to be found in one of the standard online dictionaries. So it might be a good idea to have a line below the dictionary icons saying, "The above icons link to online dictionaries and reference tools, where you might find a definition of this word."
I would like to encourage people to either leave an interesting citation for the word or to in fact comment on the word ("I like this word because…"), and not just quote some dictionary.
February 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word past
Since the past can be a snare that keeps one from moving on in life, it is curious that the Slovene word for "trap, snare" is, indeed, past.
February 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word sionnach
That's beautiful! Laurels to both Bilby and his muse!
February 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word obstret
obstrèt noun, masc., sg. gen.: obstréta
literary brightness, radiance around s.th.: lunin obstret (the halo around the moon); the halo of a saint (syn.: gloriola)
rarely, archaic: fem. obstrèt, sg. gen.: obstréti
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word vez
fem. noun, sg. gen.: vezí
tie, connection; (ski) binding, ling. copula
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word sol
In Slovene: "salt" (fem., sg. gen.: solí)
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the user mcritz
Mcritz, I apologize if it sounded like I was getting on your case about the word (b)icicle, and I somehow completely missed your pronunciation guide to the word. The technique of inserting elements in parenthethes as a way of making a pun happens to be something that just gets on my nerves: overused in literary theory by American deconstructionists since at least the 1980s, this is a typographical conceit that usually cannot be aurally conveyed. If I heard your suggested pronunciation for "(b)icicle", I might easily assume it was spelled "b'icicle" or "ba'icicle"; there would be no reason for me to think of parentheses. The pun works visually, but not aurally. I have the feeling that ever since schoolchildren stopped learning how to recite poetry and other texts, the art of reading with the ears, and not only the eyes, has been dying out.
Thanks for responding to my curmudgeonly comment.
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word martian
I agree, Rt. The caption on the picture Sionnach linked to says this crater is still unnamed. I find that amazing, too. Obviously it's Happy Face Crater!
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the list slo-fem-nouns-with-sg-nom-ending-ø-gen-í
I hope so too, Pro. You have no idea how complicated the issue of word-stress is in Slovene, especially with this class of feminine nouns (stress caused by stress!). So this list actually helps me a lot.
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word obrv
eyebrow
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word nadlaket
upperarm
like podlaket and laket, can decline either as masc. or fem. noun; a variant is nadlahet (fem.).
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word podlaket
podláket
forearm
declines as either masc. (sg gen podlákta) or fem. (sg gen podlaktí); see laket. A variant is podlahet (fem.)
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word laket
láket
forearm (the same as podlaket.
may be declined either as masc. (sg gen lákta; pl nom lákti, pl gen láktov) or fem. (sg gen laktí; pl nom/acc laktí). Only the masc. noun, however, can refer to a former unit of measure (about 77 cm or 30 1/3 in), and, as an archaism, the elbow (mod. Slovene: komolec).
A variant of this is lahet (fem.).
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word lahet
fem. láhet, more commonly laket
forearm
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word tesen
noun: fem. gorge, narrow passage
February 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word žmoht
This is the word used in the Slovene subtitles to Austin Powers to translate mojo. An informal colloquial word, it may come from the German word schmachten "to yearn for, pine after".
January 31, 2009
rolig commented on the word generation z
For me, if you are going to name generations, it makes most sense to name them either by the major international events or important sociological phenomena that shaped their character (e.g. the WWII Generation, the Television Generation, the Internet Generation) or by the decade in which they came of age and made their mark (e.g. the Sixties Generation, the Millennial Generation).
January 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word floaty
A nice word used in an apt figurative way by Reesetee in a comment on Generation X.
January 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word generation x
floaty, indeed! Nice word, Rt.
This term, by the way, was popularized by Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), though the term actually goes back to a 1964 British sociological study of teenagers (in the mid-1960s, so this was the first wave of the Baby Boom generation), written by Jane Deverson and Charles Hemblett and also called Generation X, I'm guessing because the post-WWII generation seemed like such a mystery to their elders.
These terms - Generation X, and Generation Y (Why?), and now Generation Z – seem so contrived to me, quite patronizing (they are all essentially marketing labels), and, needless to say, so unimaginative that I feel sorry for the people who assume these terms for themselves.
January 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word grimald
Since no one is listing it, this could simply be a "ghost". Perhaps, someone intended to write Grimaldi (the name of the princely family of Monaco) and hit the return too soon, then deleted the word from their list.
January 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word oświęcim
Yep.
January 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word karlovy vary
A popular celebrity tourist destination in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this Czech spa resort lent its name (in the better-known German version) to a couple of cities and some famous caverns in the Southwest United States: Carlsbad.
January 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word oświęcim
I should have added this a couple of days ago, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, which marks the liberation of the infamous Nazi concentration camp in this town, which is best known as Auschwitz.
January 30, 2009
rolig commented on the word citiboobs
Wait, "commode" in what sense? That was the euphemism my mother (a polite and gracious lady from Danville, Va.) would use for the toilet basin. The Citiboobs bought an antique, $35,000 toilet? On legs?
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the user mechanolatry
Hi, Mechano, welcome to Wordie! I just want to point out a couple of things about the site.
First, there is a row of icons under each word which will take you to a definition of that word from several online dictionaries, so for ordinary words found in most dictionaries (e.g. voluptuary), you really don't need to provide a dictionary definition in your comment – unless of course, there is something special about your definition. It will probably be more helpful, to you and everyone else using the site, to provide a quotation showing the word being used, or perhaps your own personal thoughts (reactions, questions) about the word.
The second thing (which I almost forgot) is that you may want to skim through the other comments on a word page before adding your own; you might find them interesting, or not, and have something new to add, and you will avoid repeating what has already been said.
Feel free to ask my or anyone else for tips about using Wordie. And have fun!
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word zalotiti
to catch s.o. in the act of doing s.th. not allowed; more generally, to catch s.o. doing something
zalotiti se to suddenly realize s.th. (to catch oneself doing s.th.)
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word (b)icicle
But how do you pronounce this, McRitz? "He discovered … his open-parentheses-bee-close-parentheses icicle in a snow bank"? "… his bee-icicle …"? Doesn't really work for me. Words should have sounds, and not only symbols (cymbals).
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word quick male coupling
ah yes I remember it well.
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word citiboobs
I love it! I have been piqued with them for years for their pseudo-clever misspelling of city.
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the user Prolagus
I am truly honored, but since I speak Slovene with a distinct American accent, I am probably not the right person to memorialize the pronunciation of these words in the public squares of Forvoland.
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word prhutati
to flutter (wings); to be flapping (e.g. of a flag); to gust about (of a storm); fig. to be present (in a fluttering way) in the mind
// prhútniti; prhútnem: to flutter (once); to fly off, arrive with a flutter.
Related words:
prhút: flutter (noun)
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the user Prolagus
Re: the comment on my slovenš�?ina list: Are you inviting me to enter the mystical land of Forvo, Pro?
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word predo�?ati
to make visible (lit. place "in front of the eyes" – pred o�?i), hence, to show, demonstrate, present, represent, etc. //predó�?iti; predó�?im (si)
syn: prikazovati, predstavljati
January 29, 2009
rolig commented on the word reve
Rt, no one said anything about removing g's!
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word štacuna
a store, shop; formal: trgovina
Expression:
Če je tako, pa lahko kar zapremo štacuno (prenehamo delati, delovati)
Related words:
štacunar, -ka: shopkeeper
štacunarski
štacunarstvo
štacunski
štacunica
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word šajtrga
wheelbarrow, which is also called karjola; formal Slovene: samokolnica.
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word samokolnica
the formal word for "wheelbarrow"; more commonly, karjola or šajtrga.
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word karjola
wheelbarrow (from It. carriola), also šajtrga; formal Slovene: samokolnica
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the list verbophilia
Mechanolatry, you probably meant to put your comment on the word kernkompetenz (just click on the word itself and you'll see how to do it) and not on the list.
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word horehound
The horehound drops (which were not drops, but lozenges) my grandmother gave me were delicious!
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word cough
Horehound! My grandmother always would give me horehound lozenges whenever I got a sore throat as a child. Can you get such things today anywhere?
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word acnestis
Not necessarily, C_b.
I looked this up in the Century Dictionary Online (thanks again, Sionnach) and was a little surprised to find that this word really does refer simply to a place on the back that is unscratchable (which is exactly what the Greek origin of the word means); it's not a rash or some other skin condition (as one might think from its first four letters). I just refers to a place on the body, which may in fact be completely itch-free.
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word snpj
What's curious about this name is that jednota is not actually a Slovene word; it's Serbo-Croatian. The Slovene cognate is enota, and both mean "entity" or "unit", derived from jedna (S-C) / ena (Slo.), "one" (the number). The Slovene society's name translates as "Slovene National Support Unit" (not as nice-sounding in English as "Benefit Society").
Thanks for this, Reesetee! I didn't know about it at all.
January 28, 2009
rolig commented on the word acnestis
A word that should be revived.
January 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word waffle
The meaning of waffle as a verb that I am most familiar with is "to waver, keep changing one's mind," which sort of fits Weirdnet's definition. The verb waffle has become part of the US political jargon; candidates are fond of accusing their opponents of "waffling" on certain issues – which often refers to their opponent taking a more nuanced position on a complex and controversial subject rather than simply making an absolute ideological pronouncement. Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential campaign was regularly accused of waffling on the issues, which led to Gary Trudeau using a floating, wobbly waffle (with various amounts of butter on it) as his cartoon icon for Bill Clinton in the Doonesbury comic strip.
Bilby, I'm not familiar with the phrase "to waffle on" in the sense of "to be verbose". Is this the same as saying "to ramble on" – to talk on and on without making a lot of sense?
January 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word buttercup
Sionnach, what a lovely story about your mother ! Thank you for sharing it.
January 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word mabble
Sionnach, thanks for the link to the Century Dictionary! It's fascinating.
January 27, 2009
rolig commented on the word vanilla
Bilby, I love your vanilla memory (in your comment on teleiophile)! Of course, vanilla is delightful and aromatic. Unfortunately perhaps, in America the word "vanilla" has gained the connotation "plain, simple" and even "boring", thanks largely, I suppose, to the efforts of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream company, who from the 1970s on, with their much-taunted "31 flavors" (they have many more now), sought to convince the American public that there was more to frosty creamy goodness than vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, the holy trinity of American ice cream parlors since at least the 1930s. Vanilla, being white and all, consequently got the rep of being plain, unadventurous, WASPy, middle-class, grandmotherly, infantile, etc. The concept was then transferred to sexual taste, especially perhaps in the gay community, so someone who was unwilling to be bound and gagged, wear a leather harness, have hot wax dripped on his nipples, assume various specific roles and dress in the appropriate garb, etc., was said to be "vanilla" or into "vanilla sex".
Curious, though, that the word shares an etymology with vagina.
January 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word schav
You are right. According Dahl, щавель (shchavel') is Rumex acetosa - common sorel. The Slovene definition I looked up just described the plant as a "low, wild, densely growing vegetation of little value", which I took to mean "weeds". But when I now checked a Slovene-English dictionary, š�?avje is translated as "sorrel, dock". I must say, I am not familiar with that sense of "dock".
January 26, 2009
rolig commented on the word schav
Curious. Do you know the origin of this word? In Slovene, š�?avje (pronounced "shchau-ye") refers to weeds or other low-growing dense wild growth, so I'm wondering if this word (and perhaps the soup) is of Slavic origin.
January 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word body man
"Body-Man Reggie Love"? That sounds too good to be true!
January 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word teleiophile
Thanks, VO and John!
Bilby, the word vanilla has a long history (in the gay community at least) of describing "plain" (i.e. non-kinky) sex. If your point was that vanilla sex can often be wonderful and so should not be disparaged, I agree.
January 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word teleiophile
Does the NYT say anything about the origins of the this word? What does the element teleio- mean, for example?
January 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word pellucid
Oh, I wear several hats.
January 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word cromudgeon
A curmudgeon who seems not to have progressed past the early stages of humanoid evolution.
January 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word cuckoldry
But only if the horns are on the other head.
January 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word 4.44
Only one hundredth of a Beast.
January 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word antimetabole
a.k.a. the reversible raincoat.
January 25, 2009
rolig commented on the word oftenist
Thanks, Sionnach!
January 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word oftenist
Yes, but unfortunately, that source does not reference the Douglass quote. I may be wrong, but it seems strange that Douglass would misspell the word this way. If anything, educated former slaves, especially when they were public figures, tended to be overcareful about things like spelling and grammar. The last thing they wanted was to appear illiterate. The word is, of course, properly spelled "oftenest".
January 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word oftenist
Did he really spell it in this illiterate way?
January 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word pellucid
I do have a hat that says "COPY EDITOR", yes.
January 24, 2009
rolig commented on the word pellucid
Thanks, Rt! It's been a busy week. I owe you one.
January 24, 2009
rolig commented on the list etymological-curiosities
In the grocery store today, I thought of this list when I saw the squash, and nearby the staff was cleaning up a tomato that had gotten squashed on the floor. As I stood in line for the till, I realized that I hadn't given much thought to such covergences till recently. Thanks, Sarra!
Another one is the tetrasemantic dock: 1. pier, 2. deduct, 3. enclosure for the accused in court, 4. a kind of weed.
January 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word bilbo
The Am. Heritage Dict. via Dictionary.com provides two interesting, and quite contrastive, definitions for this word:
"An iron bar to which sliding fetters are attached, formerly used to shackle the feet of prisoners."
and
"A sword, especially one having a well-tempered blade."
January 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word scroggling
Where does this come from?
January 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word pellucid
Wasn't Pella the capital of Philip of Macedon and his son Alex?
*too lazy to look it up*
January 23, 2009
rolig commented on the list hymnie-lift-every-voice-and-sing
Thanks for noticing, Rt! I had thought that maybe some chorus would perform this song at the Inauguration. Then when the Rev. Lowery opened his prayer as he did, I found it so moving, that I had to share it with Wordie.
January 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word let's
Really interesting analysis. Thanks, Qroqqa!
January 23, 2009
rolig commented on the list words-i-can-use-that-wont-confuse
Perhaps you should list wont?
January 23, 2009
rolig commented on the word kurzweiliana
OK, Scion, I've read all the quotes and was duly amused/disturbed at the notion of such AI developments, but I still have no idea what is meant by kurzweiliana. I know the German word kurzweilig ("entertaining") and I know the great composer Kurt Weil (and was sort of hoping this page referred to Kurt-Weiliana), but I am clearly missing something here. Please enlighten.
January 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word entrez
Even when referring to the imperative, Artoparts was not wrong in what he/she wrote. It is still the 2nd person plural (or formal) form. The imperative mood also has person as a category, including 1st and 3rd persons (though these are usually expressed in English with the verb "let"): "Let's go!" "Let them rejoice!"
January 22, 2009
rolig commented on the word lift every voice and sing
The name of a hymn written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson, which is often referred to as the Negro National Anthem.
January 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word negro national anthem
The song "Lift Every Voice and Sing," written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson. See my list Hymnie: Lift Every Voice and Sing.
January 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word god of our weary years
The first line of the third verse of "Lift Every Voice and Sing", commonly known as the Negro National Anthem. This verse was use by the Rev. Joseph Lowery in his benediction at the Inauguration of President Barack Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.
January 21, 2009
rolig commented on the word hapa
legomenon? You know, of course, that neither of Obama's parents was Hawaiian, either ethnically or residentially. His mother was born and grew up in Kansas. His grandparents later moved to Hawaii, which is where he was raised while his mother remained in Indonesia. Neither of his parents, by the way, were mixed-race.
January 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word stirious
I understand now. I didn't realize "stirious" was an established (if obsolete) word meaning icicly.
January 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word asin
There was a cheese I used to buy in Toronto that was called simply Friulano. But when I asked for it recently at a well-stocked cheese counter in Ljubljana (and Slovenia is right next-door to Friuli so I was hopeful), they didn't seem to know what it was. Perhaps I should have asked for asin?
January 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word gubbeen
I know next to nothing about cheesemaking. Are other animal byproducts (e.g. fats other than milk fats) besides milk usually involved in making cheese?
January 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word stirious
Aren't you thinking of the word mysterious? With an "e"? Also, in the words mysterious, mystery, mystic, etc. my- is part of the root (-myst-), not a prefix.
January 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word gubbeen
What do you mean by "vegetarian" here? If you understand "vegetarian" loosely (meaning without meat), then all cheeses are vegetarian, but if you understand the word to exclude all animal byproducts, then this cheese would not be made from milk. Is it made from vegetable fats? *Puzzled.*
January 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word asin
Does this mean "donkey" cheese (cf. asinine)?
January 20, 2009
rolig commented on the list liminal-words
Very nice concept for a list! Would interstice and interstitial fit here?
January 20, 2009
rolig commented on the list versutes-list
Versute, you probably meant to add this comment to the word pandiculation, not to the list itself.
January 20, 2009
rolig commented on the word tutorial
Would a Wordie "Tutorial" page be a good idea to supplement the faq page? Some people seem to be finding it hard to figure out Wordie, probably because it is so unexpectedly simple. A few pointers might be in order. I seem to recall that when I started on Wordie, there was such a page, wasn't there?
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word shovel-ready
LOL, exactly.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word mojo
I got to it through the ma.gnolia.com link she gives below.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word razkropiti
to scatter (trans.), cause to flee in all directions
~ se: to scatter (intrans.), to flee in all directions
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word vreš�?ati
to squawk, to squeal
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word mojo
If you check out Aviva's FB link, you'll see she's a woman (though you can never say for sure with virtuality).
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word shovel-ready
A turnkey is an old word for jailer/gaoler! But what about plug-and-play, as in "plug-and-play nuclear power plants".
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word huckleberry
Now there's a book that for some sad reason I have never gotten around to reading. I probably watch too much TV.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word tetrahedron
I wonder if Classifiedinformation is thinking of the special energy some new-age mysticists associate with pyramids.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word nox
I prefer the poetic meaning of the word.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word shovel-ready
I give this word maybe six months at most. Then it will itself be shovel-ready in Skipvia's sense of the word.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word huckleberry
I don't believe I've read I.J. Reilly, but Huckleberry Finn is delightful. I strongly recommend reading it.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word huck finn
See also huckleberry, for a musical use of this byword.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word huckleberry
The song is about being "drifters off to see the world." In Mark Twain's novel, Huckleberry and Jim run away from home and travel down the Mississippi on a raft, and a number of entertaining adventures ensue. So in the song, "huckleberry" means "free-spirited, adventurous, open to new things, exploring the world".
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word huckleberry
In "Moon River", it's a reference to Huckleberry Finn.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the list literarie-lanark
This is a book I'm curious about. Are you enjoying it, bilby?
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word krvnik
literary executioner, syn: rabelj.
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word kle�?
"a large boulder" - esp. the kind near the shore that might cause a shipwreck.
I encounter this word mainly in the phrase, "tu je kle�?" – "here's the boulder", meaning something like "here's the rub".
January 19, 2009
rolig commented on the word realia
This is also a useful term in writing about literature to refer to phenomena that enter a fictional or poetic text but derive from the common everyday life of the intended readership, for example, references to nailclippers or McDonald's. I first encountered it in Russian, as реали�? (realiya), when I was studying Russian literature, so I am not certain it is widely used in English-language literary criticism. But it ought to be.
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word teacherpreneur
ugh. I hate such seemingly clever yet totally tonedeaf shorthand coinages. To my ear, this means "teacher-taker", since the French element -preneur comes from prendre, "to take". Also, it betokens a certain lethargy or, conversely, affected hurriedness (and hence affected importance), as if saying, "I'm too l lazy or too busy to say/write the whole word 'entrepreneur', so I'll just say '-preneur' and hope you dunderheads get my meaning."
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word shack
To live with someone as a couple without the sanction of marriage is "to shack up" with that person. That at least is the first use of the verb "to shack" that comes to mind. The Weirdnet definitions are weird to me also.
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word as if
Telofy, in colloquial American speech the subjunctive mood is slowly dying out in such constructions. In the sentence, "Every night I start talking as if I knew things", knew is the subjunctive form of the verb. It may look like the past tense, but there is nothing past about it here; it's clearly referring to the ongoing, recurring present. One could even use it in the future: "In three years, Colbert will still be talking as if he knew things." For the verb "to be", the subjunctive form is "were", for all persons: "Every night I start talking as if I were knowledgeable"; "Every night Colbert starts talking as if he were knowledgeable." For earlier generations, these were the only permissible forms in such constructions. But in America, at least since the 1960s (and some more knowledgeable Wordie linguist like qroqqa or sarra could probably give you more exact information), the subjunctive has been deteriorating in colloquial speech (and more and more in formal writing too), so that today you are probaly more likely to hear and read "as if I know things; as if I am knowledgeable". But the meaning is the same.
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the user avivamagnolia
Hi, Avivamagnolia! Welcome to Wordie.
I'm impressed already by your energy and enthusiasm at adding words. I don't know if you realize it, however, but a few people have been offering you suggestions, for example, on the word meshugana. Basically, they are pointing out (and I agree) that you really don't have to copy and paste (or retype) dictionary definitions in the comment box, since there is already a row of icon-links to various English dictionaries right beneath the word itself. Also, next to the word, there is a feed from Wordnet providing definitions, though these, alas, are sometimes strangely written (hence many of us call this Weirdnet). Of course, if your word is very strange and unlikely to be found in one of these dictionaries, then a definition is most welcome, though speaking for myself, I usually prefer personal comments or observations about words, or paraphrases of dictionary definitions. But everyone discovers over time what works best for her or him with Wordie.
Also I am wondering why you put so many of your definition-comments in bold? It's a bit annoying (both on the home page where the comments appear to everyone and on the word page), so I am wondering if you have a good reason for it.
A lot of people when they first come to Wordie have questions, so feel free to ask me or anyone of the other more active Wordies. Also, you can find answers and discussions about some Wordie issues at the word faq.
Please continue having fun with Wordie! By the way, you've got a wonderful name!
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word žlahten
noble, fine, select, special
žlahtni plini = "noble gases"
This word is accepted as formal "proper" Slovene, but the word it comes from, žlahta "kinfolk", is considered "colloquial".
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word žlahta
family, relatives, kinfolk (16th c. slahte < OHG slahta, "generation, tribe")
This word's adjectival derivative, žlahten "noble, select", has made it into "proper" formal Slovene.
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the list film-and-cinematography
Would contre-jour fit here?
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word kolibri
Is colibrí "hummingbird" in Spanish?
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word psychomachy
Also can mean a conflict within the soul, or a battle over the soul.
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word protisvetloba
A calque based on contre-jour; backlighting.
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word contre-jour
In photography: adj. & adv. with the sun or other light source behind the subject (French, meaning "against the daylight"); in English we would call this backlighting.
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word hummingbird
In Slovene and many other languages, this bird is called kolibri (or something similar).
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word kolibri
"hummingbird" (in Slovene and other languages), from a now extinct Caribbean language. It came into Slovene via German and French. Marko Snoj, in The Slovene Etymological Dictionary (2003), writes: "borrowed from a Caribbean language, perhaps from the language of the inhabitants of the island Cayenne, in which colib(a)ri means 'shiny surface'. If the supposition is correct, then the hummingbird is named for the shiny color of its plumage."
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word jantar mantar
See yantra mandir.
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word yantra mandir
"The Yantra Mandir (commonly known as the Jantar Mantar) is an equinoctial dial, consisting a gigantic triangular gnomon with the hypotenuse parallel to the Earth's axis. On either side of the gnomon is a quadrant of a circle, parallel to the plane of the equator. The instrument is intended to measure the time of day, correct to half a second,citation needed and declination of the Sun and the other heavenly bodies."
– from the Wikipedia article (17 Jan 2007)
There were five such "dials" built by the Maharaja Jai Singh II of Jaipur in the 1720s and 1730s. The most famous ones are in Jaipur and Delhi. The word means "calculation instrument" (also from Wikipedia).
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word contrapasso
You know, I misread the original comment and, misled by Bilby's interpretation of the word, really did think this meant "walking backwards" and couldn't understand the "suffering" part of it. But now I see it describes what in English we might call comeuppance or just deserts.
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word thought showers
Well, at least it's heartening to see that representatives of epileptics and others with mental illnesses think that this is being overly sensitive. Isn't bending over backwards to avoid offending particular groups in itself offensive? I mean, it seems to imply that such groups have an extremely thin skin (I hope putting it that way isn't offensive to the PDD community – People with Dermatological Disorders). I can understand going out of your way not to offend the MPWA community (Murderous Psychopaths With Axes), but otherwise, a little reason is called for (by saying that I don't mean to offend the PIRW community - People Incapable of Reasoning With).
January 18, 2009
rolig commented on the word mutuum
Really, S.? I relate it to mutual, a rather nice word, which I suspect it is related to, though I'm not sure how it's used – sounds like a word French social philosophers (Badiou? Bourdieu?) might use.
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word p implies q
LOL!
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word prickmadam
What a name! Any idea how it got this name?
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word googol
What was deliberate, Marco?
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word features
A second suggestion about lists – one that perhaps someone has already brought up: Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow group lists together (at least our own lists), or put our lists in folders (e.g. "vocab-building", "history", "reading", "fun stuff", "Wordie-specific")?
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word not
I appreciate your point, Ptero, and I think there are a lot of cases where "to not X" may mean something different from "not to X". In the example of not eating dinner, the two meanings are entirely different ("avoiding dinner" v. "having improper table manners"), but usually a much more subtle is involved: (1) "I told you not to say that!" is different from (2) "I told you to not say that!", where we can imagine that the speaker's original instructions in (1) were simply "do not say this but rather this" and in (2) were more specifically disuasive: "I know you want to say this (or usually would say this, or are expected to say this), but in this case you must not say this." I think this is the same kind of difference as with "I told you not to come" and "I told you to not come" – essentially, this is a difference in the degree of forcefulness of the negative command.
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word contrapasso
The same way? You mean to describe somebody whose walking backward, weeping, with their face turned in the direction they're walking. Does this happen a lot in Italy?
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word anamorphic
Very interesting, and thanks, Sumit, for supplying the gallery. One of my favorite public sculptures in Ljubljana is the monument to the Slovene novelist and playwright Ivan Cankar, which stands in front of the Cankar Cultural Center. Designed by the sculptor Slavko Tihec, it is in the shape of a cube. On the front and the back, if you look at it directly, you see what looks like wavy vertical grooves, but if you look at it slightly from an angle, you see the writer's face. I have always thought this was a brilliant way to present in bronze the idea of reading: you don't always get the meaning until you find the right angle from which to approach it.
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word contrapasso
Prolagus, how is it used in Modern Italian?
Aviva, the image from the Inferno is remarkable.
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the list etymological-curiosities
Here's another great word for your wonderful list, the etymological triplet smelt (smelled; meld metals; little fish). Also, bale (bundle; menacing evil).
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word smelt
There's something fishy about this word.
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word windlestraw
A lovely word! Let's revive it!
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word thought showers
You're joking, aren't you?
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word rectalgia
Now this could be a useful word: "This is giving me a serious attack of rectalgia." Or perhaps especially in its adjectival form, rectalgic: "my rectalgic boss/client/employee/coworker".
January 17, 2009
rolig commented on the word pramen
tuft, lock, strands (e.g. of hair), esp. which can be woven into a braid; also (fig.) ribbons, strips, bands
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word disbelieve
Recently, I have been seeing this word used to mean "to not be of the opinion": "I disbelieve that the Obama stimulus package will succeed." This usage seems strange to me and, as I said, fairly recent. Normally, I would say, "I do not believe" or "I disagree that". I am used to the sense, "doubt the veracity" of someone or something: "She disbelieved his protestations of love." But even that sounds strange to my ear (compared with "She did not believe ..."). To use "disbelieve" with a "that" subordinate clause seems really unusual to me. Have I been too long outside English-speaking lands?
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word bale
Along with the common meaning indicated by Wordnet ("a bale of hay"), this word has an interesting etymological distinct archaic meaning, "destructive evil", which gives us the word baleful, "menacing; having a harmful effect".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word зимник
zimnik - December - "the winter month".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?тудень
studen' - December - the "freezing month".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word братчины
bratchiny - November - brat means "brother", but I'm not sure that is the root here. I'll need to do some research.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word грудень
gruden' - November - "clumping month" (think of snow and ice). In traditional Slovene, gruden is the name for December.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word зазимник
zazimnik - October - This means "the month before winter".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word ли�?топад
listopad - October - "leaf-fall month". In more southerly Slavic countries (e.g. Slovenia), listopad is the name for November.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word вере�?ень
veresen' - September - I am not sure what this means. I'll have to do some research.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word ревун
revun - September - the "roaring month".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word о�?енины
oseniny - September - This simply means "belonging to the autumn".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word летопроводец
letoprovodets - September - This name literally means "the one that escorts out the summer". Isn't that nice?
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?ерпень
serpen' - August - from serp, "sickle", so this is sickle month (compare veliki srpan).
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word зарев
zarev - August - from zarevo "radiance at dawn or sunset", so this is "radiant month".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word липец
lipets - July - lipa means "linden tree", so this is "linden month".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?традник
stradnik - July - stradat' means "to suffer", so perhaps this means "suffering month" (from the heat, maybe?).
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?енозорник
senozornik - July - the first part of this name, seno-, means "hay", and -zor- means something like "the radiance of the sky at dawn or sunset", so we might say this is "hay-dawn month".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word грозник
groznik - July - from the word "groza" (thunderstorm), hence, "storm month".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word червень
cherven' - June - This word comes from the Slavic word cherv', "worm", which evolved to mean also "red" in some dialects (chervonnyy, chervlennyy), so I would guess that this means "red month" and not "worm month" (though that is possible too).
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word изюк
izyuk - June - I'm not sure where this comes from.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word травень
traven' - May - "grass month" (compare veliki traven).
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word березозол
berezozol - April - the first part of this word, berezo- means "birch tree", and -zol means "evil" in modern Russian, but I am not sure that is what it means here. I need to do more research.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word цветень
tsveten' - April - means "flower month" (compare rožnik).
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?ухой
sukhoy - March - means "dry month" (compare sušec).
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?ви�?тун
svistun - March - means "whistling month".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?нежень
snezhen' - February - means "snowy month".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word �?ечень
sechen' - February - means "chopping month" (compare sve�?an).
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word бокогрей
bokogrey - February - means something like "warm your side".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word лютый
lyutyy - February - means "furious".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word про�?инец
prosinets - January (for an explanation see prosinec).
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word spangle
Yep, now it works! Bearutiful! As far as the technical questions about https, etc., I'm hardly the right person to ask.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word misunderestimate
Technically, the US president is not "our commander in chief" unless "we" are members of the US Armed Forces. The president is the servant and employee, not the commander, of U.S. citizens, which is a concept Bush never really understood.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word spangle
The problem could be my system, C_b. Your second handbag link ("here's") worked, and it had a little arrow, but the other one ("here it is again"), sans arrow, just took me to the same gibberish.
But the handbag I could see is a beauty, with all the colors of the Bearish rainbow!
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word quaker
I went to a Quaker school and for a number of years attended a Quaker meeting (i.e. what Quakers call church), and I never met a Friend who was offended by the word. They even use it regularly themselves, though Friend is the preferred term. Still, I have heard Friends speak of "Quakerly" behavior or "Quakerly" ways of doing things. The organization's website, www.quaker.org is here, and they use the word throughout. Also Quaker blogs are to found at Planet Quaker. So I think you can use "Quaker" safely, but somewhere in the text it should be made clear, as reesetee says, that this term refers to a member of the Religious Society of Friends".
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word spangle
I did, C_b, and what I get is:
ÿØÿà JFIF yy ÿá=-Exif II* þ ! 6 > ( 2 F i‡ b ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ Z ¤ & ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
¤ ¤ ð EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY KODAK DX4530 ZOOM DIGITAL CAMERA 8/ 8/ 2007:10:19 01:01:54 š‚ ˆ �?‚ �? "ˆ ƒ�? �? 0220�? ˜ �? ¬ ‘ ’
À ’ È ’
�? ’ Ø ’ Š–’ Œ˜ ’ �?—
’ à †’ šŒ› 0100 kr € C ¢ è ¢ °ª £ ¸¬«£ ¹® $"" @`ff 2007:10:18 19:28:26 2007:10:18 19:28:26 ( @ € J R ( Z Ë9 H H ÿØÿÛ „
"These" doesn't have an arrow next to it like links to other webpages usually do. Surely that means something.
*pouts*
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word garret
Perhaps it was a place originally intended for keeping poultry?
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word spangle
Ms. Bear, did you intend to link a picture of your handbags to your last comment? I, for one, would love to see your spangled handbags.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word garret
Well, I overstated the problem of course. It could be a New Dawn, too, since now it's so easy to access reliable reference tools, if you know which ones they are. But a lot of people still don't think to look words up in dictionaries even, and user-created databases, while endlessly useful and often very amusing, do not really attempt (with a few exceptions like the Wikipedia folks) to provide reliable information. They operate on the theory that people will correct each other. Which is fair enough. But still it means that there is a ton of incorrect, misleading, self-serving, facetious and specious information out there online. Words like "authoritative" (and indeed even "author") seem to be falling into disrepute. But it's not all so bad, and I'm probably being too pessimistic. Things do tend to right themselves (and write themselves). So calm down, my friend.
*offers reesetee a cup of comforting camomile tea*
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word garret
I know, Rt. It's so sad. English took hundreds of years to come up with a more or less standardized spelling and grammar, and in a generation all that work is becoming unraveled. More and more, I think the Internet age risks becoming the New Dark Ages.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word troglodyke
With verbal jests of this sort, context is everything. I can easily imagine some dear friends of mine, who are lesbians, good-naturedly calling another lesbian friend a "troglodyke" because she chooses not to have an active social life. Personally, I don't think there is anything inherantly offensive in the word or even in the jocular definition Hernesheir has provided. But like many things online, the context is so nebulous that interpretation can become quite difficult. Here, as in countless other things, the virtual world falls far short of the real one. We wouldn't have these problems, probably, if we were all just yakking in some real-life café.
January 16, 2009
rolig commented on the word garret
Well, a lot of people have trouble spelling. And most of them don't use good copy-editors.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word features
I don't mean ordering lists according to when I made the list (which I know I can do now), but ordering lists according to when I last added a word to the list (i.e. more active or less active lists). I don't think we can do this - yet - can we? But I have unlimited faith in John's programming powers/prowess.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word garret
Prolagus, "a hundred-grand garret" would be a loft apartment that cost 100,000 dollars (or pounds?) to buy. I'm not sure what the song wants to imply. Usually the word "garret" is associated with poor artists or writers living in a cheap rented attic space that has been converted into a makeshift apartment. Garrets can be nice, though. I lived in one for six years in Toronto.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the list traditional-slovene-names-of-months
The two traven months, too, when you consider that trava means "grass" and as slang has the same meaning as the English word.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word sušec
The old Slovene name for March. The word most likely comes from sušiti, "to dry", hence this means "Dryingmonth".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word gruden
Old Slovene name for December. Literally, this means "clumpy".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word listopad
Old Slovene name for November. Literally, this means "leaf-fall".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word vinotok
Old Slovene name for October. Literally, this means "wine-pouring".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word kimavec
Old Slovene name for September. Literally, this means "nodder".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word veliki srpan
Old Slovene name for August. The word "srpan" comes from srp, "sickle", hence this means "Great Sicklemonth".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word mali srpan
Old Slovene name for July. The word "srpan" comes from srp, "sickle", hence this means "Little Sicklemonth".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word rožnik
Also, the name of a hill in the middle of Ljubljana.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word rožnik
Old Slovene name for June. Also rožni cvet and rženi cvet. The root "rož-" means "flower"; hence this is "Flowermonth".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word veliki traven
Old Slovene name for May. The word "travan" comes from trava, "grass", hence this means "Great Grassmonth".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word mali traven
Old Slovene name for April. The word "traven" comes from trava, "grass", hence this means "Little Grassmonth".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word sve�?an
Old Slovene name for February. In the 15th century, February was called se�?an, which may come from an IE root meaning "dry" or from the Slavic root sek-, meaning "chop" (Choppingmonth). The -v- probably was added under the influence of the religious holiday sve�?nica, "Candlemas", on February 2.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word prosinec
Old Slovene name for January. The word most likely comes from Old Slavic prosinǫti, "to shine through", perhaps because in this month the sun begins to shine through the clouds more strongly. Hence, this means "Shinethroughmonth".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word doline
The western part of Slovenia is, literally, pitted with caves, sinkholes and disappearing rivers, and it was here, in this region called Kras in Slovene (Karst in German and Carso in Italian), that this particular limestone geology was first systematically investigated. The name of the region, however, is ancient and predates the arrival of the Slavs in the 6th century CE.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word oleaginous makeweight
Nice observation, Hernesheir!
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word ponor
Another borrowing from either Slovene or Serbo-Croatian.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word doline
O boy! another Slavonicism! This word, like karst, actually comes from from Slovene, in which dolina normally means "valley".
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word features
Here's an idea: What about being able to order (at least) our own lists according to how recently we added words to them (i.e. according to degree of activeness). This would make it easier when we return periodically to work on older lists, which now end up buried a few screens down.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word fehtat
to bum, borrow (without having to give back)
fehtat �?ik - to bum a cigarette
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word anton chekh
Author of such works for the stage as Uncle Van and One Sister (who was always dreaming of going to the medium-sized town of Mosc), as well as The Cher Orchard, a sci-fi play about a mad gay scientist who makes a gaggle of replicants based on the object of his obsession. Unfortunately, Anton never made it big, perhaps because it's hard take seriously someone whose last name sounds like you're clearing your throat.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word italo calvi
Clever!
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word spangle
I always suspected you were a spangler, C-b.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word bu�?en
loud, clamorous, vociferous
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word only
I agree with you, C_b; that's something I deal with a lot as a copy-editor. But of course, when "only" begins a clause, it can also mean "were it not for the fact that":
She would have turned around and walked out there and then, only he told her he loved her.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word ost
sharpened point, barb (also fig.)
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word skrhati
to blunt, dull, fig. weaken
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the list alternative-names-for-new-yorkers
or maybe less facetiously, Empirites.
Also, I see that New York Staters gets a few Googlits.
Finally, if NYC means New York City, then would NYS be New York State. If so, we perhaps could say Nyssers.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the word zdržema
without interruption; continually; from the root -drž ("hold"), perhaps tenaciously.
January 15, 2009
rolig commented on the list alternative-names-for-new-yorkers
Actually, I think, Knickerbocker was first used (after Washington Irving's fictional persona Dietrich Knickerbocker) to refer to the Dutch descendents of the original settlers of the state, who lived not only in the city but also along the Hudson River Valley.
Another, rather facetious suggestion for the inhabitants of NY State would be Empiricists.
January 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word wichtig
weighty (if you're looking for a cognate, or even a mnemonic)
January 14, 2009
rolig commented on the list alternative-names-for-new-yorkers
Strange that no one has suggested Knickerbocker. Isn't this an old term for New Yorker?
January 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word more reliable than the british weather
There will always be an English weather.
January 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word spangle
Pleth, in the phrase "star-spangled banner", "spangled" is a form (participle) of the verb "to spangle". But of course you know that. One could argue that this represents a use of the verb.
January 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word plundra
slush; in more formal Slovene, brozga.
plundrast - slushy
January 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word oleaginous makeweight
This was in a newspaper headline?! Can you imagine "oleaginous" appearing in your typical American newspaper article, let alone a headline?
January 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word pretkan
cunning, devious
synonyms: zvit, prebrisan
January 14, 2009
rolig commented on the word spangle
My first association with this word is the National Anthem of the United States of America (I'm a Baltimore boy, after all), hence my question to Whichbe: Why do you hate freedom?
January 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word kain pelikat
This sounds like something John Grisham or Nora Ephron might have written.
January 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word spangle
Whichbe, why do you hate freedom?
January 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word sinistroverse
See dextroverse (its antonym).
January 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word dextroverse
And here I thought this was a word describing the right-handed bias of the world we live in!
January 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word centauromachia
Why so perplexed, Tectquix? Peritus's meaning is correct, although I have more commonly encountered the form centauromachy, but both are correct and equally valid. The battle between the centaurs and the Lapiths, at the wedding feast of Pirithous, was a well-known theme in Greek art, most notably on the frieze of the Parthenon in Athens. Wikipedia offers this article about the battle.
January 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word šikanirati
formal to cause unpleasantness for s.o., antagonize, annoy
Related words:
šikána - annoyance, irritation
šikanózen - irritating, antagonizing
January 13, 2009
rolig commented on the word pamž
kid, brat - derog.
"Opa! Bogve �?e nima celo kakega pamža z njim! Pa ja, a sem jo kdaj kaj vprašal?"
Z. Ho�?evar, Rožencvet, p. 177.
"O wow! Maybe she even had a kid with him! And yeah, did I ever ask her anything?"
January 12, 2009
rolig commented on the list etymological-curiosities
Another curious word, which goes along with Sionnach's foxy suggestion, is thrush, which is not only a bird but also (with a different etymology entirely) a mouth infection.
January 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word quinquagesima
The fiftieth day before Easter, hence the name.
January 12, 2009
rolig commented on the word try
C_b, what do you think of "go and"? "I'll go and tell her you're here." v. "I'll go tell her you're here."
January 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word stride
The Oxford American also gives the past participle as stridden. I probably wouldn't say "stridden" (and would rarely say "stride" or "strode"), but I suppose I could imagine a context in which I would write it: "He had stridden the whole length of the field, as the angel had instructed, when he came upon a simple wooden chest on the lid of which were engraved four strange symbols, which he thought might be runes." I doubt if any reasonably educated English speaker would be flummoxed by the word "stridden" in this sentence, even if it's not commonly used in the present-day conversational language.
January 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word pollianish
Probably you're thinking of Pollyannaish, from the name Pollyanna, an unfailingly optimistic character in the children's books of Eleanor Hodgman Porter and the Disney movies based on them.
January 10, 2009
rolig commented on the list lost-for-word
Hair stylist's?
January 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word stationary stationery
The envelopes aren't moving.
January 10, 2009
rolig commented on the word last of the year
The model for future lists of the year.
January 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word wordie word of the year 2008
I too wish to extend my thanks to whichbe for such masterful organizing/juggling of phrases, lists, tags and words in a stunning display of the very opposite of multislacking. And congranulations and hippy birchday to our award-winging lastmaker Sionnatch! And congrats also to the_grene_kni3t, who first listed the WWOTY08 but seems to have been doing some multislacking of her/his own in the past couple months. And to Ms. C._Bear for her indefatigable defense of freedom in first listing the WPOTY08.
January 9, 2009
rolig commented on the word mavenry
"People commit many errors in grammar and fall into many infelicities in usage — but not as often as the mavenry* would have you think. * Language mavens, self-appointed authorities and kibitzers whose ranks include schoolteachers, editors, columnists, bloggers and quacks of many varieties."
– John E. McIntyre, "The Origins of Error," You Don't Say (6 Jan. 2009)
January 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word sambuke
Was this played while drinking sambuca? (I see Asativum beat me to the pun.)
January 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word sambuke
Was this played while drinking sambuca?
January 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word moujik
A more common transliteration from the Russian is muzhik.
January 7, 2009
rolig commented on the word mujik
A more common transliteration from the Russian is muzhik.
January 7, 2009
rolig commented on the list hackneyed-expressions-in-three-words
LOL? IMHO? Aren't these and other netspeech shortcuts just another kind of hackneyed expression?
January 6, 2009
rolig commented on the word valley of the doles
Steamy potboiler in which two retired senators, husband and wife, descend into wild debauchery after discovering the thrill of ED medication.
January 6, 2009
rolig commented on the list questions-for-the-ages
"Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving?"
"Is there – is there balm in Gilead?"
January 6, 2009
rolig commented on the list etymological-curiosities
How about lay (to place, a narrative poem)? I'm not sure why you decided against lie (to recline, an untruth) – aren't they etymologically distinct?
January 5, 2009
rolig commented on the list etymological-curiosities
The word cleave would seem to belong here.
January 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word femmage
I would think that, if we wanted one, femmage would make a good counterpart to homage, i.e. as an artistic or literary tribute specifically to a woman as opposed to one honoring a man.
January 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word transparent
I like contranyms, if the opposing meanings are truly well established and especially if they are etymologically distinct (like, I think, "cleave", the classic example of a contranym), or if they separated so long ago that their common origin is essentially forgotten, or when a certain use of a word is so counterintuitive as to be remarkable (e.g. the use of "commencement" to refer to a ceremony that marks the completion of one's education).
January 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word searching for a needle in a googlestack
See wild Google chase.
January 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word wild google chase
When you search for something on Google and find thousands hits but the one you want is nowhere in the first 10 pages of hits. Also known as searching for a needle in a Googlestack.
January 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word the problem with the internet
Things may have been more difficult, but not all difficulties are bad. On the Internet, you may discover, after a number of wild Google chases, that the restaurant you were hoping to go to has closed, but before the Internet, you would call them on the telephone and either get the message that the phone number no longer exists, or be redirected to another phone number (and perhaps the new restaurant the owners had opened). You might even end up talking to a real person. Or you would just go there and discover that there was a different restaurant in the old location (maybe), and maybe you would try that one and it would become your new favorite restaurant. In any case, you would have gotten out of the house and off your butt.
No, I am not convinced that things were better before the Internet. Some things were easier, but ease also comes with a price.
January 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word transparent
I don't see (pun intended) "transparent" as being contranymic or autantonymous. The core notion of transparency is that something becomes invisible so that something else can be visible. Etymologically, the word means "appearing through". When we say, "The negotiations should be transparent", we are using a kind of metonymy: the transparency refers to the framework of the negotiations, which should be "invisible" (not opaque), allowing us to see what is actually happening. To call the word "transparent" contranymic seems to flatten it into two opposing meanings, whereas it actually conveys a single metaphorical meaning that is whole, if complex.
January 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word the problem with the internet
Prolagus, what was worse before the Internet?
January 3, 2009
rolig commented on the list etymological-curiosities
I like this list a lot! But I am wondering what dear is doing here. Isn't the meaning "cherished" just an extension of the meaning "expensive (valuable, rare)"? In French, cher does similar double duty, as does дорогой / dorogoy in Russian.
Another word I might suggest would be slough (meaning 1. "swamp", and 2. "shed dead skin"). And now that I think of it, also shed. And then there's the triple-duty row (1. "operate a boat using oars", 2. "a straight line of something", 3. "a quarrel"). There appear to be many such homographs in English.
January 3, 2009
rolig commented on the word synecdoche
I love the old Judy Garland flick, Metonymy St. Louis!
January 2, 2009
rolig commented on the word coup de foudre
Prolagus is right (and we also say "a bolt of lightning"), but you do not necessarily need to translate this expression. Although not common, the phrase coup de foudre, which is found in English dictionaries, could be used as it is in a sophisticated English text just as we use other French expressions (e.g. pièce de la résistance, coup de grâce, par excellance) in English.
January 1, 2009
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
Thanks again, Sionnach, for a fun and clever game! Happy New Year!
January 1, 2009
rolig commented on the word past tense
Chiming in here, it's interesting how various processes have combined to create pairs of such participial adjectives in English, where both words are spelt the same and mean the same thing, but are pronounced differently in different contexts:
blessed ("blessed /blest/ bread") v. blessèd (which is sometime used as a substitute for "damned": "Get your blessèd things out of my house!")
aged ("an aged /'eɪdʒd/ wine") v. agèd (= very old, "an agèd man")
learned ("learned /lərnd/ behavior") v. learnèd (=erudite, "a learnèd professor").
January 1, 2009
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
For #28, I had guessed "Judges" because I was assuming you meant the books of the Bible, which in my Protestant tradition are ordered as follows: ... Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, I & II Samuel, I & II Kings ... Thus, Judges is the third book after Numbers, and Kings is the third book after Judges. In the Catholic Vulgate Bible, however, the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings are grouped together as I, II, III & IV Kings, so if this is what you have in your Irish mind, then perhaps the answer you are looking for is Joshua, since then this mega-Kings would be the third book after Joshua. This would also hold true for the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible), in which, though Samuel is preserved as a separate entity in the section called Nevi'im (Prophets), Ruth is relegated to another section, the Ketuvim (Writings). So let's go with Joshua (Y'hoshua).
December 30, 2008
rolig commented on the list speaking-french-with-fanciful-bakers
Where's the zajebano Karlova�?ko?
December 29, 2008
rolig commented on the word features
I like, no, love, the simplicity of Wordie, though as I write this I realize that as a value, "simplicity" can be understood two ways, either as being easy for me to do everything I want to do, from making vocab lists to making friendships, or as being elegantly constructed, without any extraneous bells, whistles, coaxings, suggestions, autoblather, etc. Wordie balances both of these meanings nicely. I have always liked Wordie the way it is, even as it has changed, and that is because I think John has a very clear vision of the kind of site he wants Wordie to be and the kind he does not want it to be. I have even come to like the constraints of Wordie, such as the forced public nature of nearly everything that goes on here (except for the fairly new development of private notes). It is not hard, for example, to find out if someone is online (or has recently been): just click on their name somewhere to get to there profile page, and check their recent activity, or if this is not available, check their last comment. If they are online and haven't been commenting, well, maybe they're doing their own Wordie-work (tidying lists, adding words) and don't feel like socializing.
December 29, 2008
rolig commented on the list metaphors-we-live-by
You've got me thinking again, after many years, about Owen Barfield and his book Poetic Diction, which examines myth and metaphor as being at the root of language.
December 28, 2008
rolig commented on the word obirati se
to hesitate, to take your time (doing something); syn: obotavljati se, omahovati
December 28, 2008
rolig commented on the word cvikat
to be afraid, to flinch (also, to pinch) < G. zwicken
"Vse jaz to zastopim," sem rekel. "Ampak ti bi rad meni povedal nekaj drugega. Samo ne cvikat."
"V redu," je rekel, "samo ne me potem tepst. Evo, nimaš poguma za rad imet. Rajši bi koga ubil, namesto ..."
"I get all that," I said. "But you want to tell me something else. Only don't be afraid."
"Okay," he said, "just don't beat me up afterwards. Here it is, then: you don't have the courage to love. You'd rather kill someone instead ..."
– Zoran Ho�?evar, Rožencvet, p. 88.
December 28, 2008
rolig commented on the list antique-names-female
I see you have my grandmother's name already, only she spelled it Zylpha. She was the daughter, or perhaps granddaughter, of German immigrants, so I assume this name is related to the German word Sylphe ("sylph"), where the initial consonant is pronounced /z/.
December 28, 2008
rolig commented on the word antehesternal
pertaining to the day before yesterday (ante+hesternal).
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
Alternative for #3: nudiustertian. I found this using the One Look Reverse Dictionary, a very useful tool. (Antehesternal, which I still prefer, I worked out more or less on my own.)
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
On cumyxaphile v. cumyxaphilist, my assumption was based on the fact that one who enjoys bibliophily is a bibliophile. With matchbox collecting, it seems, for quick and primitive Google checks, that both -phile and -philist are used, but "cumyxaphile" gets 212 hits, as opposed to 5 for "cumyxaphilist".
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
Btw, I applaud Mollusque for figuring out cumyxaphily, but without taking anything at all away from that triumph, I should point out the closer parallel to numismatist would be cumyxaphile.
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
I will guess that #20 is Orpheus, but I'm not very confident.
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the word zvarnoharno
I did a couple of Google searches, but couldn't find anything about the linguistic origin of this word. I did discover, however, that in Russian this word is written цварнохарно, which would be transliterated, using one of the more common and more user-friendly systems, as tsvarnokharno; in the "scientific" system, this would be cvarnoharno or cvarnoxarno. The z spelling, most likely, is based on German, where the letter z is pronounced /ts/. I doubt the word has Slavic origins; my guess would be that, given Gurdjieff's own nationality, it's Armenian. But sadly, I know nothing of Armenian.
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the word wordie word of the year 2008
For me the most wonderful word I learned on Wordie in 2008 was mono no aware. I fully agree with Mollusque about the horrible, snicker-inducing, bartesque word hork.
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the word mele kalikimaka
I wonder if "Mele Kalikimaka" is really a translation. I would guess that it rather represents the rendering of the English words "Merry Christmas" into Hawaiian phonology, with the r-sound turning into the l-sound, /s/ turning into /k/ and the insertion of extra vowels to keep consonantal sounds apart. Similarly, though with different rules, the Polynesian toponym Kiribati derives from Gilbert.
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
Sarra, thanks! It sounds Rilkean!
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the word zvarnoharno
What language is this?
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the word domowina
I have always been curious about the Lusatian Sorbs. Are you Sorbian, Kargin?
By the way, I assume domowina means "homeland" (as does domovina in Slovene).
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the word social lubricant
Or as Ogden Nash put it, famously, in "The Ice-Breaker":
Candy is dandy
But liquor is quicker.
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
The choral piece in #37 is beautiful but unknown to me. I can't wait to find out the answer!
Can the answer to #25 really be as simple as "Duchamp"? Marcel Duchamp is the author of the painting Nude Descending a Staircase just as Jasper Johns is the author of the flag painting. Or am I missing something?
December 27, 2008
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
Thanks, sionnach, it's a fun quiz, very clever and testing different kinds of knowledge!
For #27, I suggested a diamond (the card suit symbol), not a fleur-de-lys, thinking that if ace = 1, then ice = diamond. But it's a stretch, I admit.
*puts thinking cap back on*
December 26, 2008
rolig commented on the list quiz-time-7-special-saturnalia-edition
Here are a few guesses. Mostly, I'm baffled.
3. antehesternal
6. Aleksey Stakhanov
9. fünfzehn
13. Vallisoletano
18. barouche
22. quiche
24. lapis lazuli
27. ♢
28. judges
Edit: #9, #18, #28 added; #22 changed (was "buns").
December 25, 2008
rolig commented on the word expressions for merry christmas in various languages
С рожде�?твом Хри�?товым! (Russian) Transliterated (with stress): S rozhdestvóm Khristóvym! IPA (very roughly): /srəʒdʲɪ'stvɔm xrʲi'stovɨm/
December 25, 2008
rolig commented on the word expressions for merry christmas in various languages
Vesel boži�?! /vəˌseʋ ˈbɔʒɪʧ/ (Slovene)
December 25, 2008
rolig commented on the word malora
Slovene slang, borrowed from Italian. Literally it means "an evil hour", but would commonly be translated as "hell": Naj gre v maloro! = "May he go to hell!"
It is also used in the sense of "failure, a big mess": Če ni�? ne ukrepamo, bo gospodarstvo šlo v maloro. = "If we don't do anything, the economy will tank."
December 25, 2008
rolig commented on the list private-slang
Didn't he serve under Corporal Terminology and General Usage?
December 24, 2008
rolig commented on the list loan-words-from-french
I assume you are mainly interested in recent borrowings, from the last two hundred years or so, and not those that go back to the Norman Conquest, which would be a hefty chunk of the vocabulary of Modern English.
December 24, 2008
rolig commented on the word nasaaq
You know, John, I think I saw something in the NYT fashion section about plunging hatlines.
December 22, 2008
rolig commented on the word deprifixation
I was going to suggest this should be deprefixation, but as reesetee points out, it's a madeupical word anyway. Also, I wondered if the spelling was intentional, to form a portmanteau from deprivation + prefix.
December 22, 2008
rolig commented on the word tain
Nice citation - and what a great word! It was new to me.
December 22, 2008
rolig commented on the word methinks
"One of the better speeches..."! As if most of Will Shakespeare's speeches were rather ho-hum.
December 22, 2008
rolig commented on the word quantum
Thanks for the explanation, all! I suspect people will keep on using "quantum leap" to mean a significant, world-altering change, and physicists will keep arguing over whether such popular use is valid. Unfortunately, people like cliches, and more to the point, we love cliches that make us sound smart.
December 22, 2008
rolig commented on the word quantum
So wouldn't this mean that a "quantum leap" was minimal change, and not the huge change we usually want this phrase to mean?
December 21, 2008
rolig commented on the word mrš�?iti
to furrow, wrinkle up, crinkle, ripple
December 21, 2008
rolig commented on the word dracena
Also known as dragon tree.
December 20, 2008
rolig commented on the list wordie-challenge
These are fun! Thanks for the invitation, whichy.
December 20, 2008
rolig commented on the word causal dress
Sadly, this is the defense used by some men charged with rape: "If she was wearing that dress, she obviously wanted it!" And appallingly, it sometimes works.
December 20, 2008
rolig commented on the word alacktra
I'm not certain who this is, but she sure looks good in mourning clothes. And doesn't she have a sister named Alastra?
December 20, 2008
rolig commented on the word hathos
Is this a portmanteau for hate + pathos (or bathos)?
December 19, 2008
rolig commented on the word methinks
Thanks for the excellent explanation, Qroqqa!
C_b, I was going to say that it shouldn't be used except facetiously, but then when I thought about it, I realized that even the facetious use of this word makes me groan. I want to ask, "You couldn't come up with anything better than that to make your ironic/facetious point?!"
Do people today really use "methinketh"? Oh, dear.
December 19, 2008
rolig commented on the word motoviliti
motovíliti
to do something in a clumsy, slow way; to move in a clumsy way
motovíliti se
to be jumbled up
December 19, 2008
rolig commented on the word tenja
literary shade, shadow
December 19, 2008
rolig commented on the word methinks
As for "me thinketh", that just reflects the older 3rd person singular form: our modern -s 3rd per. sg. ending derived from -eth.
December 19, 2008
rolig commented on the word methinks
I wasn't saying the word was cutesy in the 16th century or earlier. But to use it today is cutesy, not to mention affectatious. What's interesting to me about the OED's citations are those from the 17th and 18th centuries for the past tense form, where the writers are using "methoughts". This shows that even by that time, this word was no longer standard, since they are adding the present tense ending to a past tense form. In 21st speech and writing, "methinks", "methought", and, God help us, "methoughts", should all be avoided.
December 19, 2008
rolig commented on the word methinks
My mother used to say this word when I was growing up (back in the 1960s), which was curious because I was very much into reading Arthurian romances (especially the collection by Sidney Lanier) where the characters were always saying, "Methinks,..." Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that my mother's usage probably derived from 1940s women's college slang.
Personally, I don't like "methinks"; it's much too cutesy-quaintsy for me. Having said that, however, I find myself wondering what this word actually means. Considering its 3rd-person singular form (the ending -s) and objective form of the pronoun (dative, perhaps), I gather that this meant originally not: "In my opinion" or "My view is that", but "The idea occurs to me that...": "It thinks to me..." Such passive impersonal constructions are widespread, by the way, in Russian and other Slavic languages.
December 18, 2008
rolig commented on the word glen
glén
Slovene: silt, slime
December 17, 2008
rolig commented on the word ponzi
Charles Ponzi (d. 1949) gave his name to the kind of fraud known as the Ponzi scheme, aka pyramid scheme.
December 17, 2008
rolig commented on the word bugs
Yippee! Thanks, John, I never doubted you.
December 17, 2008
rolig commented on the word buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
See buffalo for discussion. Actually, this could be extended even further to:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo – which would mean, ridiculously:
Northwestern New York bison whom (other) northwestern New York bison intimidate intimidate (yet other) northwestern New York bison whom (other) northwestern New York bison intimidate.
December 17, 2008
rolig commented on the word vihdoin vihdoin vihdoin
I like this very much! But I am curious about the "instructive" case. With Slavic languages, which also have a case to indicate means, this is called the "instrumental" case.
December 17, 2008
rolig commented on the word mezeti
mezéti (mezím)
to trickle, ooze, run slowly and in a small amount
December 16, 2008
rolig commented on the word štropot
štropòt
from štropotáti (štropotám/štropó�?am) – to produce short, muffled sounds, like rain, "to patter" maybe?
December 16, 2008
rolig commented on the word blagojevich
The name of the most recent corrupt Illinois governor appears to be well on its way to becoming a byword. Taking off from David Letterman's coinage of the verb "to blagojevich" (he said the governor was charged with "one count of bribery, one count of fraud and one count of Blagojeviching"), the Chicago Tribune has this suggestion:
"We can come up with a working definition: Blagojevich (bluh-GOY-uh-vich) noun. a scandalous person —verb 1 to damage or cheapen 2 to complain —adj., adv. (Vulgar Slang) 1 bleeping. But would anyone use it?"
December 16, 2008
rolig commented on the word teddy
This joke won't work for most USAmericans. For years after moving to Europe and watching the BBC regularly on cable, I had no idea why a popular cooking show was called "Ready Steady Cook!" I kept hearing "steady cook" as a noun phrase. Where I come from, we say, "On your mark, get set, go!"
December 16, 2008
rolig commented on the word bugs
Thanks, sionnach. I have such faith in John's near-miraculous programming powers, that I am sure he will find a fix for this before long.
December 16, 2008
rolig commented on the word savonarola
The ridiculous way I remember this name is to think of a TV commercial where you're offered a chance to "save on a roll of" toilet paper! Somehow it's appropriate, I think, though I'm not sure why.
December 16, 2008
rolig commented on the word golconda
I did too at first, or rather, I thought this was a misspelling of La Gioconda, Leo's girl.
December 16, 2008
rolig commented on the word bugs
This question may have already been brought up, but I was wondering if it was possible with a list of more than 100 words to view all the words in alphabetical order. Now, when you click on alpha order, you can view the first 100 in alpha order, but this ability is lost with the next page of words. Can this be fixed?
December 16, 2008
rolig commented on the word golconda
A town near Hyderabad, India, whose diamond mine was so famous it became a byword for a source of great wealth (as WordNet tells us).
December 16, 2008
rolig commented on the word nickname
So is eke meaning "also" cognate with the German auch? Sehr interessant, as they used to say on Laugh-In.
December 15, 2008
rolig commented on the word peasantry
One of the few words in English where the suffix -ry indicates a class or group of people (some others are Jewry, citizenry, and Freemasonry).
December 15, 2008
rolig commented on the word opotekav
"staggered, unsteady, wavering" (about gait)
< v. opotê�?i se (opote�?em se) / opotékati se, "to stagger, move unsteadily"
December 14, 2008
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