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  • one of my first thristy wordie words!!!several years later still pursueing

    May 20, 2011

  • So what does it mean?

    May 20, 2011

  • What a great blog, fbharjo!

    May 20, 2011

  • Latin third person plural of cicuro ("to make (someone) tame").

    Thus, "Cicurant illiud Sinenses & collum argento exornant" = "The Chinese make them tame, and fit them with silver collars", in Polish Jesuit Michael Boym's 16th-century account of the mysterious mouse-hunting tortoise-chasing squirrel supposedly seen by him in southern China.

    May 20, 2011

  • My thirst for words is still untamed. Cicurant (3rd person plural) is the latin for tame. Tame is unusual in its inherent implications of being 'untamed' or atleast potentially 'untamed'. English words such as 'circus' from the Latin for 'racecourse'( a confined energy) and 'curt' from the latin 'curtus' (short) perhaps all are tracable to the same latin root.

    All these words are also perhaps from the Indo-European root (s)ker- meaning to cut. Just speculation on my part. Bias is also from the same IE root, (s)ker-, but from the Greek epikarsios at an angle ('a different cut' to use a modern English idiom)

    I am still finding 'different cuts' on words on wordnik

    - some cuts are tame and some are wild..

    May 20, 2011