The perpetrator is still visible. The ガ ga is a カ ka as in katana "B.F. sword", with its eyebrows raised, and has worked its way up to the front runner, who is now pretending to be already beheaded.
The singular should be *euarchontoglis if the plural were formed regularly from it; but back-formation has several analogical options. In this case euarchontoglire has been formed, probably not just by removing the -s (zoologists are too fly for that) but by looking at words such as 'carnivore', 'laurasiathere' (cf. Greek thêr). In fact it's -glire that's used, and *-glis only occurs here on Wordie: no-one else has thought to coin it.
Leadership is a risky business requiring wisdom, courage, and fortitude—and as my compatriot Socrates put it, courage is the knowledge of what is not to be feared.
No, young Ulleskelf, there is no such thing as a trouser. 'Trousers' is what we cognoscenti call a plurale tantum, that is "plural only". The singular form however does occur in noun-noun compounds such as 'trouser leg/pocket/press/snake', and of course by conversion as a verb. Hurrah for morphology!
Sometimes in the altered form succuba with feminine ending (which in Latin actually meant "whore"). The primacy of the masculine -us ending, however, means (I think) that it is not the case that the demons were female, rather that they took female form to lie under (sub-cub-) men; as they took male form to lie in (in-cub-) women.
JIMMY: I looked up that word the other day. It's one of those words I've never been quite sure of, but always thought I knew.
CLIFF: What was that?
JIMMY: I told you—pusillanimous. Do you know what it means?
Cliff shakes his head.
Neither did I really. All this time, I have been married to this woman, this monument to non-attachment, and suddenly I discover that there is actually a word that sums her up. Not just an adjective in the English language to describe her with—it's her name! Pusillanimous! It sounds like some fleshy Roman matron, doesn't it? The Lady Pusillanimous seen here with her husband Sextus, on their way to the Games.
One of only two(?) minimal pairs contrasting /ð/ and /θ/ initially: /ðaʊ/ "you" ~ /θaʊ/ "thousandth of an inch" (or colloquially "thousand"). The other initial pair is 'thus'; final contrasts occur in 'mouth' (n. and v.) and possibly 'withe'/'with'.
One of only two(?) minimal pairs contrasting /ð/ and /θ/ initially: /ðʌs/ "so" ~ /θʌs/ "incense" (what a thurifer carries in a thurible). The other initial pair is 'thou'; final contrasts occur in 'mouth' (n. and v.) and possibly 'withe'/'with'.
Oh that's interesting, the OED thinks the "hassock or footstool" meaning is dubious and may come from misinterpretation of the nursery rime (as it calls it), which might actually refer to a tuffet = tuft = grassy knoll, hillock.
This sort of etymology is rather misleading, it seems to me: saying dislection comes from diligere poses such questions as how the <s> arose and where the <gere> disappears to. Rather, the two words, noun and verb arose in parallel from the same root. The verb is, by convention, cited in its infinitive form, but the infinitive is not the base of any other word: it is a derived form.
The root is dĭs-lĕg-. This is what both noun and verb were formed from by suffixation in some early stage of Latin. The infinitive was formed with -ĕrĕ (in fact probably -ĕrĭ or -ĕsĭ at this stage, but let's disregard changes that don't contribute to the comparison under discussion). The noun was formed with the usual -tio, -tion- suffix. The voicing assimilation of /gt/ to /kt/ (ct) was no doubt very early, possibly pre-Latin.
In Old Latin /s/ was lost in this position before a sonorant (such as /l/ or /m/), with the previous vowel lengthening in compensation. So dĭslĕg- became dīlĕg-. Often the /s/ was subsequently restored by analogy (e.g. dismiss), which is why we get variation between di- and dis- forms.
In Old Latin the stress was initial. Unstressed vowels mostly became /ĭ/ before one consonant, /ĕ/ before two. Thus the vowel difference between dīlĭg- and dīlĕct-.
This word contains two different ligatures, in print. Appropriately, I noticed it in Nicholson Baker, who I suspect would be interested, and spin a reflection on the decline of ligatures.
Had a satirical novelist not invented it first, some modish academic or think-tank would undoubtedly have come up with Social Dynamics eventually, and would by now probably be organising seminars at 10 Downing Street to explain the triangulatory brilliance of the scheme to Tony Blair.
—Francis Wheen, 2004, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
Well I thought as you were criticizing the slavish pluralizers, you wouldn't be using such forms yourself but were citing forms used by others: thus exculpating you of gogglelessness.
Most people won't be surprised to learn that they also seek to shape what is published in journals through ghost-written essays signed by prestigious doctors, or attempt to influence prescribers' opinions through widely distributed "throwaways", a euphemism for journal articles that support their products.
Taylor . . . now wants to repeat the achievement on a much larger scale, by "decellularising" hearts, livers and other organs taken either from human cadavers or from larger animals such as pigs, and coating them in stem cells harvested from people.
Well 'suffices' is not a Latin plural; the Latin for "suffix" is suffixum. The only possible plural of 'suffix' is 'suffixes': a warning to those who play with Latinity without the goggles of knowledge.
I can only see two (relevant) vowels in that list, that of of 'strut'/'bloody' and that of 'nurse'/'vermin'/'virginal'; the two are however completely different in my accent. (And I'd use the term 'short u' to mean the vowel in 'foot' myself.)
Her hair, which was of a light brown, was becomingly braided à la Didon; and her gown, which she wore under a striped dress-spencer, was of fine cambric, made high to the throat, and ornamented round the hem with double trimming.
"Oh, she thinks no one the equal of her magnificent Cousin Alverstoke!" said Mrs Dauntry, gently laughing. "You are quite first-oars with her, I assure you!"
"and if this F. Merriville is the daughter of the only member of the family with whom I ever had the slightest acquaintance you may depend upon it she hasn't a souse, and hopes I may be so obliging as to remedy this."
French for "sting, injection", striking for that circumflex, in a position I don't think I've ever seen before. In OED as an English word, "injection, injection mark".
The child, who was as pretty as a picture, Miss Grantham saw, could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, and to watch a roué of Filey's years and experience leering down at her made Miss Grantham long to be able to box his ears, and send him to the right-about.
She might have destroyed at a blow any influence he had ever had over Adrian, and, incalculably, she had refrained from doing it.
—Georgette Heyer, Faro's Daughter
A highly unusual use of this word. Normally it is an adjective modifier (e.g. incalculably high) and means "enormous, i.e. too large (or small) to be able to be calculated". But in this example Heyer has used it as a sentence adverb meaning "too puzzling to be able to calculate, i.e. understand, work out".
Not a word. There is no usage at all for it on the Web (nor for *cagophilia), and it has no reasonable etymology. (Probably invented by someone arbitrarily deforming Old English cǽg.) Why not just say keyophile and be done with it? Or better, key collector?
I am always confused over whether I should be pronouncing this /ˈeθɒs/ (as in ethics) or /ˈiːθɒs/ (as in ether). Whenever I look it up I am confused by the fact that there are two related Greek words εθος ethos and ηθος êthos, and that though ethics comes from the latter it is invariably pronounced with short E.
So εθος ethos meant "custom, habit" but did not really give any English derivatives. The related word ηθος êthos is more complex, giving all of English ethos, ethics, ethology. In the singular its meanings extend to "character, nature", basically what ethos is and what ethics and in part ethology study; in the plural (ηθη êthê) it means "haunts, abodes" of animals and "manners, customs" of people.
Unrelated are short-E ethno- "people" and long-E (in fact AE, Greek αι-) ether, aether "airlike substance/realm".
*boggles, rereads* Aha. If you used 'seeing' instead, it would mean "not seeing galleries as places where . . . but rather seeing them as some other kind of place". Wrong 'as', however. It actually means "seeing galleries not so much as places where X happens . . . but as places where Y happens". The sentence is missing a comma after 'rivers'. (The comparative 'not so much', which governs the following 'as', is in a stylistically unusual, unexpected place.)
With 'espy', you can't espy something as something (= "in the light/form of", so the construction can only be the 'not so much . . . as' one.
Usually when a word has many meanings in English, they are the result of a centuries-long process, many of them washed up on the banks of oblivion by our time. In the case of mono, however, they're all new:
And it's perhaps a little surprising that no use of Japanese mono has come into English as a separate word. (The OED of course lists mono no aware under that phrase.)
In good Latin this was a priore. According to ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ, who seems a reliable sort of chap, it was Thomas Aquinas who first used, or at least popularized, the dative for the ablative. It's surprising how it caught on and how rarely the Classical forms are used.
It's taken me this long to find out what the word comes from. It's a contraction suu-doku "single digits" of the phrase suuzi-wa dokusin-ni kagiru "the digits are restricted to single" ("digit-TOPIC single-TO restrict" – with dokusin meaning "single" as in "unmarried", a little oddly).
It began as an American puzzle called Number Place; a Japanese company later issued it as Sudoku, a trade mark in Japan, where it is generically known as nanpure, a contraction of the English name.
Surprising etymology. The ordinary preposition comes from an Old English and Celtic word dún for "hill". The expression meaning "off-hill" was reduced by omitting the "off" part (it survives in the poetic word adown) till down itself came to mean, well, "down".
In origin the past participle of an extinct verb agast, extended form of verb gast, both meaning "frighten". The spelling with -h- first appeared in c.1425 (in Scots), well before Caxton famously introduced it in ghost; but it was not until the late 1500s that it became usual for such words.
Possible in the case of knowledge, with its completely mysterious second element—I suppose the older -leche could come from palatalization of a Northern form -leik of the -lock suffix, though the OED does not raise this possibility.
Shurely shome mishtake with lark, which though equally mysterious does not admit of anything like *-lak. The v in OE láferce might have been Norse influence; other old forms include OE láwerce, OHG lêrahha, ON lǽvirke, and this suffix won't fit in there.
The 'Rohirric' word dwimmerlaik in Tolkien's works is a use of a genuine (extinct) English word with the suffix.
English irregular verbs scarcely follow any rules at all. There are a couple of patterns (e.g. swim ~ swam ~ swum) that contain as many as ten strong verbs, but most patterns are only for several verbs. There are verbs such as bring ~ brought ~ brought that combine internal change with a weak ending; and others like show ~ showed ~ shown combining weak and strong forms. While twilve doesn't exactly match any real pattern (as far as I can recall), it's close enough to sell ~ sold ~ sold to be plausible. (The more so the more I look at the variant forms of sell historically.)
There are so many different Latin roots resembling ven-: ones meaning "come", "sell", "hunt", "vein", "love (goddess)", "wind", "forgiveness", "poison", "stomach", and "vengeance" are enough to confuse anyone. I can never quite remember that a venal person is one who can be bought (cf. vend), while a venial sin is one that is forgivable (Latin venia "forgiveness" has no other common English reflexes). The adjective of vein is usually venous but can be both of venal, venial.
Hunting and love-play are both venery; it would be natural to imagine them metaphorically connected, but they're not. Vengeance has only a post-Classical ven-; the Classical gives us vindicate. Vent is cognate with wind; the root in invent, convenient is cognate with its meaning "come"; ventriloquist related to neither.
The spelling with -j- is apparently a folk etymology (or eggcorn or other such alteration) in English after Spanish female names; the original Mexican Spanish was marihuana, mariguana of uncertain origin.
The only survivor in Modern English of the Old English action noun suffix -lác. This may have been a noun "play" and originated in compounds meaning "sword-play" for "battle".
You do indeed, except perhaps in (w)hooping-cough; however, the /w/ is recent. My mid-century Shorter Oxford only has the /hu:p/ pronunciation—even, startlingly, in whoopee, which it thinks is a homophone of hoopy.
It's really only who and its kin, with loss of the /w/ by dissimilation before the /o/. This is also probably why very few words in Old English began with /hwo/ or /hwu/. The word who may have been the reason why whole, whore, whoop were given a <w> in their spelling: this is comparatively modern, as all three historically began with /h/ + vowel.
Various uses in linguistics (principally as just the adjective of 'noun'), but in CGEL it specifically means a level of structure intermediate between noun and noun phrase: what in the Chomskyan framework is called N'. Adding a determiner to a nominal makes it a noun phrase.
Noun: dog
Nominals: black dog; big black dog; big black dog chewing my slipper
Noun phrase: this big black dog chewing my slipper
When it is a single word, I think it's also a noun: compare 'get $30 change', 'get $30 interest', 'get $30 compensation'. Switching to the numeral 'one', we can see the sum is in plain case: 'get one dollar interest' (not *'one dollar's').
In these, does 'get' take one noun phrase complement or two? Compare: '$30 interest would be nice', 'You owe me $30 change' (sequence of three NP complements otherwise unexampled), 'I'm waiting for my $30 refund'. The sequence moves around tightly like a single NP. Also: you can't replace the sum by a pronoun. If $30 is the topic, you can't say you got it refund, or got it interest. From all which I conclude '$30 cashback' is a single noun phrase composed of two noun parts (nominals or N') in apposition.
Those biological nomina in full. A name should refer clearly and unambiguously to a taxon. Ways this can be defeated or repaired are:
nomen nudum: a name published with no or insufficient description to make clear the taxon referred to.
nomen dubium: a name (apparently not so vacuous as a nomen nudum) that turns out to be inadequate to identify its target.
nomen confusum: a name that appears to confusedly refer to several taxa.
nomen ambiguum: a name that quite clearly refers to one definite taxon, according to one authority, and to another according to another.
nomen oblitum: a name that validly referred when it was published but has been disused or forgotten (oblitum) for so long that a newer alternative has gained a prescriptive right to supplant it.
nomen invalidum: an informal or malformed name that couldn't be a valid name.
nomen novum: a new name that validly supplants an older one disallowed for one of the above reasons.
nomen conservandum: an existing name that theoretically should defer to an older valid name but which is of such good standing that it is decreed that it is 'to be conserved' (conservandum).
How can 'suppletive' not be in WeirdNet? It's a familiar and long-standing grammatical term. The canonical examples in English are go ~ went and be ~ am ~ was and person ~ people; in French aller ~ va ~ ira, for example; in Ancient Greek just about every damn verb you might ever need to use, to the everlasting burden of aspiring Hellenophones.
An irregular extension of tralation, which is a doublet of translation and indeed transfer (Latin lat- < *tlat- being the suppletive supine stem, cognate with perfect tul-, of present and infinitive fer-).
In Latin, tra(ns)latiowas used for a variety of linguistic transfers that we now distinguish as translation, metaphor, metathesis, and transposition.
Howard alone looked up into the simple concameration of the roof, hoping for escape or relief or distraction.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
The Classical Latin camera meant "arch, vault" and was then transferred to a specifically arched or vaulted room. (The scene quoted above is a church.) In Late Latin it came to mean "room". So was there a Classical Latin for "room" generally, as in 'My villa has twelve rooms'? Cella is too specific: a small or side room, and wouldn't apply to the atrium or triclinium.
Usually one word, it seems to me, even when two would make equal sense: 'Would you like cashback?', 'Could I have £20 cashback, please?' And what is the difference between one word and two? Secondary stress, I think: in 'get £20 cash back', the 'back' has a longer vowel, as far as I can tell. (Possibly there is even a slight effect on the 'cash' vowel.)
Googling for this, I found it has a second meaning, which I've never encountered (as far as I'm aware): cash offered back as a sales incentive. Both meanings are in the OED, the familiar EFTPOS sense later (1988) and marked 'chiefly Brit.'
Googling for this again, two words is more common in casual/Web writing, but I think this ignores the phonetic facts.
A new formation in the 1300s, replacing 'widow', which had distinct masculine and feminine endings in Old English.
It has been said that the female is the default value here because widowhood was traditionally more important as an indicator of social status (dependence, availability etc.) in females.
By whom? Not by the OED, who don't know this word at all, nor the related words (analepsy, analemma, analeptic) in this sense. Nor by my preferred glossary of rhetoric. Nor indeed to the Ancient Greeks themselves, who used it in various ways derived from the semantic elements "take + back": such as tying up vines, acquiring knowledge, assimilating food, making amends, getting refreshed; about the closest is Aristotle's use of it for recovering memory. Possibly a recent development based on that. (Modern film and literaary theory wouldn't have made it in the OED's A's yet.)
An odd formation. I wonder where the u came from in decem-ass-. Assuming it was formed after m was replaced by vowel nasalization (decem'deke~:), I would have thought you'd expect decess-. I see from Perseus that all the compounds from seven have the 'wrong' vowel, so it might be levelling by analogy with neighbouring numbers.
A fusion of two Old English verbs: the transitive umlauted form dýfan "dip, submerge (a thing)" gave the modern form and weak conjugation—dive, dived, dived; whereas the primary verb dúfan dropped out in early Middle English, bequeathing its intransitive meaning "dive" to the other. If it had survived into Modern English it might go douve, deve, doven (I'm never very sure about how ablaut grades are inherited). The North American strong preterite dove is a new, quite modern formation.
1. Originally the verb "dive, dip in water", a derivative of which gave the bird's name (in effect "diver, dipper"). An earlier English name for the bird, in various forms such as ænid, enid, enede, ende, extinct 1400s, was cognate with Latin anat-. The verbal sense "lower the head" is later: like dipping in water but without the water.
2. The kind of cloth is unrelated. 'Duck tape' is attested considerably earlier than 'duct tape', but it's not obvious that the latter is derived by alteration of the former: it might well be an independent invention coincidentally similar.
Originally (1500s) a kind of wagon named from Kocs in Hungary. A little before 1850 it is known in its other modern meaning: a person who trains you in your studies. (The sporting help came a bit later.) This was university slang, but the OED gives no clue as to what the bridge between the two senses might be. Study conceived as driving towards a destination with an experienced driver?
The problem is that M has been revised for the third edition and B hasn't. They've put a link in the new M entry to what's going to be in the B entry once they get there—many years away, at the present rate. In the meantime, Oxford experts debunk the traditional story; and greater detail (but no ultimate explanation) is here.
Interesting: 'gloom' seems to have originally meant "frown, scowl" and to have transferred metaphorically to what clouds and such obscuring bodies do, thus "be dark". The use of 'gloom' as a noun "darkness" seems to originate with Milton. (Shakespeare has 'gloomy' in a sense that could be modern "dark" or still the metaphor "louring".)
Whereas as skipvia points out, the original sense of 'gloaming' is of light rather than darkness.
And my sister, when wee. Interesting evidence that the p can indeed be taken as a member of the /b/ phoneme without violence to English phonology: /sbə'geti/ -> /bə'sgeti/.
Pertaining to a duologue or conversation between two people: formed from either Latin duo "two" or a less-standard transcription of Greek δυο-, normally dyo-. But at least this spelling is more distinctive than dilogue or dyologue, which would be even closer to dialogue.
Oh. French is a character, a professor—it's not a comment about the language.
Actually, X-SAMPA is IPA. It's a way of transmitting IPA across the Internet using 7-bit ASCII, which for most of Internet history was all anyone could rely on to get to the other side.
Walking up Redwood Avenue with its tunnel of cernuous willows, Levi found he had lost the will even to nod his head, usually an involuntary habit with him when music was playing.
The Boston primness Howard associated with these kinds of events could not quite survive the mass of hot bodies and the crepitations of the crickets, the soft, damp bark of the trees and the atonal tuning of instruments – and all this was to the good.
Also (New Zealand) a holiday home at the beach. See Keri Hulme passim, or this Antarctic spokesperson (BBC news, 25-05-09):
The A-Frame represented something uniquely Kiwi in Antarctica. It was the concept of a mountain hut mixed with a bach and it said something about who we are.
Great word. I liked it as soon as I saw it. I don't know what it means though. *googles "a slutmuffin"* Oh, there's an LJ community whose interests include "being a slutmuffin" and "slutmuffins" . . . and "Interpol", "pushing people down wells", "cheese", "being obese", "Old Faithful", so this is definitely failing the usual tests for meaningfulness. Good word though, whatever it is.
Looks like it: Wyclif in 1382-3 used solemnize, sabbatize, authorize, then come the next burst in the 1420s: practise (which has since been remodelled), moralize, and in a text about surgery organize, paralyse, pulverize.
Huh. I always thought this was a Law French term, containing the pronoun jeo "I", as indeed jeofail is. But no, it's in effect jeu parti "divided game", a situation in games such as chess.
Surprising etymology: nothing to do with the Latin root for "little, less" found in minus, minor, minimum, minuscule. Rather, it comes from minium "vermilion, cinnabar; red lead", and refers to the use of vermilion to highlight letters in manuscripts (rubrication) and thus to the colouring of marginal pictures in manuscripts.
'Alive' here is depictive (as in 'ran around naked', 'turned up to work drunk', 'ate the meat raw') and is in contrast to a resultative complement ('shot them dead', 'hammered it flat', 'painted it blue').
Not an adjective! Not an adjective! The head word here is palatals, with noun plural ending. This can only be a noun. Parts of speech labels are not meaningless decoration.
Not a noun! Not a noun! If it ends in -ic it's likely to be an adjective (excc.: statistic, physic, medic etc.); if it ends in -ic-al it's almost certainly an adjective (excc.: physical, medical "medical examination").
The noun for this branch of astronomy is 'uranography'.
*hands up* I have just come from drinkiepoos with our team of copy editors, all of whom have been laid off today. Apparently the idea is all the writers will write perfect English from the start and all I have to do is proof-read it.
Two separate origins: the colour is from French marron "chestnut", as is the firecracker (from the noise a chestnut in the fire makes).
The "strand" sense is ultimately from Spanish cimarrón "fugitive" (< cima "summit"), with loss of the initial syllable in some language in the chain of borrowing, not clear which.
Ever to monosyllabic eer is a normal development: head, hawk, lark all come from earlier polysyllables with a medial v. In the case of eer, oer, (i) the v-ful alternatives remained in the language beside the shorter forms; (ii) at a relatively late stage the apostrophe was introduced to make the short form look like a mere variety of the longer one; and finally (iii) the short forms dropped out of everyday language. The poets didn't invent any contractions, they used the contractions available in everyday language (like it's, I've, i'th') and only gradually were some of these restricted to poetic registers.
Likewise the alternation of, say, walked and walk'd is because for some considerable time both were available in everyday language. Eventually walk'd won out and disyllabic walked was confined to poetic style.
Two different words: the aromatic component of Earl Grey tea is apparently from Bergamo in Italy, but the pear is from Turkish beğ armudu "bey's pear", altered to resemble the other word.
One of a number of evaluative words that began as verb forms (the gerund-participle or present participle) and have taken on separate life as an adjective: so also enchanting, fascinating, interesting.
You can tell the difference between verb and adjective because some modifiers only apply to adjectives:
This show is very/extremely mesmerizing/fascinating. (Adj)
*The performer is very/extremely mesmerizing/fascinating the audience. (V)
Of a semiconductor design business: doing only the design, and lacking the industrial facilities ('fabs') to fabricate the product. See more at Quinion.
The normal Welsh for "goat" is gafr. The interrelationships between the Celtic and Italic words here are not obvious: Don Ringe says the Celtic original of ceffyl "horse" seems to have gone from Latin to Celtic because it doesn't match up the way it would if it was a cognate, but this is uncertain. It is also unclear whether Italic and Celtic formed a sub-branch of IE and therefore particularly shared inherited vocabulary.
For instance, to form a proto-vrddhi derivative from *dyew- 'sky' one took the zero grade *diw-, inserted *e to give *deyw- (sic), and so derived *deyw-ó-s 'god' (literally 'skyling'). . . . This is the historical source of the derivational process called vrddhi in Sanskrit.
—Don Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. The book actually uses the Indo-Europeanist syllabicity ring under the r, but I can't find that in Unicode.
I bought some blacklead and blackleaded the grate so the iron glowed with a dull coaly gleam.
—Helen Dunmore, Your Blue-eyed Boy
Google Books throws up another use of the verb in a different Dunmore novel. WeirdNet only knows the verb. I'd never seen it used, and in fact didn't know what blacklead was. In my pub there's an old advertisement, circa 1900, for a brand of blacklead, but it depicts hoop-skirted young women in sunny outdoor colloquy, and so studiously fails to give any clue as to what it might be that I half imagined it must be some Edwardian hygiene product whose mode of application eluded me.
I've considered tagging or listing them, but I think it's too late; it'd require going through over a thousand comments and deciding which were significantly etymological in nature.
Wondering about the etymology of this, I found it originally meant "foster-child", with the familiar Latin al- "nourish" of 'aliment', but the unrecognizable part was a suffix related to the Greek passive participle suffix -omenos, not normally used in Latin.
Then I was surprised to learn that 'old' is related, as are 'altitude', 'alma mater' ("nourishing/bounteous mother"), and probably 'adult' and 'proletariat'.
The Germanic 'old' is from a past participle of that same root al- "nourish, raise", and is thus formally equivalent to Latin altus. The Latin however shifted from "grown up" to "high, tall" generally to "distant from the surface, i.e. high, tall, deep".
Ad-ul-tus and pro-l-es ("class who contribute offspring") might also contain the al- root internally.
Attested from 1862, and in the text I'm proofing, and on a BBC blog, and sporadically elsewhere on the Web, but quite as many people (and in this case I'm inclined to be one of 'em) seem to think it's a blunder, 'strategist' influenced by 'tactician'.
You're right, it is odd. I assumed it was a perfectly normal romanization of an Indian word containing aspirated th or ʈh, but it's not. The Urdu is mast "mad; drunk", and the expected romanization 'must' was used for most of the nineteenth century. Kipling appears to have stuck on the spurious -h.
Not from worm + wood. The medial -w- first appears around 1400; the earlier English was wermod, of unknown etymology. The German form Wermuth (modern Wermut) gives us vermouth via French.
I've been having a bit of a think about this tense in the bath. Shâ'a is perfective: it would normally be translated by an English past, as in 'John wanted a bicycle' (and either did or didn't get one). The imperfective is yashâ', normally "wants", as in 'John wants a bicycle' (and might or might not be getting one for Christmas). The divine will, however, at least in the more orthodox branches of Islam, presumably has the property that what God wills, God definitely gets, so the perfective shâ'a is appropriate with present or aorist meaning.
The OED's second edition uses traditional RP, in which unstressed /ɪ/ is the same phone as when stressed: so words like indivisibility or remitted have the same vowel throughout. Present-day RP and near-RP (such as Estuary) however aligns with most other accents of English in having ə for many of the unstressed positions. The third edition revision (which won't cover D for a long time) uses the symbol <ɨ> to indicate that both phones are possible.
Edit: Actually it's dotless crossed <i>, which isn't exactly the IPA cardinal symbol; I'd need to use strikethrough to show it, but that doesn't seem to work.
And Get Fuzzy ages before that. (I'm at home so trying to find actual linkable examples will see us into the next geological period, sorry. You'll have to take this one on my say-so.)
Not a plural of an English noun. As the singular 'imprimatur' means "an official mark decreeing it may be printed", the Latin verb plural imprimantur may be Englished the same way: "an official mark decreeing they may be printed". Typically, multiple documents grouped together would require only a single mark imprimantur, rather than each being given its own imprimatur. Accepting it as an English nonce-word, it's vaguely remininiscent of certain North American languages where there are different verbs for single or multiple objects.
Both words can be pluralized in the usual way: imprimaturs for various documents separately judged, imprimanturs for those relating to Pope and Madras in those citations.
Interesting too, and quite typical for Wikheadtionary, that three of their five supposed citations don't show it used in English at all, and their supposed pronunciation is directly contradicted by the only citation indicating a pronunciation.
The key thing about 'innit' is that it's invariant, like French n'est-ce pas, German nicht wahr, Italian non è vero, Turkish değil mi. In contemporary southern English English it is replacing the insanely complicated standard English construction:
Entered to record the fact that I have just heard someone say 'yard of ales' for what were being consumed last night. To me this is a straightforward, transparent syntactic combination with idiomatic meaning, but that speaker has lexicalized it more closely.
First person singular of the Latin verb meaning "wet, moisten; bathe" and thus "dye, stain". From this come our words 'tinge', 'tincture', 'tint'. So now you know.
If both Germanic and Slavonic inherited it from common Indo-European, Germanic k would correspond to a voiced sound in Slavonic, *g or perhaps *z; as Slavonic has k too it's presumably a borrowing from Germanic. Starostin lists the Germanic and Celtic forms but doesn't mention the Slavonic.
(I mentioned Polish specifically before only because I happened to know that without looking it up.)
Surprisingly perhaps, the "doctor" meaning is the original. It's a widespread Germanic root that's made it as far as Finnish (lääkäri) and Polish (lekarz). By contrast, English only shares the "blood-sucking worm" meaning with Middle Dutch. So either the word for "doctor" was applied to the worm in the pre-Old English period, or they were two separate words that have drifted together. (Anomalous vowels in some of the forms suggest that the "worm" word was originally different.)
Come, faith, madam, let us e'en pardon one another; for all the difference I find betwixt we men and you women, we forswear ourselves at the beginning of an amour, you as long as it lasts.
—Wycherley, The Country Wife, 1675
A nice example showing how old the construction is with case variation in what the CGEL calls 'determinative we' (where the NP 'we men' is headed by the noun 'men', and 'we' is a determinative, not a pronoun). That is, I presume Wycherley would have said *'betwixt us and you', not **'betwixt we and you'; but 'we men' is more of a fixed structure. In Present-day English this is often presumed to be a hypercorrection, but the OED has examples of it from well before Wycherley and prescriptive teaching.
Despite the whimsically modern name, this construction has long been integral to English: I found three examples on the same page of Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), for example.
That's a good one! I hate a man for loving you! If he did love you, 'tis but what he can't help; and 'tis your fault, not his, if he admires you. I hate a man for being of my opinion! I'll ne'er do it, by the world! (subject + VP, twice)
He afraid to lose you, madam! (subject + AP)
(In this earlier stage of English, the nominative was the default case, so 'I', 'he'; in Present-day English we would say 'Me hate' and 'Him afraid'.)
Hum. I've just encountered this word referring to what workers did to a building at the World Trade Center site. I'm tempted to leave it in for its disturbing Baudrillardian quality, but I'm afraid duty requires me to substitute something more prosaic. Dismantling, perhaps.
Disyllabic pronunciation in all meanings: to pronounce common words differently from your neighbours is pedantry and ignorance. The English word is a blend of French and Italian, getting its spelling and pronunciation from Italian but its (primary) meaning from French.
The French for a strong point, in particular the strong point of a sword (as opposed to 'foible', the weak point) is fortfɔR, masculine.
As with numerous English words (locale, morale etc.), once it was borrowed into English it subsequently acquired an extra -e in the belief that this made it look more French.
The assimilation in pronunciation to the Italian-derived musical term forte is surely complete. The OED gives the pronunciations as (fɔːti, fɔːteɪ, formerly fɔːt), and I doubt anyone has said it as a monosyllable for many decades except those who have read someone else claiming that it was one. (I used to be one of those myself, in my ignorance, before I understood how language actually works.)
I have just edited out of some text the spelling forté, a natural next progression in confusing the two source languages.
il faut encore observer que jusqu’aujourd’hui, dans notre continent, cette maladie nous est particulière, comme la controverse.
—Candide ch.4
Interesting for the double apostrophe in its formation. Flicking through web hits it seems there is some doubt in Present-day French about whether this shouldn't be two words jusqu'à aujourd'hui.
Invariably quoted out of context as if Alcuin stated this. What he wrote was: Nec audiendi sunt qui solent docere, 'Vox populi, vox Dei', cum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima est. "Nor are those who are wont to teach 'The voice of the people is the voice of God' to be listened to, for the tumult of the common people is always next to madness."
The sequence of phonograms is usually followed by a semagram, called in the Egyptological custom "determinative," which classifies a word according to its semantic sphere: for example, a sitting man * expresses the lexical realm of "man, mankind" . . .
—Antonio Loprieno, 1995, Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction, Cambridge
* At this point and scattered in the rest of the sentence after I have truncated it are actual hieroglyphics in the text. I am familiar with reading hieroglyphics; I am now ecstatic in owning a book that requires learning the Coptic alphabet to understand it properly. I have simple tastes.
—Peter Porter, 'Men Die, Women Go Mad', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
Not in my Chambers. The meaning seems obvious nevertheless. I am too drunk to pursue the matter further. Note on pronunciation: as Porter is an Australian, this verse would rhyme perfectly for him.
—Peter Porter, 'Too Many Miracles', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
Familiar in Latin, of course, "bank", but I haven't seen it used in English. It's hard to quote sufficient context from a poem while not treading on copyright toes.
The expression is grammatically unusual in that it is not a hyponym of its head: a dwarf planet is not a kind of planet. Most such expressions in English have to do with unreality of some kind (a fake Rembrandt is not a Rembrandt, a pretend dinosaur is not a dinosaur, an attempted coup is not a coup), or are lexically quirky (a Welsh rabbit is not a rabbit), or are named for rough biological resemblance (a sea anemone is not an anemone).
Latinization of Greek for "alms-house, poorhouse" (ptoch- "poor" + troph- "nourish"). I'm listing it because I noticed it in actual use today (in the plural ptochotrophia): on one of the inscriptions on The Monument, commemorating the Great Fire.
Not a variant of 'lechery', but of 'lecherous', to be pedantic. Different suffixes. (Apparently a variant in Northern French, where the k > tʃ change did not take place.) The Romance word is borrowed from a Germanic one, cognate with 'lick'; not related to Latin lux- "extravagance, debauchery".
The researchers studying 2008 TC3 say it was one of a very rare type of meteorite called ureilites, which may have originated from a single parent body.
A rare variant of the adverb 'doubtless'. The BNC goes 100:1 in favour of 'doubtless', though it's a little more common on Google as a whole, whilst still very much a minority form. I'm not aware that I've ever come across it before.
Oh, a perfectly unremarkable and harmless construction as long as it hides in the thickets; but when a writer makes a tic of it, as my present one is, out comes the red pen (and a wisp of steam from the ears).
As a comment on the word itself, it should be pointed out that it has had a great many and various meanings in its history (in English, Latin, French, etc.), numerous of them in biology; and all of those now entirely obsolete except Darwin's. Lack of awareness of this history may lead to strange misinterpretations of the history of biology, or of social science, since the Darwinian meaning is now so completely dominant it is too easy to think it was the one that was meant.
The first meaning in English was a kind of military manoeuvre. Darwin wasn't the first to espouse what we now call evolution in biology, nor the first to use that word for it (Lyell 1832 was), nor does the word appear in The Origin of Species till the 1873 sixth edition, in which he could say, 'At the present day almost all naturalists admit evolution under some form.' (The last word of the first edition, however, is 'evolved'.)
Amsuingly, the quotation after his in the OED is from Popular Science Monthly in 1880: 'I should regard a teacher of science who denied the truth of evolution as being as incompetent as one who doubted the Copernican theory.'
This spelling 'sorcerer' is strongly preferred to 'sorceror' (over 20:1 on raw Google hits), and the -or doesn't occur in BNP and isn't even mentioned in the OED as an alternative (though it does occur in the quotations with a sic against it).
(1) "cut", thus the cut of meat, and 'get the chop' = "be axed, scrapped, killed", and choppy waves.
(2) variant of 'chap' = "jaw", usually in plural chaps, chops, thus chapfallen, and the new "skill" sense I noted below.
(3) "trade, barter" (related to 'cheap', 'chapman', German kaufen "buy", and town names in Chipping), occurring nowadays only in the phrases 'chop and change' and 'chop logic' ("bandy words" but now usually understood as word (1), as if "make fine distinctions")
(4) from a Hindi word for "impression, stamp", giving commercial senses in India and China such as "seal; licence; trade mark", then colloquially "quality", as in 'not much chop' = "not very good"
A new idiom to me: 'shows off its nominal modifier chops'. According to the OED, the general meaning "skill" is a widening of "jazz trumpeter's skill" from "embouchure (in jazz)" from chops "jaws".
the necessity of being was communicated to the son of Lancelot.
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
I don't know what it means; you don't know what it means; and I will bet a silk pyjama Mr Dorky Prat Drooling Williams wasn't paying much attention at that point either. Idiot. Idiot.
'Although there may be other particulars of a public nature, tending to criminate this person, I do not think a larger and more copious catalogue is necessary to be exhibited to this worshipful bench; because the proof of all will lie before a court of superior jurisdiction.'
In the minutes before entering the water, Pugh recalls these emotions and is able to raise his core temperature, without doing any physical exercise, to 38.4°C. That's an extraordinary 1.4°C above his normal body temperature. Such "anticipatory thermogenesis" has been observed before, but not to such a high degree.
Most of the evidence comes from studies of monogamous hetersexual couples who are "serodiscordant" – in other words one person is HIV positive and the other is not.
'I suppose it is one of Nature's positive laws, that even diamond rings, worn a while, cease to raise that glow in a lady's bosom which first possession excited.'
'I think,' said Mrs. Sumelin, 'it is not very polite to compare a lady to a diamond ring.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
We have probably all heard that it was a marketing campaign by De Beers in the early 1900s that made diamonds the ubiquitous engagement gift; so this quotation is a salutary antidote to thinking they must have been little used before then.
'Now I'll tell you a secret. Lady Chestrum and I don't always hit it; she has such odd fancies. Would you believe it? she is every now and then for hearing me my Catechism. I take physic to please her twice a week; and if I have not stools enough, I must have another dose.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
I know even the late eighteenth century is not the time of Jane Austen, but I goggled at this and had to read it repeatedly to convince myself it said what it did. This is a meeting in polite society between a brainless, shiftless aristocrat and a refined, shy young lady he is trying to persuade of his merits as a future husband. And he is discussing the quantity of his stools.
Not content with this mass of amusement, you continue your beneficence to that unfortunate viscus, the stomach, under the name of dessert, till it almost faints under the obligation.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
In theory I knew that 'viscus' was the singular of 'viscera', but I doubt I've ever seen it in use till now.
'If I had broke the cup, madam,' Mr. Sumelin answered, 'it would have been a crime inexpiable but by a new set. This is, I suppose, a regular tax upon husbands; I submit to it; but I really cannot submit to the not being allowed to scald my own fingers.'
'What is there incongruous in this?' his lordship asked.
'Oh nothing, nothing! the congruity will be prodigious. Ages so near; tempers so alike; the lady so willing to make the most of her charms. O yes! you will have a son!'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
One of those words where the derivative is familiar, and if you thought about it you would be sure that where there is an incongruity there must be a congruity in its history, but you have almost certainly never seen it in the wild.
'I think, my dear, I can make his lordship dance the dance of expectation a couple of years at least; and whilst I am mother-expectant, I hope I may be able to dispose of my daughter in an honourable manner.'
So saying, this mother-expectant withdrew in a most matronly manner to her own dressing-room.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
The surprising thing is that 'expectant' here is not used in the way you would usually associate with 'mother'; though Bage, in 1796, has no difficulty talking about sex and pregnancy in a way that would be impossible for Jane Austen a short few years later. Rather, the arch young lady saying this to her friend of the same age is discussing her plot to ensnare the friend's tyrannical father in order to help her: she has no intention of actually becoming his wife (and therefore her friend's mother), but wants to keep him in expectation.
While brassica as such only entered English in 1832, I discover to my surprise that a work of about 1420 used it in the form brassik. At that time presumably it could only have meant "cabbage" because none of the other forms existed.
The OED has it from the 1940s, and just says etym. unkn. It's probably services slang, as are coeval 'brassed off' and slightly earlier 'browned off', neither of which has any known explanation either.
'I must advertise you, my dear, that my father is rather irritable.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
This is OED sense 4. d., transitive with subordinate clause; not marked by them as obsolete, and they have an example from 1850, but as this word begins Ad- it probably hasn't been revised since 1889.
Hermsprong, by the way, is a delight: a satirical, didactic novel echoing Voltaire and prefiguring Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock. And I'd never heard of the author before!
Here's another example ibidem of a similar construction with recipient object:
In passing out they were met by Mr. Hermsprong, accompanied by the man-servant of the family, a man of a respectable appearance, who, on seeing the arrest of his master, had run of his own accord to a neighbouring village, to advertise a friend of Mr. Wigley's of this unhappy business.
I can't think of any other former suppletive verbs, even in Old English; but in Present-day English you might choose to include 'must', which for past tense has to switch to 'had to'.
"Now this legislation moves to the Senate, and I look forward to receiving a final product that will serve as a strong signal to the executives who run these firms that such compensation will not be tolerated," Mr Obama said.
Use of this word to mean "pay (to bloated, thieving, port-faced capitalists)" makes me shake with fury. However, it goes back a couple of hundred years in US usage so is not a modern euphemism.
Well, it's a major news story, and any educated person would be looking at it: from a linguistic point of view it has all these hooks too. I thought the other two words were possibilities, and contemplated noding under both of them, but they both seemed a bit ad-hoc. The genus name Tianyulong I eventually plumped for is permanent, but genus names aren't really English words.
I can't see how the two main senses could be confused. The sense "now, at present" normally occurs with a continuous or atelic verb construction, as in 'I am presently reading that book' or 'Elizabeth is presently to be found disporting in the otter-strewn thoroughfares of Hammersmith'; whereas the sense "in a wee while" goes with telic constructions such as 'I'll be with you presently' or 'The gate was opened, and presently entered two horsemen.' I suspect it would be hard to construct a natural and ambiguous sentence.
I used to think the "at present" sense came from a blending of 'at present' with 'currently' of same meaning, but no, it's got a pedigree that goes back to Chaucer. It was just disapproved of for a while.
Hmm. Something like 60% of English may be based on Latin, but something like 30% of this list is Greek. To quote a character in Stoppard's The Invention of Love, 'Latin and Greek are two entirely separate languages spoken by distinct peoples living in different parts of the ancient world.' If some of the Greek words happened to pass through Latin on their way to us, probably quite as many actually came to us from French.
Heavens! The OED lists twelve different nouns and seven verbs, and add to the pot three nouns and four verbs 'wrack', and who knows how many instances that began life as 'rake' or 'reck', and no wonder we're confused. Ignoring obsolete and spurious senses, and ones I plain haven't heard of, we have:
n. (2) a moving mass of cloud;
(3) a stretching frame for cloth, and thus for torture;
(4) a vertical framework for holding things (fodder, hats, guns, clothes, cards, etc. etc.); and thus a bar engaging with a pinion; thus also the bosoms;
(4) put in a rack n. (4); esp. of pool balls; rack up "accumulate".
In answer to the question I was asking myself that led to this research: yes, rack and ruin should really be wrack and ruin, sense n. (9) being originally 'wrack'.
Another disfavoured construction is 'on the behalf of'. The initial half million hits on Google looks numerous (to the dubious extent that numbers mean anything on Google any more), but there are a hundred million for 'on behalf of'. Likewise, BNC has 4 against 2717. So while it's probably not to be considered entirely ungrammatical, it's not standard.
A new genus of dinosaur discovered in China, named after the Tianyu museum + lóng "dragon". The single species so far is biologically notable for its protofeathers or dino-fuzz; and linguistically for its malformed species name Tianyulong confuciusi. Under ICZN Article 31.1.1, Latinizations should be treated with Latin grammar, so the genitive of Confucius is confucii. (A modern name such as Sibelius would however be given the Latinization sibeliusi under 31.1.1.) Unfortunately, Article 32.5.1 prevents the original spelling from being changed: incorrect Latinization is not a sufficient error.
Well I won't be getting any of my words from that Medical 'Dictionary'. Pronunciation wrong, meaning wrong. The pronunciation would be ˈpiːdʒərɪzm (or pē′jər-izm, to guess at their system): no English-speaker would put a full vowel in the unstressed second syllable. And it's not common-or-garden pessimism (L. pessim- "worst"), it's pejorism (L. pejor- "worse"), the belief that the world is getting worse.
The variant 'intransigeant' looks like a misspelling of the usual 'intransigent', but actually comes directly from the French and some of the earliest uses in English used this spelling.
To the first array of my clumperton antagonists this I answer — that my stile is no otherwise puft up, then any mans should be which writes with any spirite; and whom would not such a devine subject put a high ravishte spirite into?
—Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the diuell, 1592
—Lawrence Durrell, 'On First Looking into Loeb's Horace'
Lots of ghits for proper names, but none I can see for a common noun; also not in OED, so I suspect a nonce-coinage of Durrell's. (But what would the places be named for?)
Three or four distinct roots. (1) The senses "noise" and "make noise" are from French (Latin son-) with excrescent-d appearing in English in the 1400s. (2) The adjective "healthy" is Germanic. (3) So is the noun "strait, channel", related to 'swim' (sumd- assimilating to sund-). (4) The sense "plumb to ascertain depth" is from French but is probably ultimately taken from the previous water sense. The idiom 'sound someone out' comes from this, not from the use of voice.
Squill are flowering in Bunhill Fields. With the aid of image search I have finally identified those blue jobs. From Latin squilla, variant of usual (and Linnean) scilla, from Greek. I wonder why the variation? Could it be a late reborrowing, from the time when ci and qui had begun to change their sounds?
'New to the dictionary' refers to the adjective, which is only attested from Caxton:
1481 CAXTON tr. Hist. Reynard Fox (1970) 69 Whan a man doth amys And thenne by counseyl amendeth it That is humaynly Du. menschelic And so ought he to doo.
Also used as a modifier, meaning "very big". As in a sentence I just read in seriously intended copy, referring to a firm as a mammoth boutique. The richness of the Web is illustrated by the fact that several of those randomized spam sites, whatever they are (I have no intention of clicking) contain this very phrase in most curious contexts:
society enrichmentm eeting invitations after applicant of the phony ugly fire succumbing inside me, soothing into the mammoth boutique between my legs.
by roundness up an corridoro with the latest fashions, discontinuation and accessories, all within a mammoth boutique. Read out ringworm genre remedies.
A surprisingly widespread idiom, with a surprisingly diverse range of meanings. In German, for example, Ich gab ihr einen Fisch means "I gave her a slap upside the head"; whereas in French donner un poisson à quelqu'un is a literary expression meaning "give someone the hump", replaced in modern slang by donner un petit chameau. In Bizkaian Basque, arraina eman is "shudder", though in Navarre it's "wriggle out of a painful obligation". In Malay, saya mau memberi ikan-ikan kepadanya is accompanied by a sinuous gesture of both hands, and must never be uttered in the joint presence of a husband and wife, for fear of drawn-out and sanguinary revenge.
The distinction between 'dis-' and plural '-s' is that the former is derivational, the latter inflectional. The non-existence of a free noun *'scissor' doesn't mean that the bound base 'scissor' can't be used in various ways: by conversion it can be used as a verb; it can take plural endings to become a free noun; and it can be used as a noun in attributive function ('scissor parts').
It's a bit difficult to see because in English bases almost always have free existence: unlike in Latin or Greek where there's no such thing as simply the 'word for' X, but rather a bound base with obligatory complex inflexion.
It appears from such an example as that in § 40 (c) that E. distich is co-radicate with (i. e. from the same root as) E. stair. The former is a borrowed word, from the weak grade, and the latter a native word, from the second grade of the same root *steig-. A similar relationship usually holds even in cases where the root does not appear as a known verb; and we may go so far as to consider words as co-radicate, provided that the consonants of the root are the same (such as st . g) and the vowels are regularly related by gradation.
—W. W. Skeat, 1905, A Primer of Classical and English Philology
shuttles like random dust desert whirlwinds hoy at their tormenting sun?
—Basil Bunting, Briggflatts
In the endnotes Bunting glosses this "toss, hurl". Immediately before these lines comes the word 'skerry', which he glosses "O, come on, you know that one."
From Latin cognitum "known", then proceeding via senses such as "knowing, clever" to "cleverly made, ingenious" to "of interesting or curious make" to its present meaning with the sense of old-fashionedness. Not related at all to 'cunt', but used as a pun by mediaeval writers that way.
For the record, not related to 'quaint': that was a pun by mediaeval writers. Nor, pace Catherine Blackledge quoted below, could any etymologist connect it with the Romance 'country'. The word is in fact of completely unknown etymology, its only known relation being Norse kunta.
It cannot be related to Latin cunnus of same meaning, as in 'cunnilingus', since that violates Grimm's Law: Latin k would match Germanic h, whereas Germanic k would match Latin g. If it was an early borrowing from Latin into Germanic, so that Grimm's Law didn't have to apply, where would the t come from?
It is possible, as an idle speculation, that it's related to the Indo-European "woman" word (queen, Venus, gyne-) or to the "know" word (know, kin, kind, king, cunning), but not both. There is no evidence for any such connexion except resemblance, probably just chance resemblance.
I was cruising for Julie Myerson, as one does, when I noticed this, and did a double-take when I realized that what I'd first read as 'asyndeton', a device I approve of, was in fact an entirely new word to me. And Julie does everything well, so she does polysyndeton well too.
On pronunciation: the eszet is always pronounced s, never z as a single <s> would be in *Scheise.
On spelling: why is the eszet retained? I thought after the recent reform its sole function was to indicate a preceding long vowel; and this is unnecessary after diphthongs, which have no length distinction. But I don't know much about the reform.
The original word for "coffee" from which virtually all others are derived. The phonetic change of hw to f is reasonable, but not the converse, making very implausible phonetically the legend that this word is related to the (former) province of Kaffa in Ethiopia, where it is said to have been first discovered.
The etymology of this seems very straightforward: Greek skiourous from ski- "shadow" + ouros "tail". Yet Starostin's etymological database evidently regards the second element not as "tail" but as the zero grade of an Indo-European *(o)wer-, name of some kind of weasel-like animal, as found reduplicated in Latin viverra, and also in German Eichhörnchen "squirrel". That latter looks like a simple Eiche "oak" + Horn "horn" + diminutive, but the second part is known to be from the *wer- root with subsequent superficial assimilation to horn.
In wish there was some indication of how much of Starostin is well-agreed and how much is his own speculation.
I don't think so. This is not a Latvian-looking word, even as a borrowing; the Latvian for "coffee" turns out to be kafija; and even as a possible brand name, there are no ghits for Cafeum site:lv.
There are very few known uses for W*k*p*d**, but looking up kafija immediately gives us a large number of other words for it in the language panel by the side.
Actually golchi is the basic word "wash (e.g. clothes") and ym- is a reciprocal or middle voice prefix. It causes soft mutation, so golchi becomes -olchi in ymolchi "wash oneself, bathe".
The sense "groom" (verb) ultimately comes from Late Latin *con-red- "make ready", with a root borrowed from Germanic.
(This is cognate with Spanish correios "couriers, post", familiar from stamps—and unrelated to 'courier'. The root also gives 'read' via a sense "advise", cf. German Rat. Its borrowing into Romance also occurs in 'array'.)
The 'favour' in the idiom is a mediaeval eggcorn: it comes from 'curry Favel', a fallow horse, proverbial for being deceitful.
A rare word in Greek, Latin, and English, with an interesting succession of senses, largely gained by misapprehension. The Greek meaning comes from mamm- "grandmother" and thrept- "reared, fed", past participle of treph- "rear, produce, maintain, feed, suckle, etc.". (The change of aspiration is the effect of Grassmann's Law, and the reason I looked this up: I didn't recognize threp-.)
This obscure Greek word somehow came to the attention of St Augustine of Hippo, which is 'surprising', says the OED, because he didn't know Greek. In any case, the mamma word means "breast" in Latin, rather than "grandmother", so he used it to mean "reared (sc. too long) at the breast".
Ben Jonson used it in English as "immature person", i.e. a spoilt child, in a figurative sense. 'But very well? O you are a meere Mammothrept in iudgement.'
Another author, Braithwait, used it shortly after this in the expressions 'strict Mamothrept' and 'severe mammothrepts', as if misunderstanding Jonson and taking it as "critic".
Related etymologically to 'brooch', 'broccoli', and 'broker'. The Latin root is brocc- "spike, piercing instrument". Huh, I always imagined 'broach' was just an ablaut variant of 'break': to broach a cask is to break into it. But no, broaching is open with an instrument called a broach; a brooch is an ornament fastened by a broach; a broker was originally one who broached, a tapster, then any retailer or dealer; and broccoli is named for its little spikes or shoots.
Delictum "offence, transgression" is from the past participle of delinquere "transgress", so is related to 'delinquent'. And, if it comes to that, to 'leave' and 'eleven'.
Basque for "stranger": ez "not" + ezagun "acquaintance" (c.w. ezagutu "know, recognize"). I just liked the appearance of this word, so I thought I'd share.
The Basque flag; with the article attached this is ikurrina, and between i and another vowel the n is palatal. As this is automatic, there is no need to spell it ikurriña.
One of the Welsh words for "butterfly". (Another is the daintily sound-symbolic pilipala.) Glöyn "coal, ember" (singulative from glo "coal") + byw adj. "living", v. "live".
—in text I'm editing. This shows that the writer has treated 'market' as an adjective, since the bare noun is not possible in that position. Presumably influenced by both the noun-noun expression 'market salary' and adjectives such as 'market-driven', 'market-competitive', etc. But these compounds are the only ghits I see for "salaries are market", so I'm going to treat it as a nonce-formation and edit it out.
Unlikely to be an eggcorn: people didn't reinterpret the unfamiliar 'brand' as familiar 'bran', I'd suggest, since 'bran new' makes no sense. Rather this is phonetic: the /d/ disappeared just as the medial /t/ in 'last night' or 'postman' does.
An unusual pronunciation seems to have arisen in Britain: tʃəˈrɪtsəʊ, as if influenced by 'pizza'. (But why the short i?) I've heard it often enough now that I can say this is the usual pronunciation, at least in my bit of London. The Spanish would normally give tʃəˈriːθəʊ in English, which is how I say it, or at least tʃəˈriːzəʊ or tʃəˈriːsəʊ.
And in fact the water would have to be a cuboidal volume sufficient to contain a hemisphere of Saturn, and that's got some gravity of its own (that's an emphatic 'some' . . . I wonder how you punctuate that?); not to mention the rigid material for the bath.
On *scissor, *underpant, *hijink—sorry, I only saw this yesterday—I've had a look through a couple of books and the closest I can find is the CGEL term bound base. They distinguish bases from affixes, so 'lighthouses' contains bases 'light' and 'house', and 'disperse' and 'discombobulate' contain bound bases, ones that can't exist as words once the affix 'dis' is removed. Some pluralia tantum bound bases have some marginal independent (or loosely-bound) existence in attributive constructions, as in 'trouser leg', 'scissor blade'.
I would have though the common pronunciation is indistinguishable between 'of' and 'have': əv is the normal unstressed form of both words. 'Have' has an alternative, less common unstressed form həv, particularly in England, but this sounds very unnatural to me after another modal like this.
The test is in those situations where modals assume their full forms, that is finally with the rest of the verb phrase omitted: 'They said I won't make it, but I will'; 'You think I can't win, but I can', etc. Problem is, 'shouldəv' is usually repeated as a whole: 'You shouldn't have done that, I should've.' So this wouldn't usually tease out whether the word was an underlying 'of' or 'have'. That said, I have sometimes heard people use a full-form 'of' here.
I'm trying to work out how you would articulate 'iced tea' and 'ice tea' differently. The extra t wouldn't affect the aspiration of the following t. It might possibly make the preceding vowel fractionally shorter, but I doubt the effect would be noticeable. All I can think of is a delay between the end of the friction of s and the release of the second t. (Separate release of the two t's is wholly unnatural.) But this delay would only be audible in slow, careful speech anyway.
Notable for the original Indo-European word having been preserved (mutatis mutandis) in virtually every descendant; the only exception I can find is Albanian (m. ri, f. re).
The article sounds like almost complete nonsense to me, and there are obvious mistakes in it, but what I think they're claiming is that concepts that happen to have changed to different words historically in IE are in fact intrinsically likely to change at about that rate. And they've calibrated it on the Swadesh 200 list. So the fact that all* IE languages preserve reflexes of the same word 'new' means we can predict that all Semitic languages will have a common word for "new" too, and pretty much all Austronesian languages will have kept theirs . . .
* Oh, except Albanian.
I keep refreshing Language Log, waiting for their hatchet job on this.
Not literally "build a nest", which it's never meant in English, but that seems to be the origin in French: a verb "nest", from an unattested Latin *nid-ic-. The earliest meaning of the noun in both French and English was its current one, "recess (for a statue)", derived in French from the verb. (The noun is from the verb because the -ch- reflects the verbalizing suffix -ic-.)
Both modern pronunciations of the vowel seem to have been present in the earliest use in English: 1600s spellings include neece, niece, niech, neech, nice as well as nitch, nich. By the 1800s only the nɪtʃnitch one seems to have survived, with French-like niːʃ rearising in the 20th century, and now predominating in BrE.
This word is an example of a noun that has converted to an adjective (they're surprisingly rare), at least for many speakers: you can hear and see 'It's very niche' or 'rather niche', referring to something in a niche market. The ability to be modified by degree adverbials is a clear sign of adjective status.
Antefluence is fine. I'm just finicky: I don't mind people madeupicking them, but if they appear to be Latin or Greek I like to see them properly done (and to have meanings of parts correctly explained, while we're at it); and I'm thinking of the puir wee kiddies who might take it for some venerable, battered word handed down from dictionary to dictionary and think it will impress others at the bar to bring it out in casual conversation, only to find their triumph ruined when some even more boring person challenges it and demands the pub dictionary.
How the modern senses are connected: the original meaning in Old English was "manger, specifically that in which Jesus was laid". This developed various senses of small containers, small buildings, and frameworks, including in the 1600s "child's cot". Perhaps from a sense of "basket" or "bag" came a thieves' cant verb "bag i.e. steal", which in the 1800s gave "petty theft" and in particular "translation illicitly used to help pupils" (and 1900s 'crib sheet', a similar set of notes not specifically relating to translation).
The relationship to the crib in cribbage is unclear.
What got me interested in this is finding that 'creche' is cognate. After the Second Germanic Consonant Shift, common Germanic *krib- gives Old High German krip-, taken into Romance, and passing from South French crépia, crepcha, giving North French crèche.
Made-up word, and ill-made. The verb stem "flow" is flu-, which gives (1) the noun flux- "flow" and (2) the participle fluent- "flowing" (-ent-, not -ant-, because flu- is second declension). (2) does not come from (1). From the participle ending -ent- comes the Latin abstract noun ending -entia. This, in French, not Latin, became -ence (as in influence etc.).
The English word Lent is from earlier 'lenten'. ('Lenten' is not, as it might now appear from its rare present-day use, an -en adjective formed from 'lent'.) The ecclesiastical meaning is peculiar to English; in related languages it just means "spring" (German Lenz).
Middle English 'lenten' is from Old English lencten, apparently from "long" + either some suffix or perhaps a word for "day". The time of days lengthening?
Although 'shrove' is indeed the preterite of 'shrive', it is morphologically impossible for this element 'Shrove' to be that verb form. A preterite can't compound with nouns like that. The OED just calls it obscure. The only speculation it can offer is that Old English might hypothetically have had a related noun that would give Middle English 'shrove', but it is very surprising then that no trace of it is found till the first mention of Shrovetide in the 1400s.
Nous riions tellement que, quand Elsa me frappa sur l'épaule et que je vis son air de Cassandre, je fus sur le point de l'envoyer au diable.
—Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
Interesting spelling: I didn't know you could get a double <ii> in native French words. (I don't know if this imperfect "we were laughing" would actually be pronounced any differently from the present tense nous rions "we laugh".)
I thought about 'status quo before the credit crunch', but that rather implies a contrast with the current status quo, which is another tautology. 'Previous status quo' sort of makes sense, and has a few ghits, so 'status quo' doesn't perhaps absolutely imply the present situation.
Today I encountered a dilemma with this: some Swede with good English had written about the 'status quo ante the credit crunch', or some such, trying to use the Latin preposition ante with an English complement. But my intuition was that the English expression 'status quo ante' doesn't work as if it contains a preposition: we say only 'restore the status quo ante', etc. A bit of Web searching confirmed that if we want to say what it was before, we have to be explicit in English: in the end I changed it to 'the status quo ante before the credit crunch'.
Saturn is the only planet in our solar system that is less dense than water. If you could build an imaginary gigantic bathtub, Saturn would float in it.
—National Geographic, trying to palm it off on NASA. No, if you built an imaginary bath, the water would still all fall through. You need to imagine building a real gigantic bath for this one.
I should have rathered a blue gown, or a violet one; but Gentleman said it was the perfect dress for a sneak or for a servant
—Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
I'd never seen this verbal use before, and assumed Waters had researched authentic Victorian colloquialism. However, web search shows it quite common today too, with much the same argument structures as 'prefer'.
A most interesting and rather obscure etymology. Arabic dhu l-qarnayn "master of the two horns", referring to the horns of a dilemma, but for some reason also an epithet of Alexander the Great.
Dhu "master of" cannot occur on its own, only in the construct state with a following noun. The stem qarn- is often believed to be an ancient borrowing from Indo-European into Semitic; the -ayn is the genitive dual ending.
I have just encountered this word in text I'm proofing, and it struck me I've never seen it. Raw Google hits are large enough, but they tend to be dominated by dictionary definitions, a quote from Frankenstein, and some learned-looking titles. That is, despite its ordinary-looking formation, it just ain't plain English.
The only English animal name with zero plural that isn't some kind of hunt animal; also the only one that simply can't take a regular plural. (As always, this universals are subject to the fate of all linguistic universals, to be violated by hitherto unnoticed examples.)
Talvivaara's key technology is bioheapleaching, which is utilized to extract metals from the ore. The technology enables cost effective and environmentally friendly exploitation of the resource using locally occurring bacteria.
This is actually the inessive case of the word: "in the ocean/sea". The nominative is meri. But it is beautiful. Practically anything in the inessive is: ravintolassa "in the restaurant", metsässä "in the wood(s)".
The elder Geoffroy and Goethe propounded, at about the same period, their law of compensation or balancement of growth; or, as Goethe expressed it, 'in order to spend on one side, nature is forced to economise on the other side.'
You are the door in the rock that finally swings free when moonlight shines on it. You are the door at the top of the stairs that only appears in dreams. You are the door that sets the prisoner free. You are the carved low door into the Chapel of the Grail. You are the door at the edge of the world. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.
—Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
Sometimes I have doubts about Winterson. Sometimes I have none.
Finnish is such a beautiful language, you could make huge lists of kauniit sanat (if I may correct the list title): my own favourites would have to include valokuva, elokuva, utukuva, sanakirja, joulukuu, maailmavalta, and of course lumikello.
In Germany, a bond covered by a loan; the original of the covered bonds issued by some other countries. The word is used untranslated in English, with plural Pfandbriefe.
From Pfand "pledge, pawn, security" + Brief "letter", or in a few combinations "certificate".
Alteration of 'home in', originally referring to pigeons, then to missiles; 'hone in on' is now commoner than 'home in on' in AmE, though less common in BrE.
The reason for the reading of the bill is that Parliament is opened by the Monarch seated in full state in the House of Lords. The Usher of the Black Rod is sent to the House of Commons to desire the members to attend the royal speech. The Commons duly, dutifully troop in, hear their monarch opening Parliament, and then return to their own chamber.
They then introduce some House of Commons business: the reading of a bill for preventing clandestine outlawries. It is never proceeded with further; but having shown their independence by attending to their own concerns, only then do the Commons debate in reply to the royal speech.
Where your mother is married to a man who thinks he is your father but who isn't; not to be confused with illegitimacy, where your mother isn't married to anyone.
A disparaging name for an ethnic group (Gk phaul- "cheap, light, mean"). Term invented by A. A. Roback.
Mencken used the extraordinary term 'achthronym' for the same meaning; a subsequent (1963) edition combined the two in this extraordinary sentence:
The English have fewer strangers within their gates, and hence their native armamentarium is smaller, and not a few of the achthronyms (or ethnophaulisms) they use come from the United States.
'Achthronym' seems to be both non-existent apart from this use of Mencken's, and unetymologizable. There is no Greek achthr- in Liddell & Scott; the nearest is achth- "burden", possibly intended figuratively; nor is there a chthr- for it to be the privative of.
It seems to be just a sporadic variant. Google shows 'unlearn' much more common with verb forms such as 'runned', 'eated' (where a child learns an irregular past first, then learns the rule and temporarily unlearns the correct form).
A construction consisting of a subject and a tenseless predicate, both topicalized, pragmatically used as an incredulous echo. The name (apparently coined by Adrian Akmajian) refers to the canonical example used as a catchphrase by Mad's Alfred E. Neuman: 'What—me worry?'. This has subject 'me', predicate the verb phrase 'worry'. (Since the construction lacks tense, the subject can't be assigned nominative case, so it takes the default case, which in English is accusative.)
Other examples, with context to show the echo pragmatics:
A: I heard John's a doctor now.
B: John a doctor, you must be kidding! (subject + NP)
Vainikka assumes that nonfinite verbs assign genitive case to their subjects: but this raises the (unanswered) question of how children come to acquire this type of case marking (since e.g. infinitives don't allow genitive subjects in adult English), and how they later come to delearn it.
In rude and barbarous periods of English history choice animals were often imported, and laws were passed to prevent their exportation: the destruction of horses under a certain size was ordered, and this may be compared to the "roguing" of plants by nurserymen.
—Origin of Species, ch. 1
Explained in an earlier passage:
When a race of plants is once pretty well established, the seed-raisers do not pick out the best plants, but merely go over their seed-beds, and pull up the "rogues," as they call the plants that deviate from the proper standard.
There can be no doubt that a race may be modified by occasional crosses, if aided by the careful selection of those individual mongrels, which present any desired character; but that a race could be obtained nearly intermediate between two extremely different races or species, I can hardly believe. Sir J. Sebright expressly experimentised for this object, and failed.
The turbit has a short and conical beak, with a line of reversed feathers down the breast; and it has the habit of continually expanding, slightly, the upper part of the oesophagus.
—Origin of Species, ch. 1
A kind of pigeon. Possibly from L turbo "(spinning) top", which possibly also gave 'turbot' the fish.
In case of misapprehension, the Italian and Slovene aren't particularly closely related, but are simply the reflexes of common Indo-European *okw-, which is preserved in almost every daughter: Slavonic *óko; Latin oculus; Greek dual ósse < *ókwje and other derivatives such as ophthalmós; Germanic augan (> OE ēage > MnE eye); Tocharian A ak; Armenian akn; Lithuanian akìs; Sanskrit a�?kṣi.
Latvian for "and", a borrowing from German und, introduced by Bible translators. The old native form is, as in Lithuanian, ir. The only instance I can think of where "and" has been borrowed.
The terse etymology below hardly explains it. The literal sense in Latin was "conquer, overcome", and it was also used in a transferred sense "prevail, succeed" in doing something, in particular "prevail in an argument, demonstrate". English in the 17th century used the word in various senses like this, but these dropped out of use in favour of the weaker modern sense "be evidence of (not necessarily conclusively)".
The Greek eléphant- means "ivory" in Homer and other early writers, "elephant" in Herodotus. It has no identifiable earlier history. The resemblance to Hebrew eleph "ox" might be more than coincidental, but if it's a North-West Semitic compound, it's unclear what the second element might have been.
In the original meanings of these two words, 'homogenous' (stress on -mog-) meant "coming from the same source", and 'homogeneous' (stress -gen-, with extra syllable as in 'genius') meant "composed of similar parts". The OED (Second edition, not recently revised) comments that 'The spelling homogenous is less common than the pronunc. (hə'mɒdɪnəs), which perh. owes its currency partly to the influence of the vb. homogenize and its derivs.', and then gives a large number of examples.
If you look at Google (e.g. for "homogenous mixture") you can see clearly that the two words are not clearly distinguished in Present-day English. The two spellings at least seem equally common (and the "mixture" meaning is far more common and familiar than the "same origin" one, I think), so presumably the two pronunciations co-exist in this meaning.
This morning's discovery: you can say 'in the capacity as'. Or at least USAans can: it has comparable numbers to the more common 'in the capacity of'. I'd never seen this construction before.
The extant mammals divide into monotremes and Theria. The monotremes are the platypus and echidnas, the Theria are the rest and divide into marsupials and Eutheria, which latter is all of us (aardvarks, horses, bats, humans etc.). The terminology can be multiplied but the important thing is the bifurcating tree: monotremes plus the rest, and the rest are marsupials plus the rest, the eutherians.
The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow.
As I went home from work I remembered the Noël Coward song 'Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans', so evidently I was wrong about this being a less formal variant, as his usage sounds old-fashioned. Well, now that I'm home, I can look up CGEL.
* looks up * Okay, it's just says 'don't let's' is a little more informal. Moreover, the first person lacks any scope difference between the two, whereas in a second person imperative there's a clear difference in meaning between:
Don't let us go with you. (= forbid us to)
Let us not go with you. (= allow us to refrain)
And yes, idioms such as 'let me see', and 'let me get this straight' suggest it's the 'let' that's the imperative.
Quirk of grammar 1: The only first person imperative verb form in English. As it can be made two words, 'let us', in very careful speech (e.g. sermons, oratory), it may be that it should be analysed as a contraction of 'let us', where 'let' is the first person imperative verb. Clearly distinct from the second person imperative (e.g. 'Let us go' addressed to a kidnapper) because that can't be contracted.
Quirk 2: The only trace of an inclusive/exclusive distinction in English, since it's only used as first person inclusive.
Quirk 3: It straddles the border between lexical and functional verbs, since its negative can be made in two ways: with do-support like a lexical verb ('Don't let's go'), or without it ('Let's not go').
Quirk 3 note 1: Not everyone has both options: the do-support option sounds considerably less formal to me, and may well be ungrammatical for some people. (Whereas in the second person imperative it's the only possibility: 'Don't let us go until you get the ransom.')
Quirk 3 note 2: As the 'let's not' form can't be contracted (*let'sn't, *letn't's), it's not like a true auxiliary (these have negative forms such as 'mustn't', 'won't'). Rather, the negation may actually be of the catenative complement clause, i.e. in 'Let's not go', it might be that 'not go' is the clause attached under the imperative 'let's'.
Although imperative and indicative entrez are identical in form, the difference is tentatively established by several verbs that do have different forms, such as soyez ~ êtes. The imperative and indicative are usually the same in the singular too, though written differently: entres ~ entre.
Alternatively, we could treat preposed vous as the affix it in fact is, and say the imperative is unprefixed ɑ~tre whereas the indicative is prefixed vuzɑ~tre.
1593 G. HARVEY New Letter Ciij, Some that haue perused eloquent bookes, and researched most curious writinges.
Also quotations from Sir Henry Wotton (ante 1639), Walton (1665), Horace Walpole (1781, conscious of it as a noticeable usage), Southey (1801), Moore (1811), etc. etc.
And the OED's current revisions haven't quite reached RES- yet, so there's a good chance of antedates when they do. The corresponding verb exists in French, Italian, and Mediaeval Latin: it's not a conversion from the noun in English.
In the obviously apocryphal story quoted below, the term 'trilled r' probably only means 'pronounced r', i.e. the normal Irish pronunciation ˈlarkɪn as against the England/Australia pronunciation ˈlaːkɪn. But could it have been a true trill or roll? Irish English is known to have had this value in the late eighteenth century; perhaps some 'broad' speakers still retained it in the 1860s.
The inserted vowel between the /rk/ is again likely to be an exaggeration by the hearer reporting it, since in their accent /r/ couldn't occur without a following vowel. It's true that Irish Gaelic and Irish English do insert ə between certain consonants, as in the names 'Colm', 'Fir Bolg' and the word 'film', but I don't know that /rk/ would do that, especially as it can be syllabified /lar.kɪn/.
In linguistics however, anaphora is indexing between two elements in a sentence, normally a noun phrase and a coreferential pronoun. For example, 'John saw himself in the mirror', 'John hit the mirror and smashed it'. Here 'John' is co-indexed with the anaphor 'himself', and 'mirror' with the anaphor 'it'.
In the Chomskyan tradition the term 'anaphor' is restricted to the former (reflexives and reciprocals), and the latter kind are contrastively called 'pronouns'. In wider linguistic circles I think they are all called anaphors.
Usually coreferential; but note that the antecedent can be something lacking reference, e.g. 'Luckily nobody lost their life': 'their' is anaphoric to its non-referential antecedent 'nobody'.
The hypothesis of Achaemenid "alloglottography" (Gershevitch 1979) holds that Achaemenid Elamite was a medium for transmitting texts that were conceived and dictated in Old Iranian languages, to be read out and understood as Old Iranian texts . . .
— Matthew Stolper, 'Elamite', in Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the World's Ancient Languages
ref. is to: Gershevitch, Ilya, 1979, 'The alloglottography of Old Persian', Trans. Phil. Soc. London
It's good, isn't it? It's so rare that Google doesn't know it's a noun, so doesn't also offer up hits for grammaticalizationists. There are more of them and they illustrate its meaning a bit better. Do I detect some suppressed hostility in many of the uses?
For solid information, research grammaticalization—an increasingly prominent topic in recent linguistics.
Possible ancient folk etymology. In Latin and some Greek dialects from which Latin borrowed it, the word had a long O (ω or ου), not the short o of polu- "many"; and it inflected as a normal second declension noun in -ος, thus plural polypi, as if not a compound of pod- "foot". So it's possible it's a borrowing into Greek which has been altered to fit the folk etymology "many-foot". But if so, this happened as early as Mycenean, which shows -pod- inflection.
Related to bio-, zo- "life" and thus to English quick, Latin viv-, vit-. The labiovelar *gw usually became b but in *su-gwih3- "well-life" the adjacent u delabialized it to g instead. (And zo- is apparently a different dialectal development, *gwj > *gj > *dz > zd. I didn't know that either.)
move towards a basilect and thus less like the standard of the lexifier language: in (one theory of) the development of creoles from non-standard lects
Not a back-formation. Though the noun 'opinion' is much older in both English and French than the verb 'opine', the verb does come from a Classical Latin verb.
adj. (rare) Relating to ergative constructions. In particular (where I found it): of transitive verbs with an actual patient; Hurrian for example distinguishes ergatival and non-ergatival verb morphology.
That made his lordship laugh, but he told her that he could not permit her to be everlastingly maudling her inside with such stuff as ratafia, and bade her drink it up like a good girl.
'Well, I won't have you jauntering about with her any more!' said Sherry, in a very imperious style. 'Mind that!'
—Georgette Heyer, Friday's Child
Not in OED (in any sense), but there are ghits and Google Books hits showing it going back some time; as a verb, usually construed with 'about'. I can't tell if it's from a particular regional dialect. Also occurs as a noun, synonym of 'jaunt'. Also of course an agent noun formed from 'jaunt'.
A former banker whose exposé Invisible Citi led to his disappearance. He was found years later embedded in the Millennium Footbridge in London, giving it a peculiar wobble.
Yes, they're tone numbers (1 = level, 2 = rising, 3 = fall-rise, 4 = falling). However, according to this dictionary it seems it should actually be tiao2kan3 "ridicule, tease" from tiao2 "incite, provoke" and kan3 "bold" . . . unless there's some tonal sandhi going on that's beyond my small knowledge of Chinese.
Edited: Tone 3 is fall-rise, of course, not rise-fall.
A newly-discovered preposition, at least in Australian English. The sentence Geoffrey Pullum found it in is: 'On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.'
But do you say 'stridden'? I don't. Nor do Deirdre Wilson, Geoff Pullum, and a number of other linguists. It's just not a natural part of standard Present-day English. Details at Language Log.
Quirk of grammar: this enters into a construction where it can't (standardly) be inflected—no 'tried', 'trying', not even third person singular 'tries', just plain 'try'.
I try and jog every day.
They try and jog every day.
I intend to try and jog every day.
but:
*She/he tries and jog(s?) every day.
*I tried and jog(ged?) yesterday.
*I insist on trying and jog(ging?).
I have in fact read and heard attempts at using it in an inflected situation, but they're clearly non-standard. Oddly, it's only 'try and' that suffers from this foible: both 'try to' and 'go and' behave fine. 'Go and' is the more relevant because the 'and' makes the two verbs inflect the same way: 'I went and jogged yesterday', 'I insist on going and jogging'.
I should change the example. I've never jogged in my life; I've never even tried.
Quirk of grammar: this behaves differently from its uncontracted origin 'there is' in that it freely accepts a plural co-subject*. So 'There's three men in the garden' is grammatical, whereas it's not with 'There is'.
* I'm at work so can't check what the proper name for this item is: the 'three men' in my example. The subject is the noun 'there' (sic - it's a noun, a pronoun to be precise). The other is co-subject, associated subject, extrapolated subject?
Quirk of grammar: the verb lacks a standard past participle. Today I stride left, yesterday I strode right, so that makes twice I have . . .? Various analogical bashes can be made, of course, but you know you're making it up as you go along.
In the work of Daniel Dennett, a zimbo is a zombie (an organism physically and behaviourally identical to a human being except that it is not conscious) which can interrogate and discuss its own internal states. A zimbo would presumably report (incorrectly) that it was conscious. Dennett (and I) think we're all zimboes. Oh, except that he and I don't actually think we're conscious.
I am curious to know what the longest is that has been in genuine use as a word, not as a record-breaker. Going by OED quotations 'disestablishmentarian' seems genuine, whereas extensions of it were facetious. At 21 letters, it equals 'non-universalizability', the longest I've genuinely used myself.
Presumably a nonce back-formation from the modern (1880s) 'recidivism', 'recidivist', rather than a conscious revival of the obsolete 'recidive' v. (single quote from 1548 in OED). Perhaps also a play with 'dive': "I dived back into my alma mater".
A few Web hits for the verb or 'recidived', particularly in relation to cancer ( = "relapse; relapsed"), but from sampling them I suspect they're mainly misuses by authors whose native language does have this as an ordinary modern word. This Hughes passage; a few uses in a legal sense.
From L. re-cad- "fall back" with regular Old Latin change of unstressed a to i.
Very close: seaweed-green is in the OED hyphenated, but none of their quotations hyphenates it, and Web search hits don't show it as an unarguable compound word. It behaves more like a syntactic complex, which excludes beach seaweed too.
Some of the suggestions below work in some accents: mirific, implicit, iridin in older RP (like indivisibility), conundrum, mundungus in (some forms of) AmE, possibly Scottish too; but in too many other accents they have schwas as well as full vowels.
Yes and no. The German ant- is cognate with Greek ant(i)-, and with the English prefixes in an-swer and un-do, un-roll (which is not the negative un-), and Latin ante-. But it's common inheritance from PIE rather than borrowed or imitated formation.
This is unusually from the genitive kyn-os rather than the stem kyn-o-: that is it is a compound of the type dog's-tail rather than dog-tail. This is common in English but this is the first I've noticed in Greek. The expected form would be *cynure.
(The Dog's Tail is Ursa Minor, containing the Pole Star, thus figuratively a centre round which everything turns.)
Philatelic term for the Arab microstates that around 1970 flooded the children's stamp-collecting market with brightly coloured gummed labels purporting to be postage stamps.
Either Profs or Profs., depending on whether you use the BrE convention of contractions (which include the last letter of the word) not taking a full stop.
Common misspelling of 'jejune', probably influenced by French jeune "young", with the presumed connecting meaning "immature". It's actually cognate with the lesser-known (and unrelated) jeûne "fasting".
Hm, I didn't know what I thought of this, until I found out I did: my magisterial, authoritative, ex-cathedra judgement under 'etymythology' was: To be distinguished from folk etymology, or is perhaps a kind of folk etymology.
I'm a big favourer of 'or perhaps' clauses. I'm not sure if there's any leather-bound book of dooms where the angels have recorded the true meanings of technical terms even in linguistics.
Oh yes, á is at least (1) a preposition (cognate with 'on', I think), (2) a noun "river" (c.w. aqua), (3) the 1.sg. and 3.sg. present of eiga "own", from earlier aih. The preposition í is cognate with its meaning "in".
The criterion of the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary is the local pronunciation, in order of frequency, so if they give Barlick second it's because the citizens of Barlick use that less than the other. It stands out more because it's more interesting, but their research has determined that it's less common locally.
The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names gives the regular pronunciation first (stress on 'old'), but gives a second possibility, as if spelt Barlick.
Only the same rule as in Present-day English: the vowel is required after /t/ and /d/ ('batted', 'bedded'). As far as I know the choice is entirely metrical. The loss of the vowel is sometimes called syncope or syncopation, but that sounds rather old-fashioned to me.
The vowel is also retained in some adjectives with the form of past participles (such as 'learned', 'blessed, 'one-legged'), but I know of no good reason why these are exceptional.
Way back in Old English there was a good phonetic reason: the vowel was used after a light syllable (fremede) but not after a heavy one (dēmde, drencte). This combined with a great deal of change of vowel quantity in Middle English gave those past tenses that are today spelt without an -e-, such as 'lent', 'bled', 'heard', 'met'. But this was over long before the apostrophe convention in text: the apostrophe indicated the normal pronunciation without a vowel, and the vowel was only used for metre.
More specifically: a consonant that is formed by the approach of the tongue to the fixed parts of the mouth, causing colouration of the air stream but not so much as to cause friction.
So she told him all about the flowers, how some grew very slowly and others bloomed in a night; how clever the convolvulus was at climbing, and how shy violets were, and why honeycups had folded petals.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
Not in OED as a plant name. It does refer to Zenobia pulverentula, but this is not native, so I doubt that Max meant that one. An obscure folk name? I can't find it qua plant name on Google Books either.
"These are primroses," she would say. "Did you not know? And these are ladies'-feet, and these forget-me-nots.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
Well primroses and forget-me-nots I know, but I can't find ladies'-foot, lady's-foot, what have you, in the OED. Just below she says that one trailing down so prettily is Astyanax, which sober truth appears to reveal as a genus of fish. Max appears to be pulling the many-belled leg.
The mask-maker's elevating talk about the gods, followed by the initative ceremony of his saintly mask, had driven all discordant memories from his love-thoughts of Jenny Mere.
Conceive, my Lord, my pride and pleasure when Mercury flew into my shop, one night last year, and made me Apollo's warrant-holder. It is the highest privilege that any mask-maker can desire.
A new operette, The Fair Captive of Samarcand, was being enacted, and the frequenters of Garble's were all curious to behold the débutante, Jenny Mere, who was said to be both pretty and talented.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
This French (or German) variant of 'operetta' isn't in my dictionary of music, though the OED has it.
Lord George called for port and champagne and beckoned the bowing homuncule to his box, that he might compliment him on his skill and pledge him in a bumper of the grape.
It is pleasant to record that many persons were inobnoxious to the magic of his title and disapproved of him so strongly that, whenever he entered a room where they happened to be, they would make straight for the door and watch him very severely through the key-hole.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
derived from the older sense of 'obnoxious to', "liable to harm from"
I assumed from the lack of asterisk against advisor that it was attested, whereas its presumed derivative *advisorius wasn't. The 'as if' need only have scope over the first word. It's not in my Latin dictionary nor in Perseus, but I don't know what date Perseus goes up to: advisor (assuming it existed) could have been mediaeval.
From the look of the OED quotations, 'advisor' became common in AmE usage from about 1900. It is now three to four times more common than 'adviser' in AmE and slightly more common in BrE on the Web at least. This is on both the raw Google figures (as I've just checked) and on Lynneguist's survey of academic usage.
However, the BNC, which reflects slightly older BrE use, has 'adviser' six times more often than 'advisor', and I think this reflects our intuitions better than the near-equal split of Web hits.
Unlike most other -vise words, 'advise' doesn't directly contain the Latin verb vid-, vis- "see", but comes via a prepositional phrase containing a noun. So its verbal inflexion had to be re-formed in Late Latin, rather than being regularly inherited from the base verb. It's not a classical word, but there apparently was a Late Latin advisor (mentioned in OED s.v. 'advisory').
When for months there was no sign or sound of her, he sighed and relived that time when his house was full of motherlessness—and the chief unmothering was Wild's.
Well, Grant Barrett's The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English has the tree and tomato sense, but restricting it to "catface napkin" doesn't find any relevant hits except this Morrison line. Aha! Too narrow! "catface cloth" finds a couple of US dialect dictionaries with the required sense "wrinkle in ironed cloth".
Also a Northern and Scottish dialectal word for a door latch. Commemorated in the exquisite Sneck Lifter ale from Jennings Brewery. A sneck lifter was a man's last sixpence; with it he could lift the sneck of the pub, buy one drink, and hope his friends would treat him to more.
He would explain to an acquaintance that God, believing that Hardy expected the weather to change and give him a chance to work, counter-suggestibly arranged that the sky should remain cloudless.
—from C. P. Snow's 1967 foreword to G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology
A nonce-word by Snow. Hardy was a ferocious atheist and a cricket-lover, and brought along to matches an 'anti-God battery' consisting of an umbrella and other things intending to fool the Supreme Fascist into thinking he, Hardy, expected it to rain.
The original (1873/4) name for a game resembling tennis but played on lawns. Almost immediately it was perceived that calling it 'lawn tennis' would help attract the unlettered and those who had been attacked by sphygmomanometers in their formative years. (Actually the latter might have been coined a bit later—you wouldn't think it was possible to learn too much Ancient Greek, would you? But it was somehow contrived among the leisured classes of the late 1800s.)
Lawn tennis became so popular that tennis had to start huffily calling itself real tennis. Sadly, this left the trophy open for grabs, and lawn tennis is now usually called tennis.
He used to walk round the cinderpath with a long, loping, clumping-footed stride (he was a slight spare man, physically active even in his late fifties, still playing real tennis) head down, hair, tie, sweaters, papers all flowing , a figure that caught everyone's eyes.
—from C. P. Snow's 1967 foreword to G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology
"a footpath, or running-track, laid with cinders"—OED
Sic to space between 'flowing' and comma: there are proof-reading errors in every book however oft reprinted. I also think it requires a comma after the closing bracket, though arguably you could do without and it would be read in an integrated way: 'He walked round the cinderpath with a loping stride head down' is possible, I suppose.
When Trinity put him up in college—within four years he became a Fellow—there was no 'Alan St. Aubyn' apolausticity for him at all.
—from C. P. Snow's 1967 foreword to G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology
A nonce-word from 'apolaustic': the only occurrence on the Web (until Wordie is next visited by a spider) is this passage. Snow is referring to Ramanujan's dietary habits; and the Alan St Aubin reference is explained by Hardy in this extract '
I withdraw my claim that this is equivalent to aphesis: that's just a phonetic reduction, but the present process is morphological: you treat something that isn't an affix as an affix.
This changed its meaning in the nineteenth century. Although it is related to 'fruit', the ultimate root of both is Latin fru- "enjoy", and English 'fruition' originally meant "enjoyment". In the 1800s it shifted to its present meaning of "completion, fulfilment" in expressions such as 'come to fruition'.
I think it is seldom used in the supposedly literal sense "fruiting", but this was presumably part of the bridging meaning: after your orchard fruits you have its fruition.
Whilom, as tells the tale, was a walled cheaping-town hight Utterhay, which was builded in a bight of the land a little off the great highway which went from over the mountains to the sea.
—opening of William Morris's The Water of the Wondrous Isles
Nobody has noted it yet, so can I just mention that the people of Fernando Poo are the Bubi. And their mainland neighbours in Rio Muni are the Fang. The Fang and the Bubi.
And it is suggested that those have been published simultaneously, which is, of course, not easy to achieve for alloplagiarism ("simultaneous publication is rarely observed for duplicates that do not share authors").
I submit that Salins has Sokaled the Times, since there is no way someone with enough grasp of social-scientific methods to hold his position could make such huge howlers unintentionally.
When the customer comes and Violet is sudsing the thin gray hair . . .
Then sudses with all her heart those three or four ounces of gray hair, soft and interesting as a baby's.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
A morphological oddity: the noun 'suds' was originally plural, but you'd still expect the derived verb to be made from the base 'sud'. However, we say 'suds' as a verb too.
It has big deep-down chairs and a card table by the window covered with jade, dracena and doctor plants until they want to have card games or play tonk between themselves.
Breathing hurts in weather that cold, but whatever the problems of being winterbound in the City they put up with them because it is worth anything to be on Lenox Avenue safe from fays and the things they think up;
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
short for 'ofay', US black slang for a white person, of much-guessed etymology
The verb is originally a different one, meaning "seem", probably related to the ordinary 'think'; they were distinct in OE but fell together in ME, thus giving all the reanalysis of the grammar. The verb meaning "seem" was normally impersonal: it thinks me = it seems to me.
The 'me' was indeed dative, but as the verb was usually 3rd singular (-s, -th) it's dubious whether it was subject of the verb. (Dative subjects are common in Icelandic, and the phenomenon is called quirky case.)
The other archaic survival, 'meseems', illustrates the structure a bit more clearly, since 'methinks' is liable to be (mis)interpreted as "I think", whereas 'meseems' is unmistakably "it seems to me".
Chrestus and Christus are unrelated but were confused in Roman times as a name of Jesus. Chrêstus = "useful, worthy, good"; Christus = "anointed" = Meshiah.
The instructive case is a relic; it's not the usual case for marking instruments: that would (I think) be vihdalla. The -lla is called adessive and basically means "on, at".
It's actually the <! that marks the DOCTYPE line as special. Real comments begin with <!-- and continue to the closing -->. Anything else within < and > will be treated as a tag, but browsers try and render what they can, which usually means silently ignoring any tags that don't make sense. So this makes them in effect a comment and invisible to the page, but is not the right way of doing it. You can't rely on browsers that way.
Typing < will give < (and typing & will give &, so typing &lt; will give <, and anything more complex sends you mad).
The less-than sign could be interpreted as the beginning of an HTML tag, then it and the petals beyond discarded when it proves an unknown tag. Use < for safety.
In this distress he received a remittance of five pounds from London, with which he provided himself a decent coat, and determined to go to London, but unhappily spent his money at a favourite tavern.
—Johnson's life of Savage
A nice, clear contrast between a sentence adverb and a—well, what do we call the other possibility? A verb adverb? Anyway, Johnson is applying the speaker-oriented adverb 'unhappily' to the whole clause 'but spent his money at a favourite tavern'. The topic, Mr Richard Savage, however, probably happily spent his money there. Though it is of course quite possible that because of his poverty, hunger, and want of friends he unhappily spent his money there, given Johnson's delineation of Savage's character this seems unlikely.
Afterthought. Either Johnson has made an error, or this is a rare construction for 'provide': he might have confused the 'with' of 'with five pounds' with that of 'provide someone with something'. Outside a relative clause, what Johnson has written would be ?'He provided himself a decent coat (with the five pounds)'; this ditransitive use of 'provide' is OED sense 6, which has the note 'Also occas. with indirect object without to.'
His resentment of this treatment, which, in his own opinion at least, he had not deserved, was such that he broke off all correspondence with most of his contributors, and appeared to consider them as persecutors and oppressors; and in the latter part of his life declared that their conduct toward him, since his departure from London, had 'been perfidiousness improving on perfidiousness, and inhumanity on inhumanity.'
—Johnson's life of Savage
Also an interestingly biting use of 'improve': OED lists several obsolete uses where it means "increase (something bad)".
But Savage easily reconciled himself to mankind without imputing any defect to his work, by observing that his poem was unluckily published two days after the prorogation of the parliament, and by consequence at a time when all those who could be expected to regard it were in the hurry of preparing for their departure, or engaged in taking leave of others upon their dismission from publick affairs.
Sometimes the singular is lexicalized: we don't say *teethbrush or *feetrest because the words toothbrush, footrest exist. Otherwise the singular sounds a bit more natural to me: mouse eater, mice eater, tooth treatment, teeth treatment; and these are in sharp contrast to the unacceptable *hands rest, *rats eater.
Seen in a supermarket: a bunch of white woolly things labelled 'feet warmers'. An illustration of the morphological principle that irregular plurals can be used as modifiers of other nouns, whereas in general usage regular plurals can't: *hands warmers.
Note: 'sports' is one common exception in general usage; business and law parlance freely use plural modifiers ('securities expertise', 'notes issuance').
national firms such as Dechert have de-emphasized development work, referred to in legal circles as "dirt law," in favor of real estate finance and securitization.
Actually it's a sign of the decline of classical education (mutter mutter, they were probably too busy listening to 'pop groups') that they missed the chance to use arctonaut.
Ghits for the fused form way outnumber the hyphenated. You think I don't check these things scrupulously before committing the electrons to print? You think BBC science reporting is the last word? Huh! And on the Internet all words are immortal.
The buttercomb is used to mix in flavourings like balderherb on your butterslab. When done, keep it in a safe place like a basketcrib to protect it from beetlegrub.
An older, heavy-set woman. Very similar to a MILF, but without the wanting to have sex with them part. Can be any chunky woman, but usually reserved for fat blondes.—Urban Dictionary
The routine in which a dummy attempts to seize a glass of water from a ventriloquist drinking it: part of the final viva before the pair are admitted to the Ventriloquial Circle.
This incorporates the expansion of two existing potlines — a series of electrolytic cells (known as pots) in which alumina (powdered aluminium) is reduced to high purity aluminum metal.
The supposed 'pizzazz' connexion looks like the usual far-fetched nonsense possibly inspired by a random vague resemblance to something (eta: presumably Persian piroza "turquoise"). The first use of the word ('pizazz') is in Harper's Bazaar, 1937, claiming to be quoting the editor of the Harvard Lampoon. How Persian or turquoise would get in there is not apparent.
Actually none of 'nth', 'cwm', 'crwth', 'crypt', 'gypsy', or any of the other words with vowels belong here. The only words without vowels are ones where a consonant is the syllabic peak, such as 'brr', 'grr', 'mm', 'hmm', 'psst', 'pfft', 'shh', 'tsk'.
This relationship exists to support such things as the destroy event -- so that when a parent component (such as the root) is destroyed, the parent knows who its children are, and can destroy them before destroying itself.
In a predicative position, I think "obvious" is the more likely meaning, and contexts are typically things like 'The reason is apparent'. When you qualify it with 'only', or contrast it with 'real' ('What is apparent is not always real') you force it into the "seeming" meaning.
Merrill Lynch has announced that it is set to launch the first FX CDO or CFXO (Collateralised FX Obligation), an investment product designed to apply the CDO technology commonly used within the credit world to Foreign Exchange as an underlying asset class.
Another initiative is servicer advancing where, for each interest payment date, the servicer advances to the securitization special purpose vehicle (SPV) the shortfall between the full amount of money due from the borrowers and what is collected.
Swiss Re and Axa took the principle of [mortality derivatives] further with extreme-mortality bonds. These make a profit for the issuer if there’s a sudden spike in the death rate and thus can be used to hedge an insurer against a range of high-impact, low-probability events such as a bird flu pandemic.
These ‘mortality derivatives’ aren’t punts on a single individual coming to an untimely end. Instead, the payoffs are linked to death rates among large groups of people – something that could be very useful for balancing risks...
Barclays Capital has been a leading player in SIV-lites, which combine traditional structured investment vehicle (SIV) and collateralised debt obligation (CDO) technologies.
Q1172 Chairman: You cannot tell me what a CDO-squared is? Can anybody tell me what it is?
Mr Palmer: A CDO-squared is a derivative structure designed to give investors exposure to a CDO.
Q1173 Chairman: Mr Corrigan, can you try to explain it to us in simple language?
Mr Corrigan: I think the easiest way to understand what a CDO-squared is to start with what a CDO is. If I were to take the example of mortgage-backed securities, institutions package up a family of individual mortgages into what is a fairly plain vanilla mortgage-backed facility. I think it is entirely fair to say that when those mortgage-backed securities are issued the disclosures associated with the issuance of those instruments are quite wholesome.
Mr Corrigan: A CDO carves out of a plain vanilla mortgage-backed security certain credit tranches of that security and reformulates them in what is called a structured credit product into a particular class of credit standards affecting those particular mortgages, not the full pool of mortgages. That is called a CDO. When you take a CDO and then roll it into a second CDO that is called a CDO-squared; in other words, it is a CDO made up of other CDOs.
Q1175 Chairman: If you put in another one it is a CDO-cubed?
Mr Corrigan: Thank God, we have not got that far yet.
—Select Committee on Treasury, UK Hansard, 4 December 2007
Etymologically or morphologically unusual: it contains an '-ize' suffix (and is usually so spelt), but not the '-ize' suffix. It is in fact the French suffix found in 'advertise' and possibly 'chastise'.
What struck me here is the semantics of the compound, with the noun in an objective relationship to the past participle. So far today I haven't been able to think of any others. This compound construction is usually used in an agentive way ('moth-eaten clothes', 'God-given talents'), or locative ('Frankfurt-listed company'), or instrumental in 'blood-spattered', 'frost-bitten', 'halogen-lit'. Then there's 'flesh-coloured' and 'sepia-toned'.
Then I began wondering about the clause this compound was related to: 'Jolie was assured (of) an Oscar', the two forms of which are passives of something like 'Her performance assured Jolie (of) an Oscar.' Ghits for 'assured him (of) victory' shows both are used, with 'of' much more common.
Tkinter automatically maintains a widget tree (via the master and children attributes of each widget instance), so a widget won't disappear when the application's last reference goes away; it must be explicitly destroyed before this happens (using the destroy method).
Admittedly this might be a straightforward on-the-fly syntactic compound, rather than a specific technical term, but I like the sound of 'widget tree'. Also that it consists of masters and children.
. . . ladies of the haute sewer taking their last stroll, sauntering on their last Rotten Row, going slowly along in the dark, holding up their badgered flounces, or standing still, silent and as indifferent as the dead . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I can't find a sense of 'badger(ed)' that makes sense here, but hey, it's Djuna Barnes, and on this note I end my collection of weird words from that lush and mysterious Nightwood.
. . . in our age bred up into infants searching for a womb to crawl into, not be made to walk loth the gingerly dust of death, but to find a moist, gillflirted way.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I had no idea what this meant; 'gill-flirt' is in the OED with a transparent meaning "wanton girl". Okay. *reviews sentence* Okay, I still have no idea what it means, Djuna.
Also two grammatical oddities; 'loth' as an adverb (normally it's only an adjective in the predicative complement 'be loth to VP'), and 'gingerly' as an adjective.
The tall spinney of horse-chestnut trees, raucous with the calling of the rooks and rubbish-roofed with the clutter of their sprawling nests, was one of their familiar places.
Will dipped out a pail of pellets from the bin in the farm-smelling barn, which was not really a barn at all, but a long, low building with a tiled roof, once a stable.
A full symphony orchestra was swelling out of the radio; their eldest sister Gwen was slicing onions and singing; their mother was broad-beamed and red-faced over an oven.
There's a place in Antarctica called the Whichaway Nunataks, which even as I child I considered deeply scary: lost in the wilds of Antarctica, nuns coming at you from every direction, ninja-like and polar-bear-like concealed under their camouflage twats, crevasses impeding your escape.
"Did not Periander think fit to lie with his wife Melissa after she had already gone hent to heaven?"
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
past tense and past participle of 'hent' = "take, snatch, carry off". The line is from Bishop Jeremy Taylor, (mis)quoted by the drunken Irish doctor, who by the way would be left out entirely from my director's cut version of Nightwood, reducing it by a third and probably eviscerating it to the point of pointlessness from the author's point of view, but still.
What Taylor actually said (in his Sermon XVII was: 'If it be otherwise, the man enjoys a wife as Periander did his dead Melissa, by an unnatural union, neither pleasing nor holy, useless to all the purposes of society, and dead to content.'
Periander, tyrant of Corinth, was accounted one of the Seven Sages, but killed his wife on false suspicion of infidelity, and was rumoured to have made it up to her afterwards in a non-socially-approved way.
. . . so you can imagine how she trembled when she saw herself going toward fifty without a thing done to make her a tomb-piece, or anything in her past that would get a flower named for her.
. . . for I'm a fisher of men and my gimp is doing a saltarello over every body of water to fetch up what it may.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
If I may hazard a guess at what on earth Barnes is putting into the mouth of her maniac doctor, this is OEDgimpn.1, sense 2., 'A fishing-line composed of silk, etc., bound with wire to strengthen it.'
. . . and me sitting between them going mad because I am a doctor and a collector and a talker of Latin, and a sort of petropus of the twilight and a physiognomist that can't be flustered by the wrong feature on the right face . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I don't know what this means. Not in the latest revision of the OED, though they do quote from Nightwood elsewhere. Does the drunken Irish doctor mean he is some kind of stone-footed creature, or is this a reference to the Petropus genus of flying foxes, or what? I can't find any English other use of the word apart from the genus and this quotation.
He separates the two for fear of indignities, so that the mystery is cut in every cord; the design wildcats down the charter mortalis, and you get crime.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Most unusual use of 'wildcat' as a verb. I'm not even entirely clear what it means here. Also, the only ghits for 'charter mortalis' are this quote.
You wash your brawl with every thought, with every gesture, with every conceivable emollient and savon, and expect to find your way again.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Not italicized in the text, so treated as naturalized English, though the text does contain numerous italicized French terms. I have never seen this word used in English. (Nor do I know what 'brawl' is supposed to mean here. But the speaker is a raving Irishman and the author is Djuna Barnes, so mine not to reason why.)
The night and the day are two travels, and the French—gut-greedy and fist-tight though they often are—often leave testimony of the two in the dawn . . .
I haven't got the book with me today, and Snippet View is too mean to give me much context, but I think as well as poo it might contain the odd aborted fetus, this being one of the doctor's lines of business.
We now urgently need to . . . introduce a Green New Deal – which would . . . generate a transformational economic programme to substantially decarbonise our economy.
—from a letter from a Green Party spokesperson, New Scientist, 15/11/2008
. . . the grandmother who, for some unknown reason, was dressed as a man, wearing a billycock and a corked moustache, ridiculous and plump in tight trousers and a red waistcoat . . .
Listening to the faint sounds from the street, every murmur from the garden, an unevolved and tiny hum that spoke of the progressive growth of noise that would be Robin coming home, Nora lay and beat her pillow without force, unable to cry, her legs drawn up.
A black horse, standing on trembling hind legs that shook in apprehension of the raised front hooves, hsi beautiful ribboned head pointed down and toward the trainer's whip, pranced slowly, the foreshanks flickering to the whip.
. . . he felt that he was looking upon a figurehead in a museum, which though static, no longer roosting on its cutwater, seemed yet to be going against the wind . . .
About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water—as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations—the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds—meet of child and desperado.
You'd think this would be one of the boatloads of ambitious words that came over with William the Conqueror. But no, it's a newcomer, about 1700, from the Italian form of 'aptitude', which it replaced in its current senses.
. . . marking the exact centre of his body with the obstetric line seen on fruits—the inevitable arc produced by heavy rounds of burgundy, schlagsahne, and beer.
(Hedvig had played the waltzes of her time with the masterly stroke of a man, in the tempo of her blood, rapid and rising—that quick mannerliness of rouch associated with the playing of the Viennese, who, though pricked with the love of rhythm, execute its demands in the duelling manner)
Comments by qroqqa
Show previous 200 comments...
qroqqa commented on the word アスパラガス
The perpetrator is still visible. The ガ ga is a カ ka as in katana "B.F. sword", with its eyebrows raised, and has worked its way up to the front runner, who is now pretending to be already beheaded.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hepatoscopic
Putnam's always been a bit of a troublemaker, with his hidden bar and his quite willful misinterpretations of Akkadian hepatoscopic practice.
—It's all fun and games until someone gets their head stuck in a 3,600-year-old Sumerian pot
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bremsstrahlung
No, braking radiation: bremsen "brake", as an electron might have to do passing near a nucleus.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word euarchontoglire
The singular should be *euarchontoglis if the plural were formed regularly from it; but back-formation has several analogical options. In this case euarchontoglire has been formed, probably not just by removing the -s (zoologists are too fly for that) but by looking at words such as 'carnivore', 'laurasiathere' (cf. Greek thêr). In fact it's -glire that's used, and *-glis only occurs here on Wordie: no-one else has thought to coin it.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word compatriot
Leadership is a risky business requiring wisdom, courage, and fortitude—and as my compatriot Socrates put it, courage is the knowledge of what is not to be feared.
—Arianna Huffington, Right is Wrong, quoted in The New Republic, found (if I've got this right) via Powell's Books Review-a-Day, found via 3 Quarks Daily
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word trouser
No, young Ulleskelf, there is no such thing as a trouser. 'Trousers' is what we cognoscenti call a plurale tantum, that is "plural only". The singular form however does occur in noun-noun compounds such as 'trouser leg/pocket/press/snake', and of course by conversion as a verb. Hurrah for morphology!
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word succubus
Sometimes in the altered form succuba with feminine ending (which in Latin actually meant "whore"). The primacy of the masculine -us ending, however, means (I think) that it is not the case that the demons were female, rather that they took female form to lie under (sub-cub-) men; as they took male form to lie in (in-cub-) women.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word 日本語
Nihongo, Japanese for "Japanese language"
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pusillanimous
JIMMY: I looked up that word the other day. It's one of those words I've never been quite sure of, but always thought I knew.
CLIFF: What was that?
JIMMY: I told you—pusillanimous. Do you know what it means?
Cliff shakes his head.
Neither did I really. All this time, I have been married to this woman, this monument to non-attachment, and suddenly I discover that there is actually a word that sums her up. Not just an adjective in the English language to describe her with—it's her name! Pusillanimous! It sounds like some fleshy Roman matron, doesn't it? The Lady Pusillanimous seen here with her husband Sextus, on their way to the Games.
—John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thou
One of only two(?) minimal pairs contrasting /ð/ and /θ/ initially: /ðaʊ/ "you" ~ /θaʊ/ "thousandth of an inch" (or colloquially "thousand"). The other initial pair is 'thus'; final contrasts occur in 'mouth' (n. and v.) and possibly 'withe'/'with'.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thus
One of only two(?) minimal pairs contrasting /ð/ and /θ/ initially: /ðʌs/ "so" ~ /θʌs/ "incense" (what a thurifer carries in a thurible). The other initial pair is 'thou'; final contrasts occur in 'mouth' (n. and v.) and possibly 'withe'/'with'.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tuffet
Oh that's interesting, the OED thinks the "hassock or footstool" meaning is dubious and may come from misinterpretation of the nursery rime (as it calls it), which might actually refer to a tuffet = tuft = grassy knoll, hillock.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dislection
This sort of etymology is rather misleading, it seems to me: saying dislection comes from diligere poses such questions as how the <s> arose and where the <gere> disappears to. Rather, the two words, noun and verb arose in parallel from the same root. The verb is, by convention, cited in its infinitive form, but the infinitive is not the base of any other word: it is a derived form.
The root is dĭs-lĕg-. This is what both noun and verb were formed from by suffixation in some early stage of Latin. The infinitive was formed with -ĕrĕ (in fact probably -ĕrĭ or -ĕsĭ at this stage, but let's disregard changes that don't contribute to the comparison under discussion). The noun was formed with the usual -tio, -tion- suffix. The voicing assimilation of /gt/ to /kt/ (ct) was no doubt very early, possibly pre-Latin.
In Old Latin /s/ was lost in this position before a sonorant (such as /l/ or /m/), with the previous vowel lengthening in compensation. So dĭslĕg- became dīlĕg-. Often the /s/ was subsequently restored by analogy (e.g. dismiss), which is why we get variation between di- and dis- forms.
In Old Latin the stress was initial. Unstressed vowels mostly became /ĭ/ before one consonant, /ĕ/ before two. Thus the vowel difference between dīlĭg- and dīlĕct-.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fluffiness
This word contains two different ligatures, in print. Appropriately, I noticed it in Nicholson Baker, who I suspect would be interested, and spin a reflection on the decline of ligatures.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gonna
Hardly Jamaican patois: Standard English rather. Everyone normally says some reduced form conventionally written 'gonna'.
June 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fah
fɔ~?
June 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word triangulatory
Had a satirical novelist not invented it first, some modish academic or think-tank would undoubtedly have come up with Social Dynamics eventually, and would by now probably be organising seminars at 10 Downing Street to explain the triangulatory brilliance of the scheme to Tony Blair.
—Francis Wheen, 2004, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
June 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word slavish pluralization
Well I thought as you were criticizing the slavish pluralizers, you wouldn't be using such forms yourself but were citing forms used by others: thus exculpating you of gogglelessness.
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word throwaway
Most people won't be surprised to learn that they also seek to shape what is published in journals through ghost-written essays signed by prestigious doctors, or attempt to influence prescribers' opinions through widely distributed "throwaways", a euphemism for journal articles that support their products.
—New Scientist, 6 June 2009
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word upskill
To combat pirates getting on air, Mercer's team is "upskilling" – learning a new bag of internet and surveillance tricks . . .
—New Scientist, 6 June 2009
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word decellularize
Taylor . . . now wants to repeat the achievement on a much larger scale, by "decellularising" hearts, livers and other organs taken either from human cadavers or from larger animals such as pigs, and coating them in stem cells harvested from people.
—New Scientist, 6 June 2009
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vasculature
"We've built the vasculature but we don't think we've built enough muscle to keeps animals alive."
—New Scientist, 6 June 2009
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word slavish pluralization
Well 'suffices' is not a Latin plural; the Latin for "suffix" is suffixum. The only possible plural of 'suffix' is 'suffixes': a warning to those who play with Latinity without the goggles of knowledge.
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list ugly-words-short-u
I can only see two (relevant) vowels in that list, that of of 'strut'/'bloody' and that of 'nurse'/'vermin'/'virginal'; the two are however completely different in my accent. (And I'd use the term 'short u' to mean the vowel in 'foot' myself.)
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list luonto
Luonto is nature.
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word that's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind
From my reading of the spectrogram, there's no possibility of a schwa in there between the two consonant segments.
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list famous-transmitted-messages
Peccavi, being a single word, would be ideal; 'tis pity it's a fraud.
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word s
The first intercontinental radio message, transmitted (in Morse code) from Cornwall to Newfoundland in 1901.
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dress-spencer
Her hair, which was of a light brown, was becomingly braided à la Didon; and her gown, which she wore under a striped dress-spencer, was of fine cambric, made high to the throat, and ornamented round the hem with double trimming.
—Georgette Heyer, Frederica
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word first-oars
"Oh, she thinks no one the equal of her magnificent Cousin Alverstoke!" said Mrs Dauntry, gently laughing. "You are quite first-oars with her, I assure you!"
—Georgette Heyer, Frederica
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word souse
"and if this F. Merriville is the daughter of the only member of the family with whom I ever had the slightest acquaintance you may depend upon it she hasn't a souse, and hopes I may be so obliging as to remedy this."
—Georgette Heyer, Frederica
Same as sou.
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tachograph
(i) Think it's a typo for tachygraph.
(ii) Look up in OED.
(iii) Simultaneously have nagging feeling I've already wordied this.
(iv) Look up on Wordie.
(v) Get back to work.
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cagophile
It's unfortunate that philately and paedophilia have combined to give us two unwanted extra meanings of phil-.
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word piqûre
French for "sting, injection", striking for that circumflex, in a position I don't think I've ever seen before. In OED as an English word, "injection, injection mark".
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word right-about
The child, who was as pretty as a picture, Miss Grantham saw, could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, and to watch a roué of Filey's years and experience leering down at her made Miss Grantham long to be able to box his ears, and send him to the right-about.
—Georgette Heyer, Faro's Daughter
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word incalculably
She might have destroyed at a blow any influence he had ever had over Adrian, and, incalculably, she had refrained from doing it.
—Georgette Heyer, Faro's Daughter
A highly unusual use of this word. Normally it is an adjective modifier (e.g. incalculably high) and means "enormous, i.e. too large (or small) to be able to be calculated". But in this example Heyer has used it as a sentence adverb meaning "too puzzling to be able to calculate, i.e. understand, work out".
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mooch
A mooch-cow is one that just stands in a field chewing grass and looking at you.
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cagophile
Not a word. There is no usage at all for it on the Web (nor for *cagophilia), and it has no reasonable etymology. (Probably invented by someone arbitrarily deforming Old English cǽg.) Why not just say keyophile and be done with it? Or better, key collector?
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ethos
I am always confused over whether I should be pronouncing this /ˈeθɒs/ (as in ethics) or /ˈiːθɒs/ (as in ether). Whenever I look it up I am confused by the fact that there are two related Greek words εθος ethos and ηθος êthos, and that though ethics comes from the latter it is invariably pronounced with short E.
So εθος ethos meant "custom, habit" but did not really give any English derivatives. The related word ηθος êthos is more complex, giving all of English ethos, ethics, ethology. In the singular its meanings extend to "character, nature", basically what ethos is and what ethics and in part ethology study; in the plural (ηθη êthê) it means "haunts, abodes" of animals and "manners, customs" of people.
Unrelated are short-E ethno- "people" and long-E (in fact AE, Greek αι-) ether, aether "airlike substance/realm".
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nigella
Also Latin name for love-in-a-mist; whereas the only Kalonji I've heard of is the former president and God-King of South Kasai.
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word espy
Don't even joke about that.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word espy
*boggles, rereads* Aha. If you used 'seeing' instead, it would mean "not seeing galleries as places where . . . but rather seeing them as some other kind of place". Wrong 'as', however. It actually means "seeing galleries not so much as places where X happens . . . but as places where Y happens". The sentence is missing a comma after 'rivers'. (The comparative 'not so much', which governs the following 'as', is in a stylistically unusual, unexpected place.)
With 'espy', you can't espy something as something (= "in the light/form of", so the construction can only be the 'not so much . . . as' one.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pizza
The future of pizza is pizzarà.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mono
Usually when a word has many meanings in English, they are the result of a centuries-long process, many of them washed up on the banks of oblivion by our time. In the case of mono, however, they're all new:
(1) 1851: Mono, a Californian tribe
(2) 1924: a picador's assistant, a monosabio
(3) 1937: a boiler suit, especially those worn by Republican militia in the Spanish Civil War (literally "monkey")
(4) 1959: monophonic recording
(5) 1964: the disease mononucleosis
(6) 1970: monochrome, black and white
(7) 1977: a single-hulled boat, a monohull
(8) 1979: a single-stranded fibre, a monofilament
And it's perhaps a little surprising that no use of Japanese mono has come into English as a separate word. (The OED of course lists mono no aware under that phrase.)
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word skelf
No stars in this black sky, no moon to speak of, no name
or number to the hour, no skelf of light.
—Carol Ann Duffy, 'Over'
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word a fortiori
A mediaeval alteration of Classical a fortiore.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word a posteriori
A mediaeval alteration of Classical a posteriore.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word a priori
In good Latin this was a priore. According to ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ, who seems a reliable sort of chap, it was Thomas Aquinas who first used, or at least popularized, the dative for the ablative. It's surprising how it caught on and how rarely the Classical forms are used.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sudoku
It's taken me this long to find out what the word comes from. It's a contraction suu-doku "single digits" of the phrase suuzi-wa dokusin-ni kagiru "the digits are restricted to single" ("digit-TOPIC single-TO restrict" – with dokusin meaning "single" as in "unmarried", a little oddly).
It began as an American puzzle called Number Place; a Japanese company later issued it as Sudoku, a trade mark in Japan, where it is generically known as nanpure, a contraction of the English name.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word down
Surprising etymology. The ordinary preposition comes from an Old English and Celtic word dún for "hill". The expression meaning "off-hill" was reduced by omitting the "off" part (it survives in the poetic word adown) till down itself came to mean, well, "down".
June 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list alist
agriculturalist, constitutionalist, nationalist
June 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word aghast
In origin the past participle of an extinct verb agast, extended form of verb gast, both meaning "frighten". The spelling with -h- first appeared in c.1425 (in Scots), well before Caxton famously introduced it in ghost; but it was not until the late 1500s that it became usual for such words.
June 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word conutry
But etymologically sound. The author is a nut; if you take them up you're a conut; and that makes the process conutry.
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word wedlock
Possible in the case of knowledge, with its completely mysterious second element—I suppose the older -leche could come from palatalization of a Northern form -leik of the -lock suffix, though the OED does not raise this possibility.
Shurely shome mishtake with lark, which though equally mysterious does not admit of anything like *-lak. The v in OE láferce might have been Norse influence; other old forms include OE láwerce, OHG lêrahha, ON lǽvirke, and this suffix won't fit in there.
The 'Rohirric' word dwimmerlaik in Tolkien's works is a use of a genuine (extinct) English word with the suffix.
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word twilve
English irregular verbs scarcely follow any rules at all. There are a couple of patterns (e.g. swim ~ swam ~ swum) that contain as many as ten strong verbs, but most patterns are only for several verbs. There are verbs such as bring ~ brought ~ brought that combine internal change with a weak ending; and others like show ~ showed ~ shown combining weak and strong forms. While twilve doesn't exactly match any real pattern (as far as I can recall), it's close enough to sell ~ sold ~ sold to be plausible. (The more so the more I look at the variant forms of sell historically.)
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word venal
There are so many different Latin roots resembling ven-: ones meaning "come", "sell", "hunt", "vein", "love (goddess)", "wind", "forgiveness", "poison", "stomach", and "vengeance" are enough to confuse anyone. I can never quite remember that a venal person is one who can be bought (cf. vend), while a venial sin is one that is forgivable (Latin venia "forgiveness" has no other common English reflexes). The adjective of vein is usually venous but can be both of venal, venial.
Hunting and love-play are both venery; it would be natural to imagine them metaphorically connected, but they're not. Vengeance has only a post-Classical ven-; the Classical gives us vindicate. Vent is cognate with wind; the root in invent, convenient is cognate with its meaning "come"; ventriloquist related to neither.
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word marijuana
The spelling with -j- is apparently a folk etymology (or eggcorn or other such alteration) in English after Spanish female names; the original Mexican Spanish was marihuana, mariguana of uncertain origin.
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word wedlock
The only survivor in Modern English of the Old English action noun suffix -lác. This may have been a noun "play" and originated in compounds meaning "sword-play" for "battle".
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word whom
You do indeed, except perhaps in (w)hooping-cough; however, the /w/ is recent. My mid-century Shorter Oxford only has the /hu:p/ pronunciation—even, startlingly, in whoopee, which it thinks is a homophone of hoopy.
May 31, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word whom
It's really only who and its kin, with loss of the /w/ by dissimilation before the /o/. This is also probably why very few words in Old English began with /hwo/ or /hwu/. The word who may have been the reason why whole, whore, whoop were given a <w> in their spelling: this is comparatively modern, as all three historically began with /h/ + vowel.
May 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nominal
Various uses in linguistics (principally as just the adjective of 'noun'), but in CGEL it specifically means a level of structure intermediate between noun and noun phrase: what in the Chomskyan framework is called N'. Adding a determiner to a nominal makes it a noun phrase.
Noun: dog
Nominals: black dog; big black dog; big black dog chewing my slipper
Noun phrase: this big black dog chewing my slipper
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cashback
When it is a single word, I think it's also a noun: compare 'get $30 change', 'get $30 interest', 'get $30 compensation'. Switching to the numeral 'one', we can see the sum is in plain case: 'get one dollar interest' (not *'one dollar's').
In these, does 'get' take one noun phrase complement or two? Compare: '$30 interest would be nice', 'You owe me $30 change' (sequence of three NP complements otherwise unexampled), 'I'm waiting for my $30 refund'. The sequence moves around tightly like a single NP. Also: you can't replace the sum by a pronoun. If $30 is the topic, you can't say you got it refund, or got it interest. From all which I conclude '$30 cashback' is a single noun phrase composed of two noun parts (nominals or N') in apposition.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word apologist
Not someone who studies apes. Bad brain, go to your basket. It took me several seconds to work out where apes might come into what I was just reading.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nomen
Those biological nomina in full. A name should refer clearly and unambiguously to a taxon. Ways this can be defeated or repaired are:
nomen nudum: a name published with no or insufficient description to make clear the taxon referred to.
nomen dubium: a name (apparently not so vacuous as a nomen nudum) that turns out to be inadequate to identify its target.
nomen confusum: a name that appears to confusedly refer to several taxa.
nomen ambiguum: a name that quite clearly refers to one definite taxon, according to one authority, and to another according to another.
nomen oblitum: a name that validly referred when it was published but has been disused or forgotten (oblitum) for so long that a newer alternative has gained a prescriptive right to supplant it.
nomen invalidum: an informal or malformed name that couldn't be a valid name.
nomen rejiciendum: a rejected name.
nomen novum: a new name that validly supplants an older one disallowed for one of the above reasons.
nomen conservandum: an existing name that theoretically should defer to an older valid name but which is of such good standing that it is decreed that it is 'to be conserved' (conservandum).
See here for more: vanum, vetitum, illegitimum, alternativum, etc.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word suppletive
How can 'suppletive' not be in WeirdNet? It's a familiar and long-standing grammatical term. The canonical examples in English are go ~ went and be ~ am ~ was and person ~ people; in French aller ~ va ~ ira, for example; in Ancient Greek just about every damn verb you might ever need to use, to the everlasting burden of aspiring Hellenophones.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tralatition
An irregular extension of tralation, which is a doublet of translation and indeed transfer (Latin lat- < *tlat- being the suppletive supine stem, cognate with perfect tul-, of present and infinitive fer-).
In Latin, tra(ns)latio was used for a variety of linguistic transfers that we now distinguish as translation, metaphor, metathesis, and transposition.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mini-major
a film production company that's not quite a major
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word concameration
Howard alone looked up into the simple concameration of the roof, hoping for escape or relief or distraction.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
The Classical Latin camera meant "arch, vault" and was then transferred to a specifically arched or vaulted room. (The scene quoted above is a church.) In Late Latin it came to mean "room". So was there a Classical Latin for "room" generally, as in 'My villa has twelve rooms'? Cella is too specific: a small or side room, and wouldn't apply to the atrium or triclinium.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cashback
Usually one word, it seems to me, even when two would make equal sense: 'Would you like cashback?', 'Could I have £20 cashback, please?' And what is the difference between one word and two? Secondary stress, I think: in 'get £20 cash back', the 'back' has a longer vowel, as far as I can tell. (Possibly there is even a slight effect on the 'cash' vowel.)
Googling for this, I found it has a second meaning, which I've never encountered (as far as I'm aware): cash offered back as a sales incentive. Both meanings are in the OED, the familiar EFTPOS sense later (1988) and marked 'chiefly Brit.'
Googling for this again, two words is more common in casual/Web writing, but I think this ignores the phonetic facts.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word widower
A new formation in the 1300s, replacing 'widow', which had distinct masculine and feminine endings in Old English.
It has been said that the female is the default value here because widowhood was traditionally more important as an indicator of social status (dependence, availability etc.) in females.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the user plcladder
*THWACK*
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sessionable
Such a beer is called a session bitter. This is an ordinary term for me, whereas I have to say I've never heard 'sessionable'.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word analepsis
By whom? Not by the OED, who don't know this word at all, nor the related words (analepsy, analemma, analeptic) in this sense. Nor by my preferred glossary of rhetoric. Nor indeed to the Ancient Greeks themselves, who used it in various ways derived from the semantic elements "take + back": such as tying up vines, acquiring knowledge, assimilating food, making amends, getting refreshed; about the closest is Aristotle's use of it for recovering memory. Possibly a recent development based on that. (Modern film and literaary theory wouldn't have made it in the OED's A's yet.)
Or perhaps just formed analogously with prolepsis, prochronism, anachronism.
May 28, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word impossible
"The word 'impossible' is not in my dictionary. In fact, everything between 'herring' and 'marmalade' appears to be missing."
—Dirk Gently
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word decussate
An odd formation. I wonder where the u came from in decem-ass-. Assuming it was formed after m was replaced by vowel nasalization (decem 'deke~:), I would have thought you'd expect decess-. I see from Perseus that all the compounds from seven have the 'wrong' vowel, so it might be levelling by analogy with neighbouring numbers.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dive
A fusion of two Old English verbs: the transitive umlauted form dýfan "dip, submerge (a thing)" gave the modern form and weak conjugation—dive, dived, dived; whereas the primary verb dúfan dropped out in early Middle English, bequeathing its intransitive meaning "dive" to the other. If it had survived into Modern English it might go douve, deve, doven (I'm never very sure about how ablaut grades are inherited). The North American strong preterite dove is a new, quite modern formation.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word duck
1. Originally the verb "dive, dip in water", a derivative of which gave the bird's name (in effect "diver, dipper"). An earlier English name for the bird, in various forms such as ænid, enid, enede, ende, extinct 1400s, was cognate with Latin anat-. The verbal sense "lower the head" is later: like dipping in water but without the water.
2. The kind of cloth is unrelated. 'Duck tape' is attested considerably earlier than 'duct tape', but it's not obvious that the latter is derived by alteration of the former: it might well be an independent invention coincidentally similar.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word coach
Originally (1500s) a kind of wagon named from Kocs in Hungary. A little before 1850 it is known in its other modern meaning: a person who trains you in your studies. (The sporting help came a bit later.) This was university slang, but the OED gives no clue as to what the bridge between the two senses might be. Study conceived as driving towards a destination with an experienced driver?
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word brass monkey
The problem is that M has been revised for the third edition and B hasn't. They've put a link in the new M entry to what's going to be in the B entry once they get there—many years away, at the present rate. In the meantime, Oxford experts debunk the traditional story; and greater detail (but no ultimate explanation) is here.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gloaming
Interesting: 'gloom' seems to have originally meant "frown, scowl" and to have transferred metaphorically to what clouds and such obscuring bodies do, thus "be dark". The use of 'gloom' as a noun "darkness" seems to originate with Milton. (Shakespeare has 'gloomy' in a sense that could be modern "dark" or still the metaphor "louring".)
Whereas as skipvia points out, the original sense of 'gloaming' is of light rather than darkness.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word spaghetti and meatballs
And my sister, when wee. Interesting evidence that the p can indeed be taken as a member of the /b/ phoneme without violence to English phonology: /sbə'geti/ -> /bə'sgeti/.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word duologic
Pertaining to a duologue or conversation between two people: formed from either Latin duo "two" or a less-standard transcription of Greek δυο-, normally dyo-. But at least this spelling is more distinctive than dilogue or dyologue, which would be even closer to dialogue.
Oh. French is a character, a professor—it's not a comment about the language.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word x-sampa
Actually, X-SAMPA is IPA. It's a way of transmitting IPA across the Internet using 7-bit ASCII, which for most of Internet history was all anyone could rely on to get to the other side.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word doo-rag
'It's just some crazy old woman who thought I'm gonna kill her 'cos I'm wearing a doo-rag.'
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cernuous
Walking up Redwood Avenue with its tunnel of cernuous willows, Levi found he had lost the will even to nod his head, usually an involuntary habit with him when music was playing.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word duologic
Unfortunately French was not given to duologic conversation – he addressed the group, always.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word crepitation
The Boston primness Howard associated with these kinds of events could not quite survive the mass of hot bodies and the crepitations of the crickets, the soft, damp bark of the trees and the atonal tuning of instruments – and all this was to the good.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pulvinate
Their pulvinate bellies were red satin, and it was here that the needles pierced.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Adjective of the Latin noun that also gave English 'pillow'.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word perioeci
Almost invariably used, however, in the original historical sense: inhabitants of subordinate towns around Sparta (or elsewhere in Greece).
May 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bach
Also (New Zealand) a holiday home at the beach. See Keri Hulme passim, or this Antarctic spokesperson (BBC news, 25-05-09):
The A-Frame represented something uniquely Kiwi in Antarctica. It was the concept of a mountain hut mixed with a bach and it said something about who we are.
May 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word slutmuffin
Great word. I liked it as soon as I saw it. I don't know what it means though. *googles "a slutmuffin"* Oh, there's an LJ community whose interests include "being a slutmuffin" and "slutmuffins" . . . and "Interpol", "pushing people down wells", "cheese", "being obese", "Old Faithful", so this is definitely failing the usual tests for meaningfulness. Good word though, whatever it is.
May 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word amphimediterranean
Those interested in a proper discussion of the histories of the amphimediterranean signaries should consult specialized treatments of these matters.
—Andrew Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin
May 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word baptize
Looks like it: Wyclif in 1382-3 used solemnize, sabbatize, authorize, then come the next burst in the 1420s: practise (which has since been remodelled), moralize, and in a text about surgery organize, paralyse, pulverize.
May 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word baptize
The OED says this is probably the oldest English word to contain the -ize suffix (attested from 1297).
May 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word jeopardy
Huh. I always thought this was a Law French term, containing the pronoun jeo "I", as indeed jeofail is. But no, it's in effect jeu parti "divided game", a situation in games such as chess.
May 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word miniature
Surprising etymology: nothing to do with the Latin root for "little, less" found in minus, minor, minimum, minuscule. Rather, it comes from minium "vermilion, cinnabar; red lead", and refers to the use of vermilion to highlight letters in manuscripts (rubrication) and thus to the colouring of marginal pictures in manuscripts.
May 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word quell
Sorry I'm late, sir, I was quelling a native with, ah, quells.
—Capt. Hugh Jampton, 'The Battle of Spion Kop', The Goon Show
May 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word woodwose
Resultative 'alive' in 'the statue came alive'.
May 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word woodwose
'Alive' here is depictive (as in 'ran around naked', 'turned up to work drunk', 'ate the meat raw') and is in contrast to a resultative complement ('shot them dead', 'hammered it flat', 'painted it blue').
May 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hetairae
This head word hetairae is itself the plural of singular hetaira.
May 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word palatals
Not an adjective! Not an adjective! The head word here is palatals, with noun plural ending. This can only be a noun. Parts of speech labels are not meaningless decoration.
May 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word uranographical
Not a noun! Not a noun! If it ends in -ic it's likely to be an adjective (excc.: statistic, physic, medic etc.); if it ends in -ic-al it's almost certainly an adjective (excc.: physical, medical "medical examination").
The noun for this branch of astronomy is 'uranography'.
May 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word spelling
*hands up* I have just come from drinkiepoos with our team of copy editors, all of whom have been laid off today. Apparently the idea is all the writers will write perfect English from the start and all I have to do is proof-read it.
May 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word maroon
Two separate origins: the colour is from French marron "chestnut", as is the firecracker (from the noise a chestnut in the fire makes).
The "strand" sense is ultimately from Spanish cimarrón "fugitive" (< cima "summit"), with loss of the initial syllable in some language in the chain of borrowing, not clear which.
May 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word wormhole
Wormholes are to black holes as elevators are to deep wells filled with snakes and poisoned spikes.
—Rules for Time Travelers
May 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word e'er
Ever to monosyllabic eer is a normal development: head, hawk, lark all come from earlier polysyllables with a medial v. In the case of eer, oer, (i) the v-ful alternatives remained in the language beside the shorter forms; (ii) at a relatively late stage the apostrophe was introduced to make the short form look like a mere variety of the longer one; and finally (iii) the short forms dropped out of everyday language. The poets didn't invent any contractions, they used the contractions available in everyday language (like it's, I've, i'th') and only gradually were some of these restricted to poetic registers.
Likewise the alternation of, say, walked and walk'd is because for some considerable time both were available in everyday language. Eventually walk'd won out and disyllabic walked was confined to poetic style.
May 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vigintillion
Or 1 followed by 120 zeroes.
May 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word austrasia
Austrasia has always been at war with Neustria.
May 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bergamot
Two different words: the aromatic component of Earl Grey tea is apparently from Bergamo in Italy, but the pear is from Turkish beğ armudu "bey's pear", altered to resemble the other word.
May 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list reduplicating-animals
The Western lowland gorilla is Gorilla gorilla gorilla.
May 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mesmerizing
One of a number of evaluative words that began as verb forms (the gerund-participle or present participle) and have taken on separate life as an adjective: so also enchanting, fascinating, interesting.
You can tell the difference between verb and adjective because some modifiers only apply to adjectives:
This show is very/extremely mesmerizing/fascinating. (Adj)
*The performer is very/extremely mesmerizing/fascinating the audience. (V)
May 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fabless
Of a semiconductor design business: doing only the design, and lacking the industrial facilities ('fabs') to fabricate the product. See more at Quinion.
May 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word szczaw
bilby: look in your garden. Wood sorrel is oxalis.
May 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cabbyl
The normal Welsh for "goat" is gafr. The interrelationships between the Celtic and Italic words here are not obvious: Don Ringe says the Celtic original of ceffyl "horse" seems to have gone from Latin to Celtic because it doesn't match up the way it would if it was a cognate, but this is uncertain. It is also unclear whether Italic and Celtic formed a sub-branch of IE and therefore particularly shared inherited vocabulary.
April 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word proto-vrddhi
For instance, to form a proto-vrddhi derivative from *dyew- 'sky' one took the zero grade *diw-, inserted *e to give *deyw- (sic), and so derived *deyw-ó-s 'god' (literally 'skyling'). . . . This is the historical source of the derivational process called vrddhi in Sanskrit.
—Don Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. The book actually uses the Indo-Europeanist syllabicity ring under the r, but I can't find that in Unicode.
April 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word coaly
And on blacklead.
April 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word blacklead
I bought some blacklead and blackleaded the grate so the iron glowed with a dull coaly gleam.
—Helen Dunmore, Your Blue-eyed Boy
Google Books throws up another use of the verb in a different Dunmore novel. WeirdNet only knows the verb. I'd never seen it used, and in fact didn't know what blacklead was. In my pub there's an old advertisement, circa 1900, for a brand of blacklead, but it depicts hoop-skirted young women in sunny outdoor colloquy, and so studiously fails to give any clue as to what it might be that I half imagined it must be some Edwardian hygiene product whose mode of application eluded me.
April 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word alumnus
I've considered tagging or listing them, but I think it's too late; it'd require going through over a thousand comments and deciding which were significantly etymological in nature.
April 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word alumnus
Wondering about the etymology of this, I found it originally meant "foster-child", with the familiar Latin al- "nourish" of 'aliment', but the unrecognizable part was a suffix related to the Greek passive participle suffix -omenos, not normally used in Latin.
Then I was surprised to learn that 'old' is related, as are 'altitude', 'alma mater' ("nourishing/bounteous mother"), and probably 'adult' and 'proletariat'.
The Germanic 'old' is from a past participle of that same root al- "nourish, raise", and is thus formally equivalent to Latin altus. The Latin however shifted from "grown up" to "high, tall" generally to "distant from the surface, i.e. high, tall, deep".
Ad-ul-tus and pro-l-es ("class who contribute offspring") might also contain the al- root internally.
April 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word retiarius
Best use of retiarius in a modern play:
HAROLD: He and his love are like a retiarius. Do you know what a retiarius is?
LOOSELEAF: He's a kind of gladiator who fights with a knife and a net and doesn't wear anything but a jockstrap.
HAROLD (amazed): How do you know that?
LOOSELEAF: You told me.
HAROLD: When?
LOOSELEAF: When we were up in the tree so long—with the bats.
HAROLD: Oh. I'd forgotten.
LOOSELEAF: Fourteen times you told me. I counted.
HAROLD: Really?
LOOSELEAF: You'd get this funny look in your eyes, and I'd say to myself, "Oh, Jesus—he's going to tell me what a retiarius is again."
—Kurt Vonnegut, Happy Birthday, Wanda June (The two men had been lost in the jungle after a plane crash.)
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mingy
Rupert Brooke, letter, 1912: I called you a mingy and coprologous Oxford poetaster.
Nancy Mitford, 1940: Mrs Holst only has the mingiest little diamond clip you ever saw.
Each in their own world.
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bitzer
A mongrel: bitzer this, bitzer that. Not yet in OED.
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word strategician
Attested from 1862, and in the text I'm proofing, and on a BBC blog, and sporadically elsewhere on the Web, but quite as many people (and in this case I'm inclined to be one of 'em) seem to think it's a blunder, 'strategist' influenced by 'tactician'.
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word musth
You're right, it is odd. I assumed it was a perfectly normal romanization of an Indian word containing aspirated th or ʈh, but it's not. The Urdu is mast "mad; drunk", and the expected romanization 'must' was used for most of the nineteenth century. Kipling appears to have stuck on the spurious -h.
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word lari
To be distinguished from laari, the subunit of the Maldivian rufiyaa.
April 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word autral
Not a currency: Argentina used the austral at one time.
April 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ambeguous
This was probably a scanning error in the Web version (there were many), not an error in the 1913 print.
April 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word wormwood
Not from worm + wood. The medial -w- first appears around 1400; the earlier English was wermod, of unknown etymology. The German form Wermuth (modern Wermut) gives us vermouth via French.
April 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mashallah
I've been having a bit of a think about this tense in the bath. Shâ'a is perfective: it would normally be translated by an English past, as in 'John wanted a bicycle' (and either did or didn't get one). The imperfective is yashâ', normally "wants", as in 'John wants a bicycle' (and might or might not be getting one for Christmas). The divine will, however, at least in the more orthodox branches of Islam, presumably has the property that what God wills, God definitely gets, so the perfective shâ'a is appropriate with present or aorist meaning.
April 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mashallah
'Tisn't. It's "what God wills": Arabic mâshâ'allâh from mâ "what" + shâ'a "he wants" + Allâh "God", with elision of the initial vowel of Allâh.
April 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mesonoxian
This is not a word. The only OED instance is a 1623 dictionary of inkhorn terms. And it's badly formed, being mixoclassical (to coin a word).
April 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list schwa-free
Angioneurotic is six syllables and would work in all accents, I believe.
April 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list schwa-free
The OED's second edition uses traditional RP, in which unstressed /ɪ/ is the same phone as when stressed: so words like indivisibility or remitted have the same vowel throughout. Present-day RP and near-RP (such as Estuary) however aligns with most other accents of English in having ə for many of the unstressed positions. The third edition revision (which won't cover D for a long time) uses the symbol <ɨ> to indicate that both phones are possible.
Edit: Actually it's dotless crossed <i>, which isn't exactly the IPA cardinal symbol; I'd need to use strikethrough to show it, but that doesn't seem to work.
April 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word doga
And Get Fuzzy ages before that. (I'm at home so trying to find actual linkable examples will see us into the next geological period, sorry. You'll have to take this one on my say-so.)
April 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word imprimantur
Not a plural of an English noun. As the singular 'imprimatur' means "an official mark decreeing it may be printed", the Latin verb plural imprimantur may be Englished the same way: "an official mark decreeing they may be printed". Typically, multiple documents grouped together would require only a single mark imprimantur, rather than each being given its own imprimatur. Accepting it as an English nonce-word, it's vaguely remininiscent of certain North American languages where there are different verbs for single or multiple objects.
Both words can be pluralized in the usual way: imprimaturs for various documents separately judged, imprimanturs for those relating to Pope and Madras in those citations.
Interesting too, and quite typical for Wikheadtionary, that three of their five supposed citations don't show it used in English at all, and their supposed pronunciation is directly contradicted by the only citation indicating a pronunciation.
April 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word innit
The key thing about 'innit' is that it's invariant, like French n'est-ce pas, German nicht wahr, Italian non è vero, Turkish değil mi. In contemporary southern English English it is replacing the insanely complicated standard English construction:
I couldn't find my toothbrush, could I? / innit?
You have got a passport, haven't you? / innit?
We found it yesterday, didn't we? / innit?
She likes sushi, doesn't she? / innit?
They'll come tomorrow, won't they? / innit?
April 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word shoat
There is your dinner, friend, the pork of slaves.
Our fat shoats are all eaten by the suitors
—Fitzgerald's translation of Odyssey book 14
April 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word yard of ale
Entered to record the fact that I have just heard someone say 'yard of ales' for what were being consumed last night. To me this is a straightforward, transparent syntactic combination with idiomatic meaning, but that speaker has lexicalized it more closely.
April 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tingo
First person singular of the Latin verb meaning "wet, moisten; bathe" and thus "dye, stain". From this come our words 'tinge', 'tincture', 'tint'. So now you know.
April 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word leech
If both Germanic and Slavonic inherited it from common Indo-European, Germanic k would correspond to a voiced sound in Slavonic, *g or perhaps *z; as Slavonic has k too it's presumably a borrowing from Germanic. Starostin lists the Germanic and Celtic forms but doesn't mention the Slavonic.
(I mentioned Polish specifically before only because I happened to know that without looking it up.)
April 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word leech
Surprisingly perhaps, the "doctor" meaning is the original. It's a widespread Germanic root that's made it as far as Finnish (lääkäri) and Polish (lekarz). By contrast, English only shares the "blood-sucking worm" meaning with Middle Dutch. So either the word for "doctor" was applied to the worm in the pre-Old English period, or they were two separate words that have drifted together. (Anomalous vowels in some of the forms suggest that the "worm" word was originally different.)
April 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word laicization
GEORGE: What happened to the old Archbishop?
DOTTY: He abdicated . . . or resigned or uncoped himself—
GEORGE (thoughtfully): Dis-mantled himself, perhaps.
—Stoppard, Jumpers
April 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word we
Come, faith, madam, let us e'en pardon one another; for all the difference I find betwixt we men and you women, we forswear ourselves at the beginning of an amour, you as long as it lasts.
—Wycherley, The Country Wife, 1675
A nice example showing how old the construction is with case variation in what the CGEL calls 'determinative we' (where the NP 'we men' is headed by the noun 'men', and 'we' is a determinative, not a pronoun). That is, I presume Wycherley would have said *'betwixt us and you', not **'betwixt we and you'; but 'we men' is more of a fixed structure. In Present-day English this is often presumed to be a hypercorrection, but the OED has examples of it from well before Wycherley and prescriptive teaching.
April 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mad magazine sentence
Despite the whimsically modern name, this construction has long been integral to English: I found three examples on the same page of Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), for example.
That's a good one! I hate a man for loving you! If he did love you, 'tis but what he can't help; and 'tis your fault, not his, if he admires you. I hate a man for being of my opinion! I'll ne'er do it, by the world! (subject + VP, twice)
He afraid to lose you, madam! (subject + AP)
(In this earlier stage of English, the nominative was the default case, so 'I', 'he'; in Present-day English we would say 'Me hate' and 'Him afraid'.)
April 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word jewishish
As Jonathan Miller said long ago, 'I'm not really a Jew, just Jew-ish.'
April 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word deconstruction
Hum. I've just encountered this word referring to what workers did to a building at the World Trade Center site. I'm tempted to leave it in for its disturbing Baudrillardian quality, but I'm afraid duty requires me to substitute something more prosaic. Dismantling, perhaps.
April 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word laicization
Dismantled, as Stoppard suggested?
April 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sphalm
Ooh gad, we even have an etymology s.v. 'sphalma'.
April 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word forte
Disyllabic pronunciation in all meanings: to pronounce common words differently from your neighbours is pedantry and ignorance. The English word is a blend of French and Italian, getting its spelling and pronunciation from Italian but its (primary) meaning from French.
The French for a strong point, in particular the strong point of a sword (as opposed to 'foible', the weak point) is fort fɔR, masculine.
As with numerous English words (locale, morale etc.), once it was borrowed into English it subsequently acquired an extra -e in the belief that this made it look more French.
The assimilation in pronunciation to the Italian-derived musical term forte is surely complete. The OED gives the pronunciations as (fɔːti, fɔːteɪ, formerly fɔːt), and I doubt anyone has said it as a monosyllable for many decades except those who have read someone else claiming that it was one. (I used to be one of those myself, in my ignorance, before I understood how language actually works.)
I have just edited out of some text the spelling forté, a natural next progression in confusing the two source languages.
March 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bugs
Yes! Me too! I had to sign in! *waaaa* Make it stop.
March 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word jusqu'aujourd'hui
il faut encore observer que jusqu’aujourd’hui, dans notre continent, cette maladie nous est particulière, comme la controverse.
—Candide ch.4
Interesting for the double apostrophe in its formation. Flicking through web hits it seems there is some doubt in Present-day French about whether this shouldn't be two words jusqu'à aujourd'hui.
March 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vox populi
Invariably quoted out of context as if Alcuin stated this. What he wrote was: Nec audiendi sunt qui solent docere, 'Vox populi, vox Dei', cum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima est. "Nor are those who are wont to teach 'The voice of the people is the voice of God' to be listened to, for the tumult of the common people is always next to madness."
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word semagram
The sequence of phonograms is usually followed by a semagram, called in the Egyptological custom "determinative," which classifies a word according to its semantic sphere: for example, a sitting man * expresses the lexical realm of "man, mankind" . . .
—Antonio Loprieno, 1995, Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction, Cambridge
* At this point and scattered in the rest of the sentence after I have truncated it are actual hieroglyphics in the text. I am familiar with reading hieroglyphics; I am now ecstatic in owning a book that requires learning the Coptic alphabet to understand it properly. I have simple tastes.
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word out-enchant
At rest above a star pool with my friends,
Beside that grove most fit for elegies,
I made my phrase to out-enchant the night.
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Souls Lake'
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sonnerie
To call my true love to the dance
I need the sonnerie of circumstance
and not the damp disclosures of the Manse.
—Peter Porter, 'Men Die, Women Go Mad', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
Not in my Chambers. The meaning seems obvious nevertheless. I am too drunk to pursue the matter further. Note on pronunciation: as Porter is an Australian, this verse would rhyme perfectly for him.
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cenacle
—where sparrows splash
a generation of fine mercers trained to be
the only hosts a prim cénacle knew—
—Peter Porter, 'Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces', in the volume of the same name
This would have looked more familiar in the English spelling without the accent, but the use of the French form is unexpected.
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sherdist
fought-over ground
looks no different from the urban waste
littering the road—here the sherdist found
a crinkly stone
—Peter Porter, 'Too Many Miracles', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ripa
and far from dark Messapian trappings choose
a sun-kind ripa of philosophy
—Peter Porter, 'Too Many Miracles', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
Familiar in Latin, of course, "bank", but I haven't seen it used in English. It's hard to quote sufficient context from a poem while not treading on copyright toes.
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sinopia
a conch-shell or a goat's horn cornucopia
might spill the face of wonder on the sand,
painstaking painting, miraculous sinopia.
—Peter Porter, 'Too Many Miracles', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dwarf planet
The five objects that have so far been declared dwarf planets are Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake.
The expression is grammatically unusual in that it is not a hyponym of its head: a dwarf planet is not a kind of planet. Most such expressions in English have to do with unreality of some kind (a fake Rembrandt is not a Rembrandt, a pretend dinosaur is not a dinosaur, an attempted coup is not a coup), or are lexically quirky (a Welsh rabbit is not a rabbit), or are named for rough biological resemblance (a sea anemone is not an anemone).
March 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ptochotrophium
Latinization of Greek for "alms-house, poorhouse" (ptoch- "poor" + troph- "nourish"). I'm listing it because I noticed it in actual use today (in the plural ptochotrophia): on one of the inscriptions on The Monument, commemorating the Great Fire.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word syfy
I thought real science fiction fans called it sf, and reserved sci-fi for the likes of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word oversight
Perilously close to an autantonym: the two opposing meanings are equally old, going back to the 1400s.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word lickorous
Not a variant of 'lechery', but of 'lecherous', to be pedantic. Different suffixes. (Apparently a variant in Northern French, where the k > tʃ change did not take place.) The Romance word is borrowed from a Germanic one, cognate with 'lick'; not related to Latin lux- "extravagance, debauchery".
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word leam
A synonym, not a form. The similarity of the spelling of the words in Modern English is deceptive: they are from unrelated Old English léoma and glǽm.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word scattergun
Oh, a scattergun is an actual kind of gun. I didn't know that.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ureilite
The researchers studying 2008 TC3 say it was one of a very rare type of meteorite called ureilites, which may have originated from a single parent body.
—BBC, 26/03/09
from Novo-Urei, a Russian village near which a ureilite meteorite fell c.1888
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word doubtlessly
A rare variant of the adverb 'doubtless'. The BNC goes 100:1 in favour of 'doubtless', though it's a little more common on Google as a whole, whilst still very much a minority form. I'm not aware that I've ever come across it before.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word see
Oh, a perfectly unremarkable and harmless construction as long as it hides in the thickets; but when a writer makes a tic of it, as my present one is, out comes the red pen (and a wisp of steam from the ears).
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word candlewick
I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world.
—Mr Mog Edwards in Under Milk Wood
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word see
'The past year has seen them do such-and-such.'
'His expertise in X has seen him do Y.'
A strange information-packaging use that promotes an adjunct to subject.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bring
'He brings with him his expertise in . . .'
As opposed to bringing with his chauffeur? But it sounds more natural with 'with him'.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word poowong
Near Nar Nar Goon and Koo Wee Rup, then?
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word evolution
As a comment on the word itself, it should be pointed out that it has had a great many and various meanings in its history (in English, Latin, French, etc.), numerous of them in biology; and all of those now entirely obsolete except Darwin's. Lack of awareness of this history may lead to strange misinterpretations of the history of biology, or of social science, since the Darwinian meaning is now so completely dominant it is too easy to think it was the one that was meant.
The first meaning in English was a kind of military manoeuvre. Darwin wasn't the first to espouse what we now call evolution in biology, nor the first to use that word for it (Lyell 1832 was), nor does the word appear in The Origin of Species till the 1873 sixth edition, in which he could say, 'At the present day almost all naturalists admit evolution under some form.' (The last word of the first edition, however, is 'evolved'.)
Amsuingly, the quotation after his in the OED is from Popular Science Monthly in 1880: 'I should regard a teacher of science who denied the truth of evolution as being as incompetent as one who doubted the Copernican theory.'
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pol le veq
It's Pont l'Évêque.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word case ness
It's Caithness.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word paper cramer
It's pippo creme.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sorcerer
This spelling 'sorcerer' is strongly preferred to 'sorceror' (over 20:1 on raw Google hits), and the -or doesn't occur in BNP and isn't even mentioned in the OED as an alternative (though it does occur in the quotations with a sic against it).
That actually surprises me: I thought it was one of those where fluctuation was more standard, as with adviser/advisor, conjurer/conjuror, imposter/impostor.
March 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word adviser
See advisor for details of etymology and preferences. In a nutshell: BrE somewhat prefers -er, AmE -or, but it's not a simple split.
March 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word chop
A number of different words:
(1) "cut", thus the cut of meat, and 'get the chop' = "be axed, scrapped, killed", and choppy waves.
(2) variant of 'chap' = "jaw", usually in plural chaps, chops, thus chapfallen, and the new "skill" sense I noted below.
(3) "trade, barter" (related to 'cheap', 'chapman', German kaufen "buy", and town names in Chipping), occurring nowadays only in the phrases 'chop and change' and 'chop logic' ("bandy words" but now usually understood as word (1), as if "make fine distinctions")
(4) from a Hindi word for "impression, stamp", giving commercial senses in India and China such as "seal; licence; trade mark", then colloquially "quality", as in 'not much chop' = "not very good"
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word chop
A new idiom to me: 'shows off its nominal modifier chops'. According to the OED, the general meaning "skill" is a widening of "jazz trumpeter's skill" from "embouchure (in jazz)" from chops "jaws".
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ignobility
Of actual ignobility too proud
To admit brotherhood, and sickened
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Adulescentia'
Another of those words that obviously must exist but are virtually never seen in actual use.
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word salle-d'armes
Prowess and grace of the invulnerable
Courteous horseman, the silk-shirted fencer
Far from the salle-d'armes, scraping and ringing:
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Adulescentia'
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tintsheet
Turn on the lights. Electric yellow
Light on the greylight. Aching now,
Elbows mashed on the tintsheet.
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Wet Sunday'
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word minuscular
The wondering and minuscular fore-finger
Traced that embossing by the magic world.
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Animula'
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fatou's lemma
Oh phooey, it's an img. I thought you'd found some clever way of doing it in HTML.
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word footpace
In armour before the earthen footpace he stood;
—Charles Williams, 'Taliessin at Lancelot's Mass', in Taliessin Through Logres
each at the earthen footpace ordained to be blessed and to bless
—ib.
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word monstrum
In the monstrum of triangular speed,
in a path of lineal necessity,
the necessity of being was communicated to the son of Lancelot.
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
I don't know what it means; you don't know what it means; and I will bet a silk pyjama Mr Dorky Prat Drooling Williams wasn't paying much attention at that point either. Idiot. Idiot.
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word argentine
and gathered and fled through the air to the head of Percivale,
flew and flamed and flushed the argentine column.
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
I don't think I've seen this used before to mean "argent".
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thighed
over the bier and the pale body of Blanchefleur,
mother of the nature of lovers, creature of exchange;
drained there of blood by the thighed wound,
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word overfeather
An infinite flight of doves from the storming sky
of Logres—strangely sea-travellers when the land melts—
forming to overfeather and overwhelm the helm,
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word creaturely
Solomon was the grand master of all creaturely being
in sublime necromancy, the rule and road of seeing
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word arm-fasted
Rigid his left arm stretched to the queen Balkis;
where her mouth on his hand tasted effectual magic,
intellectual art arm-fasted to the sensuous.
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word unangelical
Unangelical speed loitered upon them,
supposing the everlasting habitations had received it;
—Charles Williams, 'The Death of Palomides', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word seed-mail
I sat and heard, aloof in my young seed-mail,
scornful of my secret attention;
—Charles Williams, 'The Death of Palomides', in Taliessin Through Logres
No idea. I don't think Williams had any idea what he was talking about half the time.
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word djong
throngs of trunks covered the volcanic waters;
only the flat djongs float into alien P'o-lu.
—Charles Williams, 'The Departure of Merlin', in Taliessin Through Logres
No idea. Not in OED. I'm going to guess it's Williams's faux-archaic form of 'junk'.
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word criminate
'Although there may be other particulars of a public nature, tending to criminate this person, I do not think a larger and more copious catalogue is necessary to be exhibited to this worshipful bench; because the proof of all will lie before a court of superior jurisdiction.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word praecordia
The doctor's choler rose; he felt a suffocating sensation somewhere—a sort of swell about the præcordia; but he suffered in silence.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word girandole
Poor Sir Philip, as if he had seen the face of Medusa, flew back, and encountered a girandole, which fell to the floor—a girandole no more.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hypochondriacism
'I fear he may have infected your lordship with hypochondriacism.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word misbecome
'A little more deference to my friends, Miss Campinet, would not misbecome you.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thermogenesis
In the minutes before entering the water, Pugh recalls these emotions and is able to raise his core temperature, without doing any physical exercise, to 38.4°C. That's an extraordinary 1.4°C above his normal body temperature. Such "anticipatory thermogenesis" has been observed before, but not to such a high degree.
—New Scientist, 21 Feb. 2009
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word serodiscordant
Most of the evidence comes from studies of monogamous hetersexual couples who are "serodiscordant" – in other words one person is HIV positive and the other is not.
—New Scientist, 21 Feb. 2009
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word diamond
'I suppose it is one of Nature's positive laws, that even diamond rings, worn a while, cease to raise that glow in a lady's bosom which first possession excited.'
'I think,' said Mrs. Sumelin, 'it is not very polite to compare a lady to a diamond ring.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
We have probably all heard that it was a marketing campaign by De Beers in the early 1900s that made diamonds the ubiquitous engagement gift; so this quotation is a salutary antidote to thinking they must have been little used before then.
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word stool
'Now I'll tell you a secret. Lady Chestrum and I don't always hit it; she has such odd fancies. Would you believe it? she is every now and then for hearing me my Catechism. I take physic to please her twice a week; and if I have not stools enough, I must have another dose.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
I know even the late eighteenth century is not the time of Jane Austen, but I goggled at this and had to read it repeatedly to convince myself it said what it did. This is a meeting in polite society between a brainless, shiftless aristocrat and a refined, shy young lady he is trying to persuade of his merits as a future husband. And he is discussing the quantity of his stools.
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word scrub
'. . . for as to money, that is every body's that can get it.'
'So, I think, is title.'
'But it is not every scrub that can get it.'
'Not quite.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word viscus
Not content with this mass of amusement, you continue your beneficence to that unfortunate viscus, the stomach, under the name of dessert, till it almost faints under the obligation.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
In theory I knew that 'viscus' was the singular of 'viscera', but I doubt I've ever seen it in use till now.
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word inexpiable
'If I had broke the cup, madam,' Mr. Sumelin answered, 'it would have been a crime inexpiable but by a new set. This is, I suppose, a regular tax upon husbands; I submit to it; but I really cannot submit to the not being allowed to scald my own fingers.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word congruity
'What is there incongruous in this?' his lordship asked.
'Oh nothing, nothing! the congruity will be prodigious. Ages so near; tempers so alike; the lady so willing to make the most of her charms. O yes! you will have a son!'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
One of those words where the derivative is familiar, and if you thought about it you would be sure that where there is an incongruity there must be a congruity in its history, but you have almost certainly never seen it in the wild.
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word eulogium
Alas! the man who is destined to become your lordship's biographer must find his motive in money, and matter of eulogium in his invention.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mother-expectant
'I think, my dear, I can make his lordship dance the dance of expectation a couple of years at least; and whilst I am mother-expectant, I hope I may be able to dispose of my daughter in an honourable manner.'
So saying, this mother-expectant withdrew in a most matronly manner to her own dressing-room.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
The surprising thing is that 'expectant' here is not used in the way you would usually associate with 'mother'; though Bage, in 1796, has no difficulty talking about sex and pregnancy in a way that would be impossible for Jane Austen a short few years later. Rather, the arch young lady saying this to her friend of the same age is discussing her plot to ensnare the friend's tyrannical father in order to help her: she has no intention of actually becoming his wife (and therefore her friend's mother), but wants to keep him in expectation.
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word retrocedence
Love, like other chronic passions,—I had like to have said diseases,—has its fits of progression and retrocedence, its hot and cold fits.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word adventive
But always to preserve the adventive
Minute, never to destroy the truth
—Lawrence Durrell, 'Cavafy'
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word waterberry
Living on snails and waterberries,
Marvelling for the first time
At the luminous island, the light.
—Lawrence Durrell, 'Fangbrand'
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pastance
This place he made pastance
For the platonic ass;
—Lawrence Durrell, 'Fangbrand'
archaic for "pastime"; app. < Fr. passe-temps
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word solleret
Funny thing is the word has only been used in English since the nineteenth century—so what did the wearers call 'em?
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word brassica
While brassica as such only entered English in 1832, I discover to my surprise that a work of about 1420 used it in the form brassik. At that time presumably it could only have meant "cabbage" because none of the other forms existed.
March 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cheesed off
The OED has it from the 1940s, and just says etym. unkn. It's probably services slang, as are coeval 'brassed off' and slightly earlier 'browned off', neither of which has any known explanation either.
March 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word advertise
'I must advertise you, my dear, that my father is rather irritable.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
This is OED sense 4. d., transitive with subordinate clause; not marked by them as obsolete, and they have an example from 1850, but as this word begins Ad- it probably hasn't been revised since 1889.
Hermsprong, by the way, is a delight: a satirical, didactic novel echoing Voltaire and prefiguring Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock. And I'd never heard of the author before!
Here's another example ibidem of a similar construction with recipient object:
In passing out they were met by Mr. Hermsprong, accompanied by the man-servant of the family, a man of a respectable appearance, who, on seeing the arrest of his master, had run of his own accord to a neighbouring village, to advertise a friend of Mr. Wigley's of this unhappy business.
March 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word went
I can't think of any other former suppletive verbs, even in Old English; but in Present-day English you might choose to include 'must', which for past tense has to switch to 'had to'.
March 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word presently
I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet II from A Few Figs from Thistles
I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
—Sonnet IV, ib.
March 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word compensation
"Now this legislation moves to the Senate, and I look forward to receiving a final product that will serve as a strong signal to the executives who run these firms that such compensation will not be tolerated," Mr Obama said.
Use of this word to mean "pay (to bloated, thieving, port-faced capitalists)" makes me shake with fury. However, it goes back a couple of hundred years in US usage so is not a modern euphemism.
March 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dino-fuzz
Well, it's a major news story, and any educated person would be looking at it: from a linguistic point of view it has all these hooks too. I thought the other two words were possibilities, and contemplated noding under both of them, but they both seemed a bit ad-hoc. The genus name Tianyulong I eventually plumped for is permanent, but genus names aren't really English words.
March 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word presently
I can't see how the two main senses could be confused. The sense "now, at present" normally occurs with a continuous or atelic verb construction, as in 'I am presently reading that book' or 'Elizabeth is presently to be found disporting in the otter-strewn thoroughfares of Hammersmith'; whereas the sense "in a wee while" goes with telic constructions such as 'I'll be with you presently' or 'The gate was opened, and presently entered two horsemen.' I suspect it would be hard to construct a natural and ambiguous sentence.
I used to think the "at present" sense came from a blending of 'at present' with 'currently' of same meaning, but no, it's got a pedigree that goes back to Chaucer. It was just disapproved of for a while.
March 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list luggage-tags
The only time in my life I've been approached by an armed man, he was prominently labelled 'LAX Security'.
March 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list the-much-avoided-latin-rooted-english-list
Hmm. Something like 60% of English may be based on Latin, but something like 30% of this list is Greek. To quote a character in Stoppard's The Invention of Love, 'Latin and Greek are two entirely separate languages spoken by distinct peoples living in different parts of the ancient world.' If some of the Greek words happened to pass through Latin on their way to us, probably quite as many actually came to us from French.
March 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word rack
Heavens! The OED lists twelve different nouns and seven verbs, and add to the pot three nouns and four verbs 'wrack', and who knows how many instances that began life as 'rake' or 'reck', and no wonder we're confused. Ignoring obsolete and spurious senses, and ones I plain haven't heard of, we have:
n. (2) a moving mass of cloud;
(3) a stretching frame for cloth, and thus for torture;
(4) a vertical framework for holding things (fodder, hats, guns, clothes, cards, etc. etc.); and thus a bar engaging with a pinion; thus also the bosoms;
(7) a joint of meat; a bony horse;
(9) wreckage, ruin;
v. (1) stretch; tear apart; torment; cudgel (one's brains); charge (rent) excessively;
(3) rack n. (6)'>from a kind of horse's gait, rack n. (6) rack along "rattle along", rack off "piss off";
(4) put in a rack n. (4); esp. of pool balls; rack up "accumulate".
In answer to the question I was asking myself that led to this research: yes, rack and ruin should really be wrack and ruin, sense n. (9) being originally 'wrack'.
March 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word behalf
Another disfavoured construction is 'on the behalf of'. The initial half million hits on Google looks numerous (to the dubious extent that numbers mean anything on Google any more), but there are a hundred million for 'on behalf of'. Likewise, BNC has 4 against 2717. So while it's probably not to be considered entirely ungrammatical, it's not standard.
March 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tianyulong
A new genus of dinosaur discovered in China, named after the Tianyu museum + lóng "dragon". The single species so far is biologically notable for its protofeathers or dino-fuzz; and linguistically for its malformed species name Tianyulong confuciusi. Under ICZN Article 31.1.1, Latinizations should be treated with Latin grammar, so the genitive of Confucius is confucii. (A modern name such as Sibelius would however be given the Latinization sibeliusi under 31.1.1.) Unfortunately, Article 32.5.1 prevents the original spelling from being changed: incorrect Latinization is not a sufficient error.
March 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word xantippe
Actually it's Zentippe in the Quarto and First Folio, Zantippe in later Folios, so not an authentic Shakespearean X.
Odd that this spelling has persisted in common use: the Greek gives Xanthippe (xanth- "yellow" + hipp- "horse").
March 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pejorism
Well I won't be getting any of my words from that Medical 'Dictionary'. Pronunciation wrong, meaning wrong. The pronunciation would be ˈpiːdʒərɪzm (or pē′jər-izm, to guess at their system): no English-speaker would put a full vowel in the unstressed second syllable. And it's not common-or-garden pessimism (L. pessim- "worst"), it's pejorism (L. pejor- "worse"), the belief that the world is getting worse.
March 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word intransigeant
The variant 'intransigeant' looks like a misspelling of the usual 'intransigent', but actually comes directly from the French and some of the earliest uses in English used this spelling.
March 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word meliorism
pejorism
March 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sono
first person singular and third person (and second person polite) plural
March 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word renown
Despite huge numbers of hits for the spelling *reknown, this is unrelated to 'know'. It is however related to 'name', its root being Latin nomin-.
March 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word clumperton
To the first array of my clumperton antagonists this I answer — that my stile is no otherwise puft up, then any mans should be which writes with any spirite; and whom would not such a devine subject put a high ravishte spirite into?
—Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the diuell, 1592
March 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vivify
And with the will came the Act and so at last
He vivified naked form devoid of reason.
—Lawrence Durrell, 'Poemandres'
Listed as a discovery because I don't think I've ever seen the plain form 'vivify', as opposed to the familiar 'revivify'.
March 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word epoptic
A vision of the soul flashed across him
With the great harpoon buried in her . . .
The epoptic mystery of the whole wheat-ear!
—Lawrence Durrell, 'Poemandres'
March 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word farded
None of it but belongs
To this farded character
Whose Grecian credits are his old excuse
—Lawrence Durrell, 'Byron'
March 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word winterset
Surely the hard blue winterset
Must have conveyed a message to him—
—Lawrence Durrell, 'On First Looking into Loeb's Horace'
Lots of ghits for proper names, but none I can see for a common noun; also not in OED, so I suspect a nonce-coinage of Durrell's. (But what would the places be named for?)
March 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fent
God
Opens each fent, scent, memory, aftermath
In the sky and the sod.
—Lawrence Durrell, 'Carol on Corfu'
March 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word petrifact
Of man's own wish this breathless loveliness,
Of man's own wish this deathless petrifact.
—Lawrence Durrell, 'Aphrodite'
March 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list leev2s-list
Nope, every single person here has started by commenting on their list instead of the words. *stares briefly at designer*
March 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sound
Three or four distinct roots. (1) The senses "noise" and "make noise" are from French (Latin son-) with excrescent -d appearing in English in the 1400s. (2) The adjective "healthy" is Germanic. (3) So is the noun "strait, channel", related to 'swim' (sumd- assimilating to sund-). (4) The sense "plumb to ascertain depth" is from French but is probably ultimately taken from the previous water sense. The idiom 'sound someone out' comes from this, not from the use of voice.
March 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word squill
Squill are flowering in Bunhill Fields. With the aid of image search I have finally identified those blue jobs. From Latin squilla, variant of usual (and Linnean) scilla, from Greek. I wonder why the variation? Could it be a late reborrowing, from the time when ci and qui had begun to change their sounds?
March 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word humanly
'New to the dictionary' refers to the adjective, which is only attested from Caxton:
1481 CAXTON tr. Hist. Reynard Fox (1970) 69 Whan a man doth amys And thenne by counseyl amendeth it That is humaynly Du. menschelic And so ought he to doo.
The adverb is a different, long-established word.
March 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word copiii
Romanian for "the children": copii plural of copil, with definite article -i. (The singular definite is copilul.)
March 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word compliancy
How can there be 125 000 000 ghits for a word I've never heard of??
(Oh, I see, there's the same number for 'compliance', and no combination of pluses and quotes will separate them. Google is now officially useless.)
To put this in a real-world context, the BNC has 1292 instances of 'compliance' and none at all for 'compliancy'; so my ignorance is forgivable.
March 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word boutique
A law firm concentrating on a narrow compass of specialisms is called a boutique.
March 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mammoth
Also used as a modifier, meaning "very big". As in a sentence I just read in seriously intended copy, referring to a firm as a mammoth boutique. The richness of the Web is illustrated by the fact that several of those randomized spam sites, whatever they are (I have no intention of clicking) contain this very phrase in most curious contexts:
society enrichmentm eeting invitations after applicant of the phony ugly fire succumbing inside me, soothing into the mammoth boutique between my legs.
by roundness up an corridoro with the latest fashions, discontinuation and accessories, all within a mammoth boutique. Read out ringworm genre remedies.
March 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word you gave her the fish
A surprisingly widespread idiom, with a surprisingly diverse range of meanings. In German, for example, Ich gab ihr einen Fisch means "I gave her a slap upside the head"; whereas in French donner un poisson à quelqu'un is a literary expression meaning "give someone the hump", replaced in modern slang by donner un petit chameau. In Bizkaian Basque, arraina eman is "shudder", though in Navarre it's "wriggle out of a painful obligation". In Malay, saya mau memberi ikan-ikan kepadanya is accompanied by a sinuous gesture of both hands, and must never be uttered in the joint presence of a husband and wife, for fear of drawn-out and sanguinary revenge.
March 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the user rolig
The distinction between 'dis-' and plural '-s' is that the former is derivational, the latter inflectional. The non-existence of a free noun *'scissor' doesn't mean that the bound base 'scissor' can't be used in various ways: by conversion it can be used as a verb; it can take plural endings to become a free noun; and it can be used as a noun in attributive function ('scissor parts').
It's a bit difficult to see because in English bases almost always have free existence: unlike in Latin or Greek where there's no such thing as simply the 'word for' X, but rather a bound base with obligatory complex inflexion.
March 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word co-radicate
It appears from such an example as that in § 40 (c) that E. distich is co-radicate with (i. e. from the same root as) E. stair. The former is a borrowed word, from the weak grade, and the latter a native word, from the second grade of the same root *steig-. A similar relationship usually holds even in cases where the root does not appear as a known verb; and we may go so far as to consider words as co-radicate, provided that the consonants of the root are the same (such as st . g) and the vowels are regularly related by gradation.
—W. W. Skeat, 1905, A Primer of Classical and English Philology
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hub
You who elucidate the disk
hubbed by the sun
—Basil Bunting, Briggflatts
This puzzled me until I realized it was a conversion of the ordinary noun.
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hoy
Can you trace shuttles thrown
like drops from a fountain
. . .
shuttles like random dust desert whirlwinds hoy at their tormenting sun?
—Basil Bunting, Briggflatts
In the endnotes Bunting glosses this "toss, hurl". Immediately before these lines comes the word 'skerry', which he glosses "O, come on, you know that one."
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word culler
Anemones spite cullers of ornament
but design the pool
to their grouping.
—Basil Bunting, Briggflatts
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word serac
Scurvy gnaws, steading smell, hearth's crackle.
Crabs, shingle, seracs on the icefall.
—Basil Bunting, Briggflatts
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word quaint
From Latin cognitum "known", then proceeding via senses such as "knowing, clever" to "cleverly made, ingenious" to "of interesting or curious make" to its present meaning with the sense of old-fashionedness. Not related at all to 'cunt', but used as a pun by mediaeval writers that way.
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cunt
For the record, not related to 'quaint': that was a pun by mediaeval writers. Nor, pace Catherine Blackledge quoted below, could any etymologist connect it with the Romance 'country'. The word is in fact of completely unknown etymology, its only known relation being Norse kunta.
It cannot be related to Latin cunnus of same meaning, as in 'cunnilingus', since that violates Grimm's Law: Latin k would match Germanic h, whereas Germanic k would match Latin g. If it was an early borrowing from Latin into Germanic, so that Grimm's Law didn't have to apply, where would the t come from?
It is possible, as an idle speculation, that it's related to the Indo-European "woman" word (queen, Venus, gyne-) or to the "know" word (know, kin, kind, king, cunning), but not both. There is no evidence for any such connexion except resemblance, probably just chance resemblance.
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word polysyndeton
Polysyndeton in Julie Myerson's "Sad-Grand Moment"
I was cruising for Julie Myerson, as one does, when I noticed this, and did a double-take when I realized that what I'd first read as 'asyndeton', a device I approve of, was in fact an entirely new word to me. And Julie does everything well, so she does polysyndeton well too.
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word scheiße
On pronunciation: the eszet is always pronounced s, never z as a single <s> would be in *Scheise.
On spelling: why is the eszet retained? I thought after the recent reform its sole function was to indicate a preceding long vowel; and this is unnecessary after diphthongs, which have no length distinction. But I don't know much about the reform.
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word qahwah
The original word for "coffee" from which virtually all others are derived. The phonetic change of hw to f is reasonable, but not the converse, making very implausible phonetically the legend that this word is related to the (former) province of Kaffa in Ethiopia, where it is said to have been first discovered.
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word squirrel
The etymology of this seems very straightforward: Greek skiourous from ski- "shadow" + ouros "tail". Yet Starostin's etymological database evidently regards the second element not as "tail" but as the zero grade of an Indo-European *(o)wer-, name of some kind of weasel-like animal, as found reduplicated in Latin viverra, and also in German Eichhörnchen "squirrel". That latter looks like a simple Eiche "oak" + Horn "horn" + diminutive, but the second part is known to be from the *wer- root with subsequent superficial assimilation to horn.
In wish there was some indication of how much of Starostin is well-agreed and how much is his own speculation.
March 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word kava
The Czech and Slovak is actually káva.
March 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cafeum
I don't think so. This is not a Latvian-looking word, even as a borrowing; the Latvian for "coffee" turns out to be kafija; and even as a possible brand name, there are no ghits for Cafeum site:lv.
There are very few known uses for W*k*p*d**, but looking up kafija immediately gives us a large number of other words for it in the language panel by the side.
March 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word kofe
I don't know where you're getting these, but cross-check it: kahve is the Turkish for "coffee".
March 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word periant golchi
Actually golchi is the basic word "wash (e.g. clothes") and ym- is a reciprocal or middle voice prefix. It causes soft mutation, so golchi becomes -olchi in ymolchi "wash oneself, bathe".
March 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word plop
Also Romanian for "poplar", it appears.
March 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mammothrept
Worse are mammothraptors: hairy, tusked, hungry, and fleet on two feet.
March 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word curry
The sense "groom" (verb) ultimately comes from Late Latin *con-red- "make ready", with a root borrowed from Germanic.
(This is cognate with Spanish correios "couriers, post", familiar from stamps—and unrelated to 'courier'. The root also gives 'read' via a sense "advise", cf. German Rat. Its borrowing into Romance also occurs in 'array'.)
The 'favour' in the idiom is a mediaeval eggcorn: it comes from 'curry Favel', a fallow horse, proverbial for being deceitful.
March 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mammothrept
A rare word in Greek, Latin, and English, with an interesting succession of senses, largely gained by misapprehension. The Greek meaning comes from mamm- "grandmother" and thrept- "reared, fed", past participle of treph- "rear, produce, maintain, feed, suckle, etc.". (The change of aspiration is the effect of Grassmann's Law, and the reason I looked this up: I didn't recognize threp-.)
This obscure Greek word somehow came to the attention of St Augustine of Hippo, which is 'surprising', says the OED, because he didn't know Greek. In any case, the mamma word means "breast" in Latin, rather than "grandmother", so he used it to mean "reared (sc. too long) at the breast".
Ben Jonson used it in English as "immature person", i.e. a spoilt child, in a figurative sense. 'But very well? O you are a meere Mammothrept in iudgement.'
Another author, Braithwait, used it shortly after this in the expressions 'strict Mamothrept' and 'severe mammothrepts', as if misunderstanding Jonson and taking it as "critic".
March 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word broker
Related etymologically to 'broach' (q.v. for more detail), 'brooch', and 'broccoli'.
March 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word broccoli
Related etymologically to 'broach' (q.v. for more detail), 'brooch', and 'broker'.
March 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word broach
Related etymologically to 'brooch', 'broccoli', and 'broker'. The Latin root is brocc- "spike, piercing instrument". Huh, I always imagined 'broach' was just an ablaut variant of 'break': to broach a cask is to break into it. But no, broaching is open with an instrument called a broach; a brooch is an ornament fastened by a broach; a broker was originally one who broached, a tapster, then any retailer or dealer; and broccoli is named for its little spikes or shoots.
March 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word corpus delicti
Delictum "offence, transgression" is from the past participle of delinquere "transgress", so is related to 'delinquent'. And, if it comes to that, to 'leave' and 'eleven'.
March 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word watchmen
* notes occurrence of incorporated verb 'impulse-purchase' *
March 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word svastika
Polite way of referring to the ancient Indian symbol, with the linguistic benefit that <v> is a more standard way of transcribing the Sanskrit sound.
March 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pene-enclave
And the natural formation on Latin elements is 'penenclave'.
March 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ezezagun
Basque for "stranger": ez "not" + ezagun "acquaintance" (c.w. ezagutu "know, recognize"). I just liked the appearance of this word, so I thought I'd share.
March 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word lauburu
The Basque four-headed national symbol, resembling a fylfot or svastika made with teardrops: lau "four" + buru "head"
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ikurrin
The Basque flag; with the article attached this is ikurrina, and between i and another vowel the n is palatal. As this is automatic, there is no need to spell it ikurriña.
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word laurogei
Basque for "eighty": lau "four" + hogei "twenty". Basque counting is vigesimal.
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bridget-in-her-bravery
He has been in England as long as dove and daw,
Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree,
The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery;
And in a tender mood he, as I guess,
Christened one flower Love-in-idleness,
And while he walked from Exeter to Leeds
One April called all cuckoo-flowers Milkmaids.
—Edward Thomas, 'Lob'
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word niue
'Cept that Niue is in Polynesia. Being really small doesn't make it Micronesian, NYT.
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word glöyn byw
One of the Welsh words for "butterfly". (Another is the daintily sound-symbolic pilipala.) Glöyn "coal, ember" (singulative from glo "coal") + byw adj. "living", v. "live".
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bouton d'or
French for "buttercup", literally "gold button"
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gänseblümchen
German for "daisy": Gänse "geese" (< Gans "goose") + Blümchen, diminutive of Blume "flower". Also occurs as non-diminutive Gänseblume.
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word rittersporn
German for "larkspur, delphinium", from Ritter "knight" + Sporn "spur"
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word osterglocke
German for "daffodil", from Oster-, stem of Ostern "Easter", + Glocke "bell"
March 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word market
The firm's salaries are market
—in text I'm editing. This shows that the writer has treated 'market' as an adjective, since the bare noun is not possible in that position. Presumably influenced by both the noun-noun expression 'market salary' and adjectives such as 'market-driven', 'market-competitive', etc. But these compounds are the only ghits I see for "salaries are market", so I'm going to treat it as a nonce-formation and edit it out.
March 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bran-new
Unlikely to be an eggcorn: people didn't reinterpret the unfamiliar 'brand' as familiar 'bran', I'd suggest, since 'bran new' makes no sense. Rather this is phonetic: the /d/ disappeared just as the medial /t/ in 'last night' or 'postman' does.
March 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vocal chords
Not an eggcorn. This is a standard spelling.
March 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word underyawn
To see a child is rare there, and the eye
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
And underyawns it, and the path that looks
As if it led on to some legendary
Or fancied place where men have wished to go
And stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends.
—Edward Thomas, 'The Path'
Not in OED.
March 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word crocketed
Had there been ever any feud
'Twixt earth and sky, a mighty will
Closed it: the crocketed dark trees,
A dark house, dark impossible
Cloud-towers, one star, one lamp, one peace
Held on an everlasting lease:
—Edward Thomas, 'The Other'
March 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word chorizo
An unusual pronunciation seems to have arisen in Britain: tʃəˈrɪtsəʊ, as if influenced by 'pizza'. (But why the short i?) I've heard it often enough now that I can say this is the usual pronunciation, at least in my bit of London. The Spanish would normally give tʃəˈriːθəʊ in English, which is how I say it, or at least tʃəˈriːzəʊ or tʃəˈriːsəʊ.
March 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word malherbologie
Glorious word! French for "weed science" but would fit perfectly in Beauxbatons. The anglicized form 'malherbology' is scarcely used.
March 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pansy
Lovely translations: German Stiefmütterchen "little stepmother", Portuguese amor-perfeito "perfect love".
March 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sukuk
In Arabic this is the plural of sakk, but in English it is used as the singular and (usually) plural.
March 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word retakaful
What is to takaful as reinsurance is to insurance. A striking addition of an English prefix to an Arabic word.
March 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word imaginary
And in fact the water would have to be a cuboidal volume sufficient to contain a hemisphere of Saturn, and that's got some gravity of its own (that's an emphatic 'some' . . . I wonder how you punctuate that?); not to mention the rigid material for the bath.
March 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word rigamarole
Hunh. I have never seen this spelling.
February 28, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word glósóli
Yes: gló- v. "glow", sóli n. "sole (of shoe)"—Icelandic Online Dictionary
February 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the user rolig
On *scissor, *underpant, *hijink—sorry, I only saw this yesterday—I've had a look through a couple of books and the closest I can find is the CGEL term bound base. They distinguish bases from affixes, so 'lighthouses' contains bases 'light' and 'house', and 'disperse' and 'discombobulate' contain bound bases, ones that can't exist as words once the affix 'dis' is removed. Some pluralia tantum bound bases have some marginal independent (or loosely-bound) existence in attributive constructions, as in 'trouser leg', 'scissor blade'.
February 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word should of
I would have though the common pronunciation is indistinguishable between 'of' and 'have': əv is the normal unstressed form of both words. 'Have' has an alternative, less common unstressed form həv, particularly in England, but this sounds very unnatural to me after another modal like this.
The test is in those situations where modals assume their full forms, that is finally with the rest of the verb phrase omitted: 'They said I won't make it, but I will'; 'You think I can't win, but I can', etc. Problem is, 'shouldəv' is usually repeated as a whole: 'You shouldn't have done that, I should've.' So this wouldn't usually tease out whether the word was an underlying 'of' or 'have'. That said, I have sometimes heard people use a full-form 'of' here.
February 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ice tea
I'm trying to work out how you would articulate 'iced tea' and 'ice tea' differently. The extra t wouldn't affect the aspiration of the following t. It might possibly make the preceding vowel fractionally shorter, but I doubt the effect would be noticeable. All I can think of is a delay between the end of the friction of s and the release of the second t. (Separate release of the two t's is wholly unnatural.) But this delay would only be audible in slow, careful speech anyway.
February 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dirty
Aaand bang on time is Mark Liberman's hatchet job.
February 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hypoflexive
Prolagus is right. Duty calls, but don't take it personally.
February 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word new
Notable for the original Indo-European word having been preserved (mutatis mutandis) in virtually every descendant; the only exception I can find is Albanian (m. ri, f. re).
February 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word antefluance
Sign of a good pub. The Victoria round the corner has the Shorter Oxford, which even I consider supererogatory, but splendid.
February 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dirty
The article sounds like almost complete nonsense to me, and there are obvious mistakes in it, but what I think they're claiming is that concepts that happen to have changed to different words historically in IE are in fact intrinsically likely to change at about that rate. And they've calibrated it on the Swadesh 200 list. So the fact that all* IE languages preserve reflexes of the same word 'new' means we can predict that all Semitic languages will have a common word for "new" too, and pretty much all Austronesian languages will have kept theirs . . .
* Oh, except Albanian.
I keep refreshing Language Log, waiting for their hatchet job on this.
February 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word celestial
Do I have to spell out the TISM reference then? (* esprit de l'escalier: This Is Serious Marsupial would have worked better *)
February 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word celestial
This Is Serious, Bilby
February 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word celestial
Celestialling the word,
her colour a deference still,
her voice adored and implored : 'Lord, what choice ?'
—Charles Williams, 'The Ascent of the Spear', in Taliessin Through Logres
Mistah Williams he wanker.
February 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word niche
Not literally "build a nest", which it's never meant in English, but that seems to be the origin in French: a verb "nest", from an unattested Latin *nid-ic-. The earliest meaning of the noun in both French and English was its current one, "recess (for a statue)", derived in French from the verb. (The noun is from the verb because the -ch- reflects the verbalizing suffix -ic-.)
Both modern pronunciations of the vowel seem to have been present in the earliest use in English: 1600s spellings include neece, niece, niech, neech, nice as well as nitch, nich. By the 1800s only the nɪtʃ nitch one seems to have survived, with French-like niːʃ rearising in the 20th century, and now predominating in BrE.
This word is an example of a noun that has converted to an adjective (they're surprisingly rare), at least for many speakers: you can hear and see 'It's very niche' or 'rather niche', referring to something in a niche market. The ability to be modified by degree adverbials is a clear sign of adjective status.
February 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word antefluance
Antefluence is fine. I'm just finicky: I don't mind people madeupicking them, but if they appear to be Latin or Greek I like to see them properly done (and to have meanings of parts correctly explained, while we're at it); and I'm thinking of the puir wee kiddies who might take it for some venerable, battered word handed down from dictionary to dictionary and think it will impress others at the bar to bring it out in casual conversation, only to find their triumph ruined when some even more boring person challenges it and demands the pub dictionary.
February 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tipping the vervet
Tale of love and cross-species dressing set in a bonobo reservation.
February 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word crib
How the modern senses are connected: the original meaning in Old English was "manger, specifically that in which Jesus was laid". This developed various senses of small containers, small buildings, and frameworks, including in the 1600s "child's cot". Perhaps from a sense of "basket" or "bag" came a thieves' cant verb "bag i.e. steal", which in the 1800s gave "petty theft" and in particular "translation illicitly used to help pupils" (and 1900s 'crib sheet', a similar set of notes not specifically relating to translation).
The relationship to the crib in cribbage is unclear.
What got me interested in this is finding that 'creche' is cognate. After the Second Germanic Consonant Shift, common Germanic *krib- gives Old High German krip-, taken into Romance, and passing from South French crépia, crepcha, giving North French crèche.
February 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word circumcredance
Made-up word, and misformed: second-declension cred- "believe" gives Latin credentia, English 'credence'.
February 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word antefluance
Made-up word, and ill-made. The verb stem "flow" is flu-, which gives (1) the noun flux- "flow" and (2) the participle fluent- "flowing" (-ent-, not -ant-, because flu- is second declension). (2) does not come from (1). From the participle ending -ent- comes the Latin abstract noun ending -entia. This, in French, not Latin, became -ence (as in influence etc.).
February 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hypoflexive
hypo- is Greek, "under", not Latin
February 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word lent
The English word Lent is from earlier 'lenten'. ('Lenten' is not, as it might now appear from its rare present-day use, an -en adjective formed from 'lent'.) The ecclesiastical meaning is peculiar to English; in related languages it just means "spring" (German Lenz).
Middle English 'lenten' is from Old English lencten, apparently from "long" + either some suffix or perhaps a word for "day". The time of days lengthening?
February 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word shrove tuesday
Although 'shrove' is indeed the preterite of 'shrive', it is morphologically impossible for this element 'Shrove' to be that verb form. A preterite can't compound with nouns like that. The OED just calls it obscure. The only speculation it can offer is that Old English might hypothetically have had a related noun that would give Middle English 'shrove', but it is very surprising then that no trace of it is found till the first mention of Shrovetide in the 1400s.
February 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word riions
Nous riions tellement que, quand Elsa me frappa sur l'épaule et que je vis son air de Cassandre, je fus sur le point de l'envoyer au diable.
—Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
Interesting spelling: I didn't know you could get a double <ii> in native French words. (I don't know if this imperfect "we were laughing" would actually be pronounced any differently from the present tense nous rions "we laugh".)
February 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word status quo ante
I thought about 'status quo before the credit crunch', but that rather implies a contrast with the current status quo, which is another tautology. 'Previous status quo' sort of makes sense, and has a few ghits, so 'status quo' doesn't perhaps absolutely imply the present situation.
February 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word paczki
Yes, the <a> wants an ogonek to keep its tootsies dry.
February 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word status quo ante
Today I encountered a dilemma with this: some Swede with good English had written about the 'status quo ante the credit crunch', or some such, trying to use the Latin preposition ante with an English complement. But my intuition was that the English expression 'status quo ante' doesn't work as if it contains a preposition: we say only 'restore the status quo ante', etc. A bit of Web searching confirmed that if we want to say what it was before, we have to be explicit in English: in the end I changed it to 'the status quo ante before the credit crunch'.
February 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fair do's
That would be pronounced differently: do's duːz vs dues dʒuːz or djuːz
February 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word rufkm
Mr Bastin Hermitage (for the defence): Now, Dr Spunton, is there, to your knowledge, any disease which would account for Mrs Tasker's strange habits?
Dr Spunton: There is. It is called rufo-nanitis. The spymptoms—
Mr Hermitage: Symptoms.
Dr Spunton: Yes, spymptoms, but I always put a 'p' before a 'y'.
Cocklecarrot: With what object, might we ask?
Dr Spunton: I can't help it, m'lud.
Cocklecarrot: Do you say pyesterday?
Dr Spunton: Pyes, unfortunatelpy. It's hereditarpy. Mpy familpy all do it.
Cocklecarrot: But why 'p'?
Dr Spunton: No, py, m'lud.
—from Mr Justice Cocklecarrot's continuing case of the twelve red-bearded dwarfs, as recorded by Beachcomber
February 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word shovel-ready
"I mean, I'm set to go! I'm a shovel-ready girlfriend!"
—Alex, Doonesbury
February 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word imaginary
Saturn is the only planet in our solar system that is less dense than water. If you could build an imaginary gigantic bathtub, Saturn would float in it.
—National Geographic, trying to palm it off on NASA. No, if you built an imaginary bath, the water would still all fall through. You need to imagine building a real gigantic bath for this one.
February 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dulcarnon
Yes, reading all that was what made me opt for the succinct 'rather obscure'. I didn't feel up to unpicking what of it was relevant.
February 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word rather
I should have rathered a blue gown, or a violet one; but Gentleman said it was the perfect dress for a sneak or for a servant
—Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
I'd never seen this verbal use before, and assumed Waters had researched authentic Victorian colloquialism. However, web search shows it quite common today too, with much the same argument structures as 'prefer'.
February 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nerver
I had guessed she would come like this; and had got her some wine from Mr Way, as a nerver.
—Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
February 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word grubbian
'Look here, Maud, look, at what the little grubbian has brought us.'
—Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
Probably equivalent to "Grub Street hack".
February 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dulcarnon
A most interesting and rather obscure etymology. Arabic dhu l-qarnayn "master of the two horns", referring to the horns of a dilemma, but for some reason also an epithet of Alexander the Great.
Dhu "master of" cannot occur on its own, only in the construct state with a following noun. The stem qarn- is often believed to be an ancient borrowing from Indo-European into Semitic; the -ayn is the genitive dual ending.
February 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word randification
"But at the moment there is no talk about the randification of the Zimbabwe dollar. It is a multi-currency facility we are looking at."
—Morgan Tsvangirai, 20/02/09
February 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word metronome
A metro gnome would be more stylish than other gnomes.
February 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word acquirement
That settles it then, I'm taking it out. It was probably translated from Swiss German businesspeak anyway.
February 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word acquirement
I have just encountered this word in text I'm proofing, and it struck me I've never seen it. Raw Google hits are large enough, but they tend to be dominated by dictionary definitions, a quote from Frankenstein, and some learned-looking titles. That is, despite its ordinary-looking formation, it just ain't plain English.
February 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sheep
The only English animal name with zero plural that isn't some kind of hunt animal; also the only one that simply can't take a regular plural. (As always, this universals are subject to the fate of all linguistic universals, to be violated by hitherto unnoticed examples.)
February 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bioheapleaching
Talvivaara's key technology is bioheapleaching, which is utilized to extract metals from the ore. The technology enables cost effective and environmentally friendly exploitation of the resource using locally occurring bacteria.
February 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word illaqueation
Not "to catch someone . . .". That is a verb phrase. 'Illaqueation' is a noun. Thus, "catching someone . . . " or some such.
February 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word intermoon
We were walking together
on dead wet leaves in the intermoon
among the looming nocturnal rocks
—Margaret Atwood, 'Interlunar'
February 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word grass
Until I met WeirdNet I didn't know 'grass' primarily meant "shoot down birds".
February 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word meressä
This is actually the inessive case of the word: "in the ocean/sea". The nominative is meri. But it is beautiful. Practically anything in the inessive is: ravintolassa "in the restaurant", metsässä "in the wood(s)".
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word balancement
The elder Geoffroy and Goethe propounded, at about the same period, their law of compensation or balancement of growth; or, as Goethe expressed it, 'in order to spend on one side, nature is forced to economise on the other side.'
—Origin of Species, ch. 5
The OED only has a later (1862) quote for this.
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word peloria
We know, at least, that with irregular flowers those nearest to the axis are most subject to peloria, that is to become abnormally symmetrical.
—Origin of Species, ch. 5
In the glossary Darwin gives:
PELORIA or PELORISM.—The appearance of regularity of structure in the flowers of plants which normally bear irregular flowers.
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word door
You are the door in the rock that finally swings free when moonlight shines on it. You are the door at the top of the stairs that only appears in dreams. You are the door that sets the prisoner free. You are the carved low door into the Chapel of the Grail. You are the door at the edge of the world. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stars.
—Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
Sometimes I have doubts about Winterson. Sometimes I have none.
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word staddle
It had no foundations; it stood two metres off the ground on a set of staddle stones.
—Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
And at last I find out the name for an everyday object: those stone mushrooms barns sit on.
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word warmless
He thought the whole of the sky must have been alive once, and some stupidity or carelessness had brought it to this burnt-out, warmless place.
—Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word planeted
The moon, bone-white, bleached of life, was the relic of a solar system once planeted with Earths.
—Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vodkerishly
'Y'see him there?' he said, waving vodkerishly at a swaying figure on the street.
—Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping
One of the reasons I delight in Winterson.
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word geoglyph
Now new details about these geoglyphs suggest they may have been made for "prayer walking".
—New Scientist, 24 Jan. 2009, on the Nazca Lines
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list kauniit-sanat
Finnish is such a beautiful language, you could make huge lists of kauniit sanat (if I may correct the list title): my own favourites would have to include valokuva, elokuva, utukuva, sanakirja, joulukuu, maailmavalta, and of course lumikello.
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word lumikello
etymologically "snow bell" (lumi + kello) - compare also German Schneeglöckchen "little snow bell"
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word transportal
On the Transportal of Erratic Boulders from a lower to a higher level
—title of article by Charles Darwin, 1848, J. Geological Soc.
February 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mittelstand
Collective name for medium-sized businesses in Germany, used untranslated in English.
In German it also means the middle class, from Stand "state, condition, standing, rank, etc." in the particular sense of a social class.
February 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pfandbrief
In Germany, a bond covered by a loan; the original of the covered bonds issued by some other countries. The word is used untranslated in English, with plural Pfandbriefe.
From Pfand "pledge, pawn, security" + Brief "letter", or in a few combinations "certificate".
Read all about it.
February 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hone in
Alteration of 'home in', originally referring to pigeons, then to missiles; 'hone in on' is now commoner than 'home in on' in AmE, though less common in BrE.
February 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word yellow page
Generic attributive backformed from Yellow Pages: e.g. yellow page companies, yellow page advertisements. Often capitalized, Yellow Page advertisements.
February 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word outlawry
The reason for the reading of the bill is that Parliament is opened by the Monarch seated in full state in the House of Lords. The Usher of the Black Rod is sent to the House of Commons to desire the members to attend the royal speech. The Commons duly, dutifully troop in, hear their monarch opening Parliament, and then return to their own chamber.
They then introduce some House of Commons business: the reading of a bill for preventing clandestine outlawries. It is never proceeded with further; but having shown their independence by attending to their own concerns, only then do the Commons debate in reply to the royal speech.
See for example Hansard of 22 November 2003.
February 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word non-paternity
Where your mother is married to a man who thinks he is your father but who isn't; not to be confused with illegitimacy, where your mother isn't married to anyone.
February 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ethnophaulism
A disparaging name for an ethnic group (Gk phaul- "cheap, light, mean"). Term invented by A. A. Roback.
Mencken used the extraordinary term 'achthronym' for the same meaning; a subsequent (1963) edition combined the two in this extraordinary sentence:
The English have fewer strangers within their gates, and hence their native armamentarium is smaller, and not a few of the achthronyms (or ethnophaulisms) they use come from the United States.
'Achthronym' seems to be both non-existent apart from this use of Mencken's, and unetymologizable. There is no Greek achthr- in Liddell & Scott; the nearest is achth- "burden", possibly intended figuratively; nor is there a chthr- for it to be the privative of.
February 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list english-grammar
In lieu of my defining some of the more obscure ones, this glossary by the syntactician Andrew Radford is useful.
February 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ethny
Not in OED. Possibly coined by ethologist Frank Salter: apparently a near-synonym for 'ethnic group' but focusing on the genetical and sociobiological aspects. (Salter writes in favour of ethnocentrism as an extension of kin altruism.)
February 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word delearn
It seems to be just a sporadic variant. Google shows 'unlearn' much more common with verb forms such as 'runned', 'eated' (where a child learns an irregular past first, then learns the rule and temporarily unlearns the correct form).
February 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mad magazine sentence
A construction consisting of a subject and a tenseless predicate, both topicalized, pragmatically used as an incredulous echo. The name (apparently coined by Adrian Akmajian) refers to the canonical example used as a catchphrase by Mad's Alfred E. Neuman: 'What—me worry?'. This has subject 'me', predicate the verb phrase 'worry'. (Since the construction lacks tense, the subject can't be assigned nominative case, so it takes the default case, which in English is accusative.)
Other examples, with context to show the echo pragmatics:
A: I heard John's a doctor now.
B: John a doctor, you must be kidding! (subject + NP)
A: Isn't Mary in the army now?
B: Mary in the army? Surely not. (subject + PP)
February 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word delearn
Vainikka assumes that nonfinite verbs assign genitive case to their subjects: but this raises the (unanswered) question of how children come to acquire this type of case marking (since e.g. infinitives don't allow genitive subjects in adult English), and how they later come to delearn it.
—Andrew Radford, Genitive Subjects in Child English, 1999
February 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list monosyllabic-adjectives-ending-in-y
In fact, in front of another noun is a normal place for an English noun to be: it's in a noun role, not an adjective role.
February 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word roguing
In rude and barbarous periods of English history choice animals were often imported, and laws were passed to prevent their exportation: the destruction of horses under a certain size was ordered, and this may be compared to the "roguing" of plants by nurserymen.
—Origin of Species, ch. 1
Explained in an earlier passage:
When a race of plants is once pretty well established, the seed-raisers do not pick out the best plants, but merely go over their seed-beds, and pull up the "rogues," as they call the plants that deviate from the proper standard.
February 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word experimentize
There can be no doubt that a race may be modified by occasional crosses, if aided by the careful selection of those individual mongrels, which present any desired character; but that a race could be obtained nearly intermediate between two extremely different races or species, I can hardly believe. Sir J. Sebright expressly experimentised for this object, and failed.
—Origin of Species, ch. 1
February 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word laugher
The trumpeter and laugher, as their names express, utter a very different coo from the other breeds.
—Origin of Species, ch. 1
February 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word turbit
The turbit has a short and conical beak, with a line of reversed feathers down the breast; and it has the habit of continually expanding, slightly, the upper part of the oesophagus.
—Origin of Species, ch. 1
A kind of pigeon. Possibly from L turbo "(spinning) top", which possibly also gave 'turbot' the fish.
February 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word oko
In case of misapprehension, the Italian and Slovene aren't particularly closely related, but are simply the reflexes of common Indo-European *okw-, which is preserved in almost every daughter: Slavonic *óko; Latin oculus; Greek dual ósse < *ókwje and other derivatives such as ophthalmós; Germanic augan (> OE ēage > MnE eye); Tocharian A ak; Armenian akn; Lithuanian akìs; Sanskrit a�?kṣi.
February 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word awaver
His memory of the name awaver, too,
—from Seamus Heaney's 'In the Attic'
February 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word testimony
Also one of the most dubious etymologies, with the unwarranted assumption that testis "testicle" is a metaphorical use of testis "witness".
February 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word un
Latvian for "and", a borrowing from German und, introduced by Bible translators. The old native form is, as in Lithuanian, ir. The only instance I can think of where "and" has been borrowed.
February 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vapour cone
A transsonic vapour cone occurs just before an aeroplane breaks the sound barrier, and is spectacularly illustrated here.
February 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word elephant
Yes, I think eleph is the construct state (form used in compound with a following noun) of aleph, the letter name, the shape A being an ox's head.
February 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word evince
The terse etymology below hardly explains it. The literal sense in Latin was "conquer, overcome", and it was also used in a transferred sense "prevail, succeed" in doing something, in particular "prevail in an argument, demonstrate". English in the 17th century used the word in various senses like this, but these dropped out of use in favour of the weaker modern sense "be evidence of (not necessarily conclusively)".
February 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word elephant
The Greek eléphant- means "ivory" in Homer and other early writers, "elephant" in Herodotus. It has no identifiable earlier history. The resemblance to Hebrew eleph "ox" might be more than coincidental, but if it's a North-West Semitic compound, it's unclear what the second element might have been.
February 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vaticide
The higher the VAT, the more your prophets go down.
February 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word homogenous
In the original meanings of these two words, 'homogenous' (stress on -mog-) meant "coming from the same source", and 'homogeneous' (stress -gen-, with extra syllable as in 'genius') meant "composed of similar parts". The OED (Second edition, not recently revised) comments that 'The spelling homogenous is less common than the pronunc. (hə'mɒdɪnəs), which perh. owes its currency partly to the influence of the vb. homogenize and its derivs.', and then gives a large number of examples.
If you look at Google (e.g. for "homogenous mixture") you can see clearly that the two words are not clearly distinguished in Present-day English. The two spellings at least seem equally common (and the "mixture" meaning is far more common and familiar than the "same origin" one, I think), so presumably the two pronunciations co-exist in this meaning.
January 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word capacity
This morning's discovery: you can say 'in the capacity as'. Or at least USAans can: it has comparable numbers to the more common 'in the capacity of'. I'd never seen this construction before.
January 28, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word eutherian
The extant mammals divide into monotremes and Theria. The monotremes are the platypus and echidnas, the Theria are the rest and divide into marsupials and Eutheria, which latter is all of us (aardvarks, horses, bats, humans etc.). The terminology can be multiplied but the important thing is the bifurcating tree: monotremes plus the rest, and the rest are marsupials plus the rest, the eutherians.
January 28, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word transudation
An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls.
—New York Times, 22 January 2009
January 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word plethysmograph
The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow.
—New York Times, 22 January 2009
January 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the user chained_bear
*grrr* Loves you and your tags notwithstanding anonymous counter-taggers.
January 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word let's
As I went home from work I remembered the Noël Coward song 'Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans', so evidently I was wrong about this being a less formal variant, as his usage sounds old-fashioned. Well, now that I'm home, I can look up CGEL.
* looks up * Okay, it's just says 'don't let's' is a little more informal. Moreover, the first person lacks any scope difference between the two, whereas in a second person imperative there's a clear difference in meaning between:
Don't let us go with you. (= forbid us to)
Let us not go with you. (= allow us to refrain)
And yes, idioms such as 'let me see', and 'let me get this straight' suggest it's the 'let' that's the imperative.
January 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word let's
Quirk of grammar 1: The only first person imperative verb form in English. As it can be made two words, 'let us', in very careful speech (e.g. sermons, oratory), it may be that it should be analysed as a contraction of 'let us', where 'let' is the first person imperative verb. Clearly distinct from the second person imperative (e.g. 'Let us go' addressed to a kidnapper) because that can't be contracted.
Quirk 2: The only trace of an inclusive/exclusive distinction in English, since it's only used as first person inclusive.
Quirk 3: It straddles the border between lexical and functional verbs, since its negative can be made in two ways: with do-support like a lexical verb ('Don't let's go'), or without it ('Let's not go').
Quirk 3 note 1: Not everyone has both options: the do-support option sounds considerably less formal to me, and may well be ungrammatical for some people. (Whereas in the second person imperative it's the only possibility: 'Don't let us go until you get the ransom.')
Quirk 3 note 2: As the 'let's not' form can't be contracted (*let'sn't, *letn't's), it's not like a true auxiliary (these have negative forms such as 'mustn't', 'won't'). Rather, the negation may actually be of the catenative complement clause, i.e. in 'Let's not go', it might be that 'not go' is the clause attached under the imperative 'let's'.
January 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word qəpik
The one-hundredth part of an Azerbaijani manat. Pronounced gæpik.
January 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word entrez
Although imperative and indicative entrez are identical in form, the difference is tentatively established by several verbs that do have different forms, such as soyez ~ êtes. The imperative and indicative are usually the same in the singular too, though written differently: entres ~ entre.
Alternatively, we could treat preposed vous as the affix it in fact is, and say the imperative is unprefixed ɑ~tre whereas the indicative is prefixed vuzɑ~tre.
January 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word larrikin
Aha, so Lewis Carroll was right in having Bill say 'arrum'.
January 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word larrikin
Oh yes, but that's all merely plausibles. Demolishing the implausible is more fun.
January 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word research
1593 G. HARVEY New Letter Ciij, Some that haue perused eloquent bookes, and researched most curious writinges.
Also quotations from Sir Henry Wotton (ante 1639), Walton (1665), Horace Walpole (1781, conscious of it as a noticeable usage), Southey (1801), Moore (1811), etc. etc.
And the OED's current revisions haven't quite reached RES- yet, so there's a good chance of antedates when they do. The corresponding verb exists in French, Italian, and Mediaeval Latin: it's not a conversion from the noun in English.
January 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word larrikin
In the obviously apocryphal story quoted below, the term 'trilled r' probably only means 'pronounced r', i.e. the normal Irish pronunciation ˈlarkɪn as against the England/Australia pronunciation ˈlaːkɪn. But could it have been a true trill or roll? Irish English is known to have had this value in the late eighteenth century; perhaps some 'broad' speakers still retained it in the 1860s.
The inserted vowel between the /rk/ is again likely to be an exaggeration by the hearer reporting it, since in their accent /r/ couldn't occur without a following vowel. It's true that Irish Gaelic and Irish English do insert ə between certain consonants, as in the names 'Colm', 'Fir Bolg' and the word 'film', but I don't know that /rk/ would do that, especially as it can be syllabified /lar.kɪn/.
January 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word anaphora
In linguistics however, anaphora is indexing between two elements in a sentence, normally a noun phrase and a coreferential pronoun. For example, 'John saw himself in the mirror', 'John hit the mirror and smashed it'. Here 'John' is co-indexed with the anaphor 'himself', and 'mirror' with the anaphor 'it'.
In the Chomskyan tradition the term 'anaphor' is restricted to the former (reflexives and reciprocals), and the latter kind are contrastively called 'pronouns'. In wider linguistic circles I think they are all called anaphors.
Usually coreferential; but note that the antecedent can be something lacking reference, e.g. 'Luckily nobody lost their life': 'their' is anaphoric to its non-referential antecedent 'nobody'.
January 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word alloglottography
The hypothesis of Achaemenid "alloglottography" (Gershevitch 1979) holds that Achaemenid Elamite was a medium for transmitting texts that were conceived and dictated in Old Iranian languages, to be read out and understood as Old Iranian texts . . .
— Matthew Stolper, 'Elamite', in Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the World's Ancient Languages
ref. is to: Gershevitch, Ilya, 1979, 'The alloglottography of Old Persian', Trans. Phil. Soc. London
January 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word turunmaa
Kotona minulla on hyvä, iso Chaource. Syön tänä yönä. Plus the Finnish for "You've done something odd with a link."
January 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word turunmaa
etymology: Turun, genitive of the city Turku, + maa "land"
January 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word juustoleipa
etymology: juusto "cheese" + leipä "bread"
January 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word grammaticalizationist
It's good, isn't it? It's so rare that Google doesn't know it's a noun, so doesn't also offer up hits for grammaticalizationists. There are more of them and they illustrate its meaning a bit better. Do I detect some suppressed hostility in many of the uses?
For solid information, research grammaticalization—an increasingly prominent topic in recent linguistics.
January 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word polypus
Possible ancient folk etymology. In Latin and some Greek dialects from which Latin borrowed it, the word had a long O (ω or ου), not the short o of polu- "many"; and it inflected as a normal second declension noun in -ος, thus plural polypi, as if not a compound of pod- "foot". So it's possible it's a borrowing into Greek which has been altered to fit the folk etymology "many-foot". But if so, this happened as early as Mycenean, which shows -pod- inflection.
January 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hygiene
Related to bio-, zo- "life" and thus to English quick, Latin viv-, vit-. The labiovelar *gw usually became b but in *su-gwih3- "well-life" the adjacent u delabialized it to g instead. (And zo- is apparently a different dialectal development, *gwj > *gj > *dz > zd. I didn't know that either.)
January 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word basilectalize
move towards a basilect and thus less like the standard of the lexifier language: in (one theory of) the development of creoles from non-standard lects
January 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word opine
*eyeballs 'back-formation' tag.*
Not a back-formation. Though the noun 'opinion' is much older in both English and French than the verb 'opine', the verb does come from a Classical Latin verb.
January 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ergatival
adj. (rare) Relating to ergative constructions. In particular (where I found it): of transitive verbs with an actual patient; Hurrian for example distinguishes ergatival and non-ergatival verb morphology.
January 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word maudle
That made his lordship laugh, but he told her that he could not permit her to be everlastingly maudling her inside with such stuff as ratafia, and bade her drink it up like a good girl.
—Georgette Heyer, Friday's Child
'Maudle' is a back-formation from 'maudlin'.
January 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word jaunter
'Well, I won't have you jauntering about with her any more!' said Sherry, in a very imperious style. 'Mind that!'
—Georgette Heyer, Friday's Child
Not in OED (in any sense), but there are ghits and Google Books hits showing it going back some time; as a verb, usually construed with 'about'. I can't tell if it's from a particular regional dialect. Also occurs as a noun, synonym of 'jaunt'. Also of course an agent noun formed from 'jaunt'.
January 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word predesinential
Pertaining to the vowel or syllable before a desinence (fancy word for an inflectional suffix). Also what Dubya thinks he is.
January 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word italo calvi
A former banker whose exposé Invisible Citi led to his disappearance. He was found years later embedded in the Millennium Footbridge in London, giving it a peculiar wobble.
January 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word conscious-stricken
Not in OED, and it looks like an eggcorn, but it has been used by George Eliot, Bret Harte, and Georgette Heyer among others.
January 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dextroverse
Of inscriptions: left to right, opposite of sinistroverse.
January 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word 调侃
Yes, they're tone numbers (1 = level, 2 = rising, 3 = fall-rise, 4 = falling). However, according to this dictionary it seems it should actually be tiao2kan3 "ridicule, tease" from tiao2 "incite, provoke" and kan3 "bold" . . . unless there's some tonal sandhi going on that's beyond my small knowledge of Chinese.
Edited: Tone 3 is fall-rise, of course, not rise-fall.
January 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bush
A newly-discovered preposition, at least in Australian English. The sentence Geoffrey Pullum found it in is: 'On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.'
So it's behaving quite like another intransitive preposition, 'home'.
January 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word stride
But do you say 'stridden'? I don't. Nor do Deirdre Wilson, Geoff Pullum, and a number of other linguists. It's just not a natural part of standard Present-day English. Details at Language Log.
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word try
Quirk of grammar: this enters into a construction where it can't (standardly) be inflected—no 'tried', 'trying', not even third person singular 'tries', just plain 'try'.
I try and jog every day.
They try and jog every day.
I intend to try and jog every day.
but:
*She/he tries and jog(s?) every day.
*I tried and jog(ged?) yesterday.
*I insist on trying and jog(ging?).
I have in fact read and heard attempts at using it in an inflected situation, but they're clearly non-standard. Oddly, it's only 'try and' that suffers from this foible: both 'try to' and 'go and' behave fine. 'Go and' is the more relevant because the 'and' makes the two verbs inflect the same way: 'I went and jogged yesterday', 'I insist on going and jogging'.
I should change the example. I've never jogged in my life; I've never even tried.
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word there's
Quirk of grammar: this behaves differently from its uncontracted origin 'there is' in that it freely accepts a plural co-subject*. So 'There's three men in the garden' is grammatical, whereas it's not with 'There is'.
* I'm at work so can't check what the proper name for this item is: the 'three men' in my example. The subject is the noun 'there' (sic - it's a noun, a pronoun to be precise). The other is co-subject, associated subject, extrapolated subject?
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word stride
Quirk of grammar: the verb lacks a standard past participle. Today I stride left, yesterday I strode right, so that makes twice I have . . .? Various analogical bashes can be made, of course, but you know you're making it up as you go along.
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word must
Quirk of grammar (of the auxiliary verb): it lacks a past tense.
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list how-do-you-like-kipling
Mafeking doesn't fit here, except visually.
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tk
Snap. OED has 289 of them but they're mostly loose juxtapositions like 'don't know', 'flint-knapping, meat-knife'. Some interesting ones are 'dróttkvætt' and 'Gesamtkunstwerk'.
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tk
catkin, latke, hotkey
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word zimbiont
Even more hypothetically, a meme or memecomplex united symbiotically with a zimbo to produce a conscious (dualist?) being.
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word zimbo
In the work of Daniel Dennett, a zimbo is a zombie (an organism physically and behaviourally identical to a human being except that it is not conscious) which can interrogate and discuss its own internal states. A zimbo would presumably report (incorrectly) that it was conscious. Dennett (and I) think we're all zimboes. Oh, except that he and I don't actually think we're conscious.
January 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dubious
And the Latin root dub- is probably from a contraction of du- "two" + hab- "have", i.e. "be in two minds".
January 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list longest-words-on-wordie-2
I am curious to know what the longest is that has been in genuine use as a word, not as a record-breaker. Going by OED quotations 'disestablishmentarian' seems genuine, whereas extensions of it were facetious. At 21 letters, it equals 'non-universalizability', the longest I've genuinely used myself.
January 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pseud
Or for the rest of us, sjuːd (or SYOOD, if you really must use imitation grunting).
January 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word -rati
Or for the rest of us, ˈrɑːti (or RAH.ti, if you really must use imitation grunting).
January 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word swarm logic
Or for the rest of us, ˈswɔːm ˌlɒdʒɪk (or SWAWM loj.ik, if you really must use imitation grunting).
January 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pointer
Mislaid Red Indian Mickey Mouse America
Pointered us from campground to campground –
We were two of many.
—Ted Hughes, 'The 59th Bear', Birthday Letters
Nonce use as v. It also occurs to me now that 'campground' seems unusual: I would say 'camping-ground', and indeed OED marks it as U.S.
January 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word recidive
Weekends I recidived
Into Alma Mater.
—Ted Hughes, 'Visit', in Birthday Letters
Presumably a nonce back-formation from the modern (1880s) 'recidivism', 'recidivist', rather than a conscious revival of the obsolete 'recidive' v. (single quote from 1548 in OED). Perhaps also a play with 'dive': "I dived back into my alma mater".
A few Web hits for the verb or 'recidived', particularly in relation to cancer ( = "relapse; relapsed"), but from sampling them I suspect they're mainly misuses by authors whose native language does have this as an ordinary modern word. This Hughes passage; a few uses in a legal sense.
From L. re-cad- "fall back" with regular Old Latin change of unstressed a to i.
January 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list monovocalic-trysyllable
Very close: seaweed-green is in the OED hyphenated, but none of their quotations hyphenates it, and Web search hits don't show it as an unarguable compound word. It behaves more like a syntactic complex, which excludes beach seaweed too.
January 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list monovocalic-trysyllable
Some of the suggestions below work in some accents: mirific, implicit, iridin in older RP (like indivisibility), conundrum, mundungus in (some forms of) AmE, possibly Scottish too; but in too many other accents they have schwas as well as full vowels.
January 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word antapology
Yes and no. The German ant- is cognate with Greek ant(i)-, and with the English prefixes in an-swer and un-do, un-roll (which is not the negative un-), and Latin ante-. But it's common inheritance from PIE rather than borrowed or imitated formation.
January 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word telephonically
Failing two-legged actors, you, a unidexter, are just the sort of person we shall be attempting to contact telephonically.
—Peter Cook, one-legged Tarzan sketch
January 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cynosure
This is unusually from the genitive kyn-os rather than the stem kyn-o-: that is it is a compound of the type dog's-tail rather than dog-tail. This is common in English but this is the first I've noticed in Greek. The expected form would be *cynure.
(The Dog's Tail is Ursa Minor, containing the Pole Star, thus figuratively a centre round which everything turns.)
January 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nemo me impune lacesset
Psst. Lacessit.
January 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dune
Philatelic term for the Arab microstates that around 1970 flooded the children's stamp-collecting market with brightly coloured gummed labels purporting to be postage stamps.
January 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word trucial
Unusual in that it only ever refers to one thing, the former Trucial Coast/Oman/States.
January 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word guestbian
A guest lesbian: probably originated in 'L Word' fandom. Thus also guestbianism (rare).
January 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word superscraper
Superscraper nears date with destiny
January 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word prof.
Either Profs or Profs., depending on whether you use the BrE convention of contractions (which include the last letter of the word) not taking a full stop.
January 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thallasocracy
error for thalassocracy
January 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word jejeune
Common misspelling of 'jejune', probably influenced by French jeune "young", with the presumed connecting meaning "immature". It's actually cognate with the lesser-known (and unrelated) jeûne "fasting".
January 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word transparent
'Opaque' is autantonymous for the same reason, which always slows me down: the interface is opaque to users, so that means, uh . . .
January 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word folk etymology
Hm, I didn't know what I thought of this, until I found out I did: my magisterial, authoritative, ex-cathedra judgement under 'etymythology' was: To be distinguished from folk etymology, or is perhaps a kind of folk etymology.
I'm a big favourer of 'or perhaps' clauses. I'm not sure if there's any leather-bound book of dooms where the angels have recorded the true meanings of technical terms even in linguistics.
January 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list etymological-curiosities
May I suggest mould: "fungal coating", "earth", and "matrix, model".
January 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word �?i á �?, á á í á.
Oh yes, á is at least (1) a preposition (cognate with 'on', I think), (2) a noun "river" (c.w. aqua), (3) the 1.sg. and 3.sg. present of eiga "own", from earlier aih. The preposition í is cognate with its meaning "in".
January 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word barnoldswick
The criterion of the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary is the local pronunciation, in order of frequency, so if they give Barlick second it's because the citizens of Barlick use that less than the other. It stands out more because it's more interesting, but their research has determined that it's less common locally.
January 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word barnoldswick
The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names gives the regular pronunciation first (stress on 'old'), but gives a second possibility, as if spelt Barlick.
January 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word past tense
Only the same rule as in Present-day English: the vowel is required after /t/ and /d/ ('batted', 'bedded'). As far as I know the choice is entirely metrical. The loss of the vowel is sometimes called syncope or syncopation, but that sounds rather old-fashioned to me.
The vowel is also retained in some adjectives with the form of past participles (such as 'learned', 'blessed, 'one-legged'), but I know of no good reason why these are exceptional.
Way back in Old English there was a good phonetic reason: the vowel was used after a light syllable (fremede) but not after a heavy one (dēmde, drencte). This combined with a great deal of change of vowel quantity in Middle English gave those past tenses that are today spelt without an -e-, such as 'lent', 'bled', 'heard', 'met'. But this was over long before the apostrophe convention in text: the apostrophe indicated the normal pronunciation without a vowel, and the vowel was only used for metre.
January 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word approximant
More specifically: a consonant that is formed by the approach of the tongue to the fixed parts of the mouth, causing colouration of the air stream but not so much as to cause friction.
January 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word facetious
Hum, fəsi:ʃəsli appears to use three vowels, which means there's about 17 others that don't occur in it
January 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word the problem with the internet
Someone is wrong on the Internet.
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word honeycup
So she told him all about the flowers, how some grew very slowly and others bloomed in a night; how clever the convolvulus was at climbing, and how shy violets were, and why honeycups had folded petals.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
Not in OED as a plant name. It does refer to Zenobia pulverentula, but this is not native, so I doubt that Max meant that one. An obscure folk name? I can't find it qua plant name on Google Books either.
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ladies'-feet
"These are primroses," she would say. "Did you not know? And these are ladies'-feet, and these forget-me-nots.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
Well primroses and forget-me-nots I know, but I can't find ladies'-foot, lady's-foot, what have you, in the OED. Just below she says that one trailing down so prettily is Astyanax, which sober truth appears to reveal as a genus of fish. Max appears to be pulling the many-belled leg.
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mensiversary
"'Tis the mensiversary of our wedding," her husband answered gravely.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
not in OED
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word dewberry
Bread and honey and little strawberries were their morning fare, and in the evening they had seed-cake and dewberry wine.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word derry-dock
"Lovers are poor foolish derry-docks," the old man muttered.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
Not in OED. Can't google for it because the town of Derry|Londonderry has a dock.
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word initiative
The mask-maker's elevating talk about the gods, followed by the initative ceremony of his saintly mask, had driven all discordant memories from his love-thoughts of Jenny Mere.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
(rare use as adj. "initiating")
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mask-maker
Conceive, my Lord, my pride and pleasure when Mercury flew into my shop, one night last year, and made me Apollo's warrant-holder. It is the highest privilege that any mask-maker can desire.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word irremeable
"My wealth, my rank, my irremeable love for you, I throw them at your feet," Lord George cried piteously.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
("admitting of no return", < Latin re-mea- "return" < mea- "go, pass", as also in 'permeable')
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word operette
A new operette, The Fair Captive of Samarcand, was being enacted, and the frequenters of Garble's were all curious to behold the débutante, Jenny Mere, who was said to be both pretty and talented.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
This French (or German) variant of 'operetta' isn't in my dictionary of music, though the OED has it.
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word box-mate
"On my heart, you are a dangerous box-mate."
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
(a sharer of the same theatre box)
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word homuncule
Lord George called for port and champagne and beckoned the bowing homuncule to his box, that he might compliment him on his skill and pledge him in a bumper of the grape.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
in modern use normally 'homunculus'
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word inobnoxious
It is pleasant to record that many persons were inobnoxious to the magic of his title and disapproved of him so strongly that, whenever he entered a room where they happened to be, they would make straight for the door and watch him very severely through the key-hole.
—Max Beerbohm, The Happy Hypocrite, 1897
derived from the older sense of 'obnoxious to', "liable to harm from"
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word advisor
I assumed from the lack of asterisk against advisor that it was attested, whereas its presumed derivative *advisorius wasn't. The 'as if' need only have scope over the first word. It's not in my Latin dictionary nor in Perseus, but I don't know what date Perseus goes up to: advisor (assuming it existed) could have been mediaeval.
December 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word advisor
From the look of the OED quotations, 'advisor' became common in AmE usage from about 1900. It is now three to four times more common than 'adviser' in AmE and slightly more common in BrE on the Web at least. This is on both the raw Google figures (as I've just checked) and on Lynneguist's survey of academic usage.
However, the BNC, which reflects slightly older BrE use, has 'adviser' six times more often than 'advisor', and I think this reflects our intuitions better than the near-equal split of Web hits.
Unlike most other -vise words, 'advise' doesn't directly contain the Latin verb vid-, vis- "see", but comes via a prepositional phrase containing a noun. So its verbal inflexion had to be re-formed in Late Latin, rather than being regularly inherited from the base verb. It's not a classical word, but there apparently was a Late Latin advisor (mentioned in OED s.v. 'advisory').
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word loudtalk
Yeah, it was forbidden, all right, but nobody loudtalked us that time.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pinchnose
Or the vain and hincty pinchnoses worrying about his coat and the ivory buttons on his waistcoat?
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word tsch
The boy tsched his mule—for nothing, apparently, because he had to kick his sides with creamy heels before the animal obeyed.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word bloodrun
The crunch of bone when it is sundered, the sliced flesh and the tubes of blood cut through, shocking the bloodrun and disturbing the nerves.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word motherlessness
When for months there was no sign or sound of her, he sighed and relived that time when his house was full of motherlessness—and the chief unmothering was Wild's.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word brain-blasted
Too brain-blasted to do what the meanest sow managed: nurse what she birthed.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word catface
Well, Grant Barrett's The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English has the tree and tomato sense, but restricting it to "catface napkin" doesn't find any relevant hits except this Morrison line. Aha! Too narrow! "catface cloth" finds a couple of US dialect dictionaries with the required sense "wrinkle in ironed cloth".
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sneck
Also a Northern and Scottish dialectal word for a door latch. Commemorated in the exquisite Sneck Lifter ale from Jennings Brewery. A sneck lifter was a man's last sixpence; with it he could lift the sneck of the pub, buy one drink, and hope his friends would treat him to more.
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word counter-suggestibly
He would explain to an acquaintance that God, believing that Hardy expected the weather to change and give him a chance to work, counter-suggestibly arranged that the sky should remain cloudless.
—from C. P. Snow's 1967 foreword to G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology
A nonce-word by Snow. Hardy was a ferocious atheist and a cricket-lover, and brought along to matches an 'anti-God battery' consisting of an umbrella and other things intending to fool the Supreme Fascist into thinking he, Hardy, expected it to rain.
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sphairistike
The original (1873/4) name for a game resembling tennis but played on lawns. Almost immediately it was perceived that calling it 'lawn tennis' would help attract the unlettered and those who had been attacked by sphygmomanometers in their formative years. (Actually the latter might have been coined a bit later—you wouldn't think it was possible to learn too much Ancient Greek, would you? But it was somehow contrived among the leisured classes of the late 1800s.)
Lawn tennis became so popular that tennis had to start huffily calling itself real tennis. Sadly, this left the trophy open for grabs, and lawn tennis is now usually called tennis.
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cinderpath
He used to walk round the cinderpath with a long, loping, clumping-footed stride (he was a slight spare man, physically active even in his late fifties, still playing real tennis) head down, hair, tie, sweaters, papers all flowing , a figure that caught everyone's eyes.
—from C. P. Snow's 1967 foreword to G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology
"a footpath, or running-track, laid with cinders"—OED
Sic to space between 'flowing' and comma: there are proof-reading errors in every book however oft reprinted. I also think it requires a comma after the closing bracket, though arguably you could do without and it would be read in an integrated way: 'He walked round the cinderpath with a loping stride head down' is possible, I suppose.
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word apolausticity
When Trinity put him up in college—within four years he became a Fellow—there was no 'Alan St. Aubyn' apolausticity for him at all.
—from C. P. Snow's 1967 foreword to G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology
A nonce-word from 'apolaustic': the only occurrence on the Web (until Wordie is next visited by a spider) is this passage. Snow is referring to Ramanujan's dietary habits; and the Alan St Aubin reference is explained by Hardy in this extract '
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sweetback
He cuts his eyes over to the sweetbacks lounging on the corner.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word flop
Whether stooping to remove a pile of horse flop or sauntering off to his swank hotel, his hat had to be just so.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
Not in OED in this precise sense, but it does have: 3. dial. A mass of thin mud. Also transf.
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mammymade
Unaware that, had it failed, had she braved mammymade poisons and mammy's urgent fists, she could have had the best-dressed hair in the City.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word catface
Open her napkins wide as you please and not a catface anywhere.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
What does this mean? Only in OED in the first sense below:
A "catface" is an old wound on a tree trunk that is closing over.
—Florida Forest Health
"Catface�? is a term for describing misshapen tomato—qr. fruit with scars and holes on blossom end.
—Common Problems for Vegetable Crops
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word phoeniz
A realistic latex attachment used by gentlemen in the pr0n industry.
December 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word deprifixation
I withdraw my claim that this is equivalent to aphesis: that's just a phonetic reduction, but the present process is morphological: you treat something that isn't an affix as an affix.
December 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word succulent
STANLEY. Succulent.
MEG. You shouldn't say that word.
STANLEY. What word?
MEG. That word you said.
STANLEY. What, succulent—?
MEG. Don't say it!
STANLEY. What's the matter with it?
MEG. You shouldn't say that word to a married woman.
STANLEY. Is that a fact?
MEG: Yes.
STANLEY. Well. I never knew that.
—Pinter, The Birthday Party
December 27, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word fruition
This changed its meaning in the nineteenth century. Although it is related to 'fruit', the ultimate root of both is Latin fru- "enjoy", and English 'fruition' originally meant "enjoyment". In the 1800s it shifted to its present meaning of "completion, fulfilment" in expressions such as 'come to fruition'.
I think it is seldom used in the supposedly literal sense "fruiting", but this was presumably part of the bridging meaning: after your orchard fruits you have its fruition.
December 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word whilom
Whilom, as tells the tale, was a walled cheaping-town hight Utterhay, which was builded in a bight of the land a little off the great highway which went from over the mountains to the sea.
—opening of William Morris's The Water of the Wondrous Isles
December 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word gite
You do it the hard way: [ʒiːt].
December 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word gite
Yup: ʒiːt. Sadly you don't seem to be able to control the font, so it looks ungainly.
December 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list cold-comfort-farm
Can I just say at this point that I've fallen in love with sarahatlee a couple of hours ago purely on the strength of her list choices?
December 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word spurtle
It could be what Seth did: after all that mollocking in the sukebind he turned to spurtling in the koumiss, and Adam had to cletter it up arter 'im.
December 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word vegemite
Vegemite was briefly known (in 1928, in Queensland, I find) as Parwill. As in—Marmite and Parwill.
December 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word fernando poo
Nobody has noted it yet, so can I just mention that the people of Fernando Poo are the Bubi. And their mainland neighbours in Rio Muni are the Fang. The Fang and the Bubi.
December 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word deprifixation
Gardyloo. This has an unmadeupical name 'aphesis'.
December 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word alloplagiarism
And it is suggested that those have been published simultaneously, which is, of course, not easy to achieve for alloplagiarism ("simultaneous publication is rarely observed for duplicates that do not share authors").
—posting on blog The Parachute mainly discussing autoplagiarism.
December 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sokal
Use as a verb:
I submit that Salins has Sokaled the Times, since there is no way someone with enough grasp of social-scientific methods to hold his position could make such huge howlers unintentionally.
And as the derived gerundial noun in the article's title: Salins's SAT Sokaling.
December 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word difficutl
The Aztec St Jude: for success in a lost cause you sacrifice a prisoner to him, cutting out the heart with difficutlery.
December 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word siditty
If you don't want to dance, we can just sit there at the table, looking siditty by the lamplight and listen to the music and watch the people.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
Affecting white middle-class values, esp. characterized by an air of superiority; conceited, ‘stuck-up’.—OED
Also 'seditty', 'sadiddy' etc. Possibly an alteration of 'sedate'.
December 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word suds
When the customer comes and Violet is sudsing the thin gray hair . . .
Then sudses with all her heart those three or four ounces of gray hair, soft and interesting as a baby's.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
A morphological oddity: the noun 'suds' was originally plural, but you'd still expect the derived verb to be made from the base 'sud'. However, we say 'suds' as a verb too.
December 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word doctor plant
It has big deep-down chairs and a card table by the window covered with jade, dracena and doctor plants until they want to have card games or play tonk between themselves.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
unidentifiable
December 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word fay
Breathing hurts in weather that cold, but whatever the problems of being winterbound in the City they put up with them because it is worth anything to be on Lenox Avenue safe from fays and the things they think up;
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
short for 'ofay', US black slang for a white person, of much-guessed etymology
December 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word kitty
Big-legged women with pink kitty tongues roll money into green tubes for later on; then they laugh and put their arms around each other.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz
December 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word methinks
The verb is originally a different one, meaning "seem", probably related to the ordinary 'think'; they were distinct in OE but fell together in ME, thus giving all the reanalysis of the grammar. The verb meaning "seem" was normally impersonal: it thinks me = it seems to me.
The 'me' was indeed dative, but as the verb was usually 3rd singular (-s, -th) it's dubious whether it was subject of the verb. (Dative subjects are common in Icelandic, and the phenomenon is called quirky case.)
The other archaic survival, 'meseems', illustrates the structure a bit more clearly, since 'methinks' is liable to be (mis)interpreted as "I think", whereas 'meseems' is unmistakably "it seems to me".
December 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word chrestus
Chrestus and Christus are unrelated but were confused in Roman times as a name of Jesus. Chrêstus = "useful, worthy, good"; Christus = "anointed" = Meshiah.
December 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word vihdoin vihdoin vihdoin
The instructive case is a relic; it's not the usual case for marking instruments: that would (I think) be vihdalla. The -lla is called adessive and basically means "on, at".
December 17, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word phyx
a casket for collecting coins for recycling
December 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word -<-@
It's actually the <! that marks the DOCTYPE line as special. Real comments begin with <!-- and continue to the closing -->. Anything else within < and > will be treated as a tag, but browsers try and render what they can, which usually means silently ignoring any tags that don't make sense. So this makes them in effect a comment and invisible to the page, but is not the right way of doing it. You can't rely on browsers that way.
Typing < will give < (and typing & will give &, so typing &lt; will give <, and anything more complex sends you mad).
December 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word -<-@
The less-than sign could be interpreted as the beginning of an HTML tag, then it and the petals beyond discarded when it proves an unknown tag. Use < for safety.
December 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mazziḳim
It's sometimes used in transliterations of Semitic languages for what's more usually rendered <q>.
December 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word unhappily
In this distress he received a remittance of five pounds from London, with which he provided himself a decent coat, and determined to go to London, but unhappily spent his money at a favourite tavern.
—Johnson's life of Savage
A nice, clear contrast between a sentence adverb and a—well, what do we call the other possibility? A verb adverb? Anyway, Johnson is applying the speaker-oriented adverb 'unhappily' to the whole clause 'but spent his money at a favourite tavern'. The topic, Mr Richard Savage, however, probably happily spent his money there. Though it is of course quite possible that because of his poverty, hunger, and want of friends he unhappily spent his money there, given Johnson's delineation of Savage's character this seems unlikely.
Afterthought. Either Johnson has made an error, or this is a rare construction for 'provide': he might have confused the 'with' of 'with five pounds' with that of 'provide someone with something'. Outside a relative clause, what Johnson has written would be ?'He provided himself a decent coat (with the five pounds)'; this ditransitive use of 'provide' is OED sense 6, which has the note 'Also occas. with indirect object without to.'
December 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word perfidiousness
His resentment of this treatment, which, in his own opinion at least, he had not deserved, was such that he broke off all correspondence with most of his contributors, and appeared to consider them as persecutors and oppressors; and in the latter part of his life declared that their conduct toward him, since his departure from London, had 'been perfidiousness improving on perfidiousness, and inhumanity on inhumanity.'
—Johnson's life of Savage
Also an interestingly biting use of 'improve': OED lists several obsolete uses where it means "increase (something bad)".
December 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word dismission
But Savage easily reconciled himself to mankind without imputing any defect to his work, by observing that his poem was unluckily published two days after the prorogation of the parliament, and by consequence at a time when all those who could be expected to regard it were in the hurry of preparing for their departure, or engaged in taking leave of others upon their dismission from publick affairs.
—Johnson, life of Richard Savage
December 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word culbute
Someone who can't talk out of their arse only because their head is too firmly up it.
December 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word feet warmer
Sometimes the singular is lexicalized: we don't say *teethbrush or *feetrest because the words toothbrush, footrest exist. Otherwise the singular sounds a bit more natural to me: mouse eater, mice eater, tooth treatment, teeth treatment; and these are in sharp contrast to the unacceptable *hands rest, *rats eater.
December 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word feet warmer
Seen in a supermarket: a bunch of white woolly things labelled 'feet warmers'. An illustration of the morphological principle that irregular plurals can be used as modifiers of other nouns, whereas in general usage regular plurals can't: *hands warmers.
Note: 'sports' is one common exception in general usage; business and law parlance freely use plural modifiers ('securities expertise', 'notes issuance').
December 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word crucian
Besides, the land is wonderful there, there are no neighbours, crucians are in the size of a whale shark and strawberry in the size of a water-melon.
—Yulia Tymoshenko website
I love you dearly, Yulia, truly I do, but you need to hire some native speakers as translators.
December 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word dirt law
national firms such as Dechert have de-emphasized development work, referred to in legal circles as "dirt law," in favor of real estate finance and securitization.
—Philadelphia Business Journal, 26 May 2006
December 9, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word byres
One apiece in a beast-house, beef-house, byre, cattle-shed, cow-barton, cow-bing, cow-boosing, cow-byre, cow-hole, cow-house, cow-hovel, cow-hull, cow-lodge, cow-pen, cow-pine, cow-place, cow-shade, cow-shed, cow-shippon, cow-shud, cow-skeeling, cow-stable, cow-stall, cows'-house, hovel, lathe, milk-shed, milking-byre, milking parlour, mistall, neat-house, shed, shelter, shippon, and skeeling, o'course.
December 9, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word prorogue
Lopping the -ue wouldn't work because the pronunciation would be affected: as with, say, 'intrigue' or 'vague'.
December 9, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word teddynaut
Actually it's a sign of the decline of classical education (mutter mutter, they were probably too busy listening to 'pop groups') that they missed the chance to use arctonaut.
December 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word teddynaut
Ghits for the fused form way outnumber the hyphenated. You think I don't check these things scrupulously before committing the electrons to print? You think BBC science reporting is the last word? Huh! And on the Internet all words are immortal.
December 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word teddynaut
Attested in both English and German (plural Teddynauten).
December 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lagom
Swedish
December 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word breadcrumb
The buttercomb is used to mix in flavourings like balderherb on your butterslab. When done, keep it in a safe place like a basketcrib to protect it from beetlegrub.
December 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word breadcrumb
Or a butterbomb:
An older, heavy-set woman. Very similar to a MILF, but without the wanting to have sex with them part. Can be any chunky woman, but usually reserved for fat blondes.—Urban Dictionary
December 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word breadcrumb
We're not counting the fictional battlecrab then?
December 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pantocracy
And pantisocracy is rule by pants and socks equally.
December 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list colorless-green-ideas-sleep-furiously
iggle squiggs trazed wombly in the harlish goop
December 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word giznank
The routine in which a dummy attempts to seize a glass of water from a ventriloquist drinking it: part of the final viva before the pair are admitted to the Ventriloquial Circle.
December 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word bâtonnier
French term for the president of a Bar.
December 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word potline
This incorporates the expansion of two existing potlines — a series of electrolytic cells (known as pots) in which alumina (powdered aluminium) is reduced to high purity aluminum metal.
—itp.net, 29/07/2006
December 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word turquoise
The supposed 'pizzazz' connexion looks like the usual far-fetched nonsense possibly inspired by a random vague resemblance to something (eta: presumably Persian piroza "turquoise"). The first use of the word ('pizazz') is in Harper's Bazaar, 1937, claiming to be quoting the editor of the Harvard Lampoon. How Persian or turquoise would get in there is not apparent.
December 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list wtht-vwls
Actually none of 'nth', 'cwm', 'crwth', 'crypt', 'gypsy', or any of the other words with vowels belong here. The only words without vowels are ones where a consonant is the syllabic peak, such as 'brr', 'grr', 'mm', 'hmm', 'psst', 'pfft', 'shh', 'tsk'.
December 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word xussar iryston
Xussar Iryston: Ossetian name of South Ossetia. The term for North Ossetia is Cægat-Iryston, to which they've appended the alternative name of Alania.
December 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word apsny
Abkhaz name of Abkhazia
December 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word euskadi
Also known as Euskal Herria, which is a literal two-word phrase "Basque country".
December 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word nihon
Usual modern Japanese name of Japan: etymology Nihon < Nifon < Nipon < Nippon < two Chinese words meaning "sun origin".
Psst, WeirdNet, re definition 2: the War is over.
December 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word donostia
Basque name of San Sebastián
December 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word iruñea
Basque name of Pamplona.
December 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word dar al-baida
Arabic name of Casablanca. They mean the same thing: "white house".
December 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word finfinne
Oromo name of Addis Ababa
December 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word surrogate
New political sense of the word used in this Doonesbury with attendant helpful commentary.
December 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word zero-mode waveguide
Actually I don't know what either 'zero-mode' or 'waveguide' mean either, but some public-spirited Dutch molecular biophysicists explain it all.
November 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word destroy
This relationship exists to support such things as the destroy event -- so that when a parent component (such as the root) is destroyed, the parent knows who its children are, and can destroy them before destroying itself.
—Thinking in Tkinter
Gee I love that kind of talk. say in Ensign Parker voice
November 28, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word apparent
In a predicative position, I think "obvious" is the more likely meaning, and contexts are typically things like 'The reason is apparent'. When you qualify it with 'only', or contrast it with 'real' ('What is apparent is not always real') you force it into the "seeming" meaning.
November 27, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cfxo
Merrill Lynch has announced that it is set to launch the first FX CDO or CFXO (Collateralised FX Obligation), an investment product designed to apply the CDO technology commonly used within the credit world to Foreign Exchange as an underlying asset class.
—Maktoob Business, 3 May 2007
November 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word servicer advancing
Another initiative is servicer advancing where, for each interest payment date, the servicer advances to the securitization special purpose vehicle (SPV) the shortfall between the full amount of money due from the borrowers and what is collected.
—Securitization.Net
November 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word extreme-mortality bond
Swiss Re and Axa took the principle of [mortality derivatives] further with extreme-mortality bonds. These make a profit for the issuer if there’s a sudden spike in the death rate and thus can be used to hedge an insurer against a range of high-impact, low-probability events such as a bird flu pandemic.
—Cris Sholto Heaton in MoneyWeek, 24 Nov. 2006
November 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mortality derivative
These ‘mortality derivatives’ aren’t punts on a single individual coming to an untimely end. Instead, the payoffs are linked to death rates among large groups of people – something that could be very useful for balancing risks...
—Cris Sholto Heaton in MoneyWeek, 24 Nov. 2006
November 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word siv-lite
Barclays Capital has been a leading player in SIV-lites, which combine traditional structured investment vehicle (SIV) and collateralised debt obligation (CDO) technologies.
—Reuters, 29 August 2007
November 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cdo
Q1172 Chairman: You cannot tell me what a CDO-squared is? Can anybody tell me what it is?
Mr Palmer: A CDO-squared is a derivative structure designed to give investors exposure to a CDO.
Q1173 Chairman: Mr Corrigan, can you try to explain it to us in simple language?
Mr Corrigan: I think the easiest way to understand what a CDO-squared is to start with what a CDO is. If I were to take the example of mortgage-backed securities, institutions package up a family of individual mortgages into what is a fairly plain vanilla mortgage-backed facility. I think it is entirely fair to say that when those mortgage-backed securities are issued the disclosures associated with the issuance of those instruments are quite wholesome.
Q1174 Chairman: What does "wholesome" mean?
Mr Corrigan: A CDO carves out of a plain vanilla mortgage-backed security certain credit tranches of that security and reformulates them in what is called a structured credit product into a particular class of credit standards affecting those particular mortgages, not the full pool of mortgages. That is called a CDO. When you take a CDO and then roll it into a second CDO that is called a CDO-squared; in other words, it is a CDO made up of other CDOs.
Q1175 Chairman: If you put in another one it is a CDO-cubed?
Mr Corrigan: Thank God, we have not got that far yet.
—Select Committee on Treasury, UK Hansard, 4 December 2007
November 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word aggrandize
Etymologically or morphologically unusual: it contains an '-ize' suffix (and is usually so spelt), but not the '-ize' suffix. It is in fact the French suffix found in 'advertise' and possibly 'chastise'.
November 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word girney
A kind of socializing vocalization amongst macaques: the others are a coo and a grunt.
November 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word oscar-assured
An Oscar-assured performance from Angelia Jolie.
—blurb for some new film.
What struck me here is the semantics of the compound, with the noun in an objective relationship to the past participle. So far today I haven't been able to think of any others. This compound construction is usually used in an agentive way ('moth-eaten clothes', 'God-given talents'), or locative ('Frankfurt-listed company'), or instrumental in 'blood-spattered', 'frost-bitten', 'halogen-lit'. Then there's 'flesh-coloured' and 'sepia-toned'.
Then I began wondering about the clause this compound was related to: 'Jolie was assured (of) an Oscar', the two forms of which are passives of something like 'Her performance assured Jolie (of) an Oscar.' Ghits for 'assured him (of) victory' shows both are used, with 'of' much more common.
November 25, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list peculiarities-of-our-own-languages
Nona, Nyonya, Pak, Bapak, Ibu . . .
November 25, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word widget tree
Tkinter automatically maintains a widget tree (via the master and children attributes of each widget instance), so a widget won't disappear when the application's last reference goes away; it must be explicitly destroyed before this happens (using the destroy method).
—Fredrik Lundh, 'An Introduction to TkInter'
Admittedly this might be a straightforward on-the-fly syntactic compound, rather than a specific technical term, but I like the sound of 'widget tree'. Also that it consists of masters and children.
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word gillflirted
Hunh!
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word badgered
. . . ladies of the haute sewer taking their last stroll, sauntering on their last Rotten Row, going slowly along in the dark, holding up their badgered flounces, or standing still, silent and as indifferent as the dead . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I can't find a sense of 'badger(ed)' that makes sense here, but hey, it's Djuna Barnes, and on this note I end my collection of weird words from that lush and mysterious Nightwood.
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word third-rising
'That woman,' the doctor said, settling himself more comfortably in his chair, 'would use the third-rising of a corpse for her ends.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I wonder what this means? (Edit: "resurrection on the third day", perhaps?)
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word branchy
. . . a night in the branchy pitch of fall . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word gillflirted
. . . in our age bred up into infants searching for a womb to crawl into, not be made to walk loth the gingerly dust of death, but to find a moist, gillflirted way.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I had no idea what this meant; 'gill-flirt' is in the OED with a transparent meaning "wanton girl". Okay. *reviews sentence* Okay, I still have no idea what it means, Djuna.
Also two grammatical oddities; 'loth' as an adverb (normally it's only an adjective in the predicative complement 'be loth to VP'), and 'gingerly' as an adjective.
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hanging-bell
A small hanging-bell rings as the door moves.
—Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising
Such a simple word; yet such is the beauty of combination in the English language.
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word rubbish-roofed
The tall spinney of horse-chestnut trees, raucous with the calling of the rooks and rubbish-roofed with the clutter of their sprawling nests, was one of their familiar places.
—Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word twitch-nosed
Normally the rabbits would be huddled sleepily in corners, only the greedy ones coming twitch-nosed forward to eat.
—Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word farm-smelling
Will dipped out a pail of pellets from the bin in the farm-smelling barn, which was not really a barn at all, but a long, low building with a tiled roof, once a stable.
—Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word broad-beamed
A full symphony orchestra was swelling out of the radio; their eldest sister Gwen was slicing onions and singing; their mother was broad-beamed and red-faced over an oven.
—Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising
November 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word nunatak
There's a place in Antarctica called the Whichaway Nunataks, which even as I child I considered deeply scary: lost in the wilds of Antarctica, nuns coming at you from every direction, ninja-like and polar-bear-like concealed under their camouflage twats, crevasses impeding your escape.
November 22, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hent
"Did not Periander think fit to lie with his wife Melissa after she had already gone hent to heaven?"
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
past tense and past participle of 'hent' = "take, snatch, carry off". The line is from Bishop Jeremy Taylor, (mis)quoted by the drunken Irish doctor, who by the way would be left out entirely from my director's cut version of Nightwood, reducing it by a third and probably eviscerating it to the point of pointlessness from the author's point of view, but still.
What Taylor actually said (in his Sermon XVII was: 'If it be otherwise, the man enjoys a wife as Periander did his dead Melissa, by an unnatural union, neither pleasing nor holy, useless to all the purposes of society, and dead to content.'
Periander, tyrant of Corinth, was accounted one of the Seven Sages, but killed his wife on false suspicion of infidelity, and was rumoured to have made it up to her afterwards in a non-socially-approved way.
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word drearful
Behold this fearful tree, on which sits singing the drearful bird—Turdus musicus, or European singing thrush . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word witch-fire
And that look on a face we follow like a witch-fire.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word tomb-piece
. . . so you can imagine how she trembled when she saw herself going toward fifty without a thing done to make her a tomb-piece, or anything in her past that would get a flower named for her.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list x-s-y-where-x-is-somebody-s-name
Barrett's oesophagus
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cow pad
No, I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pad.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Hunh. I think I've only ever seen 'cow pat'.
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word water wit
I do not discuss weighty matters with water wits!
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word gimp
. . . for I'm a fisher of men and my gimp is doing a saltarello over every body of water to fetch up what it may.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
If I may hazard a guess at what on earth Barnes is putting into the mouth of her maniac doctor, this is OED gimp n.1, sense 2., 'A fishing-line composed of silk, etc., bound with wire to strengthen it.'
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word petropus
. . . and me sitting between them going mad because I am a doctor and a collector and a talker of Latin, and a sort of petropus of the twilight and a physiognomist that can't be flustered by the wrong feature on the right face . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
I don't know what this means. Not in the latest revision of the OED, though they do quote from Nightwood elsewhere. Does the drunken Irish doctor mean he is some kind of stone-footed creature, or is this a reference to the Petropus genus of flying foxes, or what? I can't find any English other use of the word apart from the genus and this quotation.
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word wildcat
He separates the two for fear of indignities, so that the mystery is cut in every cord; the design wildcats down the charter mortalis, and you get crime.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Most unusual use of 'wildcat' as a verb. I'm not even entirely clear what it means here. Also, the only ghits for 'charter mortalis' are this quote.
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word savon
You wash your brawl with every thought, with every gesture, with every conceivable emollient and savon, and expect to find your way again.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Not italicized in the text, so treated as naturalized English, though the text does contain numerous italicized French terms. I have never seen this word used in English. (Nor do I know what 'brawl' is supposed to mean here. But the speaker is a raving Irishman and the author is Djuna Barnes, so mine not to reason why.)
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word gut-greedy
The night and the day are two travels, and the French—gut-greedy and fist-tight though they often are—often leave testimony of the two in the dawn . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Also use of 'travel' as noun.
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word berserk
He neither knows himself nor his outriders, he berserks a fearful dimension and dismounts, miraculously, in bed!
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
A highly unusual use of 'berserk' as a verb. Note also the (to me somewhat strange) unbalanced placement of 'neither . . . nor'.
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word swill-pail
On the other hand, 'brimming with' starts to conjure up some pretty disturbing thoughts then.
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word swill-pail
I haven't got the book with me today, and Snippet View is too mean to give me much context, but I think as well as poo it might contain the odd aborted fetus, this being one of the doctor's lines of business.
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word swill-pail
A swill-pail stood at the head of the bed, brimming with abominations.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word decarbonize
We now urgently need to . . . introduce a Green New Deal – which would . . . generate a transformational economic programme to substantially decarbonise our economy.
—from a letter from a Green Party spokesperson, New Scientist, 15/11/2008
November 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word epsilon
By that Friday before the IMF meeting, we were literally one epsilon away from a systemic financial meltdown.
—talk by economist Nouriel Roubini, 30/09/2008
This is the first real-world use of the jargon sense of 'epsilon' I've seen.
November 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word drinkard
I have only just noticed that the word in the title of Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard isn't the familiar one.
November 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word billycock
. . . the grandmother who, for some unknown reason, was dressed as a man, wearing a billycock and a corked moustache, ridiculous and plump in tight trousers and a red waistcoat . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word unevolved
Listening to the faint sounds from the street, every murmur from the garden, an unevolved and tiny hum that spoke of the progressive growth of noise that would be Robin coming home, Nora lay and beat her pillow without force, unable to cry, her legs drawn up.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word narcoticize
Half narcoticized by the sounds and the knowledge that this was in preparation for departure, Nora spoke to herself: . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word foreshank
A black horse, standing on trembling hind legs that shook in apprehension of the raised front hooves, hsi beautiful ribboned head pointed down and toward the trainer's whip, pranced slowly, the foreshanks flickering to the whip.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cutwater
. . . he felt that he was looking upon a figurehead in a museum, which though static, no longer roosting on its cutwater, seemed yet to be going against the wind . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word somnambule
About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water—as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations—the troubling structure of the born somnambule, who lives in two worlds—meet of child and desperado.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word attitude
You'd think this would be one of the boatloads of ambitious words that came over with William the Conqueror. But no, it's a newcomer, about 1700, from the Italian form of 'aptitude', which it replaced in its current senses.
November 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word schlagsahne
. . . marking the exact centre of his body with the obstetric line seen on fruits—the inevitable arc produced by heavy rounds of burgundy, schlagsahne, and beer.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
"whipped cream" schlag- "beat" + Sahne "cream"
November 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word knife-clean
The feather in her hat had been knife-clean and quivering as if in an heraldic wind . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mannerliness
(Hedvig had played the waltzes of her time with the masterly stroke of a man, in the tempo of her blood, rapid and rising—that quick mannerliness of rouch associated with the playing of the Viennese, who, though pricked with the love of rhythm, execute its demands in the duelling manner)
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word dragon's-blood
Three massive pianos . . . sprawled over the thick dragon's-blood pile of rugs from Madrid.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 18, 2008
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