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)
Once the doctor had his audience—and he got his audience by the simple device of pronouncing at the top of his voice (at such moments as irritable and possessive as a maddened woman's) some of the more boggish and biting of the shorter early Saxon verbs—nothing could stop him.
Most of the 5000 or so known species of harvestmen or [daddy-long-legs, of order Opiliones] live in tropical South America and South-east Asia, but they also live in damp shaded areas in all climates, including the sub-arctic, and can sometimes be found in droves beneath the arris rails of fences around temperate suburban gardens.
Then there appear two—not one, but two—Christopher Robins, each about eleven years of age, both forced, poor kids, to go quaintsy-waintsy in doings about knights and squires and beauteous maidens.
—Dorothy Parker, review of Give Me Yesterday by her arch-nemesis A.A. Milne, in The New Yorker, 14 Mar. 1931
But I could not, myself, seek solace in the notion that here was just a good old ten-twenty-thirty rouser.
—Dorothy Parker, review of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, in The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 1931
I have no idea what either of these words mean, and I'm refraining listing 'ten-twenty-thirty' as a newly-discovered word on the questionable grounds that it's not a word, but a syntactic combination linked by hyphens. Either way, I still don't know what any of it means.
The play is so simply written that there is never a suggestion of the theater about it; even such a tired trick as the singing of an off-stage army marching off to war somehow loses all theatricalism and becomes grippingly real, so naturally and quietly is it brought in.
—Dorothy Parker, review of John Drinkwater's play Abraham Lincoln, in Vanity Fair, Feb. 1920
Owing to the local Russian custom of calling each person sometimes by all of his names, sometimes by only his first three or four, and sometimes by a nickname which has nothing to do with any of the other names, it is difficult for one with my congenital lowness of brow to gather exactly whom they are talking about.
—Dorothy Parker, review of Tolstoy's Redemption, in Vanity Fair, Dec. 1918
Beatrice Beckley has the thankless job of playing Lady Chiltern, one of those frightfully virtuous women of Wilde's who can't utter the simplest observation without dragging in such Sabbatical expressions as "we needs must."
—Dorothy Parker, review of An Ideal Husband, in Vanity Fair, Nov. 1918
This is probably the first time I've seen 'Sabbatical' used in anything close to the original sense of pertaining to the Sabbath.
Not sure what the grammar here is. Is 'fresh' being used as a noun, meaning "fresh drink", or is it a predicative complement (analogous to the adjectives in 'drink some neat', 'drink the milk cold')?
Her belt was cinched so tight that, looking at it, you could hardly draw your own breath, the stiff waves of her hair were netted to her skull, her skirt snapped sharply at her legs.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
By the way, I have great admiration for Parker's frequent, skilful use of asyndeton.
The dog, Bonne Bouche—she had been christened before Mrs. Hazelton bought her—wore on her head, in the manner of the fashionables among her tribe, a bow of satin ribbon holding back her silvery bangs.
It was high in her when she arrived at Mrs. Hazelton's and caroled to the maid who opened the door, "Well, Dellie, it's been a long time since we've seen each other, hasn't it?"
Exact words were never spoken, but Miss Christie had come to live in the belief that Miss Nicholl and Mrs. Hazelton had grown up together, would in fact have made a joint debut had it not been for the death of Miss Nicholl's father, too innocent a soul to mistrust the dastard who managed his financial affairs; so Miss Nicholl had had to go to work and, naturally, her path had split wide from Mrs. Hazelton's.
Miss Christie was employed in a combined lending library and gift shop, all a-twist with potted philodendron; in her life there was none such as Mrs. Hazelton.
With the years, Miss Nicholl grew no less flat in the purse and no more delightful to the eye, and it is a boresome business to go on and on feeling tenderness for one whose luck never changes.
Well, as 'aut cetera' is neither English nor Latin for the idea conveyed by the English 'et cetera' and the Latin 'et cetera', the claim 'ought' is unjustifiable. You ought to write good English or good Latin.
'Et cetera' attaches (and 'et cetera' attached) to a list: it conveys that the list is incomplete, and that there are to be understood the remaining items, the rest of that kind, other things of like kind, etc. There are further items on the list. That is an "and", not an "or", regardless of the purpose you intend to put the list to: giving someone a choice from it, for example.
The most popular theory, however, is that it mysteriously sank fifty leagues off the Azores, leaving the Slina and the Slanta Maria languages to carry on.
"Pertaining to musical timbre", heard just now on the wireless twice in quick succession, pronounced (by a USAan) three syllables 'tæːmbərəl, from the de-nasalized 'timbre' 'tæːmbər.
You've got to give the PFY marks for Wikisalting. Not only has he inserted entries into Wikipedia, he's fabricated websites, complete with photos of IT types pointing at graphs (one of these quite patently the barman of the local pub in a suit jacket with some pens stuck in the top pocket).
All Web uses of this word seem to refer to the same thing, and which is what I just learnt it as: a paper layer between two other layers used to form a transistor. An interior equivalent of a substrate.
I wouldn't normally bother to add obviously made-up words like this, but I was curious about the etymology and it otherwise fulfilled my criteria. It turns out that tillex- doesn't mean anything, and it comes from till- "pluck, pull (out) (hair, feathers etc.)" with a spurious ex- "out" stuck on.
Heighth is the regular formation, and was used by Milton and Burke for example, but was progressively eased out by -t forms from the Middle English period, and seems to have been effectively dead in standard English by 1800.
Lovely, archaic and practically non-existent word for "seat of justice", but cognate with the normal Scandinavian word for "court (of justice)", for example the Swedish Supreme Court, Högsta domstolen "the highest doom-stool".
Adjectives that are comparative in form can take a special kind of clause complement, the comparative clause:
This crossword is easier than it used to be.
This bicycle is faster than it used to be.
'Different' is semantically parallel, though not formally comparative, so it is natural by analogy to use it with comparative clauses:
?This situation is different than it used to be.
I use that, though I'm more likely to phrase it with 'to'/'from' and a noun phrase (namely a fused relative, a clause attached to a wh-word):
This situation is different to/from what it used to be.
Analogy doesn't always work, because while both 'to' and 'from' are acceptable with the adjective, the verb only takes 'from'.
*This one differs to that.
This is all modulo dialect differences: 'different than ' is not grammatical in my (standard BrE) and similar dialects. And apparently some speakers don't have 'different to', according to pterodactyl.
Semi-serious term for a sibilant with more diffuse friction; more commonly called a hushing sound. Examples are the postalveolars such as ʃ and ʒ—the sounds of 'ship' and 'fusion' rather than sharper 'sip' and 'fusing'.
After a landmark ruling in the Israeli Trade Mark Protection Court, the Simian Intelligence Project and the Simple Internet Protocol team reluctantly agreed to pool their resources. The first result is a 3-year-old bonobo trained to post spam to websites requiring a logon. Both teams admitted they had noticed an 'impressive increase in orders' since the collaboration began.
As a verb it has a highly unusual property: an adjunct of manner is obligatory (which therefore makes it a complement of manner). You can't just word a letter: you have to word it, for example, carefully or with care.
Total and sudden transformations of a language seldom happen; conquests and migrations are now very rare: but there are other causes of change, which, though slow in their operation, and invisible in their progress, are perhaps as much superiour to human resistance, as the revolutions of the sky, or intumescence of the tide.
With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.
My purpose was to admit no testimony of living authours, that I might not be misled by partiality, and that none of my cotemporaries might have reason to complain; nor have I departed from this resolution, but when some performance of uncommon excellence excited my veneration, when my memory supplied me, from late books, with an example that was wanting, or when my heart, in the tenderness of friendship, solicited admission for a favourite name.
—Johnson, preface to his Dictionary
Sic but obsolete: word now replaced by 'contemporary'.
The examples, thus mutilated, are no longer to be considered as conveying the sentiments or doctrine of their authours; the word for the sake of which they are inserted, with all its appendant clauses, has been carefully preserved; but it may sometimes happen, by hasty detruncation, that the general tendency of the sentence may be changed: the divine may desert his tenets, or the philosopher his system.
The examples, thus mutilated, are no longer to be considered as conveying the sentiments or doctrine of their authours; the word for the sake of which they are inserted, with all its appendant clauses, has been carefully preserved; but it may sometimes happen, by hasty detruncation, that the general tendency of the sentence may be changed: the divine may desert his tenets, or the philosopher his system.
It should be easy enough to tell: if the ii is a mere lengthening for effect, the negative of kowai would be kowakunai with a possible lengthening to kowakunaii for the same effect. If, however, kowaii is intrinsically an alternative form, it should have a negative kowaikunai in addition to kowakunai.
(Modulo my forgetting Japanese grammar, which is quite possible. In any case, there would be some grammatical effects if there was a word consisting of stem + suffix kowai-i.)
For a while we stood there in wordless confrontation, both of us with an expression of disbelief, myself beside my luggage and she in a pink dressing gown that was made of a material found only in the bedrooms of the English lower classes and is unaccountably called candlewick.
Where now mere traces remained of the five overthrown cities of Gomorrah, Ruma, Sodom, Seadeh and Seboah, the oleanders once grew thirty feet high beside rivers that never ran dry, and there were acacia forests and oshac trees as in Florida.
—W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1983, Eng. tr. 1996), in a diary entry feigned to be written by a traveller to Palestine in 1913.
No current usage in English, and not in OED, but a number of nineteenth-century books give oshac as the Persian name of gum ammoniac.
A new spelling to me. I would have thought you either use Latinate 'extensible' or anglicize it to 'extendable'; but no, the hybrid 'extendible' has many centuries of existence and the numbers behind it.
I also wonder how much the Femafication of government under President Bush contributed to Mr. Paulson’s fumble. All across the executive branch, knowledgeable professionals have been driven out; there may not have been anyone left at Treasury with the stature and background to tell Mr. Paulson that he wasn’t making sense.
—Paul Krugman, The New York Times, 12 October 2008
Nonce-use created in this article. A reference to the U.S. government agency FEMA, widely criticized for its response to the flooding of New Orleans.
martingalle clluestick: is a googlewhack if you correctly spell each with only one L (and use + to insist on one word). It shows up on sionnach's Words, coincidentally, as indeed does 'googlewhack'. In fact I was genuinely googling for the combination, having read about CPDOs, a kind of martingalle of financial 'securities' (what quaint terminology they have), which would naturally cause a rational person to reach for the No. 3 Clluestick.
A made-up Greek letter representing the partial derivative of the value with respect to volatility in the Black-Scholes equations. The second derivative is denoted by another invented letter, volga, and the derivative with respect to both volatility and price is vanna.
Contrary to the grey definition above, 'the uninflected form of the verb', I know of no language that has an uninflected infinitive. Most European languages, including Turkish and Finnish but excluding English and Modern Greek, have an infinitive, but in none of them is it in any way the most basic form of the verb. By tradition it is often used as the citation form of the verb: the name for the set of all inflected forms; so we speak of the verb lachen or savoir or graphein in shorthand for potentially huge numbers of forms.
In English the citation form is either simply the plain form, which is uninflected, or by a curious historical accident a word sequence that is not in any way part of the verb, nor even a constituent of sentences in which it occurs: namely the infinitival subordinator 'to' followed by the plain form of the verb. This word sequence has traditionally been called the infinitive, too. It isn't; it isn't anything, any more than 'the black' is anything in 'the black cat', or 'man with' is anything in 'the man with the golden gun'. Talk about splitting this non-constituent is therefore like talk about splitting 'the black', and claiming that 'the big, black cat' could be ungrammatical.
Sometimes, even in front of Mrs. Lanier's dressmaker's or her furrier's or her lingère's or her milliner's, there would be be a file of thin girls and small, shabby men, who held placards in their cold hands and paced up and down and up and down with slow, measured steps.
I've just heard the verb used intransitively: 'It googles', meaning it shows up on a Google search. There are a handful of ghits for "if it googles" in this sense. It seems an obvious and useful extension.
Actually the OED conflates the genus and the common noun. What it says under 'spherulite' is:
2. Palæont. (With capital initial.) A genus of fossil molluscs.
In early use in L. form Sphærulītēs.
1834 GRIFFITH tr. Cuvier XII. 92 Sphærulites,..where the valves are roughened by irregularly raised plates. 1841 MILLER O.R. Sandst. viii. 153 The hippurites, sphærulites, and nummulites of the same formations, in Greece, Italy, and Spain. 1847 ANSTED Anc. World x. 241 One such genus is called Sphærulite... They seem most nearly allied to the inhabitants of those univalve shells of which the limpet is the present representative.
—OED
Presumably the 'early' form Sphaerulites had precedence so has been restored as the genus name over Sphaerulite, but the common noun for a member of it (as in their Miller quotation) is 'sphaerulite' or 'spherulite'.
Ultimately from Latin nepotem "grandson, descendant" (nom. nepos), later also "nephew, niece", giving Italian nipote "nephew, niece". In Italian the practice was originally styled nipotismo as well as the current nepotismo.
Bank of America expects to achieve $7 thousand million in pretax expense savings, fully realized by 2012. The acquisition is expected to be accretive to earnings by 2010.
n.pl. The powers available to a statutory corporation such as a local council, more or less: that is those things that are not ultra vires. This seems to be lawyers' talk with no more precise meaning, as far as I can tell; sometimes they speak of councils' powers, at other of their vires, sometimes both, as if 'powers and vires' covered a bit more ground.
Adopting an attitude of resignation towards frustration; characterized by blaming neither oneself nor others unreasonably. Contrasted with INTROPUNITIVEa. and EXTRAPUNITIVEa.
—OED
The first use quoted is from 1938, apparently its coinage:
1938 S. ROSENZWEIG in H. A. Murray Explorations in Personality vi. 587 He may experience emotions of embarrassment and shame, making little of blame and emphasizing instead the conciliation of others and himself to the disagreeable situation. In this case he will be more interested in condoning than in condemning and will pass off the frustration as lightly as possible by making references, even at the price of self-deception, to unavoidable circumstances. This type of reaction may be termed ‘impunitive’.
Central industrial property offices of those Member States which have decided accordingly draw up simultaneously and on their own behalves, search reports relating to earlier national trade marks in their registers.
A rare instance of the plural. Examination of the 48 000 ghits for this shows that about half of them are genuine uses of it; but "on their behalves" has only a fraction of 1% of the frequency of "on their behalf".
Specifically, from the Viz character Roger Irrelevant, who said irrelevant things. The tag-line for the strip was therefore 'He's completely hatstand.'
In the financial sense the OED has examples going as far back as 1929, and they just mean "abroad, foreign". There's no sense that—as one might guess—it began with actual off-shore territories like Guernsey and was then extended to other tax havens.
I'd never seen the expression 'sufficient enough' before, and was surprised to find it seemed to have many Google hits. However, further research showed it was used well under 1% of the time, so I felt justified in editing it out as non-standard:
Exxon Mobil Corporation announced today that its subsidiary, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 15) Limited (Esso), has started production of the Xikomba deepwater development offshore Angola Block 15. Xikomba is the company's first production on Block 15 and represents the first of several anticipated operated production facilities offshore Angola.
Surprising etymology. This seems an obvious borrowing, French cendre, Latin cinerem, but in fact is unrelated. It's native English and was originally 'sinder' (cognate with 'sinter' of similar meaning, from German). The original meaning was "slag, scoria". The change of spelling to c- under French/Latin influence also led to a slight shift in meaning.
As defined by the Government of South Africa, “Artisanal mining means small-scale mining involving the extraction of minerals with the simplest of tools, on a subsistence level�?.—
Presently, he returned, followed by the boy from the public-house, who bore in one hand a plate of bread and beef, and in the other a great pot, filled with some very fragrant compound, which sent forth a grateful steam, and was indeed choice purl, made after a particular recipe which Mr Swiveller had imparted to the landlord, at a period when he was deep in his books and desirous to conciliate his friendship.
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 57
At that period, hot beer flavoured with gin, ginger, and sugar; earlier, beer with wormwood or other bitter herbs. Etym. dub.
I thought there was a more standard linguistic term for these, but all I can come up with on a famous search engine is cranberry collocation, which is not what I was thinking of.
Before 1979, the Dead Sea was meromictic, meaning it was permamently stratified into layers that didn't mix. Following the severe reduction of fresh water flowing into its upper reaches it became holomictic – essentially mixing to the same composition throughout its depth.
Looks like you need some contributions from Tashlhiyt, a Berber dialect of southern Morocco. Words include tsgllbt "you reversed", tfktstt "you gave it", sfqqst "irritate him", tssksft you made it dirty", kks "take off", ks "feed on", etc.
—examples from Rachid Ridouane, 'Syllabification in Tashlhiyt Berber, Phonetic and Phonological Arguments'
It would if I had any idea what it meant. I looked through Wolfram and found a fair few I'd never heard of: no point listing those. (I've added a sentence to the list description to clarify this.)
Peter higgs whose particle should be detected here at cern tells radio 4 '- will be very surprised if they don't find the higgs bosun. It will show that the theorists have not been talking nonsense over all these years.
I know it's only a blog, so the shift key is too time-consuming to use, but you'd think the reporters would have the key terms down pat. A Higgs bosun puts mass into the virtual sea of particles. And if he doesn't, he has to walk the Planck.
And such, we are fully persuaded, will be the sentiments of every ancient dame in the British empire, who shall read the account we shall now give of the vaunted bonne Societé, under Mme de Genlis's admired and lamented graocracy.
And now that old women have been added to the legislature, so that our gerontocracy is reinforced by a graocracy of middle-aged and old women like Lady Rhondda, Lady Astor, Lady Frances Balfour, and Mrs. Bertrand Russell, the advent of increased restraints upon the young of both sexes is a certainty.
Apparently still in use in biological nomenclature, where a sphalma typographicum is a typographical error pertaining to the correct name of a species. (Sphalma is also a genus of beetle.)
Greek sphalma n. "trip, stumble; failure, error" from sphall- v. (< *sphalj-) "trip up; overthrow; balk".
Since that 2000 comment the earliest find in English has been pushed back to 1480 (spelt marmelate), and which is incidentally earlier than the first known occurrence of the Portuguese marmelada it must come from. This is from marmelo "quince", from one or another Latin word that's ultimately a compound of Greek mêlon "apple" and méli "honey".
Could I just stick my etymological oar in here (wearing my etymologist's boater) and point out that the roots are hypn- "sleep" and ag- "lead", so the word should be formed hypn-agog-ic. There is no place for a linking vowel -o-. The spelling 'hypnagogic' is much preferable.
Ooh, this looks like it means Mother of the Quarter River (Mauritanian or Moroccan form of something like wadi umm ar-rub`). I won't stick by "quarter"—possibly a group of four, who knows.
It strikes me this is morphologically unusual: man attached directly to the verb. I can't think of any other examples: *slayman, *killman, *stealman, *rideman, *driveman, *preachman, *prayman.
Latinization of Greek Aiaia. The Latin genitive Aeaeae is sometimes claimed as an English word: q.v. for disparagement of claim. In German this island could be rendered Ääa.
This is the most faithful transliteration of the word: that is, the spelling that most clearly shows the Hebrew spelling. However, the final H is silent in the Hebrew, so 'Qabbala' is a more faithful transcription. However, the q sound of Ancient Hebrew has become k in Ashkenazic Hebrew, so that makes 'Kabbala' a contender; and the mediaeval Latin was Cabbala.
A rare example of a past participle that has become a noun. It has a plural insureds and genitive case forms insured's, insureds', and it can be modified by ordinary adjectives ('additional insureds', 'the individual insureds'). These properties distinguish it from an adjective functioning as head of a noun phrase, such as 'the unemployed'.
In the modern noun sense "obtaining or issuing of permits", I pronounce this word /ˈpɜːmɪtɪŋ/, as I think it's coined directly off the noun 'permit'. I even incline to think it should be spelt 'permiting' accordingly—but now that I do so, I'm afraid to suggest it.
The recent revision of the OED does not recognize the distinction, and just gives the verbal pronunciation /pəˈmɪtɪŋ/.
He, being a perfect gentleman, offers me a restorative snifter of his bubbly, brought as it has been all the way from his own cellars, he don't trust Sir's incinerated tastes, and I can feel it put hairs on my chest as it goes eructating down.
Puzzled me for a moment: then of course it's mobile {car valeter}, a car valeter who comes round in a van and valets your car rather than waiting for you in the car park. And how is a valeter different from a valet? I suppose it's a company that supplies valets.
Both 'onomatopoeic' and 'onomatopoetic' exist in English and are well formed, from different Greek abstract nouns. The root poi- "make" could take either the suffix -í�? (which appears in English as -y or -ia) or the suffix -ēsis. The words onomatopoií�? and onomatopoíēsis are attested respectively from Hellenistic and Byzantine times. The corresponding adjective endings are -ic and -etic.
Now it gets confusing. It seems in -poeia, -poeic the -e- is part of the root poi-, regularly rendered in Latin as poe-. But in -poesis, -poetic the Greek uses an alternative stem of just po-, and here the -e- is part of the suffixes -esis, -etic. Okay, now even I'm confused. *squints and memorizes*
This spelling is an error for 'xanthochroid', which can be analysed as coming from either ochr- "pale" or chro- "skin". Huxley, the coiner of the original noun 'Xanthochroi', apparently intended the former (according to the OED).
One of those words with a complicated unfolding of senses. The origin is Latin *sequit-, past participle of seq- "follow", and the earliest meanings in English (late 1200s) are three senses of a "following":
(i) attendance on a lord at court, i.e. following one's lord there;
(ii) a lord's following, i.e. his company or retinue;
Then came the sense of "pursuit", hunting or seeking, and in the early 1400s this developed the sense of pursuing someone at law, a lawsuit. This then widened to any supplication or petition (early to mid 1400s). In the late 1500s it took on the particular sense of "courtship, wooing".
Now I'm guessing it was the "livery" sense that around 1400 was extended to any set of matching things: first clothing; then playing-cards (early 1500s); and numerous obsolete uses. 'Suit of armour' is modern, no earlier than Sir Walter Scott.
The variant form 'suite' took on various "set" meanings: rooms (early 1700s), music (mid 1700s), furniture (early 1800s), bathroom fittings (early 1900s).
In BrE this has the peculiar grammatical property that as an adverb it can't occur on its own: it has to be premodified by another adverb. So we can say that it will very/quite/more likely happen tomorrow, but not that *it will likely happen tomorrow. The latter is of course normal in AmE. As an adjective there's no such restriction: it is likely to happen, and it is very/quite/more likely to happen.
Whereas 'probably' behaves quite normally: it will probably happen.
Simply put Kevin thinks that the hoops a typical out-of-the-box user has to jump through to install additional applications other than what is included by the OEM might be a big differentiator when it comes to sorting out which NetBook(s) might become popular with users.
The Macy quote is a good find, and indeed there are some Google hits for 'rumouring' and 'rumoring' in a verbal sense. Virtually no generalizations about language are absolute, and exceptions can always be found. However, it's probably still true that most of us don't use 'rumo(u)ring' as a verb. You have to wade through pages of Google hits to find genuine uses. (And CGEL documents Standard English, not all dialectal or idiolectal variations.)
There's another common use, the noun, as in rumouring on the Internet. This doesn't count.
Cosntructions with expletive object 'it' and a prepositional phrase with 'abroad', 'about' are normally conscious or subconscious echoes of Shakespeare. However, if someone said they would rumour it about that something happened, without knowing the Shakespeare quote, then that too would be a genuine instance of a living form of the verb.
It is looking more and more as though the biosphere is an interconnected network of continuously circulated genes – a "pangenome", to use the term recently coined by microbiologist Victor Tetz of St Petersburg State Pavlov Medical University in Russia.
Researchers started exploring the size and diversity of the viral world, or "virosphere", by taking samples from different environments and counting the viruses.
The 'Desert Islands Discs' programme began in 1942. Here's a list of the top requests over the years, of which the topmost is the finale of the Choral Symphony.
An interesting point. The OED notes that Latin had no verb *perplectere, only the adjective perplex-us, which looks like it's the past participle of such a verb, but might instead have come from per- "thoroughly" + the past participle plex-us of plect-ere "plait, interweave, entangle".
The English adjective was originally 'perplex', with the other words (verb and 'perplexed') derived from it.
So where does the final -s come from, qroqqa? Some English noun or verb inflection that's been fused onto it? ← READER'S VOICE
No, it's an almost original part of it. It came with the word from French into English: forms such as sumunse, somonse suggest a Late Latin *summonsa, a past participle of summonĕre, earlier summonēre (sub "under", mon- "warn"). I didn't know that.
A phonological oddity. This is the only base form I can think of that ends in /dz/, and there are no native bases ending in /ts/ (only Johnny-come-latelys like 'kibbutz'), yet it's an impeccably Anglo-Saxon native word.
The very last trace of an infinitive verb in English. The expression 'to wit' is no longer analysable in Present-Day English, but the 'wit' part was once the infinitive of a verb meaning "know" whose gerund-participle survives in the adjectives 'witting' and 'unwitting', and whose first and third person singular present 'wot' survives in the archaic exclamations 'I wot not' and 'God wot'.
The reason present tense 'wot' lacks an -s in the third person is that it is, if you go far enough back up the Indo-European family tree, a perfect tense. The present tense meant see (cf. Latin video) and the perfect "I have seen" was used for the meaning "I know".
The verb 'times' is so common that I suspect it's now the normal word for the thing amongst—what shall we call non-mathematicians?—Loggles. "Multiply it by" only outnumbers "times it by" by 4 to 1 on Google. The inflected forms 'timesing' and 'timesed' are very rare there, but possibly that reflects the contexts it's actually used in: people say, 'Times it by 2' or 'You need to times it by 2', but don't much describe doing it in the past or repeatedly.
I should mention this is listed in the CGEL (along with several others) with this peculiarity of having only one verb form. What I just discovered was a convincing reason it couldn't be an adjective (if you allow these constructions without 'to be', and I agree they don't sound perfectly natural).
The creation of a new, stable dialect (the koine) by a mixing of dialects and simplification of conflicting features.
Middle English might have arisen from Old English partly by koineization with Old Norse in the Danelaw, which in early times of contact was probably close enough to mix. (Though the 1200s Old Norse you normally study wouldn't be.)
Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness—not to add a grand convenience—in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr Podsnap's satisfaction.
. . .
These may be said to have been the articles of a faith and school which the present chapter takes the liberty of calling, after its representative man, Podsnappery.
The ultimate root is something like "vapour" or possibly "breath", giving the sense "self" in Sanskrit: compare the related Greek atmós "vapour", German Atem "breath".
The genitive marker on (most) noun phrases. The only word in English that is an obligatory clitic: that is, it must be phonetically attached to the preceding word and cannot be pronounced on its own.
The usual pronunciation of the English place is /ˈgrenɪtʃ/. The BBC Pronunciation Guide (from memory) gives that second after /ˈgrɪnɪdʒ/, their principle being to give the local pronunciation first, so presumably that's what the locals say more. Dickens puts the same pronunciation in the mouth of a somewhat rough character in The Old Curiosity Shop: 'But I should say that if he turns up anywhere, he'll come ashore somewhere about Grinidge to-morrow, at ebb tide, eh, mate?'
A highly unusual verb in Present-day English: it has only this one verb form. Although it was historically a full verb with all its parts ('Come hither Catesby, rumor it abroad, That Anne my Wife is very grieuous sicke.'—Richard III, IV.ii), for most of us today it can only be a past participle.
This raises the question of why it should be counted a verb at all, rather than an adjective: compare 'she was rumoured to be dead', 'she was keen/eager/reluctant to be dead': adjectives can take infinitival clause complements.
Well last night I found the answer, when I read this sentence opening Dorothy Parker's 'Mrs. Hoftstadter on Josephine Street':
That summer, the Colonel and I leased a bungalow named 947 West Catalpa Boulevard, rumored completely furnished: three forks, but twenty-four nutpicks.
'Completely furnished' is an adjective phrase (AdjP), and adjectives can't take AdjP complements, but verbs can: compare *'eager/easy/pleasant completely furnished' with 'considered completely furnished'. And indeed, on checking Google this morning, I find quite a few "was rumoured dead"—not the way I'd say it myself (I'd much prefer to add 'to be'), but common enough to prove it's verbal in Standard English. So, another discovery.
Coined by Plato, by the look of it: Gignetai de ek tou autou tropou misologia te kai misanthropia. "Misology and misanthropy are born in the same way." (Phaedo 89d)
First used in German by Kant (1781), in English by Coleridge (1830s).
Ugh! I don't want to go back to SAMPA /"weIsk@Ut/, but the limited HTML here offers no control over fonts. I see the IPA characters in a completely different font: Lucida Sans Unicode, I believe, an ugly one I try to avoid when I have CSS or HTML control over it. So, as with IPA generally, it's just blind luck if any one viewer's browser supports it.
Certainly in standard British speech, the spelling pronunciation /ˈweɪsˌkəʊt/ outnumbers the older /ˈweskət/, if that was ever standard. (The OED, with W not recently revised, calls the latter 'colloq. or vulgar', and though it notes the spelling 'weskit', gives no examples.) However, I can't back up this preferred pronunciation with numbers.
Denning and her colleagues have proposed that IMD implantable medical device users wear a "cloaker" device that tells the IMD to ignore any unexpected instructions. When doctors need to talk to the device, they can simply remove the cloaker.
—New Scientist, 20 August 2008
The cloaca is where you go if crackers get into the IMD first.
But he never would, never. Scared of muzzing his shirt or busting his collar or something, even if, when stoned, he would clap his hands to the rhythm.
Further clues might come now that scientists have grown the first single crystals of rare-earth iron arsenides, which are much purer than the polycrystalline materials synthesised so far.
As the temperature continued to drop, something interesting happened around 134 K. Instead of all pointing in one direction, the electron spins on neighbouring atoms lined up in opposite directions – a phenomenon called antiferromagnetism.
At a July conference on in-vitro recording technology in Reutlingen, in Germany, teams from around the world presented projects on culturing brain material and plugging it into simulations and robots, or "animats" as they are known.
The beetles' infrared-detecting organs are mounted just behind the "hips" of their second pair of legs. Each one contains about 70 spherical sensors called sensillas. Inside the hard outer case of each sensilla is a chamber holding water. This expands when exposed to infrared radiation, exerting pressure on a nerve receptor at the base of the chamber.
What we need is a historical reverse dictionary of meanings. 'Doll' was only used in the modern sense from about 1700 (and was cant at first); 'poppet' was used in this sense from about the fifteenth century; so what did English children play with before?
So called from being the real, authentic game of tennis, played for hundreds of years, as opposed to the newly-invented sphairistike or lawn tennis.
The term 'real tennis' is first known in an 1880 letter of George Eliot; the variant 'royal tennis' is attested from 1902, originally an Australian term, either the origin or a result of a folk etymology.
I'd suggest excluding sneakers, since it's not a plurale tantum: you can throw or lose one shoe, boot, sneaker, pump, plimsoll, glove etc., where the pairs are physically separable.
Rats, I have to withdraw this. There seems to be no good evidence the name Undecember was used at the time: Cicero calls them simply mensis intercalaris prior and mensis intercalaris posterior.
However, I do think it's better formed than Undecimber, for the phonological reasons I gave.
(1) I'm not aware of any evidence that Greek /a/ and /aː/ differed in anything but quality—they were more like the vowels of 'cut' and 'cart' (in my accent).
(2) The use of the vowel /eɪ/ (the FACE vowel) in Modern English is irrelevant: this comes from the Great Vowel Shift of about the 1400s, when long /aː/ changed to long /eː/ (and subsequently diphthongized).
(3) Classical Greek had a pitch accent, and our�?nós had a high tone on the final syllable. In Modern Greek (which is irrelevant to English) this has become a stress accent, but generally on the same syllable.
This of course is just the Latinization of 'murder', and was used in the Middle Ages specifically for the fine incurred by a community where a murder had taken place: the word 'murder' meant a homicide by an unknown perpetrator. As the guilty individual was unknown, their manor or hundred must bear the penalty.
A surprising etymology for the second half. Abstract noun (-y) derivative of French malade "ill; sick person", earlier malabde < *malabido < Classical male habitum "having it badly".
There was a perfectly good name Undecember already: it actually occurred in 46 BCE (just after November, before Duodecember, and two months before December). The terminal difference between decem "ten" and undecim "eleven" is presumably because of the difference in distances away from the stress: so in Undecember, with stress on -cem-, this change of /e/ to /i/ would not apply.
And I don't think the existence of a thirteenth month implies that there can be more than thirteen: how many returns of the moon can you fit in one year? Okay, 46 BCE was an exception and had fifteen months.
An autantonym, for those of you who collect 'em. This contains the element -al- "blind", so properly means "blindness by day"; but this element was neglected and it was treated as "seeing by day", synonymous with 'nyctalopia' "blindness by night". Except that the -al- was sometimes ignored in that too, so 'nyctalopia' was also used for "seeing by night".
Oh, 'bdellotomy' is better. That's not in the OED yet, but 'bdellatomy' is irregular: in Greek compounds you always use the stem (bdell-) and the connective vowel -o- between consonants.
The Greek for "sky, heaven" was our�?nós with a long /aː/. This would give Latin Ūr�?nus with stress on the -r�?-, and thus the usual English pronunciation /jʊˈreɪnəs/ or /jəˈreɪnəs/. However, Latin actually used a short /a/, for reasons I can't venture at, so the Latin Ūrănus with initial stress is the origin of the alternative English pronunciation /ˈjʊərənəs/.
I had not leisure to see our friend Masclet, who is prefect there; I could only run along the rampart and begaze the site of Lord Nelson's misemployment.
—William Taylor, 1802, letter to Thomas Martin, collected in Robberd's Memoir of Taylor's life and writings (1843)
Meseemes she doth begaze with meltynge stare
Her weddynge-bedde, hynceforthe anodhers share.
—William Taylor's 1801 play Wortigerne, supposed to be by Rowley, the 15th-century poet invented by Thomas Chatterton
Not an absolutely blemishless Latin origin though. The Latin word was lītus, lītor- "shore" and developed a variant writing littus for no good reason. The opposite happened with littera "letter", which had a ne'er-do-well variant lītera. In both cases the non-standard Latin words have prevailed, giving rise to English 'littoral' but 'literal', and likewise in other modern languages.
On the beach here there is a singular variety of curious stones. I picked up one very like a small cucumber. By the by, Dr. Johnson told me, that Gay's line in the "Beggar's Opera," "As men should serve a cucumber," &c. has no waggish meaning, with reference to men flinging away cucumbers as too cooling, which some have thought; for it has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.
—Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 5 October 1773, on the island of Coll
The Chinese currency: unusual in that (like 'sterling') it names the currency itself but not (strictly) the principal unit, which is the yuan (colloquially kuai).
(A sentence with three sets of brackets in it must need repair, but that sounds like hard work.)
Blimey, I noticed it had quite a few hits, but it's even got into some printed books—even ones about Ancient Greece! Have that proof-reader sacked now.
Shurely shome mishtake?—Ed. The Thalassocracy (thalassa, thalatta "sea") was the hegemony over the Aegean Sea exercised by various peoples (Lydians, Pelasgians, Thracians, Rhodians etc.) between the fall of Troy and the foundation of the Athenian league.
More precisely: phan- is "show, reveal" in Greek. To it was attached an agent ending -tês (as in the ancestors of 'athlete', 'Cypriot'), so phantês "revealer". Add to this hier- "sacred" and the connecting vowel -o- between consonants, and we get hierophantês "revealer of the sacred", first declension masculine.
In Latin the corresponding ending is -a (as in nauta, agricola), so it got borrowed into Latin as hierophanta. Here normal phonetic processes accumulate to lose the final -a and change the other sounds to their modern English values.
The Greek verb meaning "show" is listed in dictionaries under a citation form—either present indicative phainô "I show" or infinitive phainein "show". This latter consists of the root phan-, a verb class formative (I think) -j-, and the infinitive ending -ein. In early Greek phanj- changed to phain-. So the phant- doesn't come from this; what they share is rather the basic root phan-. It may seem pedantic to write all this out, but I increasingly think the alternative is misleading: to suggest that -phant somehow comes phonetically from phainein.
'Artefact' is considerably more common in BrE, 'artifact' in AmE. 'Artefact' is the earlier (and seems to have been invented by Coleridge!), and has -e- because it derives from a phrase, arte factum "made by art".
The -i- is by assimilation to the much more common (and much older) type seen in 'artifice', 'artificial', which are from actual compounds (not phrases) in Latin, where the linking vowel was always -i-.
Quite right: I had first thought 'English law' would be specific enough, but changed my mind and came back to add 'England and Wales' to my first posting. 'English law', while it is unlikely to mean "English-language law", is still rather vague about jurisdictions.
Iphigenia, for instance, is a form of an ancient anthropoctonous goddess, identified with Artemis.
—Gilbert Murray, 1911, The Rise of the Greek Epic
This is virtually the only instance of the word in English. Adapted from Greek anthrôpo-kton-os "person-killing" (related by ablaut to the verb ktein- "kill").
Surprisingly, the obvious derivation from capo is unsupported. The etymology of capa, cappa is very uncertain, but as far as I can make out, cappa is the earlier form. Even if capa was earlier, it has a long vowel, whereas Late Latin capo "head" had a short vowel: so the derivation is unlikely. Evidence for the long vowel comes from Old English—it gave rise to Modern English 'cope' "ecclesiastical cape", with the Middle English change of long /a/ to long /o/—and Norse kápa.
Written in fifty languages. Used by James Lindsay in the title of his Pentecontaglossal Paternoster. Note that the prefix pente- is correct: the Greek has the form πεντη- in the combination for "fifty". (So also in Pentecost.)
The root is Latin capa, cappa "cap; cloak", with various branchings of meaning and additional suffixes: one augmentative prefix gives Italian cappuccio thence French capuche. The -on of capuchon is a second augmentative; the -in- I suspect might be an Italian diminutive (or an adjective formative). The meanings of these words diverge to "person who wears", "monkey which looks like said person", "coffee which somewhat looks like him too".
I would imagine most German ranks have a certain, ah, crispness to them. The slouching Stabsgefreiter, the innocuous Unterfeldwebel, the genial Generalmajor . . . no, the images just aren't coming through.
Alternative term for the probabilistic form of reasoning called abductive: from the observation that Superman can fly it is reasonable (though uncertain) to infer that Superman is a bird or a plane, since that's the most likely explanation.
Term coined by C.S. Peirce, who thought it was close to if not exactly what Aristotle had in mind by apagoge.
Term used in the CGEL for the functional position at the front of a noun phrase (often called specifier by others). It can be filled by either determinatives (as they call them, members of the word class containing a, the, one, two, each, no, all etc.) or by genitive noun phrases (my, your, Mary's, the Prince of Denmark's, the bloke I was talking to's, etc.).
Term used in the CGEL for the word class containing a, the, one, two, each, no, all etc., by other authors often called determiners. The CGEL uses 'determiner' to mean the functional position at the front of a noun phrase (often called specifier by others).
In fact this is the only attestation of this word. In the 1884 printing of her letters it was rendered as 'midgetty' (also not a known word); the reading 'nidgetty' is from the 1995 edition.
This is the etymological spelling and was usual in BrE until the mid 20th century. The analogical spelling 'connection' arose in the early 18th century and was preferred by Webster. It is now very much a minority spelling.
This always looks to me like it should have something to do with bulls, but I can't work out what the aet- would mean. Now I don't want to unduly cramp Mr Chabon's creativity, but it does seem ill formed: he's taken the phrase aetas aurea "Golden Age" and put aetas into its stem form aetat-. However, this more naturally yields a meaning "age-golden", headed by the second element in Latin as in English. For the intended meaning, a straightforward Latin-based word would be 'auraeval/aureval' (with standard variants as for 'primaeval', 'mediaeval').
This word is usually associated with Winston Churchill's defection back to the Conservative Party in 1925, and his famous comment . . . I can't find an authoritative written source for it, but the most favoured form across the Web is 'Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.'
However, the OED has an even earlier use: Mary Frampton (1773-1846) writes about Talleyrand in her journal (published 1885): if he has 'refused to re-rat'.
The pronunciation with /f/ has no clear explanation, but both modern pronunciations are represented in the earliest uses in English: late 14th-century spellings include lutenand, luf-tenand, lieutenant, lutenaunt, leeftenaunt (with lutenant, levetenaunt as variants of the last in other copies of the manuscript).
When valuing land that stands a chance of gaining future planning permission because of its location we have to include "hope value". The "hope value" is what a purchaser is prepared to pay over and above the agricultural value because he or she believes that the land may have a chance of being developed at some time in the future.
This was Rathskeller in German until the 1901 spelling reform, which removed the silent H in words such as Rath and Thal. It happens that English borrowed the word just before that.
The OED marks sense 1 as obsolete, however; the latest quote they have for it is from the heavily archaized Harold (1848, set around 1066) by the wretched Bulwer-Lytton:
"You will not find him there," said Godrith, "for I know that as soon as he hath finished his conference with the Atheling, he will leave the city; and I shall be at his own favourite manse over the water at sunset, to take orders for repairing the forts and dykes on the Marches. You can tarry awhile and meet us; you know his old lodge in the forest land?"
It's not often that I can't spell a word I should know, so here's a memorandum. 'Peripeteia' is from pet- "fall" (as in 'apoptosis' and 'diptote', both with the zero grade), and mnemonically it's what befalls characters in a narrative. It has no relation to what was confusing me, 'peripatetic' from pat- "walk, tread".
This also means "leading figure" in a positive and potent sense in UK usage. Over half the ghits for "a * figurehead" are filled with positive terms such as 'key', 'strong', 'major', 'prominent', 'lynchpin'. Worldwide, however, the older usage strongly predominates, and figureheads are 'ceremonial', 'constitutional', 'toothless', 'compliant', 'token'. This is a remarkable turnaround in meaning: no on-line dictionary yet lists it, that I can find.
Now antedated to 1828 in the Middlebury newspaper the Vermont American:
Before the adoption of any project among the fraternity, a nod of assent was required from the rods of the whole, which was usually not wanting, provided that of the leader, (or Mugwump, as he was technically called,) appeared favorable.
My husband's eyeballs pogoed out of their sockets and boinged! into her bra cups, where they gambolled around in the throes of ecstasy before boomeranging back socketwards.
When these were done, she took some needle-work from her basket, and sat herself down upon a stool beside the lattice, where the honeysuckle and woodbine entwined their tender stems, and stealing into the room filled it with their delicious breath.
—The Old Curiosity Shop ch. 25
The problem with both these passages is that normally woodbine ishoneysuckle. Various emendations for the Shakespeare have been suggested. Woodbine could be a dialectal name for bindweed, or an error for its synonym 'weedbind' (less odorous so more unfortunate for Dickens). It could be 'woodrind', the bark of the tree (but that's not in the OED). Or the honeysuckle is the flowers of the woodbine.
More ingenious is if the woodbine and honeysuckle are in apposition, naming the same plant. Then the verb 'entwist' needs an object. Or perhaps it's used intransitively (though OED has no instances of this grammar). The object could be the elm, with 'the female ivy so enrings' bracketed off as a parenthesis. Most ingenious of all is if it originally said that the woodbine, the honeysuckle gently entwists the maple; the P being omitted by accident, male was changed to female: the ivy was considered female because it always required support. (This is William Warburton's suggestion.)
The word is from Portuguese palavra "word, speech" (thus cognate with 'parley', 'parable', 'parole', 'parliament' etc.) and probably comes into English via some African pidgin, as early uses all refer to discussions or disputes with or among Africans. Thence it passed in a fairly wide range of different senses relating to speech, dispute, or persuasion.
They look like policemen and they have the legend “traffic officer�? emblazoned in the back window. But their main job is to clear up the mess after an accident. Which means, technically, they are Wombles.
A 'ringer' is a stolen car that has had its identification numbers replaced by a set from another - usually written-off - car, which effectively changes the car's identity.
—Guardian, 14/12/2005
The OED has related senses of 'ringer'—"false numberplates" (1962) and "thief who fits false numberplates" (1970)—but not this sense referring to the car itself.
So also 'car-ringing', the practice of creating ringers.
'The practice of looking steadfastly at the navel, followed by the Hesychasts, in expectation of an outward exhibition of the light supposed to dwell within the soul of man.'—OED
The Feast of the Cacophany commemorates the occasion when Brian of Nazareth was shown to the Magi, until they realized their mistake and went elsewhere.
'You've been helped once to meat,' said Miss Brass, summing up the facts; 'you have had as much as you can eat, you're asked if you want any more, and you answer, "no!" Then don't you ever go and say you were allowanced, mind that.'
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 36
Verb possibly coined by Dickens: the earliest OED citations are here twice and Nicholas Nickleby.
Having, as it were, taken formal possession of his clerkship in virtue of these proceedings, he opened the window and leaned negligently out of it until a beer-boy happened to pass, whom he commanded to set down his tray and to serve him with a pint of mild porter, which he drank upon the spot and promptly paid for, with the view of breaking ground for a system of future credit and opening a correspondence tending thereto, without loss of time.
(iii) We have two discs with arrows going round the same way: sewing a cylinder back is the same as sewing on a Klein bottle (Figure 127), which is equivalent to sewing on two Möbius strips (compare Figure 83). So we can convert the third kind of desurgery into two of the second kind.
—Ian Stewart, 1975, Concepts of Modern Mathematics
'Champ' is the older word, with 'chomp' an originally dialectal variant that has become common latterly. In 'champ/chomp at the bit', both seem about equally common (going by Google, even in UK usage). While 'chomp at the bit' is known from 1937, 'champ at the bit' has been found back to 1885; however, the earliest sources of both are all U.S., so it doesn't look as if a BrE 'champ' has been supplanted by AmE 'chomp' in this idiom.
The sense "work, esp. hard work" is first recorded as dialectal: 1853 New Zealand, 1890 Gloucestershire, 1890 Melbourne, 1891 Sheffield. It's hard to tell how to Google this, but I'd imagine it's almost invariably in the locution 'hard graft' these days.
The sense "bribery, corruption" might be derived from this; it is first attested in 1865 and for a long time was U.S. and slang.
Yard House employee-owners are invested in the future
This is why when we are invested in the outcome, we get so anxious . . .
Hume offered no evidence that any Democrats are "invested in our losing" or "rooting for us to lose" in Iraq.
College men and women are invested in the social and are largely opposed to academic and professorial culture . . .
—Examples from Google of a meaning new to me, and not in the OED. Another dictionary, however, defines it as 'devote morally or psychologically, as to a purpose; commit', giving as example: 'Men of our generation are invested in what they do, women in what we are.'
No, Italian is not Latin, though admittedly it would save a lot of etymological shoe leather if we called them all Eurasian. The Italianization in question is the supposition that all foreign languages are more or less the same up to some pesky isomorphism, so pronouncing them like Italian/French is good enough.
The adjective 'bittersweet' is commonly quoted as a dvandva compound. The noun 'bittersweet' (woody nightshade, Solanum dulcamara) is an example of a dvandva bahuvrihi.
Well, to me 'Finnish' automatically means Finnish-language, and Ovda isn't, but your source is correct enough in calling it Finnish if it's from the Saami of northern Finland. That's not the problem: it's a much greater sloppiness that seems to have crept into astronomical naming. They're no experts on mythology or language, so once someone tells the IAU something plausible it can get stuck as apparent fact.
Not a Finnish name. There are enough web hits in a Finnish mythology context that aren't just this Godchecker text repeated, to suggest it is genuine; in which case it is probably Lappish (Saami). There is a feature on Venus named after a 'titaness', but it's not a Greek titaness, obviously (not a Greek name), and the word 'Marijian' has percolated in as if that's a kind of mythology—but the word means nothing to me, and the Marijian/Ovda/titaness/mythology connexion only occurs in explanation of this venerian feature. Someone's been sold a pup, is my guess.
The prepared script continued by stating that if the information was passed on by the salesman, the recipient would be bound to keep it confidential and would not be permitted to trade in securities of the entity concerned norengage in any other trading-related conduct in respect to those securities based on the confidential information. Those restrictions were to continue until the information was in the public domain. The sharing of information in this way is routine, the recipient is termed as having been “wall crossed�? i.e. brought across to the “confidential�? side of an information wall designed to prevent improper use of confidential price sensitive (“inside�?) information.
—'Hedge Fund Journal', Dec. 2006
On 11 February 2003 Mr Jabre was 'wall crossed' by Goldman Sachs International as part of the pre-marketing of a new issue of convertible preference shares in Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc (SMFG).
—FSA press release, 1 August 2006
I'm entering this word under the past participle, but both uses above seem to require an originating verb 'wall-cross', since they use it in a verbal rather than an adjectival way.
I wonder if the negative implication this word has for some is in part due to misunderstanding it as containing the negative mis-. It doesn't: it's misc- "mix" plus gen- "birth, generation".
'If you had seen him drink and smoke, as I did, you couldn`t have kept anything from him. He's a Salamander you know, that's what he is.'
. . .
Having revolved these things in his mind and arrived at this conclusion, he communicated to Mr Swiveller as much of his meditations as he thought proper (Dick would have been perfectly satisfied with less), and giving him the day to recover himself from his late salamandering, accompanied him at evening to Mr Quilp's house.
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 23
Two nearby quotes, the first being Dick Swiveller's explanation of the smoking and drinking habits of Mr Quilp, in which he had been compelled to join; the second is pleasing for the gerundial noun 'salamandering'.
Well, adjectives don't decline in English. Some of them inflect for grade. What would be more useful, however, is teaching some linguistics as applied to English, and using the more general word 'paradigm' rather than making an unnecessary distinction between declension and conjugation.
Not a genuine word. Given in Bailey's dictionary (1721-61), and egroting "feigned illness" in other 18th-century lists, but no actual uses are known to the OED.
From Latin aegrot- "be ill" from aeger "ill". Universities may allow an aegrotat "sick note".
Looks like a fake word to me. There are only a couple of uses of it on the Web, and the rest of the mentions are just lists of silly words. The most reliable-looking source, Grambs's 1984 Literary Companion Dictionary, doesn't give any source or etymology.
There's no Ancient Greek word corresponding to it. If the prefix was kat-, kata- "down", I don't know what the -ro- would come from. However, after a moment's thought I believe the form here is an error for 'catharolysis', which would make sense, coming from kathar- "pure, clean". A purification, a purgation, catharsis.
If this word existed, the rest of us would pronounce it /kætəˈrɒlɪsɪs/ or in pseudo-notation kat a ROL ih sis. (Or, better, with /θ/ th.)
A singular noun phrase used without a determiner (such as a, the), to indicate the role or position someone gets: it functions as the predicative complement of a transitive verb such as choose, appoint, name.
CGEL term for the ing- form of an English verb. It covers what were traditionally known as the gerund (at least in its verbal uses) and the present participle. As a verb, it can take an object but can't take a definite article:
Damp rotten houses, many to let, many yet building, many half-built and mouldering away—
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 15
This illustrates the old passive sense of the gerund-participle. Around 1800 a new construction came into use, and instead of saying the house was building, people now said it was being built. During the nineteenth century some prescriptivists deprecated this; but for some reason it prevailed without qualm, and there are no longer any superstitions about it.
Earlier still the construction was 'The house is a building', with 'a' a reduced form of the preposition 'on': we would now write this as 'a-building', if only to distance it from the other reading ('a' a determinative and 'building' a noun).
A traditional category discarded by the CGEL, which divides them amongst a few coordinators (and, or, nor, but), a few subordinators (that, if, to, for), and for the most part prepositions (after, before, when, because, despite etc.).
There were the seats where the poor old people sat, worn spare, and yellow like themselves; the rugged font where children had their names, the homely altar where they knelt in after life, the plain black tressels that bore their weight on their last visit to the cool old shady church.
If she procured a cargo of 100 quardeelen of oil, she was entitled to no additional bounty; but for every quardeel* she fell short, an additional bounty of 50 f. was due.
* The quardeel of oil contains 12 steeken Dutch, or 60. 27 gallons English.
Ooh. The definition is actually for 'condition'. It looks like 'orphanage' was marked as a hyponym of 'condition' in the database, but a pointer got relinked (*waves hands*) or something.
As an adjective meaning "spoken" it is marked as obsolete (1659) by the OED (1989 ed.), but it is still common in 'said Eucharist', so this presumably must be a (late?) twentieth-century innovation. (Google Books has one hit for it from 1920 in this sense; all others are recent.)
This is now a preposition in constructions such as 'come Thursday', 'come Easter'; in origin a subjunctive use. To be distinguished from the fossilized subjunctive in 'come hell or high water', which is still a clause; 'come Thursday' no longer is.
From the Latin pastinaca "parsnip", which contains the -ac- suffix used to form some plant names; and this is why the derived adjective is pastinaceous rather than **pastinacaceous. Only attested in English in a 1657 translation of a Latin medicinal text.
The Latin was borrowed widely into European languages in various forms, including Polish pasternak: I can't explain where the intrusive /r/ comes from here. The author Boris's grandfather Osip is said to be the first who bore this surname (when surnames were imposed on Jews in Russia).
The English -r- in the spelling is apparently an accretion on older forms such as pasnep, in awareness that many words formerly pronounced with /rs/ had dialectally lost the /r/ (e.g. 'hoss', 'passel', 'cuss', 'ass' "bottom"). The ending is an assimilation to 'neep' (also as in 'turnip').
The standard spelling in the UK legal context ('the court handed down a judgment'). In normal use 'judgement' is more common, though not hugely so. This is also true of Australia. In US and South African usage, 'judgment' is considerably though not overwhelmingly more common. Surprisingly, perhaps, the style guides of both the Guardian and The Times recommend 'judgment'. Perhaps they consider it's not worth maintaining a distinction between a court judgment and a person's judgement.
The official spelling in UK usage, used by the Patent Office and predominantly in legislation. As you get less formal (looking at all government websites, then all UK sites) it increasingly loses ground to the world-preferred 'trademark'.
If, dubiously, 'that that' is grammatical as the beginning of a fused-head noun phrase (i.e. if we can say 'That that I said is true' to mean "That which I said is true" = "What I said is true") then we can construct a sentence with four consecutive uses of 'that':
It is evident that that that that nasty man said is true.
In truth, however, the sequence is illusory anyway, since the first and third uses are the subordinator 'that', while the second and fourth are the determinative, which is for all practical purposes a different word.
The maximum sequence achievable using only uses is three: John had eaten more fairy cakes than Mary had had, had anyone stopped to count. It is possible (with a bit of grammatical legerdemain) that this could be exceeded in a sentence using the token 'that' (q.v.).
From an Old English hwinsian, which is the base of 'whine' with an -s- suffix (also seen in 'cleanse' and 'bless'). The change to -g- /dʒ/ is a Scottish and Northern development in Middle English.
Going by the OED quotations, it remained a Scottish, Irish, and Northern variant into the twentieth century, and was taken back into Southern English via the familiar Australian use.
Kundera 1, Draper 0. Greek nostos "return, homeward journey", related to nosteô "go home, come home", and ne-, nei- "go, come" (with regular omission of medial /s/). First used in English (1756) as a translation of German Heimweh; the English 'homesickness' was also first used in this translation.
Odd that the usual (?) English pronunciations /ləˈsuː/ or /læˈsuː/ are not more commonly reflected in the spelling: 'lassoo' exists (though not yet in OED 1989 edition) but is quite rare.
I wonder why this is pronounced and spelt the way it is? The Haitian, Spanish, and original English was canoa, then English developed various spellings such as cano, canow, canoo. The last of these got established as the pronunciation (too late for the Great Vowel Shift to have caused it); while the anomalous spelling canoe (not from Dutch, which has cano) prevailed. Another such puzzle is lasso.
BrE speakers strongly prefer stress on the initial syllable (either /'deb-/ or /'deɪb-/) to final /-'briː/ (83% in a 2007 survey for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary).
'Attrit' (back-formation from 'attrition') is a recent variant, apparently US military, of the older verb 'attrite' "rub; wear down", which is known from 1726 (1917 in military context).
The OED gives the two pronunciations /məˈkɑːbrə/ and /məˈkɑːb/ in that order for BrE, and the AmE equivalents in the same order. This seems to me to miss the natural third possibility, /məˈkɑːbə/, but I assume they've done some sort of quantitative research and found that few people pronounce it that way. I doubt that many people 'mispronounce' it.
The common name of a common purple border plant. The genus name is Aubrieta, named after one Claude Aubriet, but the tendency to pronounce the ending as /-'iːʃə/ is so strong that the Royal Horticultural Society long ago accepted 'aubrietia' as the common name, corresponding to this pronunciation. A frequent alternative spelling is 'aubretia'.
'Mickle' and 'muckle' are dialectal variants of the same word; it is related to Latin magn-, Greek megal-, Sanskrit mah-. Its palatalized form is seen in Tolkien's Michel Delving in the Shire; and a variant of this gave rise to Middle English 'much'.
The confusion of the proverb—treating 'mickle' and 'muckle' as opposites instead of synonyms—is first recorded in the papers of one George Washington, who calls it 'a Scotch addage'.
The attraction by a relative pronoun of other words syntactically related to it to the front of a relative clause: for example 'for whom', 'pictures of whom', 'to avoid which'. Contrast with stranding, which leaves the related words in place.
Indicating an unreal situation. English has one verb-form for marking irrealis mood: the first-person and third-person singular 'were', part of the verb 'be'. This is used with verb-subject inversion in conditional clauses ('Were I younger, I would go') and optionally in non-inverted hypothetical conditionals ('If I were/was younger, I would go') and some others (sometimes after 'as if'). Traditionally called the past subjunctive, and indeed historically derived from that.
In English grammar, the uninflected verb-form used in a number of clause types: imperative ('Go away'), subjunctive ('We recommend she go away'), and infinitival ('We should go away', 'We want her to go away'). There are some grounds for distinguishing it from the finite, non-third-singular present form ('We go away tomorrow'), even though they are formally identical in all verbs except 'be'. (And there are some grounds for treating them as the same.) English verbs do not have imperative, subjunctive, or infinitive forms: they have a single plain form used in clauses of those types.
The term is also used in Japanese grammar for the ordinary non-polite form.
The OED added this spelling only in 1997 (with first citation from 1988), yet on Google it's almost equally common as 'linchpin' on UK sites. (Worldwide it's lagging at under 3:1.) However, Google Books shows examples in the early nineteenth century, e.g. lynch pin in Catherine Hutton, Oakwood Hall, 1819.
This is not a variant spelling—that is, not one you could use if you chose to and be correct. The last non-standard spelling the OED records is this one, in 1612: 'By these two blessings (to wit) the sunne & raine meaning al other earthly benefits whatsoever, by the figure synechdoche.' If you write 'al', or 'sunne', or 'raine', by all means write 'synechdoche', but don't expect to get it by living proof-readers.
There's another instance of this from 1551; while in a 1548 source we find 'They imagyne a Sinecdoch to be in thys worde' and 'The subtyll cauillacyons, whereby they fayne Sinecdochine'. That was how they spelt then; it isn't now.
This word 'ultimately' and the infinitive ending on gelaein hide rather than illuminate the etymology. The root is gel- "laugh", with thematic ending -a- (this puts it into a subclass of verbs and shows up in many derivatives). Then gel-a-st- is an adjectival stem, showing up in gelast-os, -ê, -on "laughable" and the noun gelastês (feminine gelastria) "laugher, sneerer". With the negative prefix it is the adjective agelast-os, -ê, -on "unlaughing". It is this that Rabelais borrowed, dropping the ending as usual to fit it into French.
the act of making something soft or supple: only used in seventeenth-century translations of Bacon, rendering his Latin malacissatio, from Greek μαλακ- "soft". The -iss- is apparently a variant of the Greek -iz- suffix.
broom, the plant; the Italian word for it (somehow derived from Latin genista), first attested in English in 1899: 'The glorious ginestra, or mountain broom'.
having three consonants: usually referring to those triples that indicate the semantic root of most Semitic words, e.g. Arabic k-t-b "write", q-r-' "read", d-r-s "study", sh-r-b "drink".
a phonologically reduced form of a noun used in Semitic languages for the first element in a noun-noun construction: typically the possessed in a possessed-possessor relationship
A preposition used on its own, i.e. without a following complement. Examples are the italicized words in 'I walked away', 'I dropped out', 'I looked in for a minute', 'I looked up the phone number', 'I looked it up'. Some prepositions are only used intransitively, e.g. 'ashore', 'downstairs', 'here'. Formerly or traditionally classed as adverbs.
Actually the analogy with intransitive verbs means we should say a preposition is intransitive when it lacks an object (a noun phrase that typically refers to a distinct entity). A preposition with an object is, for example, in the kitchen. Prepositions without objects can have various kinds of complement:
Rohirric was related to Westron (the Common Speech), but with a more archaic feel to it. Tolkien translated it using actual Old English (holbytla, théoden, eorl etc.) to indicate this relatedness.
Dwarvish was if anything Semitic in inspiration: the alternation between Khazâd "Dwarves", Khuzdul "Dwarvish", and a possible construct state in Khazad-dûm "Moria" looks a lot like Semitic triconsonantal roots.
The name comes from the North Queensland language Guugu Yimidhirr, in which it refers to a particular species of kangaroo. Guugu Yimidhirr was the first Australian language to be recorded at all: Captain Cook took notes in 1770. He wrote: 'The animals which I have before mentioned, called by the Natives Kangooroo or Kanguru'; and Banks wrote: 'The largest quadruped was called by the natives kangooroo'.
It is not of course pronounced exactly like the modern English word; in particular the medial -ng- had no /g/ sound, being as in 'singer', not as in 'finger, kangaroo'. This is part of the evidence that the borrowing was from Guugu Yimidhirr into English, not vice versa. Borrowing does seem to have happened into other languages, because writers in the next few years make a bewilderingly contradictory set of statements. Some of them say the word was unknown to the natives (this is believable: as Portuguese words would be unknown in Norway or Poland), while others say the very same word was used by the natives in impossible places like Tasmania. (There is no known relationship between Tasmanian and mainland languages, for one thing.)
It is dubious whether this has any connexion with the popular belief that 'kangaroo' meant "I don't know" and was given in answer to a question about the animal. Why that word? In early years explorers didn't realize how many different languages there were in Australia, but they would have been instantly stumped by virtually any North Queensland word they tried to use in the Sydney area. It's not just kangaroos that would have had entirely different names.
So named from being the upper (sur "over") part of the loin.
The fiction that it comes from being knighted dates from at least 1655: Thomas Fuller in his Church-history of Britain adds the parenthesis '(so knighted, saith tradition, by this King Henry)' (sc. Henry VIII). It is, however, just a fiction. Swift ascribed the accolade to James I, but presumably not seriously, as it was in his satirical manual Polite Conversation.
Echidna is the Greek for "adder, viper". An echidna looks like a hedgehog, not like an adder. Consult a middling-sized Classical Greek dictionary and look up echidna, and run your finger down one further. You will find echinos "hedgehog".
Now for the cover-up. They (the Zoologists' Cabal) then renamed the echidna genera Tachyglossus and Zaglossus, from tachy- "fast", gloss- "tongue", and za- "my, what a"; thus doing the nomenclatural equivalent of looking round with shifty eyes then pointing at its tongue, saying, "Nah, nah, see, when it sticks its tongue out like that to lick up ants, it looks amazingly like an adder sticking its, er, tongue out to, er, smell the air. It does."
I once wrote to Stephen Jay Gould about this, and even broke out into green biro at the crucial point. But did I get any acknowledgement for my pioneering work? Not a sausage.
The singular of Lares is Lar; that of Penates seems to have been virtually never used, as each household had more than one, but as far as I can tell it was Penas.
Actually the book says 'sense', but it does indeed say 'inerrarable'. However, you're right that it must be an error: there's no Latin word close enough to derive it from. The only hit for it in Google Books is this passage.
It's a fair stretch to see it as a typo/blunder for 'inenarrable', but I think you're again right—I can't imagine what else it could be. (Ineffable? Ineradicable?) By the way, there's no variant 'inernarrable': that's a scanning error in modern Web copies of Webster 1913. (See its alphabetical order and etymology here.)
denoting a result: as in the adjectives in 'Mary painted the room blue', 'John hammered the metal flat'. As opposed to depictive ('John wandered the streets naked').
Of a word: derivationally based on a compound or word complex, such as 'red-bearded' = "having a red beard", or 'train-driver" = "one who drives trains". The derivational suffix (-ed, -er) is not attached to a word as such: there are no words *red-beard, *train-drive.
In grammar, a word empty of meaning. These include unintegrated fillers such as 'like', 'I mean', 'sort of', as well as nouns such as the dummy subject pronouns 'it' and 'there'. Swear words can be considered expletive if they're uttered out of habit with no intensifying meaning: from this has arisen the practice (outside grammar) of calling all swear words expletives.
One of the two kinds of relationship of a predicative complement to its predicand after the verb 'be'. An ascriptive use ascribes a property to the predicand: for example, 'Mary is tall', 'Bill is a linguist'. The other kind of use is the specifying use.
One of the two kinds of relationship of a predicative complement (PC) to its predicand (the subject) after the verb 'be'. A specifying use specifies what the predicand is identical with, and the PC can normally be swapped with the subject: for example, 'Mary is my tutor', 'My tutor is Mary'. The other kind of use is the ascriptive.
Etymology and succession of senses unclear. Probably related to 'fake' and (some senses of) obsolete 'feak'. The ultimate origin may be German fegen "sweep, clean up", which has slang senses like "plunder; fix, tamper with", as did English 'fake'.
The source for the ginger-inserting sense is Grose's 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. It looks to me like it's an instance of "fix" (make the horse appear livelier than it actually is).
The word is in use long before this in senses more like "do for, fix the little red wagon of". The variant 'fake' is first known from Vaux's 1812 dictionary of flash language; from these, the modern sense of "forge, counterfeit" arose.
This expression is often used as if by grasping it firmly you won't suffer the sting you would if you'd lightly brushed it. My father, however, trusting in this, once tried it as a kid. He says he still wakes up at night smarting from it. So I shan't be trying it.
So have they hamstrung the valour of the Subject by seeking to effeminate us all at home.
—Milton, 1641, Reform.
The earliest known use of the verb, and it neatly illustrates the anomalous past tense and past participle. One would expect 'hamstringed', since it's formed from the noun, and doesn't contain the strong verb 'string'. (Actually that verb doesn't go back to Old English, and is itself a creation of only a century or so before Milton.)
Hunh, a funny term for it, since there's no affix in any of 'a', 'an', 'apple', or (the rare dialectal) 'napple'. I would call it reanalysis. (Or misanalysis or misdivision if you're in judgemental mood; Jespersen called it metanalysis.) Examples of modern English words formed by reanalysis are 'adder', 'apron', 'newt', 'nickname', 'orange', and 'umpire' (but not 'apple'); and at the other end 'cherry' and 'pea'.
An urban myth about etymology. The most common kind is probably the fanciful derivation of a word from initials—Port Over Starboard Home is the most famous, with variations on Fornication and/or Carnal Knowledge a popular second. It also applies to the fanciful story that a king knighted sirloin, the imagined connexion between Beltane and a Near Eastern god Baal, and probably to the attempt to derive Elephant and Castle from a supposed Infanta of Castile. The term was coined by the linguist Larry Horn.
To be distinguished from folk etymology, or is perhaps a kind of folk etymology. Most folk etymologies turn incomprehensible elements into familiar words, e.g. sparrowgrass from asparagus, bridegroom from bridegome, possibly gooseberry from some other (now uncertain) first element.
In this case the folk etymology is itself probably a folk etymology. The Elephant and Castle district once housed a smithy belonging to the Cutlers' Company; cutlers used ivory for their knife handles; to indicate this the smithy used a sign of an elephant, which in heraldry is depicted with a castle on its back (an alteration of the howdah); a pub later appeared on the spot and used the elephant and castle sign too; and from this the district was named. There was never an Infanta of Castile in British history, and that story about one is presumably a fanciful invention like those about Port Over Starboard Home or Sir Loin—what the linguist Larry Horn has called etymythology.
A group of caliciviruses causing human gastroenteritis. Also seen incorrectly as 'novovirus', but actually named for the town of Norwalk in Ohio, where an outbreak occurred.
A characterization of KMS thermal equilibrium states, at inverse Hawking temperature beta, for the Killing evolution associated with a class of stationary quantum black holes in terms of a boundedness property, namely the localized state vectors should have energy density levels decreasing beta-exponentially. In particular, for a Haag-Kastler net on the Minkowski spacetime, the boundedness property for the boosts (in the Rindler wedge) is shown to be equivalent to the Bisognano-Wichmann property. In general, the boundedness condition is equivalent to a holomorphic property closely related to the one recently considered by Ruelle and D'Antoni-Zsido and shared by a natural class of non-equilibrium steady states.
And lovely though that all sounds, I know when I'm out of my depth.
I was surprised to learn on the weekend that 'mould' "fungal coating" is not related to the 'mould' meaning "earth, soil" but normally encountered in combinations like 'mouldboard' "part of a plough", 'mouldwarp' "mole (animal)", 'grave-mould' "earth of the grave", and 'moulder' "rot, crumble".
As this 'mould' is unfamiliar on its own, 'grave-mould' has sometimes been reinterpreted as containing the other one: indeed, Joyce seems to do so in Ulysses:
Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould.
(The 'mould' meaning "matrix, model, form" is again unrelated. And 'mole' the animal is not related to its alternative name 'mouldwarp'.)
n. (Archaeology)tell, mound. The word appears to be both Turkish and Kurdish; probably a borrowing from Turkish, where it means 'hill, top, crown, crest, vertex'. In Kurdish it is 'summit, mountain top' according to a Kurmanji Kurdish reference grammar. (The very large number of web hits translating the famous Tepe Gawra site as 'great mound' appear to be taking in each other's washing.)
The grammar of this verb has mushroomed in recent years. The OED (1989 edition) only has it in simple intransitive uses, similar to 'chat': 'We would schmoose all afternoon'; 'Brooklynites sit and schmooze'.
'You have erred, perhaps,' he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs, and lighting with it the long cherrywood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood . . .
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 'The Copper Beeches'
Serendipity. I'm going to start seeing it everywhere now.
My father never held a tennis racket or a golf club, and he couldn't kick a football or catch a swift pitch, but he bowled whenever he got a chance – tenpins, duckpins, candlepins, cocked hat, and quintet, a difficult game, the rules for which I was told he had helped to make up.
—James Thurber, 1952, 'Gentleman from Indiana', in The Thurber Album
My father never held a tennis racket or a golf club, and he couldn't kick a football or catch a swift pitch, but he bowled whenever he got a chance – tenpins, duckpins, candlepins, cocked hat, and quintet, a difficult game, the rules for which I was told he had helped to make up.
—James Thurber, 1952, 'Gentleman from Indiana', in The Thurber Album
'Fraught' overlaps with 'full' in that you can use them in the same narrow context: 'fraught with danger', 'full of danger'. But you can't use it as if it meant just "full"—as in 'full of beans', 'full up to the top', 'full from eating', 'inflate till it's full', etc. etc.
In fact the original sense "laden, full" scarcely seems to have survived till 1700. Here are the latest applicable prose quotations the OED has for various uses. (Poetic uses of course lingered longer.)
1666: Smaller Vessels that lay fraught for the Streights.
1668: The ships are said to be richly fraughted.
1671: And Waggons fraught with Utensils of War.
1755: Liberty, fraught with blessings as it is, when unabused, has, perhaps, been abused to our destruction.
1786: The little princess had excited her curiosity by the full-fraught pincushion.
1798: From these retreats, he often returned fraughted with light.
1803: He returned to Oxford full fraught with Greek.
The original sense was last used literally in 1668—the absurd claim that it still means this is three hundred and forty years out of date!
I'm pretty certain it doesn't and can't mean "full", which seems to be a completely obsolete sense. The OED doesn't give any post-1800 prose citations for that sense. From then on, it's always 'fraught with danger', 'fraught with difficulty', etc.— the modern senses when used with 'with' (i.e. with a prepositional phrasecomplement). Checking Google and the British National Corpus confirms this.
Used absolutely (i.e. without a PP complement), it seems to always have the ordinary modern sense "tense, difficult, distressing". This is a recent sense—the unrevised OED (2nd. ed.) only has quotations back to 1966—but it's clearly a very common and standard meaning. BNC quotations include:
The whole fraught episode must signify something.
And then the fraught silence would modulate into conciliatory monosyllable, and back to their peaceful co-existence.
Out of this fraught legal and financial tangle the bureau worker must work with the client to create order and stability.
Obviously as you get a little bit closer to it it gets rather more fraught.
From the French for 'galley' "kind of ship", in allusion to a line from Molière's Les fourberies de Scapin: Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère? "What the devil was he doing on that galley?", i.e. How on earth did he come to be in with that bunch of people?
One of several organisms whose common name is a genus name, but not the genus they're in: usually due to the vicissitudes of reclassification or priority. So geraniums are now in genus Pelargonium, whereas genus Geranium contains the cranesbills.
Other examples include the cineraria, the platypus (Platypus are beetles), and the lotus (in family Nelumbonaceae, very far away from Lotus amongst the legumes Fabaceae). Formerly also chrysanthemums fell here, but with some type species legerdemain the genus Chrysanthemum now once more contains garden chrysanthemums, rather than tansy as it once did.
I recall from visits made to water-treatment plants in my student days that the passage of water through a filter leads to the build-up of a zoogloea – a translucent jelly-like layer of organic matter.
The "drug" being tested is an anti-microRNA, or antagomir, designed to inhibit the action of miR-122, a microRNA found almost exclusively in the liver.
The term microRNA, often shorted to miRNA, was coined in 2001 to describe these tiny regulatory RNAs, and soon dozens of teams – and companies – worldwide were studying them. MicroRNAs have turned out to be the biological equivalent of dark matter, says Ruvkun.
Capasso envisages frictionless ball bearings for micromachines on a chip, or the creation of a nanocompass to give mobile devices a sense of direction.
Capasso believes its influence is the reason that MEMS have not been miniaturised as quickly as computer chips – which have no moving parts – and it may block the development of even smaller nanoelectromechanical systems.
Stiction is a growing problem for engineers working with ever tinier devices because it gums up the works of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) – which are increasingly used to make things like airbag sensors – and also affects computer hard drives and other devices with small moving parts.
Lezec is by no means alone in falling foul of what nanotechnologists call "stiction" – the collective term (derived from "static friction") for a variety of physical forces that operate at the sub-micrometre scale.
Comments by qroqqa
Show previous 200 comments...
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
qroqqa commented on the word pricked-eared
Great puffed and pearled sleeves rose to the pricked-eared pointings of the stiff lace about the head, conical and braided.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word groined
The deep accumulation of dress fell about her in groined shadows, the train, rambling through a vista of primitive trees, was carpet-thick.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word thumber
taster of rare wines, thumber of rarer books and old wives' tales
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word boggish
Once the doctor had his audience—and he got his audience by the simple device of pronouncing at the top of his voice (at such moments as irritable and possessive as a maddened woman's) some of the more boggish and biting of the shorter early Saxon verbs—nothing could stop him.
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
The doctor is Irish, by the way.
November 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word gimp-legged
If you are a gymnosophist you can do without clothes, and if you are gimp-legged you will know more wind between the knees than another . . .
—Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
November 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word arris
Most of the 5000 or so known species of harvestmen or [daddy-long-legs, of order Opiliones] live in tropical South America and South-east Asia, but they also live in damp shaded areas in all climates, including the sub-arctic, and can sometimes be found in droves beneath the arris rails of fences around temperate suburban gardens.
—Colin Tudge, The Variety of Life, p.317
November 17, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word quaintsy-waintsy
Then there appear two—not one, but two—Christopher Robins, each about eleven years of age, both forced, poor kids, to go quaintsy-waintsy in doings about knights and squires and beauteous maidens.
—Dorothy Parker, review of Give Me Yesterday by her arch-nemesis A.A. Milne, in The New Yorker, 14 Mar. 1931
November 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word a-dream
His hero is caused, by a novel device, to fall asleep and a-dream; and thus he is given yesterday.
—Dorothy Parker, review of Give Me Yesterday by her arch-nemesis A.A. Milne, in The New Yorker, 14 Mar. 1931
November 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word prevision
I was not wrong, heaven help me, in my prevision of the Milne work.
—Dorothy Parker, review of Give Me Yesterday by her arch-nemesis A.A. Milne, in The New Yorker, 14 Mar. 1931
An insignificant sentence, perhaps, but I don't know that I've ever actually seen the word 'prevision' used before.
November 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word rouser
But I could not, myself, seek solace in the notion that here was just a good old ten-twenty-thirty rouser.
—Dorothy Parker, review of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, in The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 1931
I have no idea what either of these words mean, and I'm refraining listing 'ten-twenty-thirty' as a newly-discovered word on the questionable grounds that it's not a word, but a syntactic combination linked by hyphens. Either way, I still don't know what any of it means.
November 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word theatricalism
The play is so simply written that there is never a suggestion of the theater about it; even such a tired trick as the singing of an off-stage army marching off to war somehow loses all theatricalism and becomes grippingly real, so naturally and quietly is it brought in.
—Dorothy Parker, review of John Drinkwater's play Abraham Lincoln, in Vanity Fair, Feb. 1920
November 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lowness
Owing to the local Russian custom of calling each person sometimes by all of his names, sometimes by only his first three or four, and sometimes by a nickname which has nothing to do with any of the other names, it is difficult for one with my congenital lowness of brow to gather exactly whom they are talking about.
—Dorothy Parker, review of Tolstoy's Redemption, in Vanity Fair, Dec. 1918
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sabbatical
Beatrice Beckley has the thankless job of playing Lady Chiltern, one of those frightfully virtuous women of Wilde's who can't utter the simplest observation without dragging in such Sabbatical expressions as "we needs must."
—Dorothy Parker, review of An Ideal Husband, in Vanity Fair, Nov. 1918
This is probably the first time I've seen 'Sabbatical' used in anything close to the original sense of pertaining to the Sabbath.
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word teagown
What kind of life is that, sitting around in a teagown, counting her pearls?
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word piggish
To have commandeered the bathroom for the time required for lolling and anointing would have been considered, in their mildest phrase, piggish.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cup-custard
Idabel Christie likes the fudge cup-custard, but I can't resist the prune spin.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word spin
But oh, those yummy sticky rolls, served in little baskets, and that prune spin with maraschino cherries in it!
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
'Prune spin' seems to be unknown apart from this Parker reference.
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word fresh
"Pour some fresh in Miss Nicholl's glass."
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
Not sure what the grammar here is. Is 'fresh' being used as a noun, meaning "fresh drink", or is it a predicative complement (analogous to the adjectives in 'drink some neat', 'drink the milk cold')?
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word swag
She saw signs, and chilled as she saw them, of certain swags under her chin, if not yet reality, then certainly warning.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
Note also unusual intransitive use of 'chill'.
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cinch
Her belt was cinched so tight that, looking at it, you could hardly draw your own breath, the stiff waves of her hair were netted to her skull, her skirt snapped sharply at her legs.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
By the way, I have great admiration for Parker's frequent, skilful use of asyndeton.
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word fashionable
The dog, Bonne Bouche—she had been christened before Mrs. Hazelton bought her—wore on her head, in the manner of the fashionables among her tribe, a bow of satin ribbon holding back her silvery bangs.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
I've never seen this word used as a noun before.
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word carol
It was high in her when she arrived at Mrs. Hazelton's and caroled to the maid who opened the door, "Well, Dellie, it's been a long time since we've seen each other, hasn't it?"
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word dastard
Exact words were never spoken, but Miss Christie had come to live in the belief that Miss Nicholl and Mrs. Hazelton had grown up together, would in fact have made a joint debut had it not been for the death of Miss Nicholl's father, too innocent a soul to mistrust the dastard who managed his financial affairs; so Miss Nicholl had had to go to work and, naturally, her path had split wide from Mrs. Hazelton's.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word a-twist
Miss Christie was employed in a combined lending library and gift shop, all a-twist with potted philodendron; in her life there was none such as Mrs. Hazelton.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word boresome
With the years, Miss Nicholl grew no less flat in the purse and no more delightful to the eye, and it is a boresome business to go on and on feeling tenderness for one whose luck never changes.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Bolt behind the Blue'
November 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word et cetera
Well, as 'aut cetera' is neither English nor Latin for the idea conveyed by the English 'et cetera' and the Latin 'et cetera', the claim 'ought' is unjustifiable. You ought to write good English or good Latin.
'Et cetera' attaches (and 'et cetera' attached) to a list: it conveys that the list is incomplete, and that there are to be understood the remaining items, the rest of that kind, other things of like kind, etc. There are further items on the list. That is an "and", not an "or", regardless of the purpose you intend to put the list to: giving someone a choice from it, for example.
November 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word slinto
The most popular theory, however, is that it mysteriously sank fifty leagues off the Azores, leaving the Slina and the Slanta Maria languages to carry on.
November 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word timbral
"Pertaining to musical timbre", heard just now on the wireless twice in quick succession, pronounced (by a USAan) three syllables 'tæːmbərəl, from the de-nasalized 'timbre' 'tæːmbər.
November 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word brilliantined
'Do you seriously imagine a girl like that
could be interested in an ageing, brilliantined stick insect like you?'
—Sybil to Basil, Fawlty Towers
November 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word wikisalting
You've got to give the PFY marks for Wikisalting. Not only has he inserted entries into Wikipedia, he's fabricated websites, complete with photos of IT types pointing at graphs (one of these quite patently the barman of the local pub in a suit jacket with some pens stuck in the top pocket).
—BOFH, 7 November 2008
A nonce-use occurring only in that BOFH episode (and in 15 minutes or so here). A clear* and useful word.
* assuming you know what salting a gold mine is
November 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word type iii error
I think Dawkins defined this as the error of not being able to remember which was a type I error and which type II.
November 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word interstrate
All Web uses of this word seem to refer to the same thing, and which is what I just learnt it as: a paper layer between two other layers used to form a transistor. An interior equivalent of a substrate.
November 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word rhinotillexomania
I wouldn't normally bother to add obviously made-up words like this, but I was curious about the etymology and it otherwise fulfilled my criteria. It turns out that tillex- doesn't mean anything, and it comes from till- "pluck, pull (out) (hair, feathers etc.)" with a spurious ex- "out" stuck on.
November 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word heighth
Heighth is the regular formation, and was used by Milton and Burke for example, but was progressively eased out by -t forms from the Middle English period, and seems to have been effectively dead in standard English by 1800.
November 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word nature crunch
Also known as the planet crunch.
November 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word president-elect
First Dog Designate?
November 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word president-elect
Air Force One Elect would be the aeroplane that the current president has chosen to board but has not yet boarded.
November 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word doomstool
Lovely, archaic and practically non-existent word for "seat of justice", but cognate with the normal Scandinavian word for "court (of justice)", for example the Swedish Supreme Court, Högsta domstolen "the highest doom-stool".
November 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word different
Adjectives that are comparative in form can take a special kind of clause complement, the comparative clause:
This crossword is easier than it used to be.
This bicycle is faster than it used to be.
'Different' is semantically parallel, though not formally comparative, so it is natural by analogy to use it with comparative clauses:
?This situation is different than it used to be.
I use that, though I'm more likely to phrase it with 'to'/'from' and a noun phrase (namely a fused relative, a clause attached to a wh-word):
This situation is different to/from what it used to be.
Analogy doesn't always work, because while both 'to' and 'from' are acceptable with the adjective, the verb only takes 'from'.
*This one differs to that.
This is all modulo dialect differences: 'different than ' is not grammatical in my (standard BrE) and similar dialects. And apparently some speakers don't have 'different to', according to pterodactyl.
November 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word holler
Oh, I didn't know 'tiger' was traditional. I have learnt something.
November 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hushing
adj. In phonetics: of a sound like the ʃ in 'hushing', as opposed to the sharper s of 'hissing': the postalveolar and alveolopalatal consonants.
October 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word shibilant
Semi-serious term for a sibilant with more diffuse friction; more commonly called a hushing sound. Examples are the postalveolars such as ʃ and ʒ—the sounds of 'ship' and 'fusion' rather than sharper 'sip' and 'fusing'.
October 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word simip
After a landmark ruling in the Israeli Trade Mark Protection Court, the Simian Intelligence Project and the Simple Internet Protocol team reluctantly agreed to pool their resources. The first result is a 3-year-old bonobo trained to post spam to websites requiring a logon. Both teams admitted they had noticed an 'impressive increase in orders' since the collaboration began.
October 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word of counsel
An adjective (?) of unusual form. It relates to a position some lawyers hold in a law firm. Uses include:
Rumpole is now of counsel.
Rumpole became of counsel last year.
Of counsel Rumpole is highly rated for litigation.
Rumpole holds of counsel status.
Rumpole joined in an of counsel role.
October 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word oche
Equally surprising is its pronunciation: ˈɒki, like 'hockey' without the h.
October 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mareva injunction
Under Lord Woolf's 1999 reforms a Mareva injunction was renamed a freezing injunction or freezing order.
October 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word anton piller order
Under Lord Woolf's 1999 reforms an Anton Piller order was renamed a search order.
October 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word word
As a verb it has a highly unusual property: an adjunct of manner is obligatory (which therefore makes it a complement of manner). You can't just word a letter: you have to word it, for example, carefully or with care.
October 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word intumescence
Total and sudden transformations of a language seldom happen; conquests and migrations are now very rare: but there are other causes of change, which, though slow in their operation, and invisible in their progress, are perhaps as much superiour to human resistance, as the revolutions of the sky, or intumescence of the tide.
—Johnson, preface to his Dictionary
October 25, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word enchain
With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.
—Johnson, preface to his Dictionary
Chiquitita, tell me what's wrong
You're enchained by your own sorrow
—ABBA
October 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cotemporary
My purpose was to admit no testimony of living authours, that I might not be misled by partiality, and that none of my cotemporaries might have reason to complain; nor have I departed from this resolution, but when some performance of uncommon excellence excited my veneration, when my memory supplied me, from late books, with an example that was wanting, or when my heart, in the tenderness of friendship, solicited admission for a favourite name.
—Johnson, preface to his Dictionary
Sic but obsolete: word now replaced by 'contemporary'.
October 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word detruncation
The examples, thus mutilated, are no longer to be considered as conveying the sentiments or doctrine of their authours; the word for the sake of which they are inserted, with all its appendant clauses, has been carefully preserved; but it may sometimes happen, by hasty detruncation, that the general tendency of the sentence may be changed: the divine may desert his tenets, or the philosopher his system.
—Johnson, preface to his Dictionary
October 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word appendant
The examples, thus mutilated, are no longer to be considered as conveying the sentiments or doctrine of their authours; the word for the sake of which they are inserted, with all its appendant clauses, has been carefully preserved; but it may sometimes happen, by hasty detruncation, that the general tendency of the sentence may be changed: the divine may desert his tenets, or the philosopher his system.
—Johnson, preface to his Dictionary
October 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word proceleusmatic
The ancient proceleusmatick song, by which the rowers of gallies were animated, may be supposed to have been of this kind.
—Johnson, Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, 'Raasay'
October 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word kowaii
It should be easy enough to tell: if the ii is a mere lengthening for effect, the negative of kowai would be kowakunai with a possible lengthening to kowakunaii for the same effect. If, however, kowaii is intrinsically an alternative form, it should have a negative kowaikunai in addition to kowakunai.
(Modulo my forgetting Japanese grammar, which is quite possible. In any case, there would be some grammatical effects if there was a word consisting of stem + suffix kowai-i.)
October 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word i-kiribati
I-Kiribati: adj. relating to the country of Kiribati.
October 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word i-kiritbati
Error, Will Robinson! Spurious letter! This should be I-Kiribati.
October 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word basotho
Plural of Mosotho, an inhabitant of Lesotho.
October 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mosotho
The plural is Basotho.
October 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word motswana
The plural is Batswana.
October 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word batswana
Plural of Motswana, an inhabitant of Botswana.
October 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word candlewick
For a while we stood there in wordless confrontation, both of us with an expression of disbelief, myself beside my luggage and she in a pink dressing gown that was made of a material found only in the bedrooms of the English lower classes and is unaccountably called candlewick.
—W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants
October 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word oshac
Where now mere traces remained of the five overthrown cities of Gomorrah, Ruma, Sodom, Seadeh and Seboah, the oleanders once grew thirty feet high beside rivers that never ran dry, and there were acacia forests and oshac trees as in Florida.
—W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1983, Eng. tr. 1996), in a diary entry feigned to be written by a traveller to Palestine in 1913.
No current usage in English, and not in OED, but a number of nineteenth-century books give oshac as the Persian name of gum ammoniac.
October 22, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word extendible
A new spelling to me. I would have thought you either use Latinate 'extensible' or anglicize it to 'extendable'; but no, the hybrid 'extendible' has many centuries of existence and the numbers behind it.
October 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word busywork
I rather think it is just busywork, and they would be better employed washing coffee mugs in the Senior Writers' Lounge here at Language Log Plaza.
—Geoff Pullum
October 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word body search
When I went through Los Angeles airport I was surprised at all the signs referring to LAX Security. Course this was in more carefree days, but still.
October 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word magicry
In amid Google results there are a small number of bona-fide uses of this as a normal word, typically in computer contexts:
(1) Do the above mentioned places have wireless internet magicry?
(2) This man makes picture magicry
(3) so you only need to display the button image, no need to link it to something, no need for roll over magicry
(4) One reason I've always disliked the Ateksoft solution is that it requires installation of Ateksoft magicry on the PC.
(5) after some database magicry from Andy
Also one interesting, comparable use in a non-computer context:
(6) The technical aspect is fairly easy because it is a maneuver where you stay in the straps and you do not perform any fancy sail magicry
And surprisingly, a much earlier use in the literal sense of "magic" (not in the OED) in some truly execrable poetry by Lucy Maud Montgomery:
There is never a wind to sing o'er the sea
On its dimpled bosom that holdeth in fee
Wealth of silver and magicry;
and the harbor is like to an ebon cup
With mother-o'-pearl to the lips lined up,
And brimmed with the wine of entranced delight,
Purple and rare, from the flagon of night.
October 17, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word femafication
I also wonder how much the Femafication of government under President Bush contributed to Mr. Paulson’s fumble. All across the executive branch, knowledgeable professionals have been driven out; there may not have been anyone left at Treasury with the stature and background to tell Mr. Paulson that he wasn’t making sense.
—Paul Krugman, The New York Times, 12 October 2008
Nonce-use created in this article. A reference to the U.S. government agency FEMA, widely criticized for its response to the flooding of New Orleans.
October 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word clarionet
n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments that are worse than a clarionet—two clarionets.
—Ambrose Bierce
October 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word googlewhack
martingalle clluestick: is a googlewhack if you correctly spell each with only one L (and use + to insist on one word). It shows up on sionnach's Words, coincidentally, as indeed does 'googlewhack'. In fact I was genuinely googling for the combination, having read about CPDOs, a kind of martingalle of financial 'securities' (what quaint terminology they have), which would naturally cause a rational person to reach for the No. 3 Clluestick.
September 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word vega
A made-up Greek letter representing the partial derivative of the value with respect to volatility in the Black-Scholes equations. The second derivative is denoted by another invented letter, volga, and the derivative with respect to both volatility and price is vanna.
September 17, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word infinitive
Contrary to the grey definition above, 'the uninflected form of the verb', I know of no language that has an uninflected infinitive. Most European languages, including Turkish and Finnish but excluding English and Modern Greek, have an infinitive, but in none of them is it in any way the most basic form of the verb. By tradition it is often used as the citation form of the verb: the name for the set of all inflected forms; so we speak of the verb lachen or savoir or graphein in shorthand for potentially huge numbers of forms.
In English the citation form is either simply the plain form, which is uninflected, or by a curious historical accident a word sequence that is not in any way part of the verb, nor even a constituent of sentences in which it occurs: namely the infinitival subordinator 'to' followed by the plain form of the verb. This word sequence has traditionally been called the infinitive, too. It isn't; it isn't anything, any more than 'the black' is anything in 'the black cat', or 'man with' is anything in 'the man with the golden gun'. Talk about splitting this non-constituent is therefore like talk about splitting 'the black', and claiming that 'the big, black cat' could be ungrammatical.
September 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word wraithful
For contrition is hollow and wraithful,
And regret is no part of my plan,
And I think (if my memory's faithful)
There was nothing more fun than a man!
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Little Old Lady in Lavender Silk'
Not in OED. A few bona-fide instances on the Web, including a 1982 New York Times review of Giselle:
Miss Tcherkassky was both delicate and wraithful, her every step and gesture carefully formed then flung into that night air like rising mist.
September 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lingère
Sometimes, even in front of Mrs. Lanier's dressmaker's or her furrier's or her lingère's or her milliner's, there would be be a file of thin girls and small, shabby men, who held placards in their cold hands and paced up and down and up and down with slow, measured steps.
—Dorothy Parker, 'The Custard Heart'
September 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word google
I've just heard the verb used intransitively: 'It googles', meaning it shows up on a Google search. There are a handful of ghits for "if it googles" in this sense. It seems an obvious and useful extension.
September 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word spherulite
Actually the OED conflates the genus and the common noun. What it says under 'spherulite' is:
2. Palæont. (With capital initial.) A genus of fossil molluscs.
In early use in L. form Sphærulītēs.
1834 GRIFFITH tr. Cuvier XII. 92 Sphærulites,..where the valves are roughened by irregularly raised plates. 1841 MILLER O.R. Sandst. viii. 153 The hippurites, sphærulites, and nummulites of the same formations, in Greece, Italy, and Spain. 1847 ANSTED Anc. World x. 241 One such genus is called Sphærulite... They seem most nearly allied to the inhabitants of those univalve shells of which the limpet is the present representative.
—OED
Presumably the 'early' form Sphaerulites had precedence so has been restored as the genus name over Sphaerulite, but the common noun for a member of it (as in their Miller quotation) is 'sphaerulite' or 'spherulite'.
September 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word undervalue
also n. 'An inadequate monetary value; an amount or price below the real value.' (OED) So in an 'undervalue transaction'.
September 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word nepotism
Ultimately from Latin nepotem "grandson, descendant" (nom. nepos), later also "nephew, niece", giving Italian nipote "nephew, niece". In Italian the practice was originally styled nipotismo as well as the current nepotismo.
September 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ramidus
From the Afar ramid "root".
September 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word accretive
Bank of America expects to achieve $7 thousand million in pretax expense savings, fully realized by 2012. The acquisition is expected to be accretive to earnings by 2010.
—Engulf & Devour feast on roasted bull (official announcement)
September 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word vires
n.pl. The powers available to a statutory corporation such as a local council, more or less: that is those things that are not ultra vires. This seems to be lawyers' talk with no more precise meaning, as far as I can tell; sometimes they speak of councils' powers, at other of their vires, sometimes both, as if 'powers and vires' covered a bit more ground.
September 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word impunitive
Adopting an attitude of resignation towards frustration; characterized by blaming neither oneself nor others unreasonably. Contrasted with INTROPUNITIVE a. and EXTRAPUNITIVE a.
—OED
The first use quoted is from 1938, apparently its coinage:
1938 S. ROSENZWEIG in H. A. Murray Explorations in Personality vi. 587 He may experience emotions of embarrassment and shame, making little of blame and emphasizing instead the conciliation of others and himself to the disagreeable situation. In this case he will be more interested in condoning than in condemning and will pass off the frustration as lightly as possible by making references, even at the price of self-deception, to unavoidable circumstances. This type of reaction may be termed ‘impunitive’.
September 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word behalf
Central industrial property offices of those Member States which have decided accordingly draw up simultaneously and on their own behalves, search reports relating to earlier national trade marks in their registers.
—OHIM website on Community trade marks
A rare instance of the plural. Examination of the 48 000 ghits for this shows that about half of them are genuine uses of it; but "on their behalves" has only a fraction of 1% of the frequency of "on their behalf".
September 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word heroic-sized
The maid appeared, bearing a triangular tray upon which was set an heroic-sized tea service of bright white china, each piece a hectagon.
—Dorothy Parker, 'Glory in the Daytime'
September 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hectagon
The maid appeared, bearing a triangular tray upon which was set an heroic-sized tea service of bright white china, each piece a hectagon.
—Dorothy Parker, 'Glory in the Daytime'
Presumably the intended meaning is a hexagon, influenced by 'hepta-' and 'hecto-'.
September 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word clink
A prison door doesn't go 'clink'. That's a small noise appropriate to wine glasses. Doors, especially big doors, might go 'clank'.
September 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word completely hatstand
Specifically, from the Viz character Roger Irrelevant, who said irrelevant things. The tag-line for the strip was therefore 'He's completely hatstand.'
September 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word tachograph
Thoughts and deeds on seeing it:
(i) Think it's a typo for tachygraph.
(ii) Web-search. Find it's the valid name for the thing.
(iii) Think it's malformed Greek and should be tachygraph; web-search 'tachygraph'; find that's a name for something entirely different.
(iv) Think it's appropriate and reasonable to make the alteration to the more familiar -o- in order to distinguish meanings.
(v) Look up in OED; be reminded that tákhos "speed" is just as good a Greek word as takhýs "speedy", and that 'tachograph' therefore is well-formed.
(vi) Enter on Wordie.
(vii) Wonder if there are single-word verbs for 'OED' and 'Wordie' corresponding to 'google'.
(viii) Get back to work.
September 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word offshore
In the financial sense the OED has examples going as far back as 1929, and they just mean "abroad, foreign". There's no sense that—as one might guess—it began with actual off-shore territories like Guernsey and was then extended to other tax havens.
September 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word bugs
Yes. I'm sick of sastrugi.
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word stow
also n. method of stowing, stowage, spec. of containers on a containership.
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word divesture
little-used synonym of 'divestiture'
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sufficient
I'd never seen the expression 'sufficient enough' before, and was surprised to find it seemed to have many Google hits. However, further research showed it was used well under 1% of the time, so I felt justified in editing it out as non-standard:
"sufficient enough to": 466 kGh
"sufficient to": 27,8 MGh
"enough to": 222 MGh
"sufficient enough for": 49,4 kGh
"sufficient for": 11,0 MGh
"enough for": 60,2 MGh
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word offshore
This preposition can be used transitively in the oil and gas context, e.g.
Exxon Mobil Corporation announced today that its subsidiary, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 15) Limited (Esso), has started production of the Xikomba deepwater development offshore Angola Block 15. Xikomba is the company's first production on Block 15 and represents the first of several anticipated operated production facilities offshore Angola.
—www.GulfOilandGas.com
Sounds a bit barbarous to me, but who am I to argue with a new argument structure? The OED has examples of this usage back to 1967.
(Oh, and now I've found a live example of 'onshore' likewise used: 'farm-out transactions onshore and offshore Romania'.)
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cinder
Surprising etymology. This seems an obvious borrowing, French cendre, Latin cinerem, but in fact is unrelated. It's native English and was originally 'sinder' (cognate with 'sinter' of similar meaning, from German). The original meaning was "slag, scoria". The change of spelling to c- under French/Latin influence also led to a slight shift in meaning.
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the user bodhi
The secret of duplicated comments is to edit one of them; this then brings up a delete option.
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word earn-in
(related terms: earn-out, farm-in, farm-out, sweat equity)
When a buyer agrees to do some work in advance of becoming part of the ownership, this work being what it pays for the ownership.
References: The Management of International Oil Operations, Smart Fast. A very difficult term to google, by the way. Almost all matches aren't.
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word artisanal
As defined by the Government of South Africa, “Artisanal mining means small-scale mining involving the extraction of minerals with the simplest of tools, on a subsistence level�?.—
/ɑːˈtɪzənl/
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word purl
Presently, he returned, followed by the boy from the public-house, who bore in one hand a plate of bread and beef, and in the other a great pot, filled with some very fragrant compound, which sent forth a grateful steam, and was indeed choice purl, made after a particular recipe which Mr Swiveller had imparted to the landlord, at a period when he was deep in his books and desirous to conciliate his friendship.
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 57
At that period, hot beer flavoured with gin, ginger, and sugar; earlier, beer with wormwood or other bitter herbs. Etym. dub.
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word synecology
This is the basic concept of ecology, and especially of synecology (the ecology of communities of species living together).
—New Scientist, 6 September 2008
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word stormy petrel
I thought there was a more standard linguistic term for these, but all I can come up with on a famous search engine is cranberry collocation, which is not what I was thinking of.
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word holomictic
Before 1979, the Dead Sea was meromictic, meaning it was permamently stratified into layers that didn't mix. Following the severe reduction of fresh water flowing into its upper reaches it became holomictic – essentially mixing to the same composition throughout its depth.
—New Scientist, 6 September 2008
September 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list mathematonymy
The song is extensively referenced, entirely straight-faced, s.v. 'plagiarism' in the Collins Dictionary of Mathematics.
September 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list consonant-storm
Looks like you need some contributions from Tashlhiyt, a Berber dialect of southern Morocco. Words include tsgllbt "you reversed", tfktstt "you gave it", sfqqst "irritate him", tssksft you made it dirty", kks "take off", ks "feed on", etc.
—examples from Rachid Ridouane, 'Syllabification in Tashlhiyt Berber, Phonetic and Phonological Arguments'
September 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list mathematonymy
It would if I had any idea what it meant. I looked through Wolfram and found a fair few I'd never heard of: no point listing those. (I've added a sentence to the list description to clarify this.)
September 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word o@0
'Garçon, I ordered them well-done.'
September 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word higgs boson
Peter higgs whose particle should be detected here at cern tells radio 4 '- will be very surprised if they don't find the higgs bosun. It will show that the theorists have not been talking nonsense over all these years.
—BBC Radio 4 blog live from CERN
I know it's only a blog, so the shift key is too time-consuming to use, but you'd think the reporters would have the key terms down pat. A Higgs bosun puts mass into the virtual sea of particles. And if he doesn't, he has to walk the Planck.
September 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word petabyte
A petabyte is 10^15 bytes. The binary approximation of 2^50 bytes has its own name since 1998, the pebibyte.
September 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word supercollider
Only one Wordie listing this? In less than ten hours we might be seeing superpartners, dark matter, extra dimensions, time travellers, mini black holes, strangelets, . . .
September 10, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word graocracy
And such, we are fully persuaded, will be the sentiments of every ancient dame in the British empire, who shall read the account we shall now give of the vaunted bonne Societé, under Mme de Genlis's admired and lamented graocracy.
—Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March 1830
And now that old women have been added to the legislature, so that our gerontocracy is reinforced by a graocracy of middle-aged and old women like Lady Rhondda, Lady Astor, Lady Frances Balfour, and Mrs. Bertrand Russell, the advent of increased restraints upon the young of both sexes is a certainty.
—Anthony Ludovici, 1927, Man: an Indictment
Greek graûs "old woman"
September 9, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sphalma
Apparently still in use in biological nomenclature, where a sphalma typographicum is a typographical error pertaining to the correct name of a species. (Sphalma is also a genus of beetle.)
Greek sphalma n. "trip, stumble; failure, error" from sphall- v. (< *sphalj-) "trip up; overthrow; balk".
September 9, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word marmalade
Since that 2000 comment the earliest find in English has been pushed back to 1480 (spelt marmelate), and which is incidentally earlier than the first known occurrence of the Portuguese marmelada it must come from. This is from marmelo "quince", from one or another Latin word that's ultimately a compound of Greek mêlon "apple" and méli "honey".
September 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hypnogogic
Could I just stick my etymological oar in here (wearing my etymologist's boater) and point out that the roots are hypn- "sleep" and ag- "lead", so the word should be formed hypn-agog-ic. There is no place for a linking vowel -o-. The spelling 'hypnagogic' is much preferable.
September 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word oued oum er rbia
Ooh, this looks like it means Mother of the Quarter River (Mauritanian or Moroccan form of something like wadi umm ar-rub`). I won't stick by "quarter"—possibly a group of four, who knows.
September 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hangman
It strikes me this is morphologically unusual: man attached directly to the verb. I can't think of any other examples: *slayman, *killman, *stealman, *rideman, *driveman, *preachman, *prayman.
September 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list gems-from-i-1811-dictionary-of-the-vulgar-tongue-i
The 1811 edition was 'now considerably altered and enlarged, with the modern changes and improvements'.
September 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word billety
Heraldry. Semé of billets, i.e. sewn or sprinkled with small upright oblongs. Also known as billetty.
September 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word seme
The heraldic sense 2/3 is semé. A field may be described as e.g. semé of lozenges. If the object is a fleur-de-lis the word semé-de-lis is used.
September 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word prenuptial
By a nail-biting 5-4 vote my office have just decided we will be writing this fused, rather than hyphenated. Rejoice! rejoice!
September 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word charun
Etruscan rather than Roman: a very Etruscan-looking name.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hexadecimal
Coined in 1954 from mixed Greek and Latin elements. The pure Latin form would be 'sedecimal'.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list with-both-latin-and-greek-components
heterosexual, homosexual, monolingual, monoplane, television
—but not halogen, the -gen being good Greek as well as Latin
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hexadecaroon
Y'know, this should be 'sedecaroon'. The 'hexa-' on 'hexadecimal' was some ghastly blunder by a computer bod in 1954.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word aeaea
Latinization of Greek Aiaia. The Latin genitive Aeaeae is sometimes claimed as an English word: q.v. for disparagement of claim. In German this island could be rendered Ääa.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word qabbalah
This is the most faithful transliteration of the word: that is, the spelling that most clearly shows the Hebrew spelling. However, the final H is silent in the Hebrew, so 'Qabbala' is a more faithful transcription. However, the q sound of Ancient Hebrew has become k in Ashkenazic Hebrew, so that makes 'Kabbala' a contender; and the mediaeval Latin was Cabbala.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word businesslike
Just about(1) the only word where the suffix '-like' doesn't transparently mean "like a _". Recommendation: do not hyphenate. *rubber stamp* Next!
Footnote 1: That means I can't think of any others.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word annoying
Ambiguity between adjective and verb:
PhoneSpamFilter.com is a free service designed to assist the general public in determining which callers are annoying telemarketers.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word insured
A rare example of a past participle that has become a noun. It has a plural insureds and genitive case forms insured's, insureds', and it can be modified by ordinary adjectives ('additional insureds', 'the individual insureds'). These properties distinguish it from an adjective functioning as head of a noun phrase, such as 'the unemployed'.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word centigrade
Officially obsolete since 1948, when the CGPM (governing conference of the metric system) renamed the degree centigrade as the degree Celsius.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word permitting
In the modern noun sense "obtaining or issuing of permits", I pronounce this word /ˈpɜːmɪtɪŋ/, as I think it's coined directly off the noun 'permit'. I even incline to think it should be spelt 'permiting' accordingly—but now that I do so, I'm afraid to suggest it.
The recent revision of the OED does not recognize the distinction, and just gives the verbal pronunciation /pəˈmɪtɪŋ/.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word eructate
He, being a perfect gentleman, offers me a restorative snifter of his bubbly, brought as it has been all the way from his own cellars, he don't trust Sir's incinerated tastes, and I can feel it put hairs on my chest as it goes eructating down.
—Angela Carter, 'The Kitchen Child'
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word valeter
Corporate Mobile Car Valeter
—seen on van
Puzzled me for a moment: then of course it's mobile {car valeter}, a car valeter who comes round in a van and valets your car rather than waiting for you in the car park. And how is a valeter different from a valet? I suppose it's a company that supplies valets.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word museau
He squints lugubriously down his museau.
—Angela Carter, 'The Kitchen Child'
A face. A doublet of 'muzzle', both from Old French musel, Late Latin mus- "muzzle, snout", of unknown further origin.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word armadillo
The 'Recent words' list at the moment contains a long sequence including: contralto, legato, spiccato, staccato, con legno, armadillo, pizzicato, crescendo, decrescendo, . . .
I imagine it as a kind of muffled xylophone effect.
September 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word éka
unmistakably borrowed from Sanskrit
September 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ague
The modern French spelling is aigu "acute", though English 'ague' is in origin the same word: an acute fever.
September 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word eleutherarch
And the other quote is Shelley, as I guessed: Peacock's hero of Nightmare Abbey, Scythrop Glowry, was a portrait of Shelley.
September 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ediacarian
more usually Ediacaran (official name for the period) or Vendian
September 3, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word naulizament
From Latin naulum "fare" from Greek naulon from nau- "ship" (plus -ize, -ment).
September 2, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lignivorous
"Squid-eating" would be 'loliginivorous' (Latin loligo, loligin-).
September 2, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word xanthrochroid
Oops, I meant xanthochroid. But you meant note.
September 2, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word xanthocroid
Yes, I've just noticed I made that mistake. Fixed.
September 2, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word non-onomatopoeic
Both 'onomatopoeic' and 'onomatopoetic' exist in English and are well formed, from different Greek abstract nouns. The root poi- "make" could take either the suffix -í�? (which appears in English as -y or -ia) or the suffix -ēsis. The words onomatopoií�? and onomatopoíēsis are attested respectively from Hellenistic and Byzantine times. The corresponding adjective endings are -ic and -etic.
Now it gets confusing. It seems in -poeia, -poeic the -e- is part of the root poi-, regularly rendered in Latin as poe-. But in -poesis, -poetic the Greek uses an alternative stem of just po-, and here the -e- is part of the suffixes -esis, -etic. Okay, now even I'm confused. *squints and memorizes*
September 2, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word xanthocroid
This spelling is an error for 'xanthochroid', which can be analysed as coming from either ochr- "pale" or chro- "skin". Huxley, the coiner of the original noun 'Xanthochroi', apparently intended the former (according to the OED).
September 2, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word suit
One of those words with a complicated unfolding of senses. The origin is Latin *sequit-, past participle of seq- "follow", and the earliest meanings in English (late 1200s) are three senses of a "following":
(i) attendance on a lord at court, i.e. following one's lord there;
(ii) a lord's following, i.e. his company or retinue;
(iii) the livery worn by a following or retinue.
Then came the sense of "pursuit", hunting or seeking, and in the early 1400s this developed the sense of pursuing someone at law, a lawsuit. This then widened to any supplication or petition (early to mid 1400s). In the late 1500s it took on the particular sense of "courtship, wooing".
Now I'm guessing it was the "livery" sense that around 1400 was extended to any set of matching things: first clothing; then playing-cards (early 1500s); and numerous obsolete uses. 'Suit of armour' is modern, no earlier than Sir Walter Scott.
The variant form 'suite' took on various "set" meanings: rooms (early 1700s), music (mid 1700s), furniture (early 1800s), bathroom fittings (early 1900s).
September 2, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word likely
In BrE this has the peculiar grammatical property that as an adverb it can't occur on its own: it has to be premodified by another adverb. So we can say that it will very/quite/more likely happen tomorrow, but not that *it will likely happen tomorrow. The latter is of course normal in AmE. As an adjective there's no such restriction: it is likely to happen, and it is very/quite/more likely to happen.
Whereas 'probably' behaves quite normally: it will probably happen.
September 2, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word fatally
So many ghits for "fatally killed" and "fatally stabbed to death", and almost all bona-fide news stories.
September 2, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word differentiator
New to me in any sense, but the sense I just came across is a commercial one, illustrated by these:
Although I’m somewhat biased, I believe decision patterns are the ultimate differentiator for anyone who offers consulting services.
—Decision Driven Blog, 22/08/08
Simply put Kevin thinks that the hoops a typical out-of-the-box user has to jump through to install additional applications other than what is included by the OEM might be a big differentiator when it comes to sorting out which NetBook(s) might become popular with users.
—GottaBeMobile, 14/08/08
September 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cataglottism
a good classical word for a tongue kiss, a French kiss
September 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pizza ad
A nice illustration of the fact that Noun Noun combinations in English can have practically any semantic relationship.
September 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word goblong
the shape of Cherie Booth's mouth
September 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word rumoured
The Macy quote is a good find, and indeed there are some Google hits for 'rumouring' and 'rumoring' in a verbal sense. Virtually no generalizations about language are absolute, and exceptions can always be found. However, it's probably still true that most of us don't use 'rumo(u)ring' as a verb. You have to wade through pages of Google hits to find genuine uses. (And CGEL documents Standard English, not all dialectal or idiolectal variations.)
There's another common use, the noun, as in rumouring on the Internet. This doesn't count.
Cosntructions with expletive object 'it' and a prepositional phrase with 'abroad', 'about' are normally conscious or subconscious echoes of Shakespeare. However, if someone said they would rumour it about that something happened, without knowing the Shakespeare quote, then that too would be a genuine instance of a living form of the verb.
September 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pterostegoraptor
A fierce, heavily armoured flying predator that trapped prey by falling upside down onto it. Unable to right itself, it usually starved. Extinct.
September 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pangenome
It is looking more and more as though the biosphere is an interconnected network of continuously circulated genes – a "pangenome", to use the term recently coined by microbiologist Victor Tetz of St Petersburg State Pavlov Medical University in Russia.
—New Scientist, 30 August 2008
August 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word biofilm
For example, Hatfull has identified one that gives bacteria the ability to get together in communal groups called biofilms.
—New Scientist, 30 August 2008
August 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word virosphere
Researchers started exploring the size and diversity of the viral world, or "virosphere", by taking samples from different environments and counting the viruses.
—New Scientist, 30 August 2008
August 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word desert island
The 'Desert Islands Discs' programme began in 1942. Here's a list of the top requests over the years, of which the topmost is the finale of the Choral Symphony.
. . . Euphemism for what?
August 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word perplexed
An interesting point. The OED notes that Latin had no verb *perplectere, only the adjective perplex-us, which looks like it's the past participle of such a verb, but might instead have come from per- "thoroughly" + the past participle plex-us of plect-ere "plait, interweave, entangle".
The English adjective was originally 'perplex', with the other words (verb and 'perplexed') derived from it.
August 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word summons
So where does the final -s come from, qroqqa? Some English noun or verb inflection that's been fused onto it? ← READER'S VOICE
No, it's an almost original part of it. It came with the word from French into English: forms such as sumunse, somonse suggest a Late Latin *summonsa, a past participle of summonĕre, earlier summonēre (sub "under", mon- "warn"). I didn't know that.
August 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word adze
A phonological oddity. This is the only base form I can think of that ends in /dz/, and there are no native bases ending in /ts/ (only Johnny-come-latelys like 'kibbutz'), yet it's an impeccably Anglo-Saxon native word.
August 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word wit
The very last trace of an infinitive verb in English. The expression 'to wit' is no longer analysable in Present-Day English, but the 'wit' part was once the infinitive of a verb meaning "know" whose gerund-participle survives in the adjectives 'witting' and 'unwitting', and whose first and third person singular present 'wot' survives in the archaic exclamations 'I wot not' and 'God wot'.
The reason present tense 'wot' lacks an -s in the third person is that it is, if you go far enough back up the Indo-European family tree, a perfect tense. The present tense meant see (cf. Latin video) and the perfect "I have seen" was used for the meaning "I know".
August 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word times
The verb 'times' is so common that I suspect it's now the normal word for the thing amongst—what shall we call non-mathematicians?—Loggles. "Multiply it by" only outnumbers "times it by" by 4 to 1 on Google. The inflected forms 'timesing' and 'timesed' are very rare there, but possibly that reflects the contexts it's actually used in: people say, 'Times it by 2' or 'You need to times it by 2', but don't much describe doing it in the past or repeatedly.
August 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word rumoured
I should mention this is listed in the CGEL (along with several others) with this peculiarity of having only one verb form. What I just discovered was a convincing reason it couldn't be an adjective (if you allow these constructions without 'to be', and I agree they don't sound perfectly natural).
August 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word koineization
The creation of a new, stable dialect (the koine) by a mixing of dialects and simplification of conflicting features.
Middle English might have arisen from Old English partly by koineization with Old Norse in the Danelaw, which in early times of contact was probably close enough to mix. (Though the 1200s Old Norse you normally study wouldn't be.)
August 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word podsnappery
Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness—not to add a grand convenience—in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr Podsnap's satisfaction.
. . .
These may be said to have been the articles of a faith and school which the present chapter takes the liberty of calling, after its representative man, Podsnappery.
—Our Mutual Friend
August 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word �?tman
The ultimate root is something like "vapour" or possibly "breath", giving the sense "self" in Sanskrit: compare the related Greek atmós "vapour", German Atem "breath".
August 28, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lateral
Hunh, the grey definitions up above don't even include the common phonetic terms:
adj. produced by one side of the tongue, as in various kinds of /l/ sound;
n. a lateral consonant; an /l/ sound.
But I actually dropped by here to add a new sense I just found:
n. a lateral hire, a person hired laterally (such as from a rival firm).
August 28, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word 's
The genitive marker on (most) noun phrases. The only word in English that is an obligatory clitic: that is, it must be phonetically attached to the preceding word and cannot be pronounced on its own.
August 28, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word greenwich
The usual pronunciation of the English place is /ˈgrenɪtʃ/. The BBC Pronunciation Guide (from memory) gives that second after /ˈgrɪnɪdʒ/, their principle being to give the local pronunciation first, so presumably that's what the locals say more. Dickens puts the same pronunciation in the mouth of a somewhat rough character in The Old Curiosity Shop: 'But I should say that if he turns up anywhere, he'll come ashore somewhere about Grinidge to-morrow, at ebb tide, eh, mate?'
August 28, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word miṣr
Not in Classical Arabic. /e/ is common enough in the descendant languages/dialects (cf. Mohammed, Ahmed for Classical Muhammad, Ahmad).
August 28, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word rumoured
A highly unusual verb in Present-day English: it has only this one verb form. Although it was historically a full verb with all its parts ('Come hither Catesby, rumor it abroad, That Anne my Wife is very grieuous sicke.'—Richard III, IV.ii), for most of us today it can only be a past participle.
This raises the question of why it should be counted a verb at all, rather than an adjective: compare 'she was rumoured to be dead', 'she was keen/eager/reluctant to be dead': adjectives can take infinitival clause complements.
Well last night I found the answer, when I read this sentence opening Dorothy Parker's 'Mrs. Hoftstadter on Josephine Street':
That summer, the Colonel and I leased a bungalow named 947 West Catalpa Boulevard, rumored completely furnished: three forks, but twenty-four nutpicks.
'Completely furnished' is an adjective phrase (AdjP), and adjectives can't take AdjP complements, but verbs can: compare *'eager/easy/pleasant completely furnished' with 'considered completely furnished'. And indeed, on checking Google this morning, I find quite a few "was rumoured dead"—not the way I'd say it myself (I'd much prefer to add 'to be'), but common enough to prove it's verbal in Standard English. So, another discovery.
August 28, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word misology
Coined by Plato, by the look of it: Gignetai de ek tou autou tropou misologia te kai misanthropia. "Misology and misanthropy are born in the same way." (Phaedo 89d)
First used in German by Kant (1781), in English by Coleridge (1830s).
August 28, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word miṣr
Misr is the Classical Arabic; it might be Mesr in the local dialect.
August 27, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list well-known-places-youve-never-heard-of
And there's Euskal Herria, also called Euskadi. Over in the east near Bod there's Druk-yul.
August 27, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word colquhoun
/kəʊˈhuːn/ (SAMPA /k@U"hu:n/)
August 27, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word compactum
(pl. compacta) a compact metric space
August 27, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word waistcoat
Ugh! I don't want to go back to SAMPA /"weIsk@Ut/, but the limited HTML here offers no control over fonts. I see the IPA characters in a completely different font: Lucida Sans Unicode, I believe, an ugly one I try to avoid when I have CSS or HTML control over it. So, as with IPA generally, it's just blind luck if any one viewer's browser supports it.
August 27, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word circumbinary
circling a binary star: used of a planet or protoplanetary accretion disk
August 27, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word waistcoat
Certainly in standard British speech, the spelling pronunciation /ˈweɪsˌkəʊt/ outnumbers the older /ˈweskət/, if that was ever standard. (The OED, with W not recently revised, calls the latter 'colloq. or vulgar', and though it notes the spelling 'weskit', gives no examples.) However, I can't back up this preferred pronunciation with numbers.
August 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list well-known-places-youve-never-heard-of
Apsny and Xussar Iryston are in the news. Nearby is Hayastan. Near-ish-by is Shqipëria.
August 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word demesne
The best-known use is in Keats, and rhymes with 'serene'.
August 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word doughnuts
'Cake-tori' has a certain appeal to the perverse.
August 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cloaker
Denning and her colleagues have proposed that IMD implantable medical device users wear a "cloaker" device that tells the IMD to ignore any unexpected instructions. When doctors need to talk to the device, they can simply remove the cloaker.
—New Scientist, 20 August 2008
The cloaca is where you go if crackers get into the IMD first.
August 26, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word muzz
But he never would, never. Scared of muzzing his shirt or busting his collar or something, even if, when stoned, he would clap his hands to the rhythm.
—Angela Carter, 1980, 'Black Venus'
August 24, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word polycrystalline
Further clues might come now that scientists have grown the first single crystals of rare-earth iron arsenides, which are much purer than the polycrystalline materials synthesised so far.
—New Scientist, 16 August 2008
August 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word antiferromagnetism
As the temperature continued to drop, something interesting happened around 134 K. Instead of all pointing in one direction, the electron spins on neighbouring atoms lined up in opposite directions – a phenomenon called antiferromagnetism.
—New Scientist, 16 August 2008
August 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word animat
At a July conference on in-vitro recording technology in Reutlingen, in Germany, teams from around the world presented projects on culturing brain material and plugging it into simulations and robots, or "animats" as they are known.
—New Scientist, 16 August 2008
August 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sensilla
The beetles' infrared-detecting organs are mounted just behind the "hips" of their second pair of legs. Each one contains about 70 spherical sensors called sensillas. Inside the hard outer case of each sensilla is a chamber holding water. This expands when exposed to infrared radiation, exerting pressure on a nerve receptor at the base of the chamber.
—New Scientist, 16 August 2008
August 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word doll
What we need is a historical reverse dictionary of meanings. 'Doll' was only used in the modern sense from about 1700 (and was cant at first); 'poppet' was used in this sense from about the fifteenth century; so what did English children play with before?
August 22, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ergodic
Indeed, from erg- "work" + hod- "path", and adapted from the German Ergoden coined in a somewhat different sense by Boltzmann (1884).
August 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word real tennis
So called from being the real, authentic game of tennis, played for hundreds of years, as opposed to the newly-invented sphairistike or lawn tennis.
The term 'real tennis' is first known in an 1880 letter of George Eliot; the variant 'royal tennis' is attested from 1902, originally an Australian term, either the origin or a result of a folk etymology.
August 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word corn
I too pronounce it like 'corn': /kɔːn/, rhymes with 'pawn'.
August 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list plurale-tantum
athletics, chambers (legal), corduroys, doings, hives, insignia, ironworks, mews, secateurs, shingles, statistics
I'd suggest excluding sneakers, since it's not a plurale tantum: you can throw or lose one shoe, boot, sneaker, pump, plimsoll, glove etc., where the pairs are physically separable.
August 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word undecimber
Rats, I have to withdraw this. There seems to be no good evidence the name Undecember was used at the time: Cicero calls them simply mensis intercalaris prior and mensis intercalaris posterior.
However, I do think it's better formed than Undecimber, for the phonological reasons I gave.
August 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word uranus
(1) I'm not aware of any evidence that Greek /a/ and /aː/ differed in anything but quality—they were more like the vowels of 'cut' and 'cart' (in my accent).
(2) The use of the vowel /eɪ/ (the FACE vowel) in Modern English is irrelevant: this comes from the Great Vowel Shift of about the 1400s, when long /aː/ changed to long /eː/ (and subsequently diphthongized).
(3) Classical Greek had a pitch accent, and our�?nós had a high tone on the final syllable. In Modern Greek (which is irrelevant to English) this has become a stress accent, but generally on the same syllable.
August 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word murdrum
This of course is just the Latinization of 'murder', and was used in the Middle Ages specifically for the fine incurred by a community where a murder had taken place: the word 'murder' meant a homicide by an unknown perpetrator. As the guilty individual was unknown, their manor or hundred must bear the penalty.
August 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word malady
A surprising etymology for the second half. Abstract noun (-y) derivative of French malade "ill; sick person", earlier malabde < *malabido < Classical male habitum "having it badly".
August 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word undecimber
There was a perfectly good name Undecember already: it actually occurred in 46 BCE (just after November, before Duodecember, and two months before December). The terminal difference between decem "ten" and undecim "eleven" is presumably because of the difference in distances away from the stress: so in Undecember, with stress on -cem-, this change of /e/ to /i/ would not apply.
And I don't think the existence of a thirteenth month implies that there can be more than thirteen: how many returns of the moon can you fit in one year? Okay, 46 BCE was an exception and had fifteen months.
August 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hemeralopia
An autantonym, for those of you who collect 'em. This contains the element -al- "blind", so properly means "blindness by day"; but this element was neglected and it was treated as "seeing by day", synonymous with 'nyctalopia' "blindness by night". Except that the -al- was sometimes ignored in that too, so 'nyctalopia' was also used for "seeing by night".
August 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word bdellatomy
Oh, 'bdellotomy' is better. That's not in the OED yet, but 'bdellatomy' is irregular: in Greek compounds you always use the stem (bdell-) and the connective vowel -o- between consonants.
August 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word uranus
The Greek for "sky, heaven" was our�?nós with a long /aː/. This would give Latin Ūr�?nus with stress on the -r�?-, and thus the usual English pronunciation /jʊˈreɪnəs/ or /jəˈreɪnəs/. However, Latin actually used a short /a/, for reasons I can't venture at, so the Latin Ūrănus with initial stress is the origin of the alternative English pronunciation /ˈjʊərənəs/.
August 20, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word bdellatomy
the practice of cutting leeches to empty them of blood while they still continue to suck
(Greek bdella "leech", tom- "cut")
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word begaze
I had not leisure to see our friend Masclet, who is prefect there; I could only run along the rampart and begaze the site of Lord Nelson's misemployment.
—William Taylor, 1802, letter to Thomas Martin, collected in Robberd's Memoir of Taylor's life and writings (1843)
Meseemes she doth begaze with meltynge stare
Her weddynge-bedde, hynceforthe anodhers share.
—William Taylor's 1801 play Wortigerne, supposed to be by Rowley, the 15th-century poet invented by Thomas Chatterton
One sporadic modern use:
Arts of peace, intent
To begaze the star—
—Manmohan Ghose, 1970, Collected Poems
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word stalagcite
'I see nothing. I know nothing.'
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cucumber
Oh, and I wasn't reading Boswell, I was eating a cucumber.
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word littoral
Not an absolutely blemishless Latin origin though. The Latin word was lītus, lītor- "shore" and developed a variant writing littus for no good reason. The opposite happened with littera "letter", which had a ne'er-do-well variant lītera. In both cases the non-standard Latin words have prevailed, giving rise to English 'littoral' but 'literal', and likewise in other modern languages.
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cucumber
I suppose we should quote the full verse from The Beggar's Opera. Mrs Peachum is 'in a very great passion' about Polly's sudden marriage:
Our Polly is a sad slut! nor heeds what we have taught her,
I wonder any man alive will ever rear a daughter,
For she must have both hoods and gowns, and hoops to swell her pride,
With scarfs and stays, and gloves and lace, and she'll have men beside;
And when she's drest with care and cost, all-tempting, fine and gay,
As men should serve a cucumber, she flings herself away.
So yes, 'serve' = "treat, deal with", and it fits what Dr Johnson said.
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cucumber
On the beach here there is a singular variety of curious stones. I picked up one very like a small cucumber. By the by, Dr. Johnson told me, that Gay's line in the "Beggar's Opera," "As men should serve a cucumber," &c. has no waggish meaning, with reference to men flinging away cucumbers as too cooling, which some have thought; for it has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.
—Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 5 October 1773, on the island of Coll
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word renminbi
The Chinese currency: unusual in that (like 'sterling') it names the currency itself but not (strictly) the principal unit, which is the yuan (colloquially kuai).
(A sentence with three sets of brackets in it must need repair, but that sounds like hard work.)
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word thassalocracy
Blimey, I noticed it had quite a few hits, but it's even got into some printed books—even ones about Ancient Greece! Have that proof-reader sacked now.
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word thassalocracy
Shurely shome mishtake?—Ed. The Thalassocracy (thalassa, thalatta "sea") was the hegemony over the Aegean Sea exercised by various peoples (Lydians, Pelasgians, Thracians, Rhodians etc.) between the fall of Troy and the foundation of the Athenian league.
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word countification
The conversion of a non-count (mass) noun to a count noun, as in 'a spam', 'a porno', 'porns', 'slangs', 'another shrubbery'.
(Term used by Arnold Zwicky on Language Log 18/08/08, but attested earlier, in the Handbook of Philosophical Logic, 2002, Gabbay and Guenthner.)
August 19, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hierophant
More precisely: phan- is "show, reveal" in Greek. To it was attached an agent ending -tês (as in the ancestors of 'athlete', 'Cypriot'), so phantês "revealer". Add to this hier- "sacred" and the connecting vowel -o- between consonants, and we get hierophantês "revealer of the sacred", first declension masculine.
In Latin the corresponding ending is -a (as in nauta, agricola), so it got borrowed into Latin as hierophanta. Here normal phonetic processes accumulate to lose the final -a and change the other sounds to their modern English values.
The Greek verb meaning "show" is listed in dictionaries under a citation form—either present indicative phainô "I show" or infinitive phainein "show". This latter consists of the root phan-, a verb class formative (I think) -j-, and the infinitive ending -ein. In early Greek phanj- changed to phain-. So the phant- doesn't come from this; what they share is rather the basic root phan-. It may seem pedantic to write all this out, but I increasingly think the alternative is misleading: to suggest that -phant somehow comes phonetically from phainein.
August 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word artefact
'Artefact' is considerably more common in BrE, 'artifact' in AmE. 'Artefact' is the earlier (and seems to have been invented by Coleridge!), and has -e- because it derives from a phrase, arte factum "made by art".
The -i- is by assimilation to the much more common (and much older) type seen in 'artifice', 'artificial', which are from actual compounds (not phrases) in Latin, where the linking vowel was always -i-.
August 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word plaintiff
Quite right: I had first thought 'English law' would be specific enough, but changed my mind and came back to add 'England and Wales' to my first posting. 'English law', while it is unlikely to mean "English-language law", is still rather vague about jurisdictions.
August 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word phudnik
a nudnik with a Ph.D.
August 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word plaintiff
English law term, replaced by 'claimant' in 1999 (in England and Wales).
August 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word writ
English law term, replaced by 'claim form' in 1999 (in England and Wales).
August 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word anthropoctonous
Iphigenia, for instance, is a form of an ancient anthropoctonous goddess, identified with Artemis.
—Gilbert Murray, 1911, The Rise of the Greek Epic
This is virtually the only instance of the word in English. Adapted from Greek anthrôpo-kton-os "person-killing" (related by ablaut to the verb ktein- "kill").
August 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word laconic
True.
August 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word qua
Only used in Aristotle in Latin translations of Aristotle, however. The corresponding Greek word, if it was used, would begin with /p/.
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word capuchon
Surprisingly, the obvious derivation from capo is unsupported. The etymology of capa, cappa is very uncertain, but as far as I can make out, cappa is the earlier form. Even if capa was earlier, it has a long vowel, whereas Late Latin capo "head" had a short vowel: so the derivation is unlikely. Evidence for the long vowel comes from Old English—it gave rise to Modern English 'cope' "ecclesiastical cape", with the Middle English change of long /a/ to long /o/—and Norse kápa.
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the user qroqqa
For the record, qroqqa is about the only Maltese word I know.
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word capuchon
I knew I should have put 'etc.' at the end of the list.
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pentecontaglossal
Written in fifty languages. Used by James Lindsay in the title of his Pentecontaglossal Paternoster. Note that the prefix pente- is correct: the Greek has the form πεντη- in the combination for "fifty". (So also in Pentecost.)
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word capuchon
The root is Latin capa, cappa "cap; cloak", with various branchings of meaning and additional suffixes: one augmentative prefix gives Italian cappuccio thence French capuche. The -on of capuchon is a second augmentative; the -in- I suspect might be an Italian diminutive (or an adjective formative). The meanings of these words diverge to "person who wears", "monkey which looks like said person", "coffee which somewhat looks like him too".
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lieutenant
I would imagine most German ranks have a certain, ah, crispness to them. The slouching Stabsgefreiter, the innocuous Unterfeldwebel, the genial Generalmajor . . . no, the images just aren't coming through.
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word retroductive
Alternative term for the probabilistic form of reasoning called abductive: from the observation that Superman can fly it is reasonable (though uncertain) to infer that Superman is a bird or a plane, since that's the most likely explanation.
Term coined by C.S. Peirce, who thought it was close to if not exactly what Aristotle had in mind by apagoge.
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word determiner
Term used in the CGEL for the functional position at the front of a noun phrase (often called specifier by others). It can be filled by either determinatives (as they call them, members of the word class containing a, the, one, two, each, no, all etc.) or by genitive noun phrases (my, your, Mary's, the Prince of Denmark's, the bloke I was talking to's, etc.).
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word determinative
Term used in the CGEL for the word class containing a, the, one, two, each, no, all etc., by other authors often called determiners. The CGEL uses 'determiner' to mean the functional position at the front of a noun phrase (often called specifier by others).
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word nidgetty
In fact this is the only attestation of this word. In the 1884 printing of her letters it was rendered as 'midgetty' (also not a known word); the reading 'nidgetty' is from the 1995 edition.
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word connexion
This is the etymological spelling and was usual in BrE until the mid 20th century. The analogical spelling 'connection' arose in the early 18th century and was preferred by Webster. It is now very much a minority spelling.
August 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word aetataureate
This always looks to me like it should have something to do with bulls, but I can't work out what the aet- would mean. Now I don't want to unduly cramp Mr Chabon's creativity, but it does seem ill formed: he's taken the phrase aetas aurea "Golden Age" and put aetas into its stem form aetat-. However, this more naturally yields a meaning "age-golden", headed by the second element in Latin as in English. For the intended meaning, a straightforward Latin-based word would be 'auraeval/aureval' (with standard variants as for 'primaeval', 'mediaeval').
August 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word re-rat
This word is usually associated with Winston Churchill's defection back to the Conservative Party in 1925, and his famous comment . . . I can't find an authoritative written source for it, but the most favoured form across the Web is 'Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.'
He might well have been conscious of his father Lord Randolph Churchill's comment on an earlier prime minister, Lord Derby: 'A man may rat once, but not rat and re-rat.'
However, the OED has an even earlier use: Mary Frampton (1773-1846) writes about Talleyrand in her journal (published 1885): if he has 'refused to re-rat'.
August 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lieutenant
The pronunciation with /f/ has no clear explanation, but both modern pronunciations are represented in the earliest uses in English: late 14th-century spellings include lutenand, luf-tenand, lieutenant, lutenaunt, leeftenaunt (with lutenant, levetenaunt as variants of the last in other copies of the manuscript).
August 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hope value
When valuing land that stands a chance of gaining future planning permission because of its location we have to include "hope value". The "hope value" is what a purchaser is prepared to pay over and above the agricultural value because he or she believes that the land may have a chance of being developed at some time in the future.
—UK Land Directory FAQ
August 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word rathskeller
This was Rathskeller in German until the 1901 spelling reform, which removed the silent H in words such as Rath and Thal. It happens that English borrowed the word just before that.
August 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word manse
The OED marks sense 1 as obsolete, however; the latest quote they have for it is from the heavily archaized Harold (1848, set around 1066) by the wretched Bulwer-Lytton:
"You will not find him there," said Godrith, "for I know that as soon as he hath finished his conference with the Atheling, he will leave the city; and I shall be at his own favourite manse over the water at sunset, to take orders for repairing the forts and dykes on the Marches. You can tarry awhile and meet us; you know his old lodge in the forest land?"
August 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word diptote
adj. having only two case-endings (Greek ptôsis "case"): normally used of Arabic nouns in which the accusative and genitive are identical.
n. diptote noun
August 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word peripeteia
It's not often that I can't spell a word I should know, so here's a memorandum. 'Peripeteia' is from pet- "fall" (as in 'apoptosis' and 'diptote', both with the zero grade), and mnemonically it's what befalls characters in a narrative. It has no relation to what was confusing me, 'peripatetic' from pat- "walk, tread".
August 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word figurehead
This also means "leading figure" in a positive and potent sense in UK usage. Over half the ghits for "a * figurehead" are filled with positive terms such as 'key', 'strong', 'major', 'prominent', 'lynchpin'. Worldwide, however, the older usage strongly predominates, and figureheads are 'ceremonial', 'constitutional', 'toothless', 'compliant', 'token'. This is a remarkable turnaround in meaning: no on-line dictionary yet lists it, that I can find.
August 14, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mugwump
Now antedated to 1828 in the Middlebury newspaper the Vermont American:
Before the adoption of any project among the fraternity, a nod of assent was required from the rods of the whole, which was usually not wanting, provided that of the leader, (or Mugwump, as he was technically called,) appeared favorable.
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sigaldry
She scorned him and she scoffed at him,
she laughed at him unpitying;
so long he studied wizardry
and sigaldry and smithying.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, Errantry
A Tolkien revival of an obsolete word for "enchantment, sorcery":
Sigaldrie, & false teolunges, leuunge on ore & of swefnes, & alle wichchecreftes.—Ancrene Riwle, c. 1225
Quede and harme he wil me spye,..Gef he wot of this sygaldrye That this trowes kan lye.—King Alisaunder, 1300s
Burye hym wher thy wil be, But look thou make no sigaldry To raise him up agayne.—Chester Play, c.1500
From sige "victory" + galdor "charm, enchantment" (< gal- "sing")
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pogo
My husband's eyeballs pogoed out of their sockets and boinged! into her bra cups, where they gambolled around in the throes of ecstasy before boomeranging back socketwards.
—Kathy Lette, 2001, Nip 'n' Tuck
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word blancmange
On cue, the largest pair of mammaries in the northern hemisphere glided into view. It was like a photo-finish in a blancmange bake-off.
—Kathy Lette, 2001, Nip 'n' Tuck
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word synchronized diving
Synchronized fencing, boxing, wrestling, luge, football, javelin, would all present interesting problems. They could liven it up more than drugs.
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word woodbine
Titania: Sleepe thou, and I will winde thee in my arms,
Fairies be gone, and be alwaies away.
So doth the woodbine, the sweet Honisuckle,
Gently entwist; the female Iuy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the Elme.
O how I loue thee! how I dote on thee!
—A Midsummer Night's Dream IV.i
When these were done, she took some needle-work from her basket, and sat herself down upon a stool beside the lattice, where the honeysuckle and woodbine entwined their tender stems, and stealing into the room filled it with their delicious breath.
—The Old Curiosity Shop ch. 25
The problem with both these passages is that normally woodbine is honeysuckle. Various emendations for the Shakespeare have been suggested. Woodbine could be a dialectal name for bindweed, or an error for its synonym 'weedbind' (less odorous so more unfortunate for Dickens). It could be 'woodrind', the bark of the tree (but that's not in the OED). Or the honeysuckle is the flowers of the woodbine.
More ingenious is if the woodbine and honeysuckle are in apposition, naming the same plant. Then the verb 'entwist' needs an object. Or perhaps it's used intransitively (though OED has no instances of this grammar). The object could be the elm, with 'the female ivy so enrings' bracketed off as a parenthesis. Most ingenious of all is if it originally said that the woodbine, the honeysuckle gently entwists the maple; the P being omitted by accident, male was changed to female: the ivy was considered female because it always required support. (This is William Warburton's suggestion.)
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word palaver
The word is from Portuguese palavra "word, speech" (thus cognate with 'parley', 'parable', 'parole', 'parliament' etc.) and probably comes into English via some African pidgin, as early uses all refer to discussions or disputes with or among Africans. Thence it passed in a fairly wide range of different senses relating to speech, dispute, or persuasion.
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word womble
They look like policemen and they have the legend “traffic officer�? emblazoned in the back window. But their main job is to clear up the mess after an accident. Which means, technically, they are Wombles.
—Jeremy Clarkson, The Times, 22/07/2007
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ringer
A 'ringer' is a stolen car that has had its identification numbers replaced by a set from another - usually written-off - car, which effectively changes the car's identity.
—Guardian, 14/12/2005
The OED has related senses of 'ringer'—"false numberplates" (1962) and "thief who fits false numberplates" (1970)—but not this sense referring to the car itself.
So also 'car-ringing', the practice of creating ringers.
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word umbilicanimism
'The practice of looking steadfastly at the navel, followed by the Hesychasts, in expectation of an outward exhibition of the light supposed to dwell within the soul of man.'—OED
< L. umbilicus + anima, after late Gr. omphalópsukhos
aka omphaloskepsis
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cacophany
The Feast of the Cacophany commemorates the occasion when Brian of Nazareth was shown to the Magi, until they realized their mistake and went elsewhere.
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word allowance
'You've been helped once to meat,' said Miss Brass, summing up the facts; 'you have had as much as you can eat, you're asked if you want any more, and you answer, "no!" Then don't you ever go and say you were allowanced, mind that.'
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 36
Verb possibly coined by Dickens: the earliest OED citations are here twice and Nicholas Nickleby.
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word beer-boy
Having, as it were, taken formal possession of his clerkship in virtue of these proceedings, he opened the window and leaned negligently out of it until a beer-boy happened to pass, whom he commanded to set down his tray and to serve him with a pint of mild porter, which he drank upon the spot and promptly paid for, with the view of breaking ground for a system of future credit and opening a correspondence tending thereto, without loss of time.
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 34
August 13, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word caliga
The diminutive of this is caligula—and thus the future emperor gained his nickname.
Caliga is somehow related to calc- "heel", but I don't know what the -ig- bit is doing there.
August 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cark
The two words are unlikely to be related. 'Cark' "die" is only very recently attested; it could be short for 'carcass'.
August 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word desurger
So now we can desurger using only the second type of desurgery: sewing in a Möbius strip. But doing this gives us a standard non-orientable surface.
—Ian Stewart, 1975, Concepts of Modern Mathematics (a nonce-use)
August 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word desurgery
So when our surgeries stop, we have a sphere.
Now we reverse the process. Three kinds of desurgery can happen.
(i) We have two discs with arrows going round in opposite directions, and sew in a cylinder. This is the same as sewing on a handle (Figure 126).
(ii) We have one disc, and sew in a Möbius band.
(iii) We have two discs with arrows going round the same way: sewing a cylinder back is the same as sewing on a Klein bottle (Figure 127), which is equivalent to sewing on two Möbius strips (compare Figure 83). So we can convert the third kind of desurgery into two of the second kind.
—Ian Stewart, 1975, Concepts of Modern Mathematics
Evidently a nonce-use of Stewart's to indicate the reversal of the topological process of surgery on a surface (starting with a sphere and increasing its genus or number of crosscaps).
August 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word champ
'Champ' is the older word, with 'chomp' an originally dialectal variant that has become common latterly. In 'champ/chomp at the bit', both seem about equally common (going by Google, even in UK usage). While 'chomp at the bit' is known from 1937, 'champ at the bit' has been found back to 1885; however, the earliest sources of both are all U.S., so it doesn't look as if a BrE 'champ' has been supplanted by AmE 'chomp' in this idiom.
August 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word graft
The sense "work, esp. hard work" is first recorded as dialectal: 1853 New Zealand, 1890 Gloucestershire, 1890 Melbourne, 1891 Sheffield. It's hard to tell how to Google this, but I'd imagine it's almost invariably in the locution 'hard graft' these days.
The sense "bribery, corruption" might be derived from this; it is first attested in 1865 and for a long time was U.S. and slang.
August 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word advice
I'd never seen 'advice' used as a count noun before, but came across it twice yesterday. It's so used in legal circles, e.g.
undertaking legal research, drafting advices, pleadings and skeleton arguments
Barristers' advices, opinions and professional correspondence are generally confidential and may attract legal professional privilege
August 12, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word invest
Yard House employee-owners are invested in the future
This is why when we are invested in the outcome, we get so anxious . . .
Hume offered no evidence that any Democrats are "invested in our losing" or "rooting for us to lose" in Iraq.
College men and women are invested in the social and are largely opposed to academic and professorial culture . . .
—Examples from Google of a meaning new to me, and not in the OED. Another dictionary, however, defines it as 'devote morally or psychologically, as to a purpose; commit', giving as example: 'Men of our generation are invested in what they do, women in what we are.'
August 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word jehu
No, Italian is not Latin, though admittedly it would save a lot of etymological shoe leather if we called them all Eurasian. The Italianization in question is the supposition that all foreign languages are more or less the same up to some pesky isomorphism, so pronouncing them like Italian/French is good enough.
August 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hummy
" 'Tiddely what?' said Piglet." (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent's mouth.)
" 'Pom', said Pooh. 'I put that in to make it more hummy.' "
And it is that word "hummy," my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.
—Constant Reader (Dorothy Parker), as I'm sure you know.
August 11, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word dvandva
The adjective 'bittersweet' is commonly quoted as a dvandva compound. The noun 'bittersweet' (woody nightshade, Solanum dulcamara) is an example of a dvandva bahuvrihi.
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ovda
Well, to me 'Finnish' automatically means Finnish-language, and Ovda isn't, but your source is correct enough in calling it Finnish if it's from the Saami of northern Finland. That's not the problem: it's a much greater sloppiness that seems to have crept into astronomical naming. They're no experts on mythology or language, so once someone tells the IAU something plausible it can get stuck as apparent fact.
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ovda
Not a Finnish name. There are enough web hits in a Finnish mythology context that aren't just this Godchecker text repeated, to suggest it is genuine; in which case it is probably Lappish (Saami). There is a feature on Venus named after a 'titaness', but it's not a Greek titaness, obviously (not a Greek name), and the word 'Marijian' has percolated in as if that's a kind of mythology—but the word means nothing to me, and the Marijian/Ovda/titaness/mythology connexion only occurs in explanation of this venerian feature. Someone's been sold a pup, is my guess.
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word jolie-laide
This makes a nice pun when you try to translate it: she's pretty ugly? She's jolly ugly?
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word eclair
They'd have to be very, very unleavened and wafer-thin not to be four-dimensional.
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word eclair
How can we not have the famous Chambers definition? A cake, long in shape but short in duration, with cream filling and usually chocolate icing.
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word injunct
A back-formation from 'injunction'; it has some currency, but the standard legal verb related to 'injunction' is 'enjoin'.
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word wall-crossed
The prepared script continued by stating that if the information was passed on by the salesman, the recipient would be bound to keep it confidential and would not be permitted to trade in securities of the entity concerned norengage in any other trading-related conduct in respect to those securities based on the confidential information. Those restrictions were to continue until the information was in the public domain. The sharing of information in this way is routine, the recipient is termed as having been “wall crossed�? i.e. brought across to the “confidential�? side of an information wall designed to prevent improper use of confidential price sensitive (“inside�?) information.
—'Hedge Fund Journal', Dec. 2006
On 11 February 2003 Mr Jabre was 'wall crossed' by Goldman Sachs International as part of the pre-marketing of a new issue of convertible preference shares in Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc (SMFG).
—FSA press release, 1 August 2006
I'm entering this word under the past participle, but both uses above seem to require an originating verb 'wall-cross', since they use it in a verbal rather than an adjectival way.
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word miscegenation
I wonder if the negative implication this word has for some is in part due to misunderstanding it as containing the negative mis-. It doesn't: it's misc- "mix" plus gen- "birth, generation".
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word miscegination
pssst . . . miscegenation
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word felsenmeer
For Greek read German.
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word salamander
'If you had seen him drink and smoke, as I did, you couldn`t have kept anything from him. He's a Salamander you know, that's what he is.'
. . .
Having revolved these things in his mind and arrived at this conclusion, he communicated to Mr Swiveller as much of his meditations as he thought proper (Dick would have been perfectly satisfied with less), and giving him the day to recover himself from his late salamandering, accompanied him at evening to Mr Quilp's house.
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 23
Two nearby quotes, the first being Dick Swiveller's explanation of the smoking and drinking habits of Mr Quilp, in which he had been compelled to join; the second is pleasing for the gerundial noun 'salamandering'.
August 8, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word declension
Well, adjectives don't decline in English. Some of them inflect for grade. What would be more useful, however, is teaching some linguistics as applied to English, and using the more general word 'paradigm' rather than making an unnecessary distinction between declension and conjugation.
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word egrote
Not a genuine word. Given in Bailey's dictionary (1721-61), and egroting "feigned illness" in other 18th-century lists, but no actual uses are known to the OED.
From Latin aegrot- "be ill" from aeger "ill". Universities may allow an aegrotat "sick note".
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word jehu
Personally I'd pronounce this /ˈdʒiːhjuː/ JEE hyoo. Since when did people start Italianizing Hebrew names?
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word bathycolpian
Or for the rest of us, /ˌbæθɪˈkɒlpɪən/ băth e KOL pe an.
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word catarolysis
Looks like a fake word to me. There are only a couple of uses of it on the Web, and the rest of the mentions are just lists of silly words. The most reliable-looking source, Grambs's 1984 Literary Companion Dictionary, doesn't give any source or etymology.
There's no Ancient Greek word corresponding to it. If the prefix was kat-, kata- "down", I don't know what the -ro- would come from. However, after a moment's thought I believe the form here is an error for 'catharolysis', which would make sense, coming from kathar- "pure, clean". A purification, a purgation, catharsis.
If this word existed, the rest of us would pronounce it /kætəˈrɒlɪsɪs/ or in pseudo-notation kat a ROL ih sis. (Or, better, with /θ/ th.)
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mash
Come along now – I just put the tea to mash.
—Joan Aiken, 1980, The Shadow Guests
OED sense 7. trans. Brit. regional. To infuse or brew (tea). Also intr.: (of tea) to draw, brew.
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word bare role np
A singular noun phrase used without a determiner (such as a, the), to indicate the role or position someone gets: it functions as the predicative complement of a transitive verb such as choose, appoint, name.
They elected Mary president.
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word gerund-participle
CGEL term for the ing- form of an English verb. It covers what were traditionally known as the gerund (at least in its verbal uses) and the present participle. As a verb, it can take an object but can't take a definite article:
Riding skateboards is forbidden.
*The riding skateboards is forbidden.
Contrast with the gerundial noun, which is a noun, so can take an article, but can't take an object, so its complement has to be put in a prepositional phrase headed by of:
The riding of skateboards is forbidden.
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word building
Damp rotten houses, many to let, many yet building, many half-built and mouldering away—
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 15
This illustrates the old passive sense of the gerund-participle. Around 1800 a new construction came into use, and instead of saying the house was building, people now said it was being built. During the nineteenth century some prescriptivists deprecated this; but for some reason it prevailed without qualm, and there are no longer any superstitions about it.
Earlier still the construction was 'The house is a building', with 'a' a reduced form of the preposition 'on': we would now write this as 'a-building', if only to distance it from the other reading ('a' a determinative and 'building' a noun).
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word conjunction
A traditional category discarded by the CGEL, which divides them amongst a few coordinators (and, or, nor, but), a few subordinators (that, if, to, for), and for the most part prepositions (after, before, when, because, despite etc.).
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word silk
also n. a Q.C.
(take silk: become a Q.C.)
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ostensive
In linguistics or philosophy, an ostensive definition is one made by pointing something out: 'That's an okapi.'
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word slot
'Tell me what the definition means' contains, for example, an indirect object slot:
Tell you what the definition means.
Tell the starving orphan what the definition means.
It contains a couple of verb slots:
Teach me what the definition means.
Tell me what the definition represents.
A tense slot on the second verb:
Tell me what the definition meant.
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word tressel
variant of trestle
There were the seats where the poor old people sat, worn spare, and yellow like themselves; the rugged font where children had their names, the homely altar where they knelt in after life, the plain black tressels that bore their weight on their last visit to the cool old shady church.
—The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 17
August 7, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word quardeel
If she procured a cargo of 100 quardeelen of oil, she was entitled to no additional bounty; but for every quardeel* she fell short, an additional bounty of 50 f. was due.
* The quardeel of oil contains 12 steeken Dutch, or 60. 27 gallons English.
—William Scoresby, 1820, An Account of the Arctic Regions, Edinburgh
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word orphanages
Ooh. The definition is actually for 'condition'. It looks like 'orphanage' was marked as a hyponym of 'condition' in the database, but a pointer got relinked (*waves hands*) or something.
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word said
As an adjective meaning "spoken" it is marked as obsolete (1659) by the OED (1989 ed.), but it is still common in 'said Eucharist', so this presumably must be a (late?) twentieth-century innovation. (Google Books has one hit for it from 1920 in this sense; all others are recent.)
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word come
This is now a preposition in constructions such as 'come Thursday', 'come Easter'; in origin a subjunctive use. To be distinguished from the fossilized subjunctive in 'come hell or high water', which is still a clause; 'come Thursday' no longer is.
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pastinaceous
From the Latin pastinaca "parsnip", which contains the -ac- suffix used to form some plant names; and this is why the derived adjective is pastinaceous rather than **pastinacaceous. Only attested in English in a 1657 translation of a Latin medicinal text.
The Latin was borrowed widely into European languages in various forms, including Polish pasternak: I can't explain where the intrusive /r/ comes from here. The author Boris's grandfather Osip is said to be the first who bore this surname (when surnames were imposed on Jews in Russia).
The English -r- in the spelling is apparently an accretion on older forms such as pasnep, in awareness that many words formerly pronounced with /rs/ had dialectally lost the /r/ (e.g. 'hoss', 'passel', 'cuss', 'ass' "bottom"). The ending is an assimilation to 'neep' (also as in 'turnip').
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list invented-by-bored-victorians
Top of my list would be sphygmomanometer and sphairistike.
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word judgment
The standard spelling in the UK legal context ('the court handed down a judgment'). In normal use 'judgement' is more common, though not hugely so. This is also true of Australia. In US and South African usage, 'judgment' is considerably though not overwhelmingly more common. Surprisingly, perhaps, the style guides of both the Guardian and The Times recommend 'judgment'. Perhaps they consider it's not worth maintaining a distinction between a court judgment and a person's judgement.
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word melanagogue
Proximately from French; ultimately from Greek melan- "black", agôg- "drawing, leading".
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word trade mark
The official spelling in UK usage, used by the Patent Office and predominantly in legislation. As you get less formal (looking at all government websites, then all UK sites) it increasingly loses ground to the world-preferred 'trademark'.
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word gravastar
A postulated alternative kind of structure to a standard black hole. Instead of a permeable event horizon it has a thin, dense shell of matter; instead of centring on a point singularity, the vacuum within the shell undergoes phase transition to a Bose-Einstein condensate.
The name is 'gravastar' rather than the expected *'gravistar' to include the vacuum aspect.
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word centinel
Old variant of sentinel.
The smoking centinel at the door interposed in this place, and without taking his pipe from his lips, growled, 'Here's the gal a comin' down.'
—The Old Curiosity Shop
Although this is the book that features Little Nell, she is not the centinel, but the gal.
August 6, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word that
If, dubiously, 'that that' is grammatical as the beginning of a fused-head noun phrase (i.e. if we can say 'That that I said is true' to mean "That which I said is true" = "What I said is true") then we can construct a sentence with four consecutive uses of 'that':
It is evident that that that that nasty man said is true.
In truth, however, the sequence is illusory anyway, since the first and third uses are the subordinator 'that', while the second and fourth are the determinative, which is for all practical purposes a different word.
August 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word had
The maximum sequence achievable using only uses is three: John had eaten more fairy cakes than Mary had had, had anyone stopped to count. It is possible (with a bit of grammatical legerdemain) that this could be exceeded in a sentence using the token 'that' (q.v.).
August 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word whinge
From an Old English hwinsian, which is the base of 'whine' with an -s- suffix (also seen in 'cleanse' and 'bless'). The change to -g- /dʒ/ is a Scottish and Northern development in Middle English.
Going by the OED quotations, it remained a Scottish, Irish, and Northern variant into the twentieth century, and was taken back into Southern English via the familiar Australian use.
August 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word euneirophrenia
*rolls beard, tears chunks out of eyes*
Euoneirophrenia or even evoneirophrenia would be good Greek. The stem is oneir-; it's not a flippin' thematic vowel.
August 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word nostalgia
Kundera 1, Draper 0. Greek nostos "return, homeward journey", related to nosteô "go home, come home", and ne-, nei- "go, come" (with regular omission of medial /s/). First used in English (1756) as a translation of German Heimweh; the English 'homesickness' was also first used in this translation.
August 5, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word goety
black magic, witchcraft, necromancy, sorcery
Goety worketh vpon the dead by inuocation, so called of the noyse that the practisers hereof make about graues.
—John Healey, 1610, translation of and commentary on Augustine of Hippo's City of God
< Greek goēteí�? < goēt- "sorcerer" < go- "cry, wail"
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lasso
Odd that the usual (?) English pronunciations /ləˈsuː/ or /læˈsuː/ are not more commonly reflected in the spelling: 'lassoo' exists (though not yet in OED 1989 edition) but is quite rare.
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word canoe
I wonder why this is pronounced and spelt the way it is? The Haitian, Spanish, and original English was canoa, then English developed various spellings such as cano, canow, canoo. The last of these got established as the pronunciation (too late for the Great Vowel Shift to have caused it); while the anomalous spelling canoe (not from Dutch, which has cano) prevailed. Another such puzzle is lasso.
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word contribute
BrE speakers prefer the stress /-'trɪb-/ to /'kɒn-/ (59% in a 2007 survey for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary).
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word liquorice
BrE speakers strongly prefer the ending /-ɪʃ/ to /-ɪs/ (83% in a 2007 survey for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary).
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word egotistic
BrE speakers strongly prefer a long vowel /ˌiːg-/ in the initial syllable to /ˌeg-/ (81% in a 2007 survey for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary).
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word dissect
BrE speakers strongly prefer a diphthong /daɪ-/ in the initial syllable to /dɪ-/ (89% in a 2007 survey for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary).
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word debris
BrE speakers strongly prefer stress on the initial syllable (either /'deb-/ or /'deɪb-/) to final /-'briː/ (83% in a 2007 survey for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary).
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word applicable
BrE speakers strongly prefer the stress /-'plɪk-/ to /'æp-/ (85% in a 2007 survey for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary).
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word adult
BrE speakers strongly prefer the stress /'æd-/ to /-'dʌlt/ (84% in a 2007 survey for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary).
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word attrit
Wear the Cong down, and he'll quit... Attrit him.
—Atlantic Monthly, 1969
'Attrit' (back-formation from 'attrition') is a recent variant, apparently US military, of the older verb 'attrite' "rub; wear down", which is known from 1726 (1917 in military context).
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word macabre
The OED gives the two pronunciations /məˈkɑːbrə/ and /məˈkɑːb/ in that order for BrE, and the AmE equivalents in the same order. This seems to me to miss the natural third possibility, /məˈkɑːbə/, but I assume they've done some sort of quantitative research and found that few people pronounce it that way. I doubt that many people 'mispronounce' it.
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word aubrietia
The common name of a common purple border plant. The genus name is Aubrieta, named after one Claude Aubriet, but the tendency to pronounce the ending as /-'iːʃə/ is so strong that the Royal Horticultural Society long ago accepted 'aubrietia' as the common name, corresponding to this pronunciation. A frequent alternative spelling is 'aubretia'.
August 4, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mickle
'Mickle' and 'muckle' are dialectal variants of the same word; it is related to Latin magn-, Greek megal-, Sanskrit mah-. Its palatalized form is seen in Tolkien's Michel Delving in the Shire; and a variant of this gave rise to Middle English 'much'.
The confusion of the proverb—treating 'mickle' and 'muckle' as opposites instead of synonyms—is first recorded in the papers of one George Washington, who calls it 'a Scotch addage'.
August 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pied-piping
The attraction by a relative pronoun of other words syntactically related to it to the front of a relative clause: for example 'for whom', 'pictures of whom', 'to avoid which'. Contrast with stranding, which leaves the related words in place.
August 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mundivagant
What what what? It's an adjective: it means "wandering through the world". It could also be a noun, "one who wanders the world"*. Not a verb.
* attested as such in Rinaldo Simonini, Southern Writers, p. 125.
August 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word morrow-speech
A periodic assembly of a guild on the day after a feast-day; a morn-speech.
August 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word acton's law
Usually given in this abbreviated form, but what Lord Acton actually wrote was: 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'
August 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word salamander
'Ella! It speaks! It's a Pict and it speaks!'
'Hold your hush or I'll lambast you with the salamander!' she shouted.
—Joan Aiken, Black Hearts in Battersea
3. Applied to various articles used in fire or capable of withstanding great heat.
b. An iron or poker used red-hot for lighting a pipe, igniting gunpowder, etc.
August 1, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word irrealis
Indicating an unreal situation. English has one verb-form for marking irrealis mood: the first-person and third-person singular 'were', part of the verb 'be'. This is used with verb-subject inversion in conditional clauses ('Were I younger, I would go') and optionally in non-inverted hypothetical conditionals ('If I were/was younger, I would go') and some others (sometimes after 'as if'). Traditionally called the past subjunctive, and indeed historically derived from that.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word plain form
In English grammar, the uninflected verb-form used in a number of clause types: imperative ('Go away'), subjunctive ('We recommend she go away'), and infinitival ('We should go away', 'We want her to go away'). There are some grounds for distinguishing it from the finite, non-third-singular present form ('We go away tomorrow'), even though they are formally identical in all verbs except 'be'. (And there are some grounds for treating them as the same.) English verbs do not have imperative, subjunctive, or infinitive forms: they have a single plain form used in clauses of those types.
The term is also used in Japanese grammar for the ordinary non-polite form.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lynchpin
The OED added this spelling only in 1997 (with first citation from 1988), yet on Google it's almost equally common as 'linchpin' on UK sites. (Worldwide it's lagging at under 3:1.) However, Google Books shows examples in the early nineteenth century, e.g. lynch pin in Catherine Hutton, Oakwood Hall, 1819.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word synechdoche
This is not a variant spelling—that is, not one you could use if you chose to and be correct. The last non-standard spelling the OED records is this one, in 1612: 'By these two blessings (to wit) the sunne & raine meaning al other earthly benefits whatsoever, by the figure synechdoche.' If you write 'al', or 'sunne', or 'raine', by all means write 'synechdoche', but don't expect to get it by living proof-readers.
There's another instance of this from 1551; while in a 1548 source we find 'They imagyne a Sinecdoch to be in thys worde' and 'The subtyll cauillacyons, whereby they fayne Sinecdochine'. That was how they spelt then; it isn't now.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word consenting
n. the obtaining of consent, typically in planning or environmental matters.
Evidently a new use: OED has no use of the noun later than 1703.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ginestra
That's the one. The derivation from Latin to French genêt is comfortingly regular.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word agelast
This word 'ultimately' and the infinitive ending on gelaein hide rather than illuminate the etymology. The root is gel- "laugh", with thematic ending -a- (this puts it into a subclass of verbs and shows up in many derivatives). Then gel-a-st- is an adjectival stem, showing up in gelast-os, -ê, -on "laughable" and the noun gelastês (feminine gelastria) "laugher, sneerer". With the negative prefix it is the adjective agelast-os, -ê, -on "unlaughing". It is this that Rabelais borrowed, dropping the ending as usual to fit it into French.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word malacissation
the act of making something soft or supple: only used in seventeenth-century translations of Bacon, rendering his Latin malacissatio, from Greek μαλακ- "soft". The -iss- is apparently a variant of the Greek -iz- suffix.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ginestra
broom, the plant; the Italian word for it (somehow derived from Latin genista), first attested in English in 1899: 'The glorious ginestra, or mountain broom'.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word triconsonantal
having three consonants: usually referring to those triples that indicate the semantic root of most Semitic words, e.g. Arabic k-t-b "write", q-r-' "read", d-r-s "study", sh-r-b "drink".
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word construct state
a phonologically reduced form of a noun used in Semitic languages for the first element in a noun-noun construction: typically the possessed in a possessed-possessor relationship
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word intransitive preposition
A preposition used on its own, i.e. without a following complement. Examples are the italicized words in 'I walked away', 'I dropped out', 'I looked in for a minute', 'I looked up the phone number', 'I looked it up'. Some prepositions are only used intransitively, e.g. 'ashore', 'downstairs', 'here'. Formerly or traditionally classed as adverbs.
Actually the analogy with intransitive verbs means we should say a preposition is intransitive when it lacks an object (a noun phrase that typically refers to a distinct entity). A preposition with an object is, for example, in the kitchen. Prepositions without objects can have various kinds of complement:
zero: She walked away.
predicative complement: She regards him as a fool.
preposition phrase: She walked out of the room.
clause: She ate before she left home.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word rohirric
Rohirric was related to Westron (the Common Speech), but with a more archaic feel to it. Tolkien translated it using actual Old English (holbytla, théoden, eorl etc.) to indicate this relatedness.
Dwarvish was if anything Semitic in inspiration: the alternation between Khazâd "Dwarves", Khuzdul "Dwarvish", and a possible construct state in Khazad-dûm "Moria" looks a lot like Semitic triconsonantal roots.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word kangaroo
The name comes from the North Queensland language Guugu Yimidhirr, in which it refers to a particular species of kangaroo. Guugu Yimidhirr was the first Australian language to be recorded at all: Captain Cook took notes in 1770. He wrote: 'The animals which I have before mentioned, called by the Natives Kangooroo or Kanguru'; and Banks wrote: 'The largest quadruped was called by the natives kangooroo'.
It is not of course pronounced exactly like the modern English word; in particular the medial -ng- had no /g/ sound, being as in 'singer', not as in 'finger, kangaroo'. This is part of the evidence that the borrowing was from Guugu Yimidhirr into English, not vice versa. Borrowing does seem to have happened into other languages, because writers in the next few years make a bewilderingly contradictory set of statements. Some of them say the word was unknown to the natives (this is believable: as Portuguese words would be unknown in Norway or Poland), while others say the very same word was used by the natives in impossible places like Tasmania. (There is no known relationship between Tasmanian and mainland languages, for one thing.)
It is dubious whether this has any connexion with the popular belief that 'kangaroo' meant "I don't know" and was given in answer to a question about the animal. Why that word? In early years explorers didn't realize how many different languages there were in Australia, but they would have been instantly stumped by virtually any North Queensland word they tried to use in the Sydney area. It's not just kangaroos that would have had entirely different names.
July 31, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sirloin
So named from being the upper (sur "over") part of the loin.
The fiction that it comes from being knighted dates from at least 1655: Thomas Fuller in his Church-history of Britain adds the parenthesis '(so knighted, saith tradition, by this King Henry)' (sc. Henry VIII). It is, however, just a fiction. Swift ascribed the accolade to James I, but presumably not seriously, as it was in his satirical manual Polite Conversation.
July 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word echidna
Echidna is the Greek for "adder, viper". An echidna looks like a hedgehog, not like an adder. Consult a middling-sized Classical Greek dictionary and look up echidna, and run your finger down one further. You will find echinos "hedgehog".
Now for the cover-up. They (the Zoologists' Cabal) then renamed the echidna genera Tachyglossus and Zaglossus, from tachy- "fast", gloss- "tongue", and za- "my, what a"; thus doing the nomenclatural equivalent of looking round with shifty eyes then pointing at its tongue, saying, "Nah, nah, see, when it sticks its tongue out like that to lick up ants, it looks amazingly like an adder sticking its, er, tongue out to, er, smell the air. It does."
I once wrote to Stephen Jay Gould about this, and even broke out into green biro at the crucial point. But did I get any acknowledgement for my pioneering work? Not a sausage.
July 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word overwrought
Jim: Do any of them say anything other than tired and emotional?
Bernard: William Hickey said you were overwrought, Minister.
Jim: Just overwrought, nothing about being drunk.
Bernard: Just overwrought.
Sir Humphrey: Overwrought as a newt actually.
—'The Economy Drive', Yes Minister
July 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lare
The singular of Lares is Lar; that of Penates seems to have been virtually never used, as each household had more than one, but as far as I can tell it was Penas.
July 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word inerrarable
Actually the book says 'sense', but it does indeed say 'inerrarable'. However, you're right that it must be an error: there's no Latin word close enough to derive it from. The only hit for it in Google Books is this passage.
It's a fair stretch to see it as a typo/blunder for 'inenarrable', but I think you're again right—I can't imagine what else it could be. (Ineffable? Ineradicable?) By the way, there's no variant 'inernarrable': that's a scanning error in modern Web copies of Webster 1913. (See its alphabetical order and etymology here.)
July 30, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word resultative
denoting a result: as in the adjectives in 'Mary painted the room blue', 'John hammered the metal flat'. As opposed to depictive ('John wandered the streets naked').
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word do-support
The use of 'do' as the inflected verb in a negative, interrogative, or emphatic clause.
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word parasynthetic
Of a word: derivationally based on a compound or word complex, such as 'red-bearded' = "having a red beard", or 'train-driver" = "one who drives trains". The derivational suffix (-ed, -er) is not attached to a word as such: there are no words *red-beard, *train-drive.
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word expletive
In grammar, a word empty of meaning. These include unintegrated fillers such as 'like', 'I mean', 'sort of', as well as nouns such as the dummy subject pronouns 'it' and 'there'. Swear words can be considered expletive if they're uttered out of habit with no intensifying meaning: from this has arisen the practice (outside grammar) of calling all swear words expletives.
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ascriptive
One of the two kinds of relationship of a predicative complement to its predicand after the verb 'be'. An ascriptive use ascribes a property to the predicand: for example, 'Mary is tall', 'Bill is a linguist'. The other kind of use is the specifying use.
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word specifying
One of the two kinds of relationship of a predicative complement (PC) to its predicand (the subject) after the verb 'be'. A specifying use specifies what the predicand is identical with, and the PC can normally be swapped with the subject: for example, 'Mary is my tutor', 'My tutor is Mary'. The other kind of use is the ascriptive.
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word feague
Etymology and succession of senses unclear. Probably related to 'fake' and (some senses of) obsolete 'feak'. The ultimate origin may be German fegen "sweep, clean up", which has slang senses like "plunder; fix, tamper with", as did English 'fake'.
The source for the ginger-inserting sense is Grose's 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. It looks to me like it's an instance of "fix" (make the horse appear livelier than it actually is).
The word is in use long before this in senses more like "do for, fix the little red wagon of". The variant 'fake' is first known from Vaux's 1812 dictionary of flash language; from these, the modern sense of "forge, counterfeit" arose.
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word grasp the nettle
This expression is often used as if by grasping it firmly you won't suffer the sting you would if you'd lightly brushed it. My father, however, trusting in this, once tried it as a kid. He says he still wakes up at night smarting from it. So I shan't be trying it.
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word hamstring
So have they hamstrung the valour of the Subject by seeking to effeminate us all at home.
—Milton, 1641, Reform.
The earliest known use of the verb, and it neatly illustrates the anomalous past tense and past participle. One would expect 'hamstringed', since it's formed from the noun, and doesn't contain the strong verb 'string'. (Actually that verb doesn't go back to Old English, and is itself a creation of only a century or so before Milton.)
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word affix-clipping
Hunh, a funny term for it, since there's no affix in any of 'a', 'an', 'apple', or (the rare dialectal) 'napple'. I would call it reanalysis. (Or misanalysis or misdivision if you're in judgemental mood; Jespersen called it metanalysis.) Examples of modern English words formed by reanalysis are 'adder', 'apron', 'newt', 'nickname', 'orange', and 'umpire' (but not 'apple'); and at the other end 'cherry' and 'pea'.
July 29, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mentalist
also (slang) a 'mental', a nutter
July 25, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word etymythology
An urban myth about etymology. The most common kind is probably the fanciful derivation of a word from initials—Port Over Starboard Home is the most famous, with variations on Fornication and/or Carnal Knowledge a popular second. It also applies to the fanciful story that a king knighted sirloin, the imagined connexion between Beltane and a Near Eastern god Baal, and probably to the attempt to derive Elephant and Castle from a supposed Infanta of Castile. The term was coined by the linguist Larry Horn.
To be distinguished from folk etymology, or is perhaps a kind of folk etymology. Most folk etymologies turn incomprehensible elements into familiar words, e.g. sparrowgrass from asparagus, bridegroom from bridegome, possibly gooseberry from some other (now uncertain) first element.
July 25, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word infanta
In this case the folk etymology is itself probably a folk etymology. The Elephant and Castle district once housed a smithy belonging to the Cutlers' Company; cutlers used ivory for their knife handles; to indicate this the smithy used a sign of an elephant, which in heraldry is depicted with a castle on its back (an alteration of the howdah); a pub later appeared on the spot and used the elephant and castle sign too; and from this the district was named. There was never an Infanta of Castile in British history, and that story about one is presumably a fanciful invention like those about Port Over Starboard Home or Sir Loin—what the linguist Larry Horn has called etymythology.
July 25, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word norovirus
A group of caliciviruses causing human gastroenteritis. Also seen incorrectly as 'novovirus', but actually named for the town of Norwalk in Ohio, where an outbreak occurred.
July 23, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word rindler wedge
I was looking up the Unruh temperature, which led me to a new thing called a Rindler wedge (a portion of spacetime with a certain coordinate system on it), and trying to understand that, I came across an abstract of a 2000 paper by Guido and Longo called Beta-holomorphic States on C*-algebras and Black Hole Thermodynamics:
A characterization of KMS thermal equilibrium states, at inverse Hawking temperature beta, for the Killing evolution associated with a class of stationary quantum black holes in terms of a boundedness property, namely the localized state vectors should have energy density levels decreasing beta-exponentially. In particular, for a Haag-Kastler net on the Minkowski spacetime, the boundedness property for the boosts (in the Rindler wedge) is shown to be equivalent to the Bisognano-Wichmann property. In general, the boundedness condition is equivalent to a holomorphic property closely related to the one recently considered by Ruelle and D'Antoni-Zsido and shared by a natural class of non-equilibrium steady states.
And lovely though that all sounds, I know when I'm out of my depth.
July 22, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word mould
I was surprised to learn on the weekend that 'mould' "fungal coating" is not related to the 'mould' meaning "earth, soil" but normally encountered in combinations like 'mouldboard' "part of a plough", 'mouldwarp' "mole (animal)", 'grave-mould' "earth of the grave", and 'moulder' "rot, crumble".
As this 'mould' is unfamiliar on its own, 'grave-mould' has sometimes been reinterpreted as containing the other one: indeed, Joyce seems to do so in Ulysses:
Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould.
(The 'mould' meaning "matrix, model, form" is again unrelated. And 'mole' the animal is not related to its alternative name 'mouldwarp'.)
July 22, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word tepe
n. (Archaeology) tell, mound. The word appears to be both Turkish and Kurdish; probably a borrowing from Turkish, where it means 'hill, top, crown, crest, vertex'. In Kurdish it is 'summit, mountain top' according to a Kurmanji Kurdish reference grammar. (The very large number of web hits translating the famous Tepe Gawra site as 'great mound' appear to be taking in each other's washing.)
July 22, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word schmooze
The grammar of this verb has mushroomed in recent years. The OED (1989 edition) only has it in simple intransitive uses, similar to 'chat': 'We would schmoose all afternoon'; 'Brooklynites sit and schmooze'.
Now however a number of argument structures are used. They include:
(a) ditransitive, with reflexive recipient:
'trying to schmooze myself a seat on an earlier flight'
'so I can go and schmooze myself a reference'
(b) monotransitive, reflexive recipient, prepositional phrase as goal:
'I managed to schmooze myself aboard Air Force 2'
'I can usually schmooze myself through most situations.'
'If only I could schmooze myself into success'
(c) simple reflexive:
'One thing I still haven't learned is exactly how to properly schmooze myself at these events'
'We need an afterparty after every one so I can schmooze myself!'
(d) two complemements, one the preposition 'up' and the other an impersonal object:
'How to ... schmooze up a storm'
'But I'm not saying he should schmooze up his case'
(These two differ in that 'storm' is a result, 'case' is a pre-existing object.)
(e) ditto but with a personal affected object:
'I got to schmooze up the people who were British'
'to schmooze up some reasonably well known bloggers to come to Amsterdam'
(f) two complements, preposition 'up' and prepositional phrase headed by 'to' indicating the person (cf. 'cosy up to', 'pal up to'):
'I feel that the main goal of most social mixing is to schmooze up to the other person'
'a chance for the big aerospace companies to schmooze up to their customers'
July 22, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cherrywood
'You have erred, perhaps,' he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs, and lighting with it the long cherrywood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood . . .
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 'The Copper Beeches'
Serendipity. I'm going to start seeing it everywhere now.
'Clay' = "clay pipe" is OED sense 6. a.
July 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word pill
also v.t. (dial. and obs.) peel.
then take 3 hazel stickes or wands of a year groth, pill them fair and white
—Bodleian MS Ashmole 1406, quoted in Diane Purkiss, 2000, Troublesome Things
July 21, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cocked hat
My father never held a tennis racket or a golf club, and he couldn't kick a football or catch a swift pitch, but he bowled whenever he got a chance – tenpins, duckpins, candlepins, cocked hat, and quintet, a difficult game, the rules for which I was told he had helped to make up.
—James Thurber, 1952, 'Gentleman from Indiana', in The Thurber Album
July 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word quintet
My father never held a tennis racket or a golf club, and he couldn't kick a football or catch a swift pitch, but he bowled whenever he got a chance – tenpins, duckpins, candlepins, cocked hat, and quintet, a difficult game, the rules for which I was told he had helped to make up.
—James Thurber, 1952, 'Gentleman from Indiana', in The Thurber Album
July 18, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word knock up
also v.i. practise before a tennis game
July 17, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word fraught
'Fraught' overlaps with 'full' in that you can use them in the same narrow context: 'fraught with danger', 'full of danger'. But you can't use it as if it meant just "full"—as in 'full of beans', 'full up to the top', 'full from eating', 'inflate till it's full', etc. etc.
In fact the original sense "laden, full" scarcely seems to have survived till 1700. Here are the latest applicable prose quotations the OED has for various uses. (Poetic uses of course lingered longer.)
1666: Smaller Vessels that lay fraught for the Streights.
1668: The ships are said to be richly fraughted.
1671: And Waggons fraught with Utensils of War.
1755: Liberty, fraught with blessings as it is, when unabused, has, perhaps, been abused to our destruction.
1786: The little princess had excited her curiosity by the full-fraught pincushion.
1798: From these retreats, he often returned fraughted with light.
1803: He returned to Oxford full fraught with Greek.
The original sense was last used literally in 1668—the absurd claim that it still means this is three hundred and forty years out of date!
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word fraught
I'm pretty certain it doesn't and can't mean "full", which seems to be a completely obsolete sense. The OED doesn't give any post-1800 prose citations for that sense. From then on, it's always 'fraught with danger', 'fraught with difficulty', etc.— the modern senses when used with 'with' (i.e. with a prepositional phrase complement). Checking Google and the British National Corpus confirms this.
Used absolutely (i.e. without a PP complement), it seems to always have the ordinary modern sense "tense, difficult, distressing". This is a recent sense—the unrevised OED (2nd. ed.) only has quotations back to 1966—but it's clearly a very common and standard meaning. BNC quotations include:
The whole fraught episode must signify something.
And then the fraught silence would modulate into conciliatory monosyllable, and back to their peaceful co-existence.
Out of this fraught legal and financial tangle the bureau worker must work with the client to create order and stability.
Obviously as you get a little bit closer to it it gets rather more fraught.
—So this is what the word actually means.
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word galère
From the French for 'galley' "kind of ship", in allusion to a line from Molière's Les fourberies de Scapin: Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère? "What the devil was he doing on that galley?", i.e. How on earth did he come to be in with that bunch of people?
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word geranium
One of several organisms whose common name is a genus name, but not the genus they're in: usually due to the vicissitudes of reclassification or priority. So geraniums are now in genus Pelargonium, whereas genus Geranium contains the cranesbills.
Other examples include the cineraria, the platypus (Platypus are beetles), and the lotus (in family Nelumbonaceae, very far away from Lotus amongst the legumes Fabaceae). Formerly also chrysanthemums fell here, but with some type species legerdemain the genus Chrysanthemum now once more contains garden chrysanthemums, rather than tansy as it once did.
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word zoogloea
I recall from visits made to water-treatment plants in my student days that the passage of water through a filter leads to the build-up of a zoogloea – a translucent jelly-like layer of organic matter.
—New Scientist, 28 June 2008
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word blogofascism
Lee Siegel coined the term "blogofascism" to describe the intolerant name-calling on the net.
—New Scientist, 28 June 2008
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word antagomir
The "drug" being tested is an anti-microRNA, or antagomir, designed to inhibit the action of miR-122, a microRNA found almost exclusively in the liver.
—New Scientist, 28 June 2008
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word anti-microrna
What's more, by adding "anti-microRNA" molecules that bind to and block specific microRNAs, it is also possible to turn on whole sets of genes.
—New Scientist, 28 June 2008
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word microrna
The term microRNA, often shorted to miRNA, was coined in 2001 to describe these tiny regulatory RNAs, and soon dozens of teams – and companies – worldwide were studying them. MicroRNAs have turned out to be the biological equivalent of dark matter, says Ruvkun.
—New Scientist, 28 June 2008
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word nanocompass
Capasso envisages frictionless ball bearings for micromachines on a chip, or the creation of a nanocompass to give mobile devices a sense of direction.
—New Scientist, 28 June 2008
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word nanoelectromechanical
Capasso believes its influence is the reason that MEMS have not been miniaturised as quickly as computer chips – which have no moving parts – and it may block the development of even smaller nanoelectromechanical systems.
—New Scientist, 28 June 2008
If I could pipelink here, I would pipelink 'MEMS' to 'microelectromechanical'.
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word microelectromechanical
Stiction is a growing problem for engineers working with ever tinier devices because it gums up the works of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) – which are increasingly used to make things like airbag sensors – and also affects computer hard drives and other devices with small moving parts.
—New Scientist, 28 June 2008
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word stiction
Lezec is by no means alone in falling foul of what nanotechnologists call "stiction" – the collective term (derived from "static friction") for a variety of physical forces that operate at the sub-micrometre scale.
—New Scientist, 28 June 2008
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word requicken
and his youth
Gave his fame flowerlike fragrance and soft growth
As of a rose requickening, when he stood
Fair in their eye, a flower of faultless blood.
—Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word outlighten
so yet majestical
Above the crowns on younger heads she moves,
Outlightening with her eyes our late-born loves.�?
—Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word influent
So as a fire the mighty morning smote
Throughout her, and incensed with the influent hour
Her whole soul’s one great mystical red flower
Burst,
—Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse
July 16, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word superflux
Shapes that wax pale and shift in swift strange wise,
Voice faces with unspeculative eyes,
Dim things that gaze and glare, dead mouths that move,
Featureless heads discrowned of hate and love,
Mockeries and masks of motion and mute breath,
Leavings of life, the superflux of death—
—Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word lamping
Hath he not bid relume their flameless flowers
With summer fire and heat of lamping song,
—Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse
"Flashing, beaming, resplendent" and perhaps suggested by Italian lampante, according to the OED.
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word ravin
With tender hours and tempering dew to cure
The hunger and thirst of day’s distemperature
And ravin of the dry discolouring hours,
—Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse
The word is cognate with 'rapine', but I'm not sure of the exact sense here: rapine; or voracity; or plunder.
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word deathward
Yea, but what then? albeit all this were thus,
And soul smote soul and left it ruinous,
And love led love as eyeless men lead men,
Through chance by chance to deathward
—Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse
Actually an instance of the circumfix to ...-ward.
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word new-fangleness
But all is turn’d, thorough my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness;
And she also to use new-fangleness.
—Wyatt
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word liquefaction
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
—Herrick, 'Upon Julia's Clothes'
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word trepidation
But trepidation of the spheares,
Though greater farre, is innocent.
—Donne, 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning'
The touching of the Ptolemaic spheres one upon the other produced the music of the spheres.
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word russetly
Though Pyramids decay
And Kingdoms, like the Orchard
Flit Russetly away
—Emily Dickinson
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word cedarn
But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
—Coleridge, 'Kubla Khan'
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the list poetics-2
Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse contains so many lovely compounds that I can't list them all separately: starry-sighted, fever-fit, storm-struck, gold-eyed, sharp-breathed, storm-star, wind-wearied, wind-foot, sunbeam-smitten, opal-wise, April-coloured, song-tree, rose-white, flower-named, storm-reddening, wine-bright, south-risen, girl-star, amber-coloured, blood-bright, love-light, fire-white, motion-moulded, false-face, time-forgotten, time-wandering, honey-hearted, wind-hollowed, moonbeam-coloured, sun-stricken, flower-soft, blossom-scented, sweet-souled, life-compelling, late-born, subtler-eyed, blood-compelling, star-quickening, star-clothed, new-blown, wind-worn, grey-grown, water-way, foam-flowers, sea-roses, death-stricken, new-mated, sea-scented, land-roses, sun-satisfied, rose-fashion, branch-knotted, star-crossed, love-wounded, thunder-hours, tongue-stricken, fuller-feathered, rhyme-bells, dream-determined, heart-sundering, foam-paven, wave-ridge, wave-breach, . . .
Here too belong footnoted his many negatives: distemperature, disorbed, innavigable, unspeculative, discrowned, incognisable, immitigable, unbewildered, unswallowed, awless, plumeless, unkissed, mishallowed, insubmissive, misborn, unenamoured, unsunken, . . .
And that's just the prelude and first canto.
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word latter
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
—Tennyson, 'The Kraken Wakes'
In OED sense 3. a.: "last"; used here in reference to future time. It is odd that the OED doesn't use this line as a quotation for this sense.
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word polypus
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
—Tennyson, 'The Kraken Wakes'
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word millennial
above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
—Tennyson, 'The Kraken Wakes'
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word uninvaded
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth
—Tennyson, 'The Kraken Wakes'
Also grammatically interesting: the noun phrase 'his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep' is the topicalized cognate object of 'sleepeth'.
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word sovran
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
—Keats, 'Ode on Melancholy'
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word bee-mouth
and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
—Keats, 'Ode on Melancholy'
July 15, 2008
qroqqa commented on the word droop-headed
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
—Keats, 'Ode on Melancholy'
July 15, 2008
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