qroqqa has adopted no words, looked up 0 words, created 29 lists, listed 2600 words, written 1591 comments, added 0 tags, and loved 0 words.
Comments for qroqqa
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Thank you for the catch on "hotrus siccus," qroqqa. Pardon my dyslexic typing.
July 8, 2014
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bilby misses you. I do, too.
August 10, 2012
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Dear qroqqa,
Thank you for your comment on curry. I especially like the bit about the "mediaeval eggcorn."
Yours truly,
ruzuzu
January 19, 2011
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"qroqqa has added 24 lists containing 2,235 words, 227 comments, 227 tags, 2 favorites, and 0 pronunciations."
September 5, 2010
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We miss you and your illimitable founts of etymological wisdom!
May 24, 2010
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Would you pronounce your username?
February 28, 2010
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October 7, 2009
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Thanks for your suggestion (a week and a half ago!) regarding my question about how to refer the "singular" of a pluralis tantem. I think I understand the notion of a "bound base", but I am not sure that applies to units like *scissor, *hijink, and *trouser, since the -s in the pluralis tantum is not really an affix in the way that dis- is in discombobulate, but a grammatical ending (or perhaps this distinction is irrelevant?). In other words, when we remove the ending from scissors, we still have a hypothetical noun that acts like real nouns in certain ways, notably, it can serve as a verb ("She scissored her way through the crowd") or a modifier ("The scissor pieces lay on the table, waiting to be assembled"). Would lexeme work in such cases?
March 9, 2009
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Hi, Qroqqa! I am looking for a way to refer to the hypothetical singular form of a pluralis tantem, e.g. *scissor, *underpant, *hijink. Are these lexemes? I figured that you would be the Wordie to ask about this.
February 3, 2009
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Happy New Year qroqqa, there's only us on Wordie!
January 1, 2009
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I just wanted to say that I really appreciate your citations and contributions to this site and I'm glad you're here.
August 29, 2008
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For the record, qroqqa is about the only Maltese word I know.
August 15, 2008
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Time for a cookie! Perhaps a Maltese treat for us here?
August 15, 2008
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Hi qroqqa. I'd appreciate a Maltese miaow here.
July 12, 2008
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qroqqa, thank you for your help on the braggadocio recipe. Can I just ask you to use a narrower definition of "English word"? Risotto and espresso are Italian, Morocco is a country, and Lobelia is borrowed from the scientific name.
I can't believe no wasn't there yet!
Thank you!
July 8, 2008
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Yay! You know, there is a secret subgroup of biologists here on Wordie. But it's so secret that I can't talk about it.
July 3, 2008
Comments by qroqqa
qroqqa commented on the word Digitization
This is the preferred word worldwide over 'digitalization', by a factor of several to one, increasing to over ten to one on UK sites (there comparing -is- spellings).
March 18, 2010
qroqqa commented on the word National Grammar Day
Oh great. Grammar advice from someone who thinks you have to use 'whom' for an object. I am not even mildly curious what other ignorant garbage these idiots are propagating, but I am sad that they worked out how to line the crayons up to make a website.
March 4, 2010
qroqqa commented on the word rebar
'Hey, Crisis! You can snap rebar with your bare hands, right?'
'If it's made of styrofoam.'
—Doonesbury. Crisis is a wrestler on USO tour in Afghanistan.
March 4, 2010
qroqqa commented on the word ei
Not "no" in Finnish, contrary to the previous comment. In Finnish negation is an inflected verb: en "I do not", emme "we do not", ei "he, she, or it does not", and so on.
February 28, 2010
qroqqa commented on the word vaginalatrous
Women are like banks, boy, breaking and entering is a serious business. Give me your word you're not vaginalatrous?
—Joe Orton, Entertaining Mr Sloane, Act I
January 12, 2010
qroqqa commented on the word autocatalytically
If humans weren't using and refining language I would like to know what they were doing with their autocatalytically increasing brains
—D. Falk, quoted in Jean Aitchison, 1996, The Seeds of Speech
January 12, 2010
qroqqa commented on the word thrid
They did not speak much more, but thridded their way through many a bosky dell, whose soft green influence could not charm away the shock and the pain in Margaret's heart, caused by the recital of such cruelty; a recital too, the manner of which betrayed such utter want of imagination, and therefore of any sympathy with the suffering animal.
—Mrs Gaskell, North and South
November 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ij
There are various cross-relating conditions here. Does Dutch ij get alphabetized as a separate letter, after iz? This is how Welsh and (until recently) Spanish treated their digraphs. Did Croatian keep its nj and lj on a single piece of lead type? (Did Spanish and Welsh?) The most unusual feature of ij is its capitalization. Apparently CHamorro optionally does this: the digraph ch is capitalized as either Ch or CH.
October 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ij
There must be some better technical term for this, since it's not actually a ligature, but I don't know what it is. Compound letter? The capital form of ij is IJ, as in the IJsselmeer. (Unicode calls it a ligature, I see, but that doesn't make it one.)
October 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pied piping
Example of obligatory pied-piping:
These are the books most of whose covers I have designed.
October 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word substitution salva veritate
Example of opaque context:
(1) Reagan believed that Beatrix lived in The Hague.
(2) Reagan believed that the eldest daughter of Juliana lived in The Hague.
On the usual reading (de dicto) (1) and (2) can be true or false independently of each other; however there is the possibility of a so-called de re reading in which they are still truth-functionally equivalent, if we focus on the referential content of beliefs rather than on what the believer would say.
October 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mcgurk effect
McGonald effect would have been apt.
October 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dexterity
also n. (rare) the future, esp. in phrase persevered for dexterity. Example:
I spent my first full day in Korea at the tomb of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, yearning for the Red Sun of all mankind and seeing him persevered for dexterity.
—At Last, At Last My Visit to the DPRK!
October 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word antihelmintic
And indeed of anthelminthic, the best-formed derivative from the Greek. The prefix anti- assimilates to a following h.
Conceivably, the change of one of the two <th>'s to <t> could be an authentic reflection of Greek phonetics: Grassmann's law. If the ancient Greeks themselves ever used this word, it would have dissimilated one of the <th>'s. But it's not in Liddell & Scott so I'm afraid that makes it a mere spelling mistake.
October 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word remover
The industry association is, I noticed today, the British Association of Removers; but I don't think I've ever seen this word before. (I exclude its bound use with different meaning in such forms as paint remover.)
October 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word carapace
Pronounced kærəˈpɑːtʃi by someone on Radio 3 the other night, to my utter astonishment.
October 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word avast
What part of speech be avast? Karl 'Peg-leg' Hagen be concludin' 'tis a defective verb.
September 28, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word jaga
Apakah Anwar pengWordie baru?
September 28, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word shoreditch
Shoreditch was home to the Theatre and the Curtain, the first two theatres in (post-Roman) England. He and his whole company would have had to refresh themselves after a hard evening's acting.
September 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dilectification
Some witty person wrote a poem about these confabulations and called it "Grettir's Faring," adding many jests of his own for the dilectification of men.
—Grettir's saga, 1914 translation by G.H. Hight.
This is hapax legomenon, possibly an error by Hight for 'delectation'.
September 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word trowel
We have had nothing from the Liberal Party. All we had was Black Jack McEwen trowelling on the tariff protection while he was kidding farmers he was representing them, and Liberal Party Treasurers sitting up like slugs while being handed speeches by Treasury officials. They could not even read the stuff, much less comprehend it.
—Treasurer Paul Keating, Australian House of Representatives, 26 May 1988
September 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gutser
Ah, Internets! It so happens I can: Thursday, 26 May 1988, about 3.30 in the afternoon, Mr Keating's final paragraph on p. 3114 of Hansard. That says 'a gutser', but it's been edited at least to the extent of adding explanations in brackets that Keating wouldn't have said.
September 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gutser
Where you all come aguster is, over here we think we're born to rule you. And let me tell you this, it's been ingrained in me from childhood, I think my mission in life is to run you.
— Paul Keating
Almost all hits for "come aguster" on the Web are this Keating quote; and there are only a few for "come a guster". The original expression is "come a gutser". It's not clear from this what Keating originally said, and whether 'guster' is a genuine variant or a spreading typo meme.
September 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word baum
Cognate with English 'beam' ("rafter") and the "tree" component of 'hornbeam'. Also with Dutch 'boom', borrowed as the wooden thingy on a ship (and presumably thus the stretchy microphone), plus in the snake 'boomslang'.
September 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word livelihood
Not, in its principal sense, a compound of either 'lively' or the suffix '-head'. It's 'life' + the word giving modern English 'load', 'lode': thus meaning "provisions for life".
In the 1500s a transparent homophone meaning "liveliness" was created.
September 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word kulmakerroin
Nope: it's mathematical slope, from kulma "angle" + kerroin "coefficient, multiplier", which is from kertoa "multiply" (with mutation of t in a closed syllable).
September 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word candlebra
No, Vanessa, that is not how we do a Brazilian wax. My apologies, modom, Vanessa is new here.
September 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word meter
No particular manufacture is carried on here; the staple commodity is malt, of which large quantities are made: this place is a general reservoir for the major part of that article made within 25 or 30 miles, particularly from Saffron Walden in Essex, Newport, and villages adjacent; it is deposited in the care of persons called meters, and disposed of by them to factors or brewers in London for a small commission of 1 1/2d. per quarter; it is then put on board barges and sent to the metropolis.
—from a description of Bishop's Stortford in the Universal British Directory, 1791
September 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word women aid lorry strangling probe
The secret here is that it's not a \lorry strangling probe, it's a lorry \strangling probe. Nor is it a lorry strangling a \probe, aided by women.
September 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word inaudible
Someone must have coined it, and this is believable. This and 'amazement' are just the sort of thing that would be readily understood by his audience, and count towards the huge total of words he supposedly introduced. 'Audible' is known from 1529, and 'invisible' is ancient; someone must have been first to make the analogy, so why not the Bard?
September 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word alligator
This obviously can't have been coined by Shakespeare. Something close to the modern spelling is first known in his works: the First Folio has 'Allegater' (for the 'Aligarta' of the first edition). From this time (early to mid 1600s) classical-looking spellings with an apparent suffix -tor replaced older spellings with Spanish -o or -a. (The word is actually from el lagarto "the lizard", Classical Latin lacerta.)
September 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nerveless
How's this for an autantonym? 'Nerveless' seems to have swung right round to become a term of praise: "full of courage" instead of "devoid of courage". Almost all the leading Google hits for uses of the word are in this sense (and in a sporting context). I'd never heard this sense before now, and would have thought it a grossly insulting misapplication, almost a malapropism. But apparently this is how it's used now.
August 28, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word doubt
I've heard of some cargo cult etymology that connects them. The Latin dubit- is actually a frequentative of a contracted form of du-hib-, i.e. (allowing for Old Latin weak vowel changes) du- "two" + hab- "have", thus "have two things in mind". Or at least that is vastly more likely.
August 28, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word leucipottomy
The word from well-formed Greek would be 'leuchippotomy' using the "cut" root, or 'leuchippoglyphy' using the "carve" root.
I have to disagree with the comment about -tomy: the range of meanings of the Greek tem-/tom-/tm- root is quite wide and includes the required "cutting into". Many medical terms include -ec-tomy with a separate preposition "out", but plain -tomy as in 'neurotomy' can mean "cutting (through)".
August 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ro-ro
Also known as ro-ro-ro, or 'Roll-on Roll-off Roll-over'.
August 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ყ
Ooh! Ooh! Puts on tinfoil hat with the word 'pedant' picked out in drawing pins. It's an ejective voiceless uvular stop. Ejectives aren't plosives.
August 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word used to
Around 1800 you will find this in transitional forms: so-and-so uses to do something, is used to (= is accustomed to). Their usage is to do it. I don't know when the two words fused and it became pronounced with the st.
August 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word galileo
I understood (vaguely read/recalled) Saddam himself disfavoured the toponymic surname al-Takriti for some political reason: he didn't want to be identified too closely with a local clan, or some such.
August 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word monitoree
A pupal stage on the way to a Junior Treasury Counsel in the UK. Details here (warning: PDF)
August 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word u nu
U Nu's name was actually Nu. U is just a male title. For some reason Nu and Thant (UN secretary-general) are always mentioned with their U.
August 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word marionated
Briefly overhead in a supermarket at lunchtime: staff member describing to customer that whatever-foodstuff-it-was was marionated.
String beans? Stingray?
August 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word arsenic
* changes mind about going to PossibleUnderscore's dinner party *
August 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mandatory
I can't play sound clips, but if it's just mænˈdeɪtəri, I would assume that's a common pronunciation, and surely there's nothing strange about it. Myself, I say ˈmændətri with initial stress, which is probably the older pronunciation—mine usually are, when I look them up.
August 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thick skin
pachyderm
August 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word kenning
Also (archaic), the amount of distance that can be seen across:
They tooke a path that steepe upryght
Rose darke and full of foggye mist. And now they were within
A kenning of the upper earth, when Orphye did begin
Too dowt him least shee followed not, and through an eager love
Desyrous for too see her, he his eyes did backward move.
Immediatly shee slipped backe.
—Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, 1567
August 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pasque flower
I know. It fair gets your squippleplunch up, doesn't it?
August 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word claptrap
As a publisher once told H. L. Mencken, “there are four kinds of books that never, under any circumstances, lose money in the United States—first, detective stories, secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly debauched by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism, and other claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.�?
—via 3 Quarks Daily
My god! The plot of my bestseller drops into my lap like a ripe plum. The ghost of Lincoln debauches Nancy Drew.
August 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word prograde
The direction of orbit is known for roughly a dozen exoplanets (planets outside our solar system). This is the only example with a retrograde orbit. All others are prograde; they orbit in the same direction as the spin of their star.
—New exoplanet orbits 'backwards' (BBC, 12 August 2009)
August 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dezinkhornifistibulate
Since which time I retired myself among the merrie muses, and by the worke of my pen and inke, have dezinkhornifistibulated a fantasticall Rapsody of dialoguisme, to the end that I would not be found an idle drone among so many famous teachers and professors of noble languages, who are very busy daily in devising and setting forth new bookes & instructing our English gentry in this honourable citie of London.
—John Elliot or Eliote, Ortho-Epia Gallica, 1593
August 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word brownfield
transitive use of sprawl!
August 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word razbliuto
telofy: the English word for that feeling of embarrassment is 'squippleplunch'. Guys, add it to your lists, it's a kingpin.
August 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pasque flower
Originally passe flower, a flower that surpasses others; consciously re-formed by Gerard because it flowers at Easter.
August 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gallow
The singular noun occurs in a few fixed phrases like 'gallow-bird' (which the OED has no instances of, but Google Books has) and 'gallow-tree'. But probably these date from the times when 'gallow' could be singular; they're not quite the same process as the singularization in 'scissor blade', 'trouser leg' etc.
August 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word incubus
In 1899 Sidney Sime, later to be the Dunsany illustrator, created an understated masterpiece of erotic horror, depicting the incubus in action.
August 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word great house
fbharjo's brains must be preserved for posterity - anyone got a canopic jar?
August 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word angel ranks andor sacred rule
hierarchy
August 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word three-staked instrument of torture
travel via travail
August 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word scrooge
So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, 'Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.
—The Wind in the Willows, ch.1
August 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sea dew
That's my baby.
August 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word winged foot
Is this sneakiness? The dactyl in a pterodactyl is a foot, but doesn't mean "foot".
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word camel chicken
Aha. I was running through words I knew containing struth- (none, it seemed), when I was suddenly illuminated that avi-struth- could give 'ostrich' with enough Old French mangling.
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word recombination
Something that had long puzzled me was cleared up last night by a remark in Guth's The Inflationary Universe: the combination of nuclei and electrons 300 000 years after the Big Bang is called recombination simply because that is the standard term in (terrestrial) plasma physics, where of course scientists start with ordinary combined matter and ionize it. There is no implication in cosmology that the plasma had ever been combined before.
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word striped cloth
I keep thinking that two words in the clue must mean two root morphemes in the answer, but I'm being misled. I believe this is tabby (ultimately from a suburb of Baghdad)?
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word stand opposite to
withstand works semantically, but it's only a semi-riverhorse
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word first glue
protocol, and I can't even remember how it gets to the present sense . . . something about labels glued to codices, I think.
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word salt conceiving
halogen
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word subsequent mowing
aftermath
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word goblin
As a shadowtailed riverhorse, I think this is cobalt - or is it nickel? Both in fact. Well, well.
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word off comb
oakum
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hashish-eater
This etymology is widely questioned these days, but I've never found any of the alternatives given convincing.
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word �?�
From a Chinese name with segments li, which is the original Korean pronunciation. As l and r belong to the same phoneme (with l the initial allophone), this is variously transcribed Lee, Li, Rhee etc. In Southern Korean dialects, however, initial l has disappeared before i and become n elsewhere: thus also Yi.
Bill Poser explains this in much greater detail on Language Log.
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word phonophore
Aha. I thought it must have been you, because the programming of it automatically would be disproportionately difficult to the probability of doing it in the wrong circumstances. It would be a useful feature, but not worth doing.
August 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word phonophore
Now I could swear I wrote that word with tone numbers - thus sheng 1 pang 2 zi 4 but joinedupical - so is this site now automagically converting pinyin display?
August 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word serekh
In Egyptology, a box containing the pharaoh's Horus-name and a representation of the palace.
August 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word phonophore
The sound-bearing element (shēngpángzì) of a Chinese character. Details here.
August 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word allergen
I only noticed the other day that 'allergen' was haplological.
August 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word الإنكليزية
It appears to be the Arabic for either 'the Englishwoman' or 'England' (I forget what the Arabic for the latter is, but this would fit).
August 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pubic
This typo also occurs in Sarah Waters' Fingersmith.
August 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pled
But whenever I pled for a glimpse he would again shake his head:
—Max Beerbohm, '"Savonarola" Brown'
An unusual example of a careful writer of England using this form.
August 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word magnoperator
I wrote at once a respectful note to the magnoperator, telling him that if he would do me the honour to call on me at the Charing Cross Hotel I could show him some things that might interest him.
—Max Beerbohm, 'Felix Argallo and Walter Ledgett'
August 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bi-hemispheric
Darkness and confinement in a glare of bi-hemispheric publicity—with the beginnings of hideously vast wealth thrown in—were too much for Argallo's inveterate stoicism.
—Max Beerbohm, 'Felix Argallo and Walter Ledgett'
August 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word encomiastic
Yesterday an eager homunculus named L— struck foot across this threshold, sputtering encomiastic cackle.
—Max Beerbohm, 'Felix Argallo and Walter Ledgett' (in a letter purporting to be written by Meredith)
August 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word shawnness
. . . the small lips compressed into a short tight line by the soul's need to govern its sensibility; the sallowness, the shawnness, the close-cropped iron-grey hair . . .
—Max Beerbohm, 'Felix Argallo and Walter Ledgett'
This is hapax legomenon. The OED furnishes no clue what it might mean; yet the editions on Google Books agree on this reading.
August 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mispraise
I watched them as they passed slowly out of sight up the marble staircase which I had mispraised.
—Max Beerbohm, 'Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton'
August 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word salmi
He was smoking a cigarette, with an untasted salmi of something on his plate and a half-empty bottle of Sauterne before him; and he was quite silent.
—Max Beerbohm, 'Enoch Soames'
August 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word prosaist
To the painters he was respectful, even humble; but for the poets and prosaists of 'The Yellow Book,' and later of 'The Savoy,' he had never a word but of scorn.
—Max Beerbohm, 'Enoch Soames'
August 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tally
The first financial derivatives. Secure for much the same reason prime number encryption is. The abolition of tallies caused the burning of the Houses of Parliament. 'You promised you'd tell us about pointed sticks.'
Full fascinating story told at Exchequer tallies at Economist's View
July 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word in-migration
Finally, cities were particularly unhealthy, with death rates there exceeding birth rates by a large margin – without in-migration, European cities before 1850 would have disappeared.
—Economist's View
July 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sheba
I knew one who began black and unfluffy but was rather salt-and-peppery and fluffy with age.
July 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word re-up
Military sense, probably from 're-sign-up', in Doonesbury.
July 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bubbies
I will never come back. For the white bubbies and the silk stockings of your Actresses excite my genitals.
—Dr Johnson: the original of his remark on visiting Garrick backstage, as told by Hume to Boswell. In his Life Boswell rephrased it more decently to mention bosoms and amorous propensities.
July 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hunker down
I suspect it can go either way. Look at a clear example where the two prepositions are in the same PP: We pushed the furniture up against the wall. (There's no verb complex 'push up' with this sense.) The PP can only be fronted as a whole:
Up against the wall we pushed the furniture.
* Against the wall we pushed the furniture up.
Now compare 'prop up' + 'against':
? Up against the wall we propped the ladder.
Against the wall we propped the ladder up.
Both work for 'hunker up', for me. There's also a pronunciation test that shows both possibilities. Intransitive prepositions (such as particles) take a separate accent:
This is the \chimney that I put it up.
This is the \/office where I picked it \up.
This is the \wall where I hunkered up.
This is the \/wall where I hunkered \up.
July 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word defended
In legal terminology this can be an adjective, as demonstrated by its occurrence as complement of 'become': 'a claim that has become defended', 'if the proceedings become defended', 'debts which become defended'.
July 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word parthenophobia
I'm trying to find some theoretical justification for claiming that fear of the Parthenon would be morphologically more complex - such as Parthenonophobia. Is the final -on the genitive plural? Perhaps if I was less drunk I could look it up and think about it.
July 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word yod-dropping
Inevitable unless the yod has already fused with the preceding consonant: məˈtʃʊə, ˈtʃuːzdeɪ, 'dʒʊərɪŋ; and in earlier times 'ʃʊgə, 'neɪtʃə.
July 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list postpositive-adjectives
Elect and designate. There are also a couple (laureate and consort) that are historically of this type but which today are nouns.
July 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word postalization
The most obvious result of tariff rebalancing and competition in long-distance and international markets has been the postalisation of telecommunications prices. The term ‘postalisation’ refers to the trend towards flatter pricing levels which are increasingly distance-insensitive, mimicking the pricing of old-fashioned postal services which impose a flat rate for delivery of a standard letter, regardless of whether it’s going across the street or across the country.
—ITU website
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word currant
The name is from Corinth in Greece, and these were originally the dried grapes, and first called raisins of Corinth. In the sixteenth century the name was misapplied to the newly-introduced red and black kin of gooseberries. I am eating redcurrants as I type.
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fon
The Fon of Bum ascends to my favourites list up there with the Na of Wa and the Akond of Swat. And how pleasant to know the Kingdom of Bum is governed with the help of the wise deliberations of the Bum Council.
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fond
Originally the past participle of a now obsolete verb 'fon', whose original meaning was "lose flavour, become insipid", later extended to foolishness of various kinds, in particular foolish doting upon something: whence the modern sense, with the foolishness unimplied. Probably related to 'fun'.
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word writ
I was about to say that wasn't the past participle 'writ', but then I thought I'd better check the etymology. No, it's not the past participle, it's an original noun in ablaut relation with the verb. The noun is also familiar in 'Holy Writ'.
In fact, more likely in 'holy writ', the figurative extension.
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word paroxysmal
VEI 5 on the Volcanic Explosivity Scale, between cataclysmic (VEI 4) and colossal (VEI 6).
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word aardvark
Moriarty: Sapristi brains! You think of everything.
Grytpype-Thynne: Not everything. Sometimes I don't think of aardvarks.
Moriarty: You mustn't be so careless. After all, aardvarks never killed anybody.
—Goon Show episode 'The Lost Emperor'
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word writ
The past participle 'writ' remains in modern awareness because of Milton's line 'New presbyter is but old priest writ large.'
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ununbium
officially named copernicium in July 2009
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word copernicium
Element 112, symbol Cn, previously known by the IUPAC temporary name ununbium. (The symbol originally proposed was Cp, but this was rejected as it had once been used for the claimed element cassiopeium.)
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word scrod
No-one's done the taxi driver joke yet? (Yes, I know dontcry was hinting at it. But this is a journal of record.)
July 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word police
Frederick. Gentleman, I beg you will bestow from your superfluous wants something to relieve the pain, and nourish the weak frame, of an expiring woman.
Count. What police is here! that a nobleman's amusements should be interrupted by the attack of vagrants.
—Mrs Inchbald, Lovers' Vows, 1798
Police? The OED gives it an obsolete variant of modern 'policy', but I don't know what sense of 'policy' this is. My best guess is also-obsolete 3. 'A device, a contrivance, an expedient; a stratagem, a trick.'
N.B. (1) Note odd use of singular address 'Gentleman'. (2) Frederick is begging on behalf of his mother, so it's not as odd as it sounds; on the other hand, she's not in the scene, so perhaps the Count thinks it is.
July 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word lyman-alpha blob
a picture and explanation of a Lyman-alpha blob
July 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word homoclef
Or would follow if clef was Greek. Homocleide follows a little more closely. Ignore me, I'm just being picky.
July 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hive up
Where a company wants to take over the trade of another company it may do so by first acquiring the company’s shares and then transferring the trade to itself. This is commonly known as a hive up.
—HM Revenue & Customs, guidance on Corporation Tax
also a prepositional verb, and also of course hyphenated 'hive-up' as a noun
July 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word billion
Also means "billion" in French, viz 1 000 000 000 000. Also means "thousand million" in US English.
July 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word due
A syntactically unusual adjective in that it can take a noun phrase complement ('We are due a refund'). This suggests it is actually a preposition. In fact, one of the tests for preposition vs adjective shows it is both, in different senses. The test is that when an adjective heads a preposed adjunct ('Afraid of the dark, she . . .') it has to be predicated of the following subject, but with prepositions it doesn't have to ('Ahead of her in the dark, she noticed . . .')
When 'due' means 'owed' it is an adjective because it requires predication of the subject:
Due a £1000 tax refund, we can finally afford that new sofa.
* Due a £1000 tax refund, that new sofa looks like a bargain.
But when it means 'because of' it is a preposition because it doesn't:
Due to a £1000 tax refund, that new sofa looks like a bargain.
(I'd never understood Fowler's condemnation of one to-him recent use of 'due', and just now I realized that this is probably it, the non-predicated use, so I must go back and read that bit in Modern English Usage to see if by George I've got it.)
Note that preposition 'due' requires a following PP headed by 'to'. Adjective 'due' can also be followed by a 'to'-PP: 'the refund/respect due to us'.
July 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word worth
A syntactically highly unusual adjective in that it takes a noun phrase as a complement, as in 'worth £1000'. The very fact that it does suggests it is actually a preposition.
Two pieces of evidence against its being a preposition:
Heading a preposed adjunct, it needs to be predicated of the subject of the following clause:
* Worth a million bucks, the good times were set to roll.
(cf. With a million bucks in our pocket, the good times were set to roll. - Prepositions can do this, adjectives can't.)
It can't be fronted (pied-piped) along with a relative pronoun:
This was less than the amount which she thought the land was worth.
* This was less than the amount worth which she thought the land was.
July 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word there needs to be
(1) The dummy subject is a different word from the location (though etymologically of course they're the same). We can say 'There's one here' - we don't mean it's there. Emphatic 'There's one', pointing at it, uses location 'there', not existential 'there'. The existential one has no semantic content, it's just a subject for a verb that needs one.
And though both are traditionally called adverbs, in fact the dummy subject is a pronoun and the location word is (probably, arguably) a preposition.
(2) I have no idea of the grammar of 'need(s) be' - it's always mystified me. Certainly frozen, anyway, some subjunctive construction or something, so not relevant to the ordinary grammar of Present-day English.
July 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word displaced subject
(I should define this here because googling brings up mostly non-grammatical instances.) Term used in the CGEL for the phrase that can be equated to a dummy subject 'there', e.g.
There are three men in the garden.
In most cases it might have been the subject instead:
Three men are in the garden.
It has been displaced from subject position across the verb, but occurs before the complements and adjuncts ('in the garden'). This distinguishes it from the extraposed subject of a dummy 'it' clause, which is extraposed past the complements as well:
It is remarkable to me that men are in our garden.
July 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word there needs to be
How does it get this way? Consider first a straightforward construction of subject + verb + complement: A cherry is on the cupcake. We can turn this into an existential by introducing the pronoun subject 'there' and displacing the former subject beyond the verb (but still before the complement): There is a cherry on the cupcake. (The CGEL accordingly calls the post-verbal phrase 'a cherry' the displaced subject.)
Now what if this situation does not currently obtain, but should—it is needful? Who or what needs? Well, logically, the cherry doesn't need anything. I might need a new job, a wee, or to be home by seven, but the cherry scarcely 'needs' to be anywhere, even if there needs to be a cherry on the cupcake. So the subject of 'need', when we introduce it, is impersonal or unspecified. Logically: NEED there is a cherry on the cupcake.
Verbs require subjects, however, so the pronoun 'there' raises up to subject of 'need' (which is called a raising verb), leaving a gap in the subject position of 'is': There needs _ is a cherry on the cupcake.
Now 'is' needs to case-mark its subject, but it can't do that to a gap, so it has to be changed to the non-case-marking plain form be. Also, 'need' is lexically marked as taking 'to' before an infinitival clause ('need her to go' as opposed to 'make', which doesn't, 'make her go'). So the final output with a raised subject of 'need' is: There needs to be a cherry on the cupcake.
July 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ptarmigan
An utterly pointless <p>, by confusion with Greek pter-, to which it is completely unrelated. It's from Scots Gaelic tàrmachan, itself of unclear origin.
July 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ashplant
Well well, three Wordies already listing this as a specifically Joycean word. I just noticed it in Portrait. A stick made of ash, used as either a walking-stick or a cudgel. The oddity is of course 'plant' in this sense.
It turns out however that this is close to the etymological sense of 'plant', which was a sapling, seedling, shoot etc., before being generalized to vegetation of any size or age. The OED says this is now specifically Irish and largely confined to 'ash-plant'.
July 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word manchise
hybrid between a management contract and a franchise
July 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ebb
'I get the impression that all it does is ebb, rather than flow'
—interviewee who thought they were being complimentary about a firm, but who will get out bottoms sued off if I don't swap them round before it goes to print.
July 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word game
A handful of Texas utility companies, led by TXU Corp., are gaming the state's electricity market, using the same types of schemes exposed in the California and Enron crises to reap windfall profits at the expense of Texas consumers and smaller competitors, according to Texas Commercial Energy (TCE).
—Business Wire, 3 Feb. 2004
It's that verb again.
July 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word notwithstanding
An unusual preposition in that its complement can either precede it or follow it, without any significant distinction in meaning or grammar: 'your objections notwithstanding' = 'notwithstanding your objections'.
Contrast with 'aside' and 'apart', where the premodified and postmodified patterns are different, and with 'ago' which can only be premodified. (So also 'three weeks on', where the premodification has a different meaning to the usual use of 'on'.)
July 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word preposition phrase
Term used by CGEL instead of the much more usual 'prepositional phrase', by analogy with 'noun phrase', 'adjective phrase' etc.
July 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word aside
As a preposition this has an unusual complementation pattern. Normally it's intransitive: 'We laid the papers aside.' A postposed complement is always a preposition phrase headed by 'from': 'Aside from that . . .' (and the NP complements of 'from' seem pretty restricted too). It can take an NP complement, of rather limited types (possibly idiomatically fixed), but these precede it: 'that aside', 'joking aside', ?'these problems aside'. It is similar in these patterns to 'apart'.
July 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ago
Problem of classification: preposition or adverb? A construction like 'three weeks ago' is similar to 'three weeks later', where 'later' is the head adverb and 'three weeks' is a premodifier. However, in all such unequivocally adverbial senses, the modifier is optional. Since 'ago' can't be used on its own, the CGEL takes it to be a preposition and the NP 'three weeks' to be its preposed complement.
July 7, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word explodable
Occurring only 630 million years after the Big Bang, GRB 090423 detonated so early that astronomers had no direct evidence that anything explodable even existed back then.
July 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word entre nous
Noun? We had a quick entre nous? Our entre nous cleared up a few things? Come in here for an entre nous? I think not.
July 6, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thermometer
The units of measurement metre, litre are comparatively recent borrowings from French and for a long time the metric system was written exactly in French fashion (mètre, kilogramme) because it was only in foreign use.
The real comparison is with longer-established words such as centre, theatre, and metre "rhythm". These are the natural developments of French words from Latin and ultimately from Greek. The development was with vowel weakening to give centrum > *centro > centre (with change of k to s in there too). So this spelling and the corresponding pronunciations in French and English are regular.
However, metre "rhythm" had the spelling meter in OE, perhaps influenced by the native elements mete "measure" + agent suffix. The fact that the Modern English -er and -re are pronounced the same could not have operated then. In French there was a final schwa, and this would have been retained in borrowings into English. I think what happened to make the two endings alike is that when final schwa was lost in English, sentrə giving sentr, an epenthetic schwa was then inserted to avoid this awkward final cluster, giving sentər.
Entirely the same thing should have happened from start to finish with the compound devices such as thermometer, had such things existed in ancient times. They too should have been neuters ending in -trum, the Latin equivalent of the Greek -tron. But instead they occurred as words of the ager ~ agris type where there is an endingless nominative with an epenthetic vowel: thus nom. altimeter, acc. altimetrum. (This is the word the OED thinks might have been the origin of the French suffix; it was a post-classical Latin word, compounded of Latin first half with the Greek suffix. So the tradition of creating hybrids like speedometer goes way back.)
The model for Latin words like altimeter is the classical metrical terms such as hexameter, which were actually adjectives, so the -er ending was more convenient or more normal rather than borrowing them as -rus, -ra, -rum types. I'm not sure why.
Modern scientific words are borrowed from the Latin citation form, the nominative, so we create thermometer. Historically however the nominative died out and the accusative survived through Romance into Middle French. If these had been everyday words they would also have gone from *-metrum to **-metre.
July 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word surmise
I've just found this used with an object, a construction I've never seen before. Valid examples on Google for "surmise the situation" include:
Other, irrelevant instances are errors for 'summarise', or where the verb is followed by a that-less content clause ('We surmise the situation might have its roots in situations like this'), or chance juxtapositions ('As you may surmise, the situation is muddled.').
The OED does give one clear example of 'surmise' followed by an object (from 1817: 'The Governor-General surmised a circumstance, which always seems to have animated him to peculiar severity.'), and one where the object is a fused relative, which to me sounds much more natural, as it's like a clause ('Whatever the Jewish nation might surmise or know concerning a future life').
June 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word וְ�?ָהַבְתָּ, �?ֵת יְהוָה �?ֱלֹהֶיךָ, בְּכָל-לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל-נַפְשְ�?ךָ, וּבְכָל-מְ�?ֹדֶךָ.
Shevek, I beg to differ. If you think there is some magical prohibition against writing 'YHWH', you are a nutcase, you are out of your cotton-picking mind. It doesn't matter how many people think this, or whether it's done in the name of some loony religion, it is still totally nutty (and offensive), and no sane person should pay any attention to it.
June 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word berth
The historical succession of senses of this word is noteworthy, and perhaps the opposite of what one would expect. The original meaning (of unknown origin, c. 1600, perhaps related to 'bear off') is the space needed to avoid collision with another ship or allision with rocks etc. This survives today mainly in 'give a wide berth', which sounds a figurative use, but isn't.
Then: space sufficient to moor a ship; so a place sufficient to moor a ship; so the place in a harbour where a ship is moored. Then by transference to places inside a ship suitable for stowing objects, and finally a sleeping-place where a sailor himself was stowed. So what seems (to me) like the simplest meaning is in fact the latest in a line of figurations.
edit: I got collision and allision the wrong way rounf.
June 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word you lot
The closest my vocabulary gets to a specifically second person plural pronoun. It, as well as 'you guys', which I would accept in my dialect but don't say, is of a peculiar structure: the 'you' isn't simply the determiner function before a common noun (as in 'you students'), because (i) we freely say 'we students' but not *'we lot', and (ii) determiner 'you' seems to require a plural noun, not a group word: *'you group', *'you crowd'.
However, although 'you lot' has a certain pronoun-like quality, the 'lot' is entirely optional. A true pronoun would be fused and grammatically controlled like 'yourselves', which is in most positions not interchangeable with 'you'.
June 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bugs
Sometimes when I enter a comment, the comment box and button disappear from the screen. They return and the new comment is there if I refresh or navigate to the word.
edit: No they don't. It must have been the refresh that entered the word, because I just noticed I lost a comment entirely.
June 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pride
As a verb, for me this requires its object to be reflexive: Mary prided herself on her wit. (So also avail, behave, busy, comport, ingratiate, perjure) The OED however cites a number of modern instances of non-reflexive objects, e.g.
Mr Keating has long prided his record of bringing Budgets in on target . . .
He prided his character and dignity over failure and temporary constraints.
My husband prides us greatly.
These all strike me as errors. I will a little reluctanctly concede the grammaticality of pride in + gerund-participial clause, as in A liberal such as Sally Watson, who prided in, among her broad-minded accomplishments, having had a Puerto Rican husband and two black lovers. Even that I don't like. I might say it, but I would still strongly prefer prided herself on having. However, this appears to be a dialect difference.
June 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word forego
To be prescriptive about spelling, which I occasionally am, this word should never be seen except in the expression foregone conclusion (and possibly the foregoing).
'Why is that?' <-- READER'S VOICE
Because, amiable reader, we have a perfectly good spelling distinction between fore- with a literal or metaphorical meaning of "before" in space or time (forecourt, forequarters, forehead, foreground; forethought, foreordain, foreshadow) and the different prefix for- with an obscure meaning vaguely like "completely" or "off, away"—and to forgo is to do without, to forbear is to put up with; whereas a forebear is one born before. In actual usage this distinction is mostly adhered to. Less tears would be shed by the meaner kind of spellers if we kept piously to it.
June 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hyphen
If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.
—Oxford style guide
June 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word whoever's
Fascinating sentence: The insurer tries to recover what it can from whoever's fault it was. While probably ungrammatical, it's close to something that is grammatical and it's worth investigating why.
Let's take a fully grammatical counterpart: ... from whoever is at fault. (The fact that this is can be contracted to give whoever's might have influenced the original sentence too.) In this, whoever is a fused relative. It is simultaneously head of the noun phrase whoever is at fault, which is complement of the preposition from, and subject of the verb phrase is at fault.
In from whoever's fault it was, the whoever again heads the NP that's the complement of from, namely whoever's fault it was. But instead of being subject of a verb phrase, it's determiner of the nominal fault it was. (This nominal consists of a head noun and a relative clause modifying it.)
We need to hand-wave over whether it's whoever or genitive whoever's that's head and/or determiner—the structural status of 's is unresolved amongst linguists anyway. This aside, we have a parallel: both subject and determiner are specifiers of their respective phrases.
In both cases also the fused head can be unpacked into a complement NP with a modifying relative clause headed by a separate relative pronoun: from him whose fault it was; from him who is at fault. Thus it seems to me quite natural to produce the original sentence, and though I have to mark it as ungrammatical for my own speech, it quite possibly wasn't for the original speaker.
June 19, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word birdo
I suppose avo was already taken as "grandfather" . . . foglo or fuglo could do; ornito would be suitable. I see Ido uses ucelo. Surely any of these are more international than birdo?
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nyuni
I don't know; I only knew ndege. (Oh, I should have checked my dictionary last night. Will do so tonight if I remember.) Trying to filter copycat word-lists out of on-line search suggests nyuni might be 'archaic' (The Kamusi Project seems fairly solid) (and the ordinary word in some related languages), but don't quote me. FWIW nyuni doesn't occur in the Swahili Wikipedia.
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gossypiboma
I'm with Quinion on this one. It's less likely that someone (Williams, Bragg & Nelson 1978?) created it with a specific Swahili word in mind, than that it's suffixed with a semi-arbitrary -b- (an error or echo of -bi(o)-?) and ordinary Greek -oma, then they (or someone) fortuitously noticed boma in an English dictionary.
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word preggers
Morphologically interesting because it's one of a very small group of adjectives formed with this derivational suffix (or these suffixes together): others are 'starkers', 'bonkers', 'crackers.
Outside this semantic realm it's usually for pet proper names of people or occasionally places.
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word swineherd
Alackaday! the goosegirl wails, for her swain was a swine, you see.
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tessaraphthong
I've never encountered an actual tessaraphthong in a language; Chinese has triphthongs iao and uei (as in feng shui), and some pronunciations of English fire, tower) are triphthongs, but that seems to be the limit.
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word filial
Odd. One would expect *filiar with the usual Latin dissimilation of -al- from preceding medial /l/, but (Late) Latin had only the form filialis.
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word singulative
I virtually never click on those little icons that go to what are claimed to be dictionaries; but I did for this and was disappointed in the results (predictably). The examples cited were from English, which has no true singulatives: snowflake and rice-grain are more just translations of the kind of thing that a singulative would be.
They occur commonly in Welsh and Arabic, where the mass form is morphologically simpler than the singulative, e.g. Welsh adar "birds", aderyn "bird", or Arabic ward "flowers", wardah "flower".
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word swineherd
The swineherd is swain to the goosegirl.
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word house
Quirk of grammar: this is the only English noun* ending in /s/ where the consonant changes in the plural, like the common fate of /f/ and /θ/ in knife, bath etc.
* Okay, noun root or something—obviously bathhouse, teahouse etc. also have the same kind of irregular plural. Nitpickers!
June 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nyuni
The usual Swahili word for "bird" is ndege.
June 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word birdo
Also one of the main reasons Esperanto can't be taken 100% seriously.
June 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list kenny-kens-kenning
Honey-eater, actually: medv-ed rather than med-ved. (I'd never been 100% sure of this so I checked again just now.)
June 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word resofincular
Apparently an invention by a humorist called Lewis Burke Frumkes in Harper's magazine of December 1976. (If you're a subscriber you could see the pages up close.) (Source: Google Books)
It looks arbitrary: finc- could be from one of the stem forms of fig- "make, shape". Or conceivably a deformation of 'funicular', equating metal rope with wire; dare anyone coin 'reso-' out of 'resemble' though?
June 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word family
Nowadays we would think of the primary meaning of this as "close kin, or parents and children", and would regard other uses as extensions. In fact this is an innovation of Modern English: the first use known to the OED is from Milton:
As Father of his Familie he clad
Thir nakedness with Skins of Beasts
(Paradise Lost, book 10, ll.216-7)
The Latin word familia came* from famulus "servant" and meant "household", i.e. the servants collectively, or the estate, the house, everyone in the house. This was also the earliest meaning in English. Then came what now look like extended senses:
1425 Lineage, those descended from a common ancestor.
1545 Everyone in a household, kin as well as servants.
1583 Race, stock, people perceived as descended from a common ancestor.
1611 Brotherhood, nation, people bound by common ties.
1626 Groups or kinds of objects sharing common properties.
* In famul-us the /u/ arises in proximity to the L pinguis (dark or velarized L); in famil-ia the following /i/ makes the L exilis (clear) and thus protects the preceding /i/.
Gosh. Another discovery.
June 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word familial
Coined towards 1900 as a medical term, effectively a synonym for 'hereditary', as the older adjective 'familiar' was unsuitable. (In Latin the adjectival ending -al- dissimilated away from a previous medial /l/.)
June 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word little man in boat
The other day I read in Fair of Speech, a study of euphemism (ed. D.J. Enright), that the sexual use of 'fanny' might have arisen from familiarity with Fanny Hill (though the OED only knows it in print from 1879). The writer then went on to comment that, however, 'as far as I know, nobody has ever spoken of a woman's clarissa, or sophia.'
And I thought, but 'clarissa' is perfect for it!
June 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word e pur si muove
Also written with the first two words fused as eppur, showing the raddoppiamento sintattico.
June 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fierce
Huh, 6 days ago I observed that 'fluffiness' has two ligatures (in proper print), and coincidentally used the word 'decline'.
June 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word barrow-wight
The Valkyries, the Choosers of the slain, and the Norns who wove the fates of men at a ghastly loom were seen by living eyes. In the graves where treasures were hoarded the Barrowwights dwelt, ghosts that were sentinels over the gold: witchwives changed themselves into wolves and other monstrous animals, and for many weeks the heroes Signy and Sinfjotli ran wild in the guise of wolves.
—Andrew Lang, 'The Sagas', in Essays in Little, 1891
June 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bats
Batsbi is often encountered in the typological literature because of its interesting system of active marking, where the subject can be absolutive or ergative depending on whether the action is accidental or intentional:
tχo naizdraχ qitra "(ABS.)we (accidentally) fell to the ground"
atχo naizdraχ qitra "ERG.we (intentionally) fell to the ground"
June 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word meticais
plural of metical, the Mozambican currency
June 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word metical
plural is meticais
June 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word reais
plural of real, the Brazilian currency
June 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word matrices
Asteriges (based on the actual genitive of Vercingetorix): the stem ends in the Gaulish element -rig- "ruler".
June 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word likuta
One hundredth of a zaïre, former currency of Zaïre: plural makuta. One likuta was further divided into 100 sengi.
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word makuta
Plural of the former Zaïrean currency subunit, the likuta: 100 makuta = 1 zaïre.
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sengi
Also the one-hundredth part of a likuta, itself one hundredth of a zaïre, back when Zaïre used zaïres for currency.
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word matrices
That's right: the -trix in all these is the female agent ending (feminine of -tor), so they all go the same.
I should add that the traditional English pronunciation would be /-'traɪsiːz/ with shift of stress to the long vowel, but the most common one, matrices, is now firmly established with stress the same as the singular, so that might be preferable for all the others too.
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word two hendrices, please!
"If I want two, I'll ask!" Stan Freberg
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word grammar
Stig O'Tracey is totally convinced that he had done wrong. He can’t give an account of what the unwritten law says, but he is fully prepared to believe that he has violated it, and that his head should be nailed to the floor as punishment.
That is the view so many people have of grammar. It’s a body of cryptic doctrine,the content and purpose of which is unclear to most people but presumably known to experts; and the thing about it is that if you ever transgress, then wham, you can be hauled in front of some grammar-teaching Dinsdale Piranha for a horrible punishment.
—Geoffrey Pullum, 'The Piranha Brothers, the Unwritten Grammatical Law, and the Phenomenon of Nerdview' (.pdf of lecture, 2008)
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word helm
Mr. Robert Montgomery is very severe on the infidels, and undertakes to prove, that, as he elegantly expresses it,
"One great Enchanter helm'd the harmonious whole."
What an enchanter has to do with helming, or what a helm has to do with harmony, he does not explain.
—Macaulay eviscerating the unfortunate poet Robert Montgomery, 1830 (ganked from Language Log)
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word locus
In Latin the plural of this was either loci or loca, depending on the shade of meaning: places/seats in the theatre, posts/stations in war, spots/localities in the country, and places/ranks in society were normally loca; grounds of an argument, places/passages in an author were normally loci.
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word matrices
Latin matrix has a stem ending in /i:k/ and regularly forms its nominative by adding /s/. So also the mathematical term 'directrix' ~ 'directrices', as well as rare female agent nouns such as 'executrix'.
Vertex (doublet of vortex in Latin) owes its stem vowel to the fact that in Old Latin unstressed short vowels before a single consonant became /i/, thus plural /wertike:s/; but before two consonants, /e/, thus /werteks/. So also 'apex' ~ 'apices'. This alternation didn't apply to the long /i:/ of /ma:tri:k-s/ ~ /ma:tri:k-e:s/.
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gugu-yimidhirr
Source of the word 'kangaroo'.
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sexual
Models developed by population geneticist Sally Otto . . . suggest that under most circumstances a diverse population of clones, which accumulate differences over time as a result of mutations, outperforms sexuals.
—New Scientist, 13 June 2009
'Sexual' used as noun, contrasted with 'clone'.
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word network telescope
The new worm soon ran into a listening device, a "network telescope" housed by the San Diego Supercomputing Center at the University of California. The telescope is a collection of millions of dummy internet addresses, all of which route to a single computer. It is a useful monitor of the online underground: because there is no reason for legitimate users to reach out to these addresses, mostly only suspicious software is likely to get in touch.
—New Scientist, 13 June 2009
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gravito-magnetism
Tajmar invokes an effect called "gravito-magnetism" as a way of doing this. According to general relativity, the mass of a rotating body will drag space-time around with it, putting a twist into it. Just as a spinning charge creates a magnetic field, a spinning mass creates a gravito-magnetic field.
—New Scientist, 13 June 2009
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word magnetotellurics
Magma can be detected with a technique called magnetotellurics, which builds up a picture of what lies underground by measuring fluctuations in electric and magnetic fields at the surface.
—New Scientist, 13 June 2009
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cranial compliance
How blood flow influences cerebrospinal fluid flow can be gauged from something called "cranial compliance", a measure of the elasticity of the brain's vascular system.
—New Scientist, 13 June 2009
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gestalt
Although the link between low compliance and dementia has yet to be comprehensively shown, he says, "there is a gestalt that it's broadly true."
—New Scientist, 13 June 2009
Here 'gestalt' seems to be used as something like "broad picture, rough consensus", a meaning new to me.
June 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word the pen is on the table
Presumably Saya sedang makan when they answer the phone in an annoyed voice. It is unusual that what's conventionally called the 'present tense' in English usually isn't, whereas the 'be . . . ing' construction is more central and unmarked than en train de or (I presume) sedang.
June 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ɲɟǃǃʎ
I have always felt that students of phonetics require very, very large fields a long way from anywhere inhabited, cos if anyone catches you attempting to make this sound, you will be carted off to the loony bin forthwith, fifthwith even.
June 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gander
arby, slumry: it's not a verb. In the expression 'take a gander' it's a noun. It's modified by a determiner 'a', making the noun phrase 'a gander', which is the object of the transitive verb 'take'. If it was a verb, you'd say *'Mary gandered John', rather than 'Mary took a gander at John'.
June 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word the pen is on the table
Sedang would seem the obvious equivalent.
June 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ostracode
Colymbosathon ecplecticos comes from kolymb- "dive" + sath�?n "chap with big penis" (< sathē "penis") + ek-plēkt-ik- "amazing" (< "out" + "strike" + adjectival).
'Ostracode' itself is ostrak- "potsherd" + -�?id- (later -�?d-) "-like, -appearance".
June 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word os clitoris
Malformed by analogy with 'os penis', in which penis is the genitive of penis. This should be os clitoridis, also genitive. (Os = "bone".)
June 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word kra
The former Greenlandic letter ĸ (Unicode U+0138), now replaced by q.
June 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gloss
The linguistics department of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig (dir. Bernard Comrie) has codified morphemic glossing rules. Hurrah!
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dephlogisticated
A kind of chemical spifflicating.
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word screeve
A tense/aspect/mood paradigm in Georgian: from the Georgian grammatical term mts'k'rivi "row".
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word polish
Reasons why I like Polish, number something in a series: Dzierżyńszczyzna was a Polish autonomous region of the Byelorussian S.S.R. in 1932-8.
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word navajo
This spelling rather than Navaho was adopted by the Navajo Nation in 1969. The name is from Spanish Navajó, said to be from some local language: a good possibility is Tewa /nava/ "field" + /hu:/ "valley".
Source: Bright, 2007, Native American Placenames of the United States (essentially the same as in OED)
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list scotch-on-the-rocks
'Scotch' is never used in modern Britain for anything but the whisky. It never lived down Bums's obsessive concentration on the uterary history of the unguage.
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dephlogisticated
'Dephlogisticated air' was Priestley's original name for oxygen.
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word booze
'serve oneself to, or consume regularly'?
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ღ
The Georgian letter ghan, pronounced ɣ. Georgian is very pretty.
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list longest-single-syllable-word-in-english
Not present-day English, but one of the pronunciations of 'brougham' the carriage was bru:m (homophone of 'broom'), so 'broughams' was a 9-letter monosyllable for some 19th-century speakers. (The alleged verb *'broughammed' would be longer if it existed outside word-coining games.)
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hippocampus
The term 'sea-horse (hippocampus)' has been used in modern grants of arms to refer to the real sea creature, as distinct from the heraldic monster called the sea-horse (which apparently can also be called a hippocampus). Source: J. P. Brooke-Little's footnote 87 to Fox-Davies's A Complete Guide to Heraldry
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list bio
I am known as "Kristina" on Met-Art, my bunions have been exhibited in the Saatchi Gallery, and I can disassemble a motorbike blindfold in four minutes using only a packet of toothpicks.
June 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word brigandish
A favourite North Korean word, e.g.
Now that the U.S. and its followers got the UNSC issued its brigandish "presidential statement" critical of the DPRK's launch of satellite conducted according to the requirements and norms of international law, gravely infringing upon its sovereignty and security, it was entirely just for the DPRK to have exercised its right to just self-defence to protect itself from outsiders' threat of aggression.
. . .
The grave reality in which the situation is inching close to the brink of a war due to the brigandish moves of the U.S. and its followers proves how the DPRK was right when it has bolstered up the nuclear deterrent for self-defence based on the Songun politics.
—KCNA, 9 June 2009
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word barbican
Two concert venues in London are Barbican and Kenwood.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word アスパラガス
The perpetrator is still visible. The ガ ga is a カ ka as in katana "B.F. sword", with its eyebrows raised, and has worked its way up to the front runner, who is now pretending to be already beheaded.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hepatoscopic
Putnam's always been a bit of a troublemaker, with his hidden bar and his quite willful misinterpretations of Akkadian hepatoscopic practice.
—It's all fun and games until someone gets their head stuck in a 3,600-year-old Sumerian pot
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bremsstrahlung
No, braking radiation: bremsen "brake", as an electron might have to do passing near a nucleus.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word euarchontoglire
The singular should be *euarchontoglis if the plural were formed regularly from it; but back-formation has several analogical options. In this case euarchontoglire has been formed, probably not just by removing the -s (zoologists are too fly for that) but by looking at words such as 'carnivore', 'laurasiathere' (cf. Greek thêr). In fact it's -glire that's used, and *-glis only occurs here on Wordie: no-one else has thought to coin it.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word compatriot
Leadership is a risky business requiring wisdom, courage, and fortitude—and as my compatriot Socrates put it, courage is the knowledge of what is not to be feared.
—Arianna Huffington, Right is Wrong, quoted in The New Republic, found (if I've got this right) via Powell's Books Review-a-Day, found via 3 Quarks Daily
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word trouser
No, young Ulleskelf, there is no such thing as a trouser. 'Trousers' is what we cognoscenti call a plurale tantum, that is "plural only". The singular form however does occur in noun-noun compounds such as 'trouser leg/pocket/press/snake', and of course by conversion as a verb. Hurrah for morphology!
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word succubus
Sometimes in the altered form succuba with feminine ending (which in Latin actually meant "whore"). The primacy of the masculine -us ending, however, means (I think) that it is not the case that the demons were female, rather that they took female form to lie under (sub-cub-) men; as they took male form to lie in (in-cub-) women.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word 日本語
Nihongo, Japanese for "Japanese language"
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pusillanimous
JIMMY: I looked up that word the other day. It's one of those words I've never been quite sure of, but always thought I knew.
CLIFF: What was that?
JIMMY: I told you—pusillanimous. Do you know what it means?
Cliff shakes his head.
Neither did I really. All this time, I have been married to this woman, this monument to non-attachment, and suddenly I discover that there is actually a word that sums her up. Not just an adjective in the English language to describe her with—it's her name! Pusillanimous! It sounds like some fleshy Roman matron, doesn't it? The Lady Pusillanimous seen here with her husband Sextus, on their way to the Games.
—John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thou
One of only two(?) minimal pairs contrasting /ð/ and /θ/ initially: /ðaʊ/ "you" ~ /θaʊ/ "thousandth of an inch" (or colloquially "thousand"). The other initial pair is 'thus'; final contrasts occur in 'mouth' (n. and v.) and possibly 'withe'/'with'.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thus
One of only two(?) minimal pairs contrasting /ð/ and /θ/ initially: /ðʌs/ "so" ~ /θʌs/ "incense" (what a thurifer carries in a thurible). The other initial pair is 'thou'; final contrasts occur in 'mouth' (n. and v.) and possibly 'withe'/'with'.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tuffet
Oh that's interesting, the OED thinks the "hassock or footstool" meaning is dubious and may come from misinterpretation of the nursery rime (as it calls it), which might actually refer to a tuffet = tuft = grassy knoll, hillock.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dislection
This sort of etymology is rather misleading, it seems to me: saying dislection comes from diligere poses such questions as how the <s> arose and where the <gere> disappears to. Rather, the two words, noun and verb arose in parallel from the same root. The verb is, by convention, cited in its infinitive form, but the infinitive is not the base of any other word: it is a derived form.
The root is dĭs-lĕg-. This is what both noun and verb were formed from by suffixation in some early stage of Latin. The infinitive was formed with -ĕrĕ (in fact probably -ĕrĭ or -ĕsĭ at this stage, but let's disregard changes that don't contribute to the comparison under discussion). The noun was formed with the usual -tio, -tion- suffix. The voicing assimilation of /gt/ to /kt/ (ct) was no doubt very early, possibly pre-Latin.
In Old Latin /s/ was lost in this position before a sonorant (such as /l/ or /m/), with the previous vowel lengthening in compensation. So dĭslĕg- became dīlĕg-. Often the /s/ was subsequently restored by analogy (e.g. dismiss), which is why we get variation between di- and dis- forms.
In Old Latin the stress was initial. Unstressed vowels mostly became /ĭ/ before one consonant, /ĕ/ before two. Thus the vowel difference between dīlĭg- and dīlĕct-.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fluffiness
This word contains two different ligatures, in print. Appropriately, I noticed it in Nicholson Baker, who I suspect would be interested, and spin a reflection on the decline of ligatures.
June 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gonna
Hardly Jamaican patois: Standard English rather. Everyone normally says some reduced form conventionally written 'gonna'.
June 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fah
fɔ~?
June 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word triangulatory
Had a satirical novelist not invented it first, some modish academic or think-tank would undoubtedly have come up with Social Dynamics eventually, and would by now probably be organising seminars at 10 Downing Street to explain the triangulatory brilliance of the scheme to Tony Blair.
—Francis Wheen, 2004, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
June 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word slavish pluralization
Well I thought as you were criticizing the slavish pluralizers, you wouldn't be using such forms yourself but were citing forms used by others: thus exculpating you of gogglelessness.
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word throwaway
Most people won't be surprised to learn that they also seek to shape what is published in journals through ghost-written essays signed by prestigious doctors, or attempt to influence prescribers' opinions through widely distributed "throwaways", a euphemism for journal articles that support their products.
—New Scientist, 6 June 2009
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word upskill
To combat pirates getting on air, Mercer's team is "upskilling" – learning a new bag of internet and surveillance tricks . . .
—New Scientist, 6 June 2009
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word decellularize
Taylor . . . now wants to repeat the achievement on a much larger scale, by "decellularising" hearts, livers and other organs taken either from human cadavers or from larger animals such as pigs, and coating them in stem cells harvested from people.
—New Scientist, 6 June 2009
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vasculature
"We've built the vasculature but we don't think we've built enough muscle to keeps animals alive."
—New Scientist, 6 June 2009
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word slavish pluralization
Well 'suffices' is not a Latin plural; the Latin for "suffix" is suffixum. The only possible plural of 'suffix' is 'suffixes': a warning to those who play with Latinity without the goggles of knowledge.
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list ugly-words-short-u
I can only see two (relevant) vowels in that list, that of of 'strut'/'bloody' and that of 'nurse'/'vermin'/'virginal'; the two are however completely different in my accent. (And I'd use the term 'short u' to mean the vowel in 'foot' myself.)
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list luonto
Luonto is nature.
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word that's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind
From my reading of the spectrogram, there's no possibility of a schwa in there between the two consonant segments.
June 8, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list famous-transmitted-messages
Peccavi, being a single word, would be ideal; 'tis pity it's a fraud.
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word s
The first intercontinental radio message, transmitted (in Morse code) from Cornwall to Newfoundland in 1901.
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dress-spencer
Her hair, which was of a light brown, was becomingly braided à la Didon; and her gown, which she wore under a striped dress-spencer, was of fine cambric, made high to the throat, and ornamented round the hem with double trimming.
—Georgette Heyer, Frederica
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word first-oars
"Oh, she thinks no one the equal of her magnificent Cousin Alverstoke!" said Mrs Dauntry, gently laughing. "You are quite first-oars with her, I assure you!"
—Georgette Heyer, Frederica
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word souse
"and if this F. Merriville is the daughter of the only member of the family with whom I ever had the slightest acquaintance you may depend upon it she hasn't a souse, and hopes I may be so obliging as to remedy this."
—Georgette Heyer, Frederica
Same as sou.
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tachograph
(i) Think it's a typo for tachygraph.
(ii) Look up in OED.
(iii) Simultaneously have nagging feeling I've already wordied this.
(iv) Look up on Wordie.
(v) Get back to work.
June 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cagophile
It's unfortunate that philately and paedophilia have combined to give us two unwanted extra meanings of phil-.
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word piqûre
French for "sting, injection", striking for that circumflex, in a position I don't think I've ever seen before. In OED as an English word, "injection, injection mark".
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word right-about
The child, who was as pretty as a picture, Miss Grantham saw, could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, and to watch a roué of Filey's years and experience leering down at her made Miss Grantham long to be able to box his ears, and send him to the right-about.
—Georgette Heyer, Faro's Daughter
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word incalculably
She might have destroyed at a blow any influence he had ever had over Adrian, and, incalculably, she had refrained from doing it.
—Georgette Heyer, Faro's Daughter
A highly unusual use of this word. Normally it is an adjective modifier (e.g. incalculably high) and means "enormous, i.e. too large (or small) to be able to be calculated". But in this example Heyer has used it as a sentence adverb meaning "too puzzling to be able to calculate, i.e. understand, work out".
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mooch
A mooch-cow is one that just stands in a field chewing grass and looking at you.
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cagophile
Not a word. There is no usage at all for it on the Web (nor for *cagophilia), and it has no reasonable etymology. (Probably invented by someone arbitrarily deforming Old English cǽg.) Why not just say keyophile and be done with it? Or better, key collector?
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ethos
I am always confused over whether I should be pronouncing this /ˈeθɒs/ (as in ethics) or /ˈiːθɒs/ (as in ether). Whenever I look it up I am confused by the fact that there are two related Greek words εθος ethos and ηθος êthos, and that though ethics comes from the latter it is invariably pronounced with short E.
So εθος ethos meant "custom, habit" but did not really give any English derivatives. The related word ηθος êthos is more complex, giving all of English ethos, ethics, ethology. In the singular its meanings extend to "character, nature", basically what ethos is and what ethics and in part ethology study; in the plural (ηθη êthê) it means "haunts, abodes" of animals and "manners, customs" of people.
Unrelated are short-E ethno- "people" and long-E (in fact AE, Greek αι-) ether, aether "airlike substance/realm".
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nigella
Also Latin name for love-in-a-mist; whereas the only Kalonji I've heard of is the former president and God-King of South Kasai.
June 4, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word espy
Don't even joke about that.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word espy
*boggles, rereads* Aha. If you used 'seeing' instead, it would mean "not seeing galleries as places where . . . but rather seeing them as some other kind of place". Wrong 'as', however. It actually means "seeing galleries not so much as places where X happens . . . but as places where Y happens". The sentence is missing a comma after 'rivers'. (The comparative 'not so much', which governs the following 'as', is in a stylistically unusual, unexpected place.)
With 'espy', you can't espy something as something (= "in the light/form of", so the construction can only be the 'not so much . . . as' one.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pizza
The future of pizza is pizzarà.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mono
Usually when a word has many meanings in English, they are the result of a centuries-long process, many of them washed up on the banks of oblivion by our time. In the case of mono, however, they're all new:
(1) 1851: Mono, a Californian tribe
(2) 1924: a picador's assistant, a monosabio
(3) 1937: a boiler suit, especially those worn by Republican militia in the Spanish Civil War (literally "monkey")
(4) 1959: monophonic recording
(5) 1964: the disease mononucleosis
(6) 1970: monochrome, black and white
(7) 1977: a single-hulled boat, a monohull
(8) 1979: a single-stranded fibre, a monofilament
And it's perhaps a little surprising that no use of Japanese mono has come into English as a separate word. (The OED of course lists mono no aware under that phrase.)
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word skelf
No stars in this black sky, no moon to speak of, no name
or number to the hour, no skelf of light.
—Carol Ann Duffy, 'Over'
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word a fortiori
A mediaeval alteration of Classical a fortiore.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word a posteriori
A mediaeval alteration of Classical a posteriore.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word a priori
In good Latin this was a priore. According to ΣΩΦΡΟΣΥΝΗ, who seems a reliable sort of chap, it was Thomas Aquinas who first used, or at least popularized, the dative for the ablative. It's surprising how it caught on and how rarely the Classical forms are used.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sudoku
It's taken me this long to find out what the word comes from. It's a contraction suu-doku "single digits" of the phrase suuzi-wa dokusin-ni kagiru "the digits are restricted to single" ("digit-TOPIC single-TO restrict" – with dokusin meaning "single" as in "unmarried", a little oddly).
It began as an American puzzle called Number Place; a Japanese company later issued it as Sudoku, a trade mark in Japan, where it is generically known as nanpure, a contraction of the English name.
June 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word down
Surprising etymology. The ordinary preposition comes from an Old English and Celtic word dún for "hill". The expression meaning "off-hill" was reduced by omitting the "off" part (it survives in the poetic word adown) till down itself came to mean, well, "down".
June 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list alist
agriculturalist, constitutionalist, nationalist
June 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word aghast
In origin the past participle of an extinct verb agast, extended form of verb gast, both meaning "frighten". The spelling with -h- first appeared in c.1425 (in Scots), well before Caxton famously introduced it in ghost; but it was not until the late 1500s that it became usual for such words.
June 2, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word conutry
But etymologically sound. The author is a nut; if you take them up you're a conut; and that makes the process conutry.
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word wedlock
Possible in the case of knowledge, with its completely mysterious second element—I suppose the older -leche could come from palatalization of a Northern form -leik of the -lock suffix, though the OED does not raise this possibility.
Shurely shome mishtake with lark, which though equally mysterious does not admit of anything like *-lak. The v in OE láferce might have been Norse influence; other old forms include OE láwerce, OHG lêrahha, ON lǽvirke, and this suffix won't fit in there.
The 'Rohirric' word dwimmerlaik in Tolkien's works is a use of a genuine (extinct) English word with the suffix.
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word twilve
English irregular verbs scarcely follow any rules at all. There are a couple of patterns (e.g. swim ~ swam ~ swum) that contain as many as ten strong verbs, but most patterns are only for several verbs. There are verbs such as bring ~ brought ~ brought that combine internal change with a weak ending; and others like show ~ showed ~ shown combining weak and strong forms. While twilve doesn't exactly match any real pattern (as far as I can recall), it's close enough to sell ~ sold ~ sold to be plausible. (The more so the more I look at the variant forms of sell historically.)
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word venal
There are so many different Latin roots resembling ven-: ones meaning "come", "sell", "hunt", "vein", "love (goddess)", "wind", "forgiveness", "poison", "stomach", and "vengeance" are enough to confuse anyone. I can never quite remember that a venal person is one who can be bought (cf. vend), while a venial sin is one that is forgivable (Latin venia "forgiveness" has no other common English reflexes). The adjective of vein is usually venous but can be both of venal, venial.
Hunting and love-play are both venery; it would be natural to imagine them metaphorically connected, but they're not. Vengeance has only a post-Classical ven-; the Classical gives us vindicate. Vent is cognate with wind; the root in invent, convenient is cognate with its meaning "come"; ventriloquist related to neither.
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word marijuana
The spelling with -j- is apparently a folk etymology (or eggcorn or other such alteration) in English after Spanish female names; the original Mexican Spanish was marihuana, mariguana of uncertain origin.
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word wedlock
The only survivor in Modern English of the Old English action noun suffix -lác. This may have been a noun "play" and originated in compounds meaning "sword-play" for "battle".
June 1, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word whom
You do indeed, except perhaps in (w)hooping-cough; however, the /w/ is recent. My mid-century Shorter Oxford only has the /hu:p/ pronunciation—even, startlingly, in whoopee, which it thinks is a homophone of hoopy.
May 31, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word whom
It's really only who and its kin, with loss of the /w/ by dissimilation before the /o/. This is also probably why very few words in Old English began with /hwo/ or /hwu/. The word who may have been the reason why whole, whore, whoop were given a <w> in their spelling: this is comparatively modern, as all three historically began with /h/ + vowel.
May 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nominal
Various uses in linguistics (principally as just the adjective of 'noun'), but in CGEL it specifically means a level of structure intermediate between noun and noun phrase: what in the Chomskyan framework is called N'. Adding a determiner to a nominal makes it a noun phrase.
Noun: dog
Nominals: black dog; big black dog; big black dog chewing my slipper
Noun phrase: this big black dog chewing my slipper
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cashback
When it is a single word, I think it's also a noun: compare 'get $30 change', 'get $30 interest', 'get $30 compensation'. Switching to the numeral 'one', we can see the sum is in plain case: 'get one dollar interest' (not *'one dollar's').
In these, does 'get' take one noun phrase complement or two? Compare: '$30 interest would be nice', 'You owe me $30 change' (sequence of three NP complements otherwise unexampled), 'I'm waiting for my $30 refund'. The sequence moves around tightly like a single NP. Also: you can't replace the sum by a pronoun. If $30 is the topic, you can't say you got it refund, or got it interest. From all which I conclude '$30 cashback' is a single noun phrase composed of two noun parts (nominals or N') in apposition.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word apologist
Not someone who studies apes. Bad brain, go to your basket. It took me several seconds to work out where apes might come into what I was just reading.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word nomen
Those biological nomina in full. A name should refer clearly and unambiguously to a taxon. Ways this can be defeated or repaired are:
nomen nudum: a name published with no or insufficient description to make clear the taxon referred to.
nomen dubium: a name (apparently not so vacuous as a nomen nudum) that turns out to be inadequate to identify its target.
nomen confusum: a name that appears to confusedly refer to several taxa.
nomen ambiguum: a name that quite clearly refers to one definite taxon, according to one authority, and to another according to another.
nomen oblitum: a name that validly referred when it was published but has been disused or forgotten (oblitum) for so long that a newer alternative has gained a prescriptive right to supplant it.
nomen invalidum: an informal or malformed name that couldn't be a valid name.
nomen rejiciendum: a rejected name.
nomen novum: a new name that validly supplants an older one disallowed for one of the above reasons.
nomen conservandum: an existing name that theoretically should defer to an older valid name but which is of such good standing that it is decreed that it is 'to be conserved' (conservandum).
See here for more: vanum, vetitum, illegitimum, alternativum, etc.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word suppletive
How can 'suppletive' not be in WeirdNet? It's a familiar and long-standing grammatical term. The canonical examples in English are go ~ went and be ~ am ~ was and person ~ people; in French aller ~ va ~ ira, for example; in Ancient Greek just about every damn verb you might ever need to use, to the everlasting burden of aspiring Hellenophones.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tralatition
An irregular extension of tralation, which is a doublet of translation and indeed transfer (Latin lat- < *tlat- being the suppletive supine stem, cognate with perfect tul-, of present and infinitive fer-).
In Latin, tra(ns)latio was used for a variety of linguistic transfers that we now distinguish as translation, metaphor, metathesis, and transposition.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mini-major
a film production company that's not quite a major
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word concameration
Howard alone looked up into the simple concameration of the roof, hoping for escape or relief or distraction.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
The Classical Latin camera meant "arch, vault" and was then transferred to a specifically arched or vaulted room. (The scene quoted above is a church.) In Late Latin it came to mean "room". So was there a Classical Latin for "room" generally, as in 'My villa has twelve rooms'? Cella is too specific: a small or side room, and wouldn't apply to the atrium or triclinium.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cashback
Usually one word, it seems to me, even when two would make equal sense: 'Would you like cashback?', 'Could I have £20 cashback, please?' And what is the difference between one word and two? Secondary stress, I think: in 'get £20 cash back', the 'back' has a longer vowel, as far as I can tell. (Possibly there is even a slight effect on the 'cash' vowel.)
Googling for this, I found it has a second meaning, which I've never encountered (as far as I'm aware): cash offered back as a sales incentive. Both meanings are in the OED, the familiar EFTPOS sense later (1988) and marked 'chiefly Brit.'
Googling for this again, two words is more common in casual/Web writing, but I think this ignores the phonetic facts.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word widower
A new formation in the 1300s, replacing 'widow', which had distinct masculine and feminine endings in Old English.
It has been said that the female is the default value here because widowhood was traditionally more important as an indicator of social status (dependence, availability etc.) in females.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the user plcladder
*THWACK*
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sessionable
Such a beer is called a session bitter. This is an ordinary term for me, whereas I have to say I've never heard 'sessionable'.
May 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word analepsis
By whom? Not by the OED, who don't know this word at all, nor the related words (analepsy, analemma, analeptic) in this sense. Nor by my preferred glossary of rhetoric. Nor indeed to the Ancient Greeks themselves, who used it in various ways derived from the semantic elements "take + back": such as tying up vines, acquiring knowledge, assimilating food, making amends, getting refreshed; about the closest is Aristotle's use of it for recovering memory. Possibly a recent development based on that. (Modern film and literaary theory wouldn't have made it in the OED's A's yet.)
Or perhaps just formed analogously with prolepsis, prochronism, anachronism.
May 28, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word impossible
"The word 'impossible' is not in my dictionary. In fact, everything between 'herring' and 'marmalade' appears to be missing."
—Dirk Gently
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word decussate
An odd formation. I wonder where the u came from in decem-ass-. Assuming it was formed after m was replaced by vowel nasalization (decem 'deke~:), I would have thought you'd expect decess-. I see from Perseus that all the compounds from seven have the 'wrong' vowel, so it might be levelling by analogy with neighbouring numbers.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dive
A fusion of two Old English verbs: the transitive umlauted form dýfan "dip, submerge (a thing)" gave the modern form and weak conjugation—dive, dived, dived; whereas the primary verb dúfan dropped out in early Middle English, bequeathing its intransitive meaning "dive" to the other. If it had survived into Modern English it might go douve, deve, doven (I'm never very sure about how ablaut grades are inherited). The North American strong preterite dove is a new, quite modern formation.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word duck
1. Originally the verb "dive, dip in water", a derivative of which gave the bird's name (in effect "diver, dipper"). An earlier English name for the bird, in various forms such as ænid, enid, enede, ende, extinct 1400s, was cognate with Latin anat-. The verbal sense "lower the head" is later: like dipping in water but without the water.
2. The kind of cloth is unrelated. 'Duck tape' is attested considerably earlier than 'duct tape', but it's not obvious that the latter is derived by alteration of the former: it might well be an independent invention coincidentally similar.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word coach
Originally (1500s) a kind of wagon named from Kocs in Hungary. A little before 1850 it is known in its other modern meaning: a person who trains you in your studies. (The sporting help came a bit later.) This was university slang, but the OED gives no clue as to what the bridge between the two senses might be. Study conceived as driving towards a destination with an experienced driver?
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word brass monkey
The problem is that M has been revised for the third edition and B hasn't. They've put a link in the new M entry to what's going to be in the B entry once they get there—many years away, at the present rate. In the meantime, Oxford experts debunk the traditional story; and greater detail (but no ultimate explanation) is here.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word gloaming
Interesting: 'gloom' seems to have originally meant "frown, scowl" and to have transferred metaphorically to what clouds and such obscuring bodies do, thus "be dark". The use of 'gloom' as a noun "darkness" seems to originate with Milton. (Shakespeare has 'gloomy' in a sense that could be modern "dark" or still the metaphor "louring".)
Whereas as skipvia points out, the original sense of 'gloaming' is of light rather than darkness.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word spaghetti and meatballs
And my sister, when wee. Interesting evidence that the p can indeed be taken as a member of the /b/ phoneme without violence to English phonology: /sbə'geti/ -> /bə'sgeti/.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word duologic
Pertaining to a duologue or conversation between two people: formed from either Latin duo "two" or a less-standard transcription of Greek δυο-, normally dyo-. But at least this spelling is more distinctive than dilogue or dyologue, which would be even closer to dialogue.
Oh. French is a character, a professor—it's not a comment about the language.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word x-sampa
Actually, X-SAMPA is IPA. It's a way of transmitting IPA across the Internet using 7-bit ASCII, which for most of Internet history was all anyone could rely on to get to the other side.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word doo-rag
'It's just some crazy old woman who thought I'm gonna kill her 'cos I'm wearing a doo-rag.'
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cernuous
Walking up Redwood Avenue with its tunnel of cernuous willows, Levi found he had lost the will even to nod his head, usually an involuntary habit with him when music was playing.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word duologic
Unfortunately French was not given to duologic conversation – he addressed the group, always.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word crepitation
The Boston primness Howard associated with these kinds of events could not quite survive the mass of hot bodies and the crepitations of the crickets, the soft, damp bark of the trees and the atonal tuning of instruments – and all this was to the good.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pulvinate
Their pulvinate bellies were red satin, and it was here that the needles pierced.
—Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Adjective of the Latin noun that also gave English 'pillow'.
May 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word perioeci
Almost invariably used, however, in the original historical sense: inhabitants of subordinate towns around Sparta (or elsewhere in Greece).
May 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bach
Also (New Zealand) a holiday home at the beach. See Keri Hulme passim, or this Antarctic spokesperson (BBC news, 25-05-09):
The A-Frame represented something uniquely Kiwi in Antarctica. It was the concept of a mountain hut mixed with a bach and it said something about who we are.
May 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word slutmuffin
Great word. I liked it as soon as I saw it. I don't know what it means though. *googles "a slutmuffin"* Oh, there's an LJ community whose interests include "being a slutmuffin" and "slutmuffins" . . . and "Interpol", "pushing people down wells", "cheese", "being obese", "Old Faithful", so this is definitely failing the usual tests for meaningfulness. Good word though, whatever it is.
May 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word amphimediterranean
Those interested in a proper discussion of the histories of the amphimediterranean signaries should consult specialized treatments of these matters.
—Andrew Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin
May 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word baptize
Looks like it: Wyclif in 1382-3 used solemnize, sabbatize, authorize, then come the next burst in the 1420s: practise (which has since been remodelled), moralize, and in a text about surgery organize, paralyse, pulverize.
May 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word baptize
The OED says this is probably the oldest English word to contain the -ize suffix (attested from 1297).
May 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word jeopardy
Huh. I always thought this was a Law French term, containing the pronoun jeo "I", as indeed jeofail is. But no, it's in effect jeu parti "divided game", a situation in games such as chess.
May 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word miniature
Surprising etymology: nothing to do with the Latin root for "little, less" found in minus, minor, minimum, minuscule. Rather, it comes from minium "vermilion, cinnabar; red lead", and refers to the use of vermilion to highlight letters in manuscripts (rubrication) and thus to the colouring of marginal pictures in manuscripts.
May 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word quell
Sorry I'm late, sir, I was quelling a native with, ah, quells.
—Capt. Hugh Jampton, 'The Battle of Spion Kop', The Goon Show
May 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word woodwose
Resultative 'alive' in 'the statue came alive'.
May 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word woodwose
'Alive' here is depictive (as in 'ran around naked', 'turned up to work drunk', 'ate the meat raw') and is in contrast to a resultative complement ('shot them dead', 'hammered it flat', 'painted it blue').
May 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hetairae
This head word hetairae is itself the plural of singular hetaira.
May 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word palatals
Not an adjective! Not an adjective! The head word here is palatals, with noun plural ending. This can only be a noun. Parts of speech labels are not meaningless decoration.
May 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word uranographical
Not a noun! Not a noun! If it ends in -ic it's likely to be an adjective (excc.: statistic, physic, medic etc.); if it ends in -ic-al it's almost certainly an adjective (excc.: physical, medical "medical examination").
The noun for this branch of astronomy is 'uranography'.
May 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word spelling
*hands up* I have just come from drinkiepoos with our team of copy editors, all of whom have been laid off today. Apparently the idea is all the writers will write perfect English from the start and all I have to do is proof-read it.
May 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word maroon
Two separate origins: the colour is from French marron "chestnut", as is the firecracker (from the noise a chestnut in the fire makes).
The "strand" sense is ultimately from Spanish cimarrón "fugitive" (< cima "summit"), with loss of the initial syllable in some language in the chain of borrowing, not clear which.
May 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word wormhole
Wormholes are to black holes as elevators are to deep wells filled with snakes and poisoned spikes.
—Rules for Time Travelers
May 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word e'er
Ever to monosyllabic eer is a normal development: head, hawk, lark all come from earlier polysyllables with a medial v. In the case of eer, oer, (i) the v-ful alternatives remained in the language beside the shorter forms; (ii) at a relatively late stage the apostrophe was introduced to make the short form look like a mere variety of the longer one; and finally (iii) the short forms dropped out of everyday language. The poets didn't invent any contractions, they used the contractions available in everyday language (like it's, I've, i'th') and only gradually were some of these restricted to poetic registers.
Likewise the alternation of, say, walked and walk'd is because for some considerable time both were available in everyday language. Eventually walk'd won out and disyllabic walked was confined to poetic style.
May 18, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vigintillion
Or 1 followed by 120 zeroes.
May 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word austrasia
Austrasia has always been at war with Neustria.
May 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bergamot
Two different words: the aromatic component of Earl Grey tea is apparently from Bergamo in Italy, but the pear is from Turkish beğ armudu "bey's pear", altered to resemble the other word.
May 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list reduplicating-animals
The Western lowland gorilla is Gorilla gorilla gorilla.
May 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mesmerizing
One of a number of evaluative words that began as verb forms (the gerund-participle or present participle) and have taken on separate life as an adjective: so also enchanting, fascinating, interesting.
You can tell the difference between verb and adjective because some modifiers only apply to adjectives:
This show is very/extremely mesmerizing/fascinating. (Adj)
*The performer is very/extremely mesmerizing/fascinating the audience. (V)
May 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fabless
Of a semiconductor design business: doing only the design, and lacking the industrial facilities ('fabs') to fabricate the product. See more at Quinion.
May 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word szczaw
bilby: look in your garden. Wood sorrel is oxalis.
May 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cabbyl
The normal Welsh for "goat" is gafr. The interrelationships between the Celtic and Italic words here are not obvious: Don Ringe says the Celtic original of ceffyl "horse" seems to have gone from Latin to Celtic because it doesn't match up the way it would if it was a cognate, but this is uncertain. It is also unclear whether Italic and Celtic formed a sub-branch of IE and therefore particularly shared inherited vocabulary.
April 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word proto-vrddhi
For instance, to form a proto-vrddhi derivative from *dyew- 'sky' one took the zero grade *diw-, inserted *e to give *deyw- (sic), and so derived *deyw-ó-s 'god' (literally 'skyling'). . . . This is the historical source of the derivational process called vrddhi in Sanskrit.
—Don Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. The book actually uses the Indo-Europeanist syllabicity ring under the r, but I can't find that in Unicode.
April 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word coaly
And on blacklead.
April 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word blacklead
I bought some blacklead and blackleaded the grate so the iron glowed with a dull coaly gleam.
—Helen Dunmore, Your Blue-eyed Boy
Google Books throws up another use of the verb in a different Dunmore novel. WeirdNet only knows the verb. I'd never seen it used, and in fact didn't know what blacklead was. In my pub there's an old advertisement, circa 1900, for a brand of blacklead, but it depicts hoop-skirted young women in sunny outdoor colloquy, and so studiously fails to give any clue as to what it might be that I half imagined it must be some Edwardian hygiene product whose mode of application eluded me.
April 21, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word alumnus
I've considered tagging or listing them, but I think it's too late; it'd require going through over a thousand comments and deciding which were significantly etymological in nature.
April 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word alumnus
Wondering about the etymology of this, I found it originally meant "foster-child", with the familiar Latin al- "nourish" of 'aliment', but the unrecognizable part was a suffix related to the Greek passive participle suffix -omenos, not normally used in Latin.
Then I was surprised to learn that 'old' is related, as are 'altitude', 'alma mater' ("nourishing/bounteous mother"), and probably 'adult' and 'proletariat'.
The Germanic 'old' is from a past participle of that same root al- "nourish, raise", and is thus formally equivalent to Latin altus. The Latin however shifted from "grown up" to "high, tall" generally to "distant from the surface, i.e. high, tall, deep".
Ad-ul-tus and pro-l-es ("class who contribute offspring") might also contain the al- root internally.
April 20, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word retiarius
Best use of retiarius in a modern play:
HAROLD: He and his love are like a retiarius. Do you know what a retiarius is?
LOOSELEAF: He's a kind of gladiator who fights with a knife and a net and doesn't wear anything but a jockstrap.
HAROLD (amazed): How do you know that?
LOOSELEAF: You told me.
HAROLD: When?
LOOSELEAF: When we were up in the tree so long—with the bats.
HAROLD: Oh. I'd forgotten.
LOOSELEAF: Fourteen times you told me. I counted.
HAROLD: Really?
LOOSELEAF: You'd get this funny look in your eyes, and I'd say to myself, "Oh, Jesus—he's going to tell me what a retiarius is again."
—Kurt Vonnegut, Happy Birthday, Wanda June (The two men had been lost in the jungle after a plane crash.)
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mingy
Rupert Brooke, letter, 1912: I called you a mingy and coprologous Oxford poetaster.
Nancy Mitford, 1940: Mrs Holst only has the mingiest little diamond clip you ever saw.
Each in their own world.
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bitzer
A mongrel: bitzer this, bitzer that. Not yet in OED.
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word strategician
Attested from 1862, and in the text I'm proofing, and on a BBC blog, and sporadically elsewhere on the Web, but quite as many people (and in this case I'm inclined to be one of 'em) seem to think it's a blunder, 'strategist' influenced by 'tactician'.
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word musth
You're right, it is odd. I assumed it was a perfectly normal romanization of an Indian word containing aspirated th or ʈh, but it's not. The Urdu is mast "mad; drunk", and the expected romanization 'must' was used for most of the nineteenth century. Kipling appears to have stuck on the spurious -h.
April 17, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word lari
To be distinguished from laari, the subunit of the Maldivian rufiyaa.
April 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word autral
Not a currency: Argentina used the austral at one time.
April 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ambeguous
This was probably a scanning error in the Web version (there were many), not an error in the 1913 print.
April 16, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word wormwood
Not from worm + wood. The medial -w- first appears around 1400; the earlier English was wermod, of unknown etymology. The German form Wermuth (modern Wermut) gives us vermouth via French.
April 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mashallah
I've been having a bit of a think about this tense in the bath. Shâ'a is perfective: it would normally be translated by an English past, as in 'John wanted a bicycle' (and either did or didn't get one). The imperfective is yashâ', normally "wants", as in 'John wants a bicycle' (and might or might not be getting one for Christmas). The divine will, however, at least in the more orthodox branches of Islam, presumably has the property that what God wills, God definitely gets, so the perfective shâ'a is appropriate with present or aorist meaning.
April 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mashallah
'Tisn't. It's "what God wills": Arabic mâshâ'allâh from mâ "what" + shâ'a "he wants" + Allâh "God", with elision of the initial vowel of Allâh.
April 15, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mesonoxian
This is not a word. The only OED instance is a 1623 dictionary of inkhorn terms. And it's badly formed, being mixoclassical (to coin a word).
April 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list schwa-free
Angioneurotic is six syllables and would work in all accents, I believe.
April 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the list schwa-free
The OED's second edition uses traditional RP, in which unstressed /ɪ/ is the same phone as when stressed: so words like indivisibility or remitted have the same vowel throughout. Present-day RP and near-RP (such as Estuary) however aligns with most other accents of English in having ə for many of the unstressed positions. The third edition revision (which won't cover D for a long time) uses the symbol <ɨ> to indicate that both phones are possible.
Edit: Actually it's dotless crossed <i>, which isn't exactly the IPA cardinal symbol; I'd need to use strikethrough to show it, but that doesn't seem to work.
April 14, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word doga
And Get Fuzzy ages before that. (I'm at home so trying to find actual linkable examples will see us into the next geological period, sorry. You'll have to take this one on my say-so.)
April 13, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word imprimantur
Not a plural of an English noun. As the singular 'imprimatur' means "an official mark decreeing it may be printed", the Latin verb plural imprimantur may be Englished the same way: "an official mark decreeing they may be printed". Typically, multiple documents grouped together would require only a single mark imprimantur, rather than each being given its own imprimatur. Accepting it as an English nonce-word, it's vaguely remininiscent of certain North American languages where there are different verbs for single or multiple objects.
Both words can be pluralized in the usual way: imprimaturs for various documents separately judged, imprimanturs for those relating to Pope and Madras in those citations.
Interesting too, and quite typical for Wikheadtionary, that three of their five supposed citations don't show it used in English at all, and their supposed pronunciation is directly contradicted by the only citation indicating a pronunciation.
April 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word innit
The key thing about 'innit' is that it's invariant, like French n'est-ce pas, German nicht wahr, Italian non è vero, Turkish değil mi. In contemporary southern English English it is replacing the insanely complicated standard English construction:
I couldn't find my toothbrush, could I? / innit?
You have got a passport, haven't you? / innit?
We found it yesterday, didn't we? / innit?
She likes sushi, doesn't she? / innit?
They'll come tomorrow, won't they? / innit?
April 12, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word shoat
There is your dinner, friend, the pork of slaves.
Our fat shoats are all eaten by the suitors
—Fitzgerald's translation of Odyssey book 14
April 11, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word yard of ale
Entered to record the fact that I have just heard someone say 'yard of ales' for what were being consumed last night. To me this is a straightforward, transparent syntactic combination with idiomatic meaning, but that speaker has lexicalized it more closely.
April 10, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tingo
First person singular of the Latin verb meaning "wet, moisten; bathe" and thus "dye, stain". From this come our words 'tinge', 'tincture', 'tint'. So now you know.
April 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word leech
If both Germanic and Slavonic inherited it from common Indo-European, Germanic k would correspond to a voiced sound in Slavonic, *g or perhaps *z; as Slavonic has k too it's presumably a borrowing from Germanic. Starostin lists the Germanic and Celtic forms but doesn't mention the Slavonic.
(I mentioned Polish specifically before only because I happened to know that without looking it up.)
April 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word leech
Surprisingly perhaps, the "doctor" meaning is the original. It's a widespread Germanic root that's made it as far as Finnish (lääkäri) and Polish (lekarz). By contrast, English only shares the "blood-sucking worm" meaning with Middle Dutch. So either the word for "doctor" was applied to the worm in the pre-Old English period, or they were two separate words that have drifted together. (Anomalous vowels in some of the forms suggest that the "worm" word was originally different.)
April 9, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word laicization
GEORGE: What happened to the old Archbishop?
DOTTY: He abdicated . . . or resigned or uncoped himself—
GEORGE (thoughtfully): Dis-mantled himself, perhaps.
—Stoppard, Jumpers
April 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word we
Come, faith, madam, let us e'en pardon one another; for all the difference I find betwixt we men and you women, we forswear ourselves at the beginning of an amour, you as long as it lasts.
—Wycherley, The Country Wife, 1675
A nice example showing how old the construction is with case variation in what the CGEL calls 'determinative we' (where the NP 'we men' is headed by the noun 'men', and 'we' is a determinative, not a pronoun). That is, I presume Wycherley would have said *'betwixt us and you', not **'betwixt we and you'; but 'we men' is more of a fixed structure. In Present-day English this is often presumed to be a hypercorrection, but the OED has examples of it from well before Wycherley and prescriptive teaching.
April 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word mad magazine sentence
Despite the whimsically modern name, this construction has long been integral to English: I found three examples on the same page of Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), for example.
That's a good one! I hate a man for loving you! If he did love you, 'tis but what he can't help; and 'tis your fault, not his, if he admires you. I hate a man for being of my opinion! I'll ne'er do it, by the world! (subject + VP, twice)
He afraid to lose you, madam! (subject + AP)
(In this earlier stage of English, the nominative was the default case, so 'I', 'he'; in Present-day English we would say 'Me hate' and 'Him afraid'.)
April 5, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word jewishish
As Jonathan Miller said long ago, 'I'm not really a Jew, just Jew-ish.'
April 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word deconstruction
Hum. I've just encountered this word referring to what workers did to a building at the World Trade Center site. I'm tempted to leave it in for its disturbing Baudrillardian quality, but I'm afraid duty requires me to substitute something more prosaic. Dismantling, perhaps.
April 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word laicization
Dismantled, as Stoppard suggested?
April 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sphalm
Ooh gad, we even have an etymology s.v. 'sphalma'.
April 3, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word forte
Disyllabic pronunciation in all meanings: to pronounce common words differently from your neighbours is pedantry and ignorance. The English word is a blend of French and Italian, getting its spelling and pronunciation from Italian but its (primary) meaning from French.
The French for a strong point, in particular the strong point of a sword (as opposed to 'foible', the weak point) is fort fɔR, masculine.
As with numerous English words (locale, morale etc.), once it was borrowed into English it subsequently acquired an extra -e in the belief that this made it look more French.
The assimilation in pronunciation to the Italian-derived musical term forte is surely complete. The OED gives the pronunciations as (fɔːti, fɔːteɪ, formerly fɔːt), and I doubt anyone has said it as a monosyllable for many decades except those who have read someone else claiming that it was one. (I used to be one of those myself, in my ignorance, before I understood how language actually works.)
I have just edited out of some text the spelling forté, a natural next progression in confusing the two source languages.
March 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bugs
Yes! Me too! I had to sign in! *waaaa* Make it stop.
March 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word jusqu'aujourd'hui
il faut encore observer que jusqu’aujourd’hui, dans notre continent, cette maladie nous est particulière, comme la controverse.
—Candide ch.4
Interesting for the double apostrophe in its formation. Flicking through web hits it seems there is some doubt in Present-day French about whether this shouldn't be two words jusqu'à aujourd'hui.
March 30, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word vox populi
Invariably quoted out of context as if Alcuin stated this. What he wrote was: Nec audiendi sunt qui solent docere, 'Vox populi, vox Dei', cum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima est. "Nor are those who are wont to teach 'The voice of the people is the voice of God' to be listened to, for the tumult of the common people is always next to madness."
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word semagram
The sequence of phonograms is usually followed by a semagram, called in the Egyptological custom "determinative," which classifies a word according to its semantic sphere: for example, a sitting man * expresses the lexical realm of "man, mankind" . . .
—Antonio Loprieno, 1995, Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction, Cambridge
* At this point and scattered in the rest of the sentence after I have truncated it are actual hieroglyphics in the text. I am familiar with reading hieroglyphics; I am now ecstatic in owning a book that requires learning the Coptic alphabet to understand it properly. I have simple tastes.
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word out-enchant
At rest above a star pool with my friends,
Beside that grove most fit for elegies,
I made my phrase to out-enchant the night.
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Souls Lake'
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sonnerie
To call my true love to the dance
I need the sonnerie of circumstance
and not the damp disclosures of the Manse.
—Peter Porter, 'Men Die, Women Go Mad', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
Not in my Chambers. The meaning seems obvious nevertheless. I am too drunk to pursue the matter further. Note on pronunciation: as Porter is an Australian, this verse would rhyme perfectly for him.
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word cenacle
—where sparrows splash
a generation of fine mercers trained to be
the only hosts a prim cénacle knew—
—Peter Porter, 'Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces', in the volume of the same name
This would have looked more familiar in the English spelling without the accent, but the use of the French form is unexpected.
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sherdist
fought-over ground
looks no different from the urban waste
littering the road—here the sherdist found
a crinkly stone
—Peter Porter, 'Too Many Miracles', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ripa
and far from dark Messapian trappings choose
a sun-kind ripa of philosophy
—Peter Porter, 'Too Many Miracles', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
Familiar in Latin, of course, "bank", but I haven't seen it used in English. It's hard to quote sufficient context from a poem while not treading on copyright toes.
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sinopia
a conch-shell or a goat's horn cornucopia
might spill the face of wonder on the sand,
painstaking painting, miraculous sinopia.
—Peter Porter, 'Too Many Miracles', in Dragons in their Pleasant Palaces
March 29, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word dwarf planet
The five objects that have so far been declared dwarf planets are Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake.
The expression is grammatically unusual in that it is not a hyponym of its head: a dwarf planet is not a kind of planet. Most such expressions in English have to do with unreality of some kind (a fake Rembrandt is not a Rembrandt, a pretend dinosaur is not a dinosaur, an attempted coup is not a coup), or are lexically quirky (a Welsh rabbit is not a rabbit), or are named for rough biological resemblance (a sea anemone is not an anemone).
March 27, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ptochotrophium
Latinization of Greek for "alms-house, poorhouse" (ptoch- "poor" + troph- "nourish"). I'm listing it because I noticed it in actual use today (in the plural ptochotrophia): on one of the inscriptions on The Monument, commemorating the Great Fire.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word syfy
I thought real science fiction fans called it sf, and reserved sci-fi for the likes of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word oversight
Perilously close to an autantonym: the two opposing meanings are equally old, going back to the 1400s.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word lickorous
Not a variant of 'lechery', but of 'lecherous', to be pedantic. Different suffixes. (Apparently a variant in Northern French, where the k > tʃ change did not take place.) The Romance word is borrowed from a Germanic one, cognate with 'lick'; not related to Latin lux- "extravagance, debauchery".
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word leam
A synonym, not a form. The similarity of the spelling of the words in Modern English is deceptive: they are from unrelated Old English léoma and glǽm.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word scattergun
Oh, a scattergun is an actual kind of gun. I didn't know that.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ureilite
The researchers studying 2008 TC3 say it was one of a very rare type of meteorite called ureilites, which may have originated from a single parent body.
—BBC, 26/03/09
from Novo-Urei, a Russian village near which a ureilite meteorite fell c.1888
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word doubtlessly
A rare variant of the adverb 'doubtless'. The BNC goes 100:1 in favour of 'doubtless', though it's a little more common on Google as a whole, whilst still very much a minority form. I'm not aware that I've ever come across it before.
March 26, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word see
Oh, a perfectly unremarkable and harmless construction as long as it hides in the thickets; but when a writer makes a tic of it, as my present one is, out comes the red pen (and a wisp of steam from the ears).
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word candlewick
I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world.
—Mr Mog Edwards in Under Milk Wood
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word see
'The past year has seen them do such-and-such.'
'His expertise in X has seen him do Y.'
A strange information-packaging use that promotes an adjunct to subject.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word bring
'He brings with him his expertise in . . .'
As opposed to bringing with his chauffeur? But it sounds more natural with 'with him'.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word poowong
Near Nar Nar Goon and Koo Wee Rup, then?
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word evolution
As a comment on the word itself, it should be pointed out that it has had a great many and various meanings in its history (in English, Latin, French, etc.), numerous of them in biology; and all of those now entirely obsolete except Darwin's. Lack of awareness of this history may lead to strange misinterpretations of the history of biology, or of social science, since the Darwinian meaning is now so completely dominant it is too easy to think it was the one that was meant.
The first meaning in English was a kind of military manoeuvre. Darwin wasn't the first to espouse what we now call evolution in biology, nor the first to use that word for it (Lyell 1832 was), nor does the word appear in The Origin of Species till the 1873 sixth edition, in which he could say, 'At the present day almost all naturalists admit evolution under some form.' (The last word of the first edition, however, is 'evolved'.)
Amsuingly, the quotation after his in the OED is from Popular Science Monthly in 1880: 'I should regard a teacher of science who denied the truth of evolution as being as incompetent as one who doubted the Copernican theory.'
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word pol le veq
It's Pont l'Évêque.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word case ness
It's Caithness.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word paper cramer
It's pippo creme.
March 25, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word sorcerer
This spelling 'sorcerer' is strongly preferred to 'sorceror' (over 20:1 on raw Google hits), and the -or doesn't occur in BNP and isn't even mentioned in the OED as an alternative (though it does occur in the quotations with a sic against it).
That actually surprises me: I thought it was one of those where fluctuation was more standard, as with adviser/advisor, conjurer/conjuror, imposter/impostor.
March 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word adviser
See advisor for details of etymology and preferences. In a nutshell: BrE somewhat prefers -er, AmE -or, but it's not a simple split.
March 24, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word chop
A number of different words:
(1) "cut", thus the cut of meat, and 'get the chop' = "be axed, scrapped, killed", and choppy waves.
(2) variant of 'chap' = "jaw", usually in plural chaps, chops, thus chapfallen, and the new "skill" sense I noted below.
(3) "trade, barter" (related to 'cheap', 'chapman', German kaufen "buy", and town names in Chipping), occurring nowadays only in the phrases 'chop and change' and 'chop logic' ("bandy words" but now usually understood as word (1), as if "make fine distinctions")
(4) from a Hindi word for "impression, stamp", giving commercial senses in India and China such as "seal; licence; trade mark", then colloquially "quality", as in 'not much chop' = "not very good"
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word chop
A new idiom to me: 'shows off its nominal modifier chops'. According to the OED, the general meaning "skill" is a widening of "jazz trumpeter's skill" from "embouchure (in jazz)" from chops "jaws".
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word ignobility
Of actual ignobility too proud
To admit brotherhood, and sickened
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Adulescentia'
Another of those words that obviously must exist but are virtually never seen in actual use.
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word salle-d'armes
Prowess and grace of the invulnerable
Courteous horseman, the silk-shirted fencer
Far from the salle-d'armes, scraping and ringing:
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Adulescentia'
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word tintsheet
Turn on the lights. Electric yellow
Light on the greylight. Aching now,
Elbows mashed on the tintsheet.
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Wet Sunday'
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word minuscular
The wondering and minuscular fore-finger
Traced that embossing by the magic world.
—Robert Fitzgerald, 'Animula'
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word fatou's lemma
Oh phooey, it's an img. I thought you'd found some clever way of doing it in HTML.
March 23, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word footpace
In armour before the earthen footpace he stood;
—Charles Williams, 'Taliessin at Lancelot's Mass', in Taliessin Through Logres
each at the earthen footpace ordained to be blessed and to bless
—ib.
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word monstrum
In the monstrum of triangular speed,
in a path of lineal necessity,
the necessity of being was communicated to the son of Lancelot.
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
I don't know what it means; you don't know what it means; and I will bet a silk pyjama Mr Dorky Prat Drooling Williams wasn't paying much attention at that point either. Idiot. Idiot.
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word argentine
and gathered and fled through the air to the head of Percivale,
flew and flamed and flushed the argentine column.
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
I don't think I've seen this used before to mean "argent".
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word thighed
over the bier and the pale body of Blanchefleur,
mother of the nature of lovers, creature of exchange;
drained there of blood by the thighed wound,
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word overfeather
An infinite flight of doves from the storming sky
of Logres—strangely sea-travellers when the land melts—
forming to overfeather and overwhelm the helm,
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word creaturely
Solomon was the grand master of all creaturely being
in sublime necromancy, the rule and road of seeing
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word arm-fasted
Rigid his left arm stretched to the queen Balkis;
where her mouth on his hand tasted effectual magic,
intellectual art arm-fasted to the sensuous.
—Charles Williams, 'The Last Voyage', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word unangelical
Unangelical speed loitered upon them,
supposing the everlasting habitations had received it;
—Charles Williams, 'The Death of Palomides', in Taliessin Through Logres
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word seed-mail
I sat and heard, aloof in my young seed-mail,
scornful of my secret attention;
—Charles Williams, 'The Death of Palomides', in Taliessin Through Logres
No idea. I don't think Williams had any idea what he was talking about half the time.
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word djong
throngs of trunks covered the volcanic waters;
only the flat djongs float into alien P'o-lu.
—Charles Williams, 'The Departure of Merlin', in Taliessin Through Logres
No idea. Not in OED. I'm going to guess it's Williams's faux-archaic form of 'junk'.
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word criminate
'Although there may be other particulars of a public nature, tending to criminate this person, I do not think a larger and more copious catalogue is necessary to be exhibited to this worshipful bench; because the proof of all will lie before a court of superior jurisdiction.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word praecordia
The doctor's choler rose; he felt a suffocating sensation somewhere—a sort of swell about the præcordia; but he suffered in silence.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word girandole
Poor Sir Philip, as if he had seen the face of Medusa, flew back, and encountered a girandole, which fell to the floor—a girandole no more.
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 22, 2009
qroqqa commented on the word hypochondriacism
'I fear he may have infected your lordship with hypochondriacism.'
—Robert Bage, 1796, Hermsprong
March 22, 2009
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