Today as I was working on a translation of a poem, I got a call from someone offering my company security services (which I don't need). I wanted to tell him that he must be from Porlock, but of course he would not have understood. The reference is to a note Coleridge appended to his poem "Kubla Khan". Writing of himself in the third person, he says:
"On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"
I just learned that the origins of this word, which represents a costly nightmare, a rite of passage, a crutch, a refuge, and a pleasure – and enormous profits – for so many, comes from the name bestowed on the tobacco plant in a self-aggrandizing act by the 16th-century French diplomat Jean Nicot de Villemain, who brought the plant and its seeds from Portugal to the French King Charles IX in 1560. He introduced snuff tobacco to the French court, thus making a name for himself, so to speak. The rest is tragic history. So nicotine goes on my Suprisingly Eponymous list – the first word to be added in many years.
The conversation we had in 2008(!) about the word porajmos are the kind of Wordie conversations I miss. By the way is chained_bear still around? And reesetee?
My favorite is still dawdle, which of course includes all the other -dles, but evntually the old -dles dull and I look for some new -dle thing to whet my noodle.
vendingmachine, so sorry to hear about the stalker (the price of fame?), but it's great that you're having such success with your comic creations! It's nice to be back.
Sadly, my beloved cat Aglaja, born in September 2004, passed away on December 27, 2017. Fondly known as "the Clowness" for her lively and amusing facial expressions and body positions, she brought love and warmth and energy to all those who had the good fortune to know her. She leaves behind a heart-broken family: myself, my partner and her sister, Erazma. Rest in peace, dear friend.
Bilby, sorry to spoil your otherwise excellent pun, but if you had been in Southern Africa in the 16th or 17th century, you might well have seen such events, and I'm sure it you would not have wanted to:
"The Khoi (known as "Hottentots") first encountered European explorers and merchants around AD 1500. The ongoing encounters were often violent. Local population dropped when the Khoi were exposed to smallpox by Europeans. Warfare against Europeans flared when the Dutch East India Company enclosed traditional grazing land for farms. Over the following century, the Khoi were steadily driven off their land, which effectively ended their traditional life." – Wikipedia, "Khoikhoi"
When I added this to my homophone/homograph list in 2009, it was done in pure jest. Sadly, it's now a daily headline (when not pushed out by other atrocities closer to home).
Isn't this what housemates do? Sharent? I think the word the author of the Telegraph article is looking for is "co-parenting" or perhaps "shared parenting". Must everything be crammed into a portmanteau? In fact, I thought this faux word, or "fauord", meant the very opposite, that is, exclusively female parenting (derived from "she-parenting"). Not for the first time, I am calling for a moratorium on portmanteaux, or rather, a portmantorium.
With all due respect to Rebecca Solnit, wouldn't a clearer, more elegant, and more pronounceable way to express this idea be "privileged obliviousness" or "the obliviousness of privilege"? (And does she not know how to spell "privilege"?)
*wonders why people feel the need to coin words when perfectly good ones already exist*
Vendingmachine, don't be upset with the Century Dictionary definition; it was written more than a century ago when there were both music-masters and music-mistresses, just as there were both authors and authoresses and murderers and murderesses.
More commonly, and more traditionally, a word used in response by somebody who is either (a) offended by the suggestion that they should buy something in medium or (b) proud of their build and dismissive of those who might, in kindness or flattery, suggest a medium: a) "Medium, schmedium, I need a small!" b) "Medium, schmedium, I'm an extra-large!"
Reading Blake's famous poem "The Tyger", with its reference to the animal's "fearful symmetry", I realized (among other things) that "fearful" is a contranym. In Blake's poem, it means "able to stir dread, fear" -- "awesome" in its more traditional meaning -- but of course today it more usually means "feeling fear, being afraid".
It seems to me to be even more modern and appropriate, and more civil, to refer to people's ethnicity (if that's even necessary) by standard, non-derogatory descriptors: Osama bin Laden was an Arab (more specifically, a Saudi Arabian); Palestinians are, well, Palestinians; and Nina Davuluri is an Indian-American (more specifically, a Tulugu-American, if the Wikipedia entry about her can be trusted). Why group Arabs (or Moroccans, Algerians, Libyans, Egyptians, Palestinians, Saudi Arabians, Emiratis, Qataris, Bahrainis, Omanis, Yemenis, Iraqis), Berbers, Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Israelis, Iranians, Pakistanis, and Indians under such a peculiar label? What good does it serve?
"I, as a speaker and writer of English, am descriptivist. I look at what it is doing at the moment, puzzling it out, making my own choices. Prescriptivism comes in when as a gimlet-eyed editor or teacher I advise which available product is best suited to the customer. I do not lay down the law, for there is no law."
– John E. McIntyre, "Free-market English", "You Don't Say" blog, Baltimore Sun, 16 Oct. 2015
Used in the sense of "decrepit", "decaying": "This time, I started out again, with the misconception common to Anglo-Saxons, that the real Rome is the Rome of the ugly ruins, the Rome of all those grey cariated temples wedged in between the hills and the slums of the city." – Thomas Merton, The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948)
Writing in the late 1940s, Thomas Merton in his first memoir, The Seven-Storey Mountain, described his Aunt Maud as follows:
"Nice, in the strict sense, and in the broad colloquial sense, was a word made for her: she was a very nice person. In a way, her pointed nose and her thin smiling lips eve suggested the expression of one who had just finished pronouncing that word. 'How nice!'"
I'm not sure what he means by "the strict sense" - perhaps "respectable", perhaps "fastidious"; by "the broad colloquial sense", he almost certainly means "pleasant and agreeable", the way most of us use the word today.
Reading another comment on Wordnik that referred to "natural language", it struck me that the term is a retronym. I'm not sure when it originated, but I imagine the term was first used to distinguish human communication from machine communication.
An article today in The Guardian on the mass-killer in Oregon reminded me of this word (perhaps my focus on words is a way of distracting myself from the hideous reality):
"The 26-year-old, obsessed by the macabre hoopla surrounding other mass shootings, left a note – a multi-page, angry screed, it was reported – and murdered with apparent yearning for posthumous notoriety."
"Screed" seems exactly the right word here, and this convinced me that it should be on my Fibrous Words list. By the way, notice the apt use also of the word notoriety.
The question was: "Do authors auth?" My response is that they don't. Somebody who auths would be properly called an "auther", though I am not sure what that means, since I don't know what "auth" means. It has not yet obtained a meaning that is widely understood. (Though with a little effort on someone's part and the Internet, perhaps it will in a few days.) Speaking of how words are formed, the relation between the stem word and its derivative, whether by back- or forward-formation, is not always self-evident. Escalators, for example, do not escalate, at least not in the way that crises do. Similarly, authors are not people who authorize things. If you ask, "What, then, do authors do?" The answer is simple: "Authors author." The noun is easily and regularly verbed.
A derogatory name for the Soviet Union especially in the early years. It comes from the acronym "Sovdep" for Sovet deputatov, or "Council of Deputies". As a state of mind, Sovdepia is connected to the worst excesses of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as embodied by the Communist Party of the USSR.
"Determined to prove their mettle, several Republican presidential candidates showed new aggressiveness in lacing into Donald J. Trump on Wednesday night, seeking to elevate themselves as leaders of substance and shake up a race that Mr. Trump has dominated all summer."
– Jonathan Martin and Patrick Healy, "Candidates use second G.O.P. debate to taunt Donald Trump", New York Times, 16 Sept. 2015
Just a brief morphological note in the hope of dispelling confusion about the nonce word "disspelling". The "dis-" particle in the word derives from the verb "to dis", which is slang for "to disrespect", which itself is slang for "to show disrepect" or "to treat disrespectfully". It is not a misspelling of "dispelling", which derives from the Latin "dispellere" and means "to drive away", in the sense of making something (usually bad) disappear.
In the sense of the aggressive tag phrase, am I right to assume that "ya bish" derives from the gangsterish Italian word "capisci?" (pronounced "kapeesh"), meaning "Have I made that clear enough?"
I don't like this term. All the best libraries contain books waiting to be read. The term "antilibrary" suggests something that stands in opposition to the library, like a Board of Censorship or book-burning fascists. Taleb makes an excellent point in the quoted passage, but he's hit on the wrong term. But why do the books look at you menacingly? My unread books (and they are many) look at me invitingly.
In John Keats' narrative poem "Isabella", the heroine's materialistic brothers are referred to as "those Baälites of pelf" – invective worth remembering.
Tmesis, by the way, is part of Russian grammar when it comes to prepositional phrases with negative pronouns such as никто (nikto, "nobody"), ничто (nichto, "nothing"), and никакой (nikakoy, "no kind of"). So if you want to say, "We were not talking about anybody", that would be "Мы не говорили ни о ком" (My ne govorili ni o kom), literally (more or less), "We were not talking no-about-body" (Russian uses the double negative).
According to the Oxford American, "ride herd on" is "N.Amer. , keep watch over" -- an idiom I did not know before. An example, from a NYT article on the Alice show at the Morgan Library in NY: "Carroll often rode herd on Tenniel, one of the most successful illustrators of his day; 'Don’t give Alice so much crinoline' was typical of the detailed degree of his authorial involvement." ("Looking at the birth of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice,' 150 years old", New York Times, June 25, 2015)
My first thought was a mistake for, or the origin of, the phrase I know: "to ride hard on somebody", which I understand as meaning "to keep the pressure on someone, often mercilessly, to get the work done". But maybe I have adopted this as an eggcorn.
This word is used by John Keats in a striking, and perhaps surprising, condemnation of capitalist exploitation of workers, colonial exploitation, and cruelty to animals:
Wonderful! The image of a poet's work as garners (granaries) holding the grain of thought is found also in Baratynsky's poem "Autumn" (1837), though with different implications:
But you, as you enter the autumn of your days, O plowman of the fields of life, and your earthly lot appears before your eyes in all its generosity, and as the furrows of this life get ready to offer up their bounty to you and so reward the labor of existence, and as the precious harvest ripens, and you, in grains of thought, gather it in, now at the prime of human destiny—
In the early 1990s a song that never failed to move me, that seemed to weld me to my life in its fullest, truest experience, was "Being Boring" by the Pet Shop Boys. I was intrigued by the central quotation from "the wife of a famous writer" and wondered exactly where it came from. I guessed that it must be from Zelda Fitzgerald, but never bothered finding the exact quote (finding such things was harder in those days). Now, today, I found a website devoted to the song: www.10yearsofbeingboring.com, and the quote itself, acknowledged as being from ZF, but without the specific reference, which I then easily found on Google Books:
"… the Flapper … bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure; she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do."
– Zelda Fitzgerald, "Eulogy on the Flapper" (1922), The Collected Writings (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
What a lovely word! Here it is in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where Brutus tells his wife, Portia, that he will soon reveal to her why is worried and pensive:
Of course, someone could come along and start talking about Obama's or Boehner's fleering at some question, and then when asked about the word, say: it's when you flinch and sneer at the same time. And then if people start using it a lot to mean simultaneous flinching and sneering, well there you have your portmanteau. But it won't be the same old Scandinavian-born fleer that Shakespeare knew.
Rules of style that may have once held a certain (dubious) validity but are now long dead; nevertheless they continue to live on various websites devoted to the general issue of how English is going to the dogs. Examples: never split an infinitive, don't end sentences with a preposition, don't start sentences with a coordinate conjunction, avoid the passive voice, etc. etc.
"I am indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they are in great danger, I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat's leather have gone upon my handiwork." – Second Commoner (a cobbler), in Shakespeare, Julius Ceasar, Act I, scene i.
Named after the Persian mathematician Muhammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780-c. 850), referred to in Latin texts as Algoritmi or Algaurizin (acc. to Wikipedia). The "al-Khwarizmi" part of his name, which gave us the word "algorism", which then became "algorithm", means "from Khwarezm", a medieval country in Central Asia that was also known as Chorasmia. Hence, our word is both eponymous and toponymous.
An interesting word for a certain kind of mistake occasionally encountered in occasionally encountered in medieval manuscripts manuscripts and on the Web.
So Stephen Amell defines "sinceriously" as 1) a noun ("the ability…") and 2) a verb ("to initiate…")? But its form suggests that it is in fact an adverb. And what is the difference between "sinceriously" and "sincerely"? Sincerity usually implies a serious attitude, doesn't it? This strikes me as just another worthless portmanteau that is neither sincere nor serious in intent.
The Romanized spelling of Chekhov's name in Chinese: Āndōng Bāfǔluòwéiqí Qìhēfū (安东·巴甫洛维奇·契诃夫), which, probably because of a typo, was transformed to "Anton kowolski vicki Chekhov"! See the discussion at Languagehat, http://languagehat.com/anton-kowolski-vicki-chekhov
Not really homophonic, but approaching it. Weirdly, this phrase crossed my mind as I was admiring the nutrias who congregate on the banks of the river near where I live. I have never tasted a nutria, though I used to own a hat, a shapka, actually, a wonderful and much loved shapka, made of nutria fur.
Perhaps we should start using UKoGBaNI more in colloquial speech. We could pronounce it "ooko gbanee" with an African inflection, or "yookog banny" (more Southeast Asian, perhaps?). It also makes a convenient demonym: Ukogbanian.
A word very much in the news these days in Slovenia. The closest English word for it is "sleet". It's the icy covering that forms on branches, electrical cables, and other things, and it has been doing a great deal of damage this week, bringing down trees and cables and resulting in power outages and road closings across a large swath of the country.
This occurred to me yesterday while listening to the news about the Iran nuclear deal, and it begged me to put it here. It's more than three words, but i can't remember where we put STF-like collocations of this sort.
According to the theory of the Orientalist Sir Richard Burton, this is the region in which different-generation male homosexuality was prevalent and even celebrated by the indigenous peoples. (See the Wikipedia article for details.)
Here the "v" and the "r" both serve as (semi-)vowels, to give you a pronunciation that is something like oozBURST -- which is nice, considering that the word means "a budding".
So I suppose "matricide" is killing yourself after watching the whole Matrix series a dozen times and still not being able to figure out what's real not.
Came across this yesterday reading Henry James and I thought, what a nice word. I was looking for such a word recently in one of my translations and it didn't occur to me (I used "mirth" instead, another great word). And yet it's not an unusual word, not archaic, just a little dusty. When was the last time I used "levity" in a sentence when I wasn't saying, facetiously, "This is no time for levity"?
Fascinating. In Russian, the piece is still called "elephant" ("slon"), and in Slovene, it's a "hunter" ("lovec"), which I assume is connected with the old "archer" name. I did not know the word "alfin" and am surprised to learn that it was ever used in English, but it must have been, if the Century has a definition for it.
It actually describes something that amuses and annoys me on so many US TV shows, as when the CSI guys explain to each other exactly the process they are use ("and now I'm going to run the fingerprints through the database"). I keep waiting for one of them to say, "Yes, of course you are. You always do. That's your job. Why are you telling me this? Do you think I don't know what goes on in a CSI lab? I've been working here 15 years, forgodsake!"
This is the Slovene word for a fan (the old kind of folding fan people, women especially, or rather, ladies) would use to cool themselves on hot days. I like the way it sounds. It sounds cool (in both sense of the word): the puff of pah- with the release of -ljača.
The tourist agency drives them every day to a different natural wonder in the mountainous country: cliffs and ravines, rivers and streams sparkling in sunshine. There is always something else to be oohed at, photographed, and always some arduous narrow trail to be followed to get to the breathtaking vista. It is beautiful but exhausting. The group is bloated from the beauty, as every day it gorges gorgeous gorges.
Second: Is that any different from saying "drenched in sweat"?
Third: I always associate "bedraggled" with being wet, though being in a generally miserable-looking state is essential too. It would sound strange to me to say: "Gene Kelly was cheerfully bedraggled as he celebrated the joys of crooning in precipitation."
Great list, hernesheir! I added a few: the obvious signature and tag, as well as crest and tell (in the sense of a sign that someone is lying), though I'm not sure that this last one fits with the idea of the list. With open lists, especially, I think it's wise to say what sort of words you're looking for.
I love the older sense of truant, as "stray, displaced, wandering", used by George Eliot in this passage from The Mill on the Floss, describing the Red Deeps, an area of hollows and hills where Maggie Tulliver enjoyed taking her walks. The place, she says, had a charm for Maggie:
especially in summer, when she could sit in the grassy hollow under the shadow of a branching ash, stooping aslant from the steep above her, and listen to the hum of insects, like tiniest bells on the garment of Silence, or see the sunlight piercing the distant boughs, as if to chase and drive home the truant heavenly blue of the wild hyacinths.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), Book V, chap. 1, "In the Red Deeps"
Pro, good luck on your future endeavors! Have you got something lined up? Returning to Italy? Drop me a line if you're interested in visiting neighboring Slovenia!
By 1979, "gay" in the sense of "homosexual" was already widespread among gays and lesbians themselves, so I expect that there is a play on words going on here. Bishop was a lesbian, who like most lesbians of her generation had to be very discreet; it may indeed be the case that this poem about freedom and escape (from the mirror!) indicates a new acceptance of her own homosexuality.
The sense you mention, alasdair17, pertains to the noun phrase Pyrrhic victory, not to the word pyrrhic per se, which is why I do not give it here. I do, however, provide it under "Pyrrhic victory" (note the capital "P", which I prefer since in this sense the word derives from the proper noun Pyrrhus). By the way, there really was no need to use four question marks in a row. I hope you have calmed down a little.
As far as I can tell, "rampid" is (still) non-standard English. People often use it (mistakenly, I would say) for "rampant". The standard phrase is "run rampant".
"According to anonymous senior administration sources quoted in the New York Times, Obama decided to speed up a programme first launched by his predecessor, George W Bush, codenamed Olympic Games, whose aim was to use computer viruses to attack Iran's nuclear enrichment programme."
– Peter Beaumont, "Obama 'sped up cyber-attacks on Iran's nuclear programme'", The Guardian, 1 June 2012.
The lack of a hyphen in "codenamed" (read "code-named") here is annoying. I initially read this as "co-denamed" and imagined Bush and Obama together "denaming" this programme as Olympic Games. Why do people hate hyphens? Hyphens are our friends!
This is a misspelling. Note that the correct spelling is griping. As a general rule, verbs that end in a silent -e, drop the -e when the ending -ing is added. There are exceptions (the only ones that come to mind are dyeing, to distinguish it from dying, and ageing, though here many prefer aging) – but "gripeing" is not one of them.
The adjective exists, only it is spelled differently: erinaceous. Feel free to use this word, spelled correctly with the adjectival -ous suffix, to describe any hedgehoggy acquaintances you may have.
*feeling a little sad, and a little curmudgeonly about the fact that modern dictionaries don't make references like "the leap of Curtius into the chasm, or the death of the martyr Stephen". Today it's all about quantifiable information with little thought to knowledge and none to wisdom.*
Interesting, mtc. Baratynsky's "wondrous city" has a very different connotation than "Cloud Cuckoo Land", but the latter certainly belongs on my states-of-mind-from-absurdistan-to-zion list.
Ruzuzu, Baratynsky and I go way back. I was introduced to him by Pushkin and Nabokov, with an added endorsement from Brodsky.
Coined by none other than Alfred Hitchcock. I placed this on my bywords list (for now at least) because this sounds like a person's name; presumably the MacGuffin in movie could be an (unnamed) character.
As someone who doesn't play violent role-playing video games I am not interested in having my images taken anywhere near WOW, thank you. And if I want any jism-layered group montages (especially of the fraternity variety), I know a few select websites where to find them.
Sadly, in his notes to Lolita (The Annotated Lolita), the otherwise seemingly erudite Alfred Appel Jr. believes that "auroch" is the singular of "aurochs", a word Nabokov uses in the all-important penultimate sentence of the novel.
"In modern times the term 'pornography' connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which demands the traditional word for direct action on the patient. … Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust."
A dry white wine indigenous to the Vipava valley in Slovenia (according to the Slovene Wikipedia, for what it's worth, this variety was first mentioned in 1324). The excellent bottle I tried (2006 vintage) came from the Sončni škol cellar in Renče.
The difference between the spellings hryvnia and hryvnya for the Ukrainian гривня is one of English transliteration, specifically how to transliterate the Ukrainian Cyrillic letter я. In both transliterations the letter before the "a" does not represent a separate syllable, but only the softening (palatalization) of the "n". Other possible renderings would be "hryvnja", "hryvňa", "hryvn'a", and "hryvña", since the letter "j", the caron, the apostrophe, and the tilde are all conventional ways (in separate systems) of indicating such palatalization. Curiously, the Oxford American Dictionary gives "hryvna" as its main headword (despite indicating the iotization of the a in its pronunciation guide), with "hryvnia" as an "also". (I can understand why it might make sense to reserve the y-transliteration for the Ukrainian vowel "y"/"и", though the same argument can be made for preserving "i" for the Ukrainian vowel "i".)
LesHerasymchuk is right, though, about the history of the Ukrainian language: both Ukrainian and Russian (as well as Belorusian) come from Old East Slavic (the language of the medieval state known as Kievan Rus); Ukrainian does not come from Russian. In terms of continuity, it is more accurate to say that Russian comes from Old Ukrainian (though linguists don't usually use that anachronistic term, preferring instead "Old East Slavic"). And it is also true that Russian was profoundly influenced by Church Slavonic, a by-product of Old Bulgaro-Macedonian (a South Slavic language). I don't know whether modern Ukrainian has been as deeply influenced by Church Slavonic.
Which is the correctly cased form, yarb? I would guess the lowercase barometz, since this is the name of a type of (mythical) entity (like unicorn), not a personal name (like Pegasus).
Well, since it's Nabokov, there could well be a Slavic solution. In Slovene the verb gugati means "to rock"; a gugalnik is a rocking chair, while a gugalnica is a swing. The Russian word for "to rock or swing" is different (качаться / kachat'sya), but I wondered anyway if there was a cognate. It turns out that Dahl's mid-19th-c. dictionary includes the word гугала / gugala (from a northern Russian dialect) which means "swing" (noun) and, indeed, the verb гугаться / gugat'sya, "to swing". So I would suggest that Nabokov playfully Englished this as "google", meaning something like "sway back and forth".
In Russian and Slovene and, I expect, many other languages this name has become a common noun referring to a patron of the arts, especially someone who supports a particular artist, writer, or art institution.
In a statement, this is "a commitment to an extra message that (metaphorically speaking) comes through on a second channel, without adding anything to the factual content of what is said." –Geoffrey K. Pullum, "A wee conventional implicature", Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3650#more-3650
Pullum gives the examples of "damn" in such statements as "Somebody stole my damn guitar" and "wee" in Scottish usage: "I'll just be going off for a wee cup o' tea":
"It seems to me that wee has a similar syntactic privilege of occurrence — you can just pick a salient noun at random and stick wee on that — but the semantic contribution is just an optimistic and comforting attitudinal overtone: rather than the vague impression that the speaker is pissed at the situation, which is what damn conveys, wee supplies a vague impression that the speaker is being helpful and optimistic and that things are going to be just fine."
This is a word I've been encountering recently -- it feels academically faddish -- in the sense of "ideological" or perhaps simply "purported": In an article in the New York Times Book Review on the (obviously) important role of the Bible in Western literature, the author, referring to Faulkner and Dostoevsky, writes: "The failure of the notionally Christian worlds of Russia and Mississippi to be in any way sufficient to the occasion of Christ among them would be a true report always and everywhere." (Marilynne Robinson, "The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible," NYT Sunday Book Review, 22 Dec. 2011)
Thanks, ru! But Nancy's citation there simply confirms my point. Ammon Shea (the guy who read the OED), writes about the word: "The OED does not give any citation for its use except for Henry Cockeram's 1623 English Dictionarie." This is a white elephant of a word, a verbal knick-knack: it sits on the shelf and people say, "Oh, how pretty!" but nobody really knows what to do with it except display it as a pretty word. And when you do try to use it (right now, a certain @impropaganda has Tweeted®, "Hope the weather holds for some beautiful southern apricity!") you end up sounding precious, arch, or pompous.
The fact that all of the examples, and even the Tweets®, merely cite this word and do not use it make me wonder if it is in fact a word that people say (or more likely, write). This seems more like a museum piece than an "actual word".
It occurred to me today that this is a retronym, which only appeared once it became standard practice to send young children out of the home to receive a primary education. Until the 19th century, or thereabouts, young children, if they received any education at all, were educated at home.
Thanks, leaden! What beautiful work this is! So I suppose one message in the image is that happiness points the way to enlightenment but is not enlightenment.
I could imagine "wear" being used as a count noun in a situation where someone was comparing the durability of different items (their various "wears" after a year of use, for instance), but it's hardly elegant English. It is simply a matter of count-nouning the already existent deverbal noun "wear".
Apparently, one of these, recently found on Little Barrier Island in New Zealand by Mark Moffatt, is the biggest insect in the world. Click on the following link (if you dare), for more:
This is very popular in Slovenia, where it is called šmoren (from the German word Schmarrn), or more formerly cesarski praženec, a calque on Kaiserschmarrn, meaning something like "the Emperor's pancake" (for a recipe, see http://www.austria.info/uk/austrian-cuisine/kaiserschmarren-1561302.html). According to the Slovene culinary website www.kulinarika.net, this treat got its name when an innkeeper in Ježica served it to the Austrian and Russian emperors, who were stopping there on their way to the 1821 Congress in nearby Ljubljana (Laibach). Today Ježica is part of Ljubljana, and that same inn, or gostilna, is still there; it is called "Pri ruskom carju" ("The Russian Czar"), and it has lent its name to the surrounding neighborhood: the Russian Czar neighborhood.
For the time being, we could use the "Feedback" tab. I suggest going to the Feedback (a different website), clicking "Problems" and titling the comment, for example, "SPAM: timberlandsalgs profile".
In contemporary visual-art practice, this refers to works that cross different media (for instance, that combine painting and video; installation and social action; intervention and performance, etc.).
Is anybody else using the "feedback" tab on the left side of the new Wordnik Preview? It seems like I am the only one asking questions and pointing out problems, which is crazy, since I know many other people should have comments about the new interface.
In fact, the distinction is still very much alive in certain contexts. I don't think anyone would disagree that "a jealous husband" means something very different from "an envious husband". But whereas "envious" still cannot mean what "jealous" has traditionally meant (fearful about losing something one thinks one possesses); "jealous" has been encroaching on the territory of "envious".
Ru, that is the way I have always understood the distinction. But since the phrase, "I'm so jealous!" (which really is a kind of compliment when said to a friend -- meaning, essentially and paradoxically, "I celebrate your good fortune") has become ubiquitous, the finer distinction may be lost on the hoi polloi.
Perhaps it's ultimate iteration, in which case Wizard Alex, aka He Who Started Monday, would, perhaps, specialize in repeating things to the point where no further repetition is necessary.
Hern, I actually meant first to comment on your apply day: it sounds lovely. Do you have apple trees? That's one of the things I miss in my urban life.
GHibbs's grasp of grammar is less than firm, I fear. Not every modifier is an adjective -- or more precisely, it's neither standard practice nor useful to label every modifier an adjective. In the case of the listing ship, we are dealing with a present active participle (as it was termed when I was learning grammar some 40 years ago) from the verb "to list" ("lean to one side").
Compare the word untoward, which has a similar, though not identical, meaning ("inappropriate, unacceptable, etc.). Surely, the words must be derived from to and fro (which I guess meant originally "toward and away from").
Yes, it is actually, though that had not occurred to me before, since it shows up in some very common words, like fant ("boy") and in a lot of slang: ful ("completely", from the German voll), zafrkniti ("to mess up, screw, cause problems"), and of cours fukati (another borrowing from the Germanic languages) and its derivatives. But these are all borrowings (fant comes from the Romance infant, but most of the others are Germanisms) or, occasionally onomatopoeic forms (frfotati, for example, means "to flutter"). Historically, the Slavic languages did not have a separate "f" phoneme; the f-sound existed only as the devoiced allophone of the "v" phoneme. But Slovene, having lived in very close quarters with German (and Friulian) for some 14 centuries, has made "f" its own, although I guess, compared to the other letters, it is still somewhat rare. But then, the other 10-pointer, "ž" is a full-fledged Slavic phoneme and doesn't strike me as particularly rare either.
Thanks for the Scrabble counts, Froggy. That's very interesting!
But can-canning (i.e. reduplicative canning) and sinning may, in fact, be related. Allow me to cite Irving Berlin: "She started a heat wave by letting her seat wave in such a way that the customers say she certainly can can-can." Here the "heat wave" caused by the can-canning of the woman in the lyric is, clearly, a not-so-subtle reference to what one may argue is, at least, a pre-sinning state or even, to be sure, a sinning one, if we accept the Gospel dictum that lustful thoughts are themselves sinful. Hence, reduplicative canning may in fact possess a relation of causality with regard to non-reduplicative sinning.
But I don't think you can parse it that way. And why would you want to? Obviously, omnipotence and omniscience are not equivalent; they are different concepts. The question is, does one presume the other?
I beg to differ. If knowledge is a form of power, then omnipotence -- the possession of all power -- must include omniscience -- the power of knowing all.
Done: "Ab C. Defghi & Co." It's an open list, so please contribute as you can. (Milosrdenstvi, I'm looking forward to seeing the Georgian alphabet up there, and the Indonesian from Bilby, the Irish from Fox, etc.)
The d and the e have been reversed. But I have always pronounced this something like "abseh défghi jekyll minópker stoov wyxes". Once you've tackled a Slavic language, you can find a way to pronounce almost any string of letters.
"Writers, by nature, tend to be people in whom l'esprit de l'escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte after the moment for saying it has passed. So they take a few years longer and put it in print."
– Louis Menand, "Bad Comma" (a review of Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, The New Yorker, June 28, 2004.
So Christinerick, in your opinion, devout Catholics do not practice hagiolatry? If you agree with that statement, then you would agree that "hagiolatry" is a word. We don't get to choose what is or is not a word on the basis of whether we support the concept the word represents.
In the UK, Van Dyke's name has become a byword for someone can't imitate an English accent successfully – the result of the American actor's woeful imitation of a Cockney chimney sweep in the film Mary Poppins.
Cf. the following usage:
"I’m a Londoner with a very neutral British accent living in the US and my (American) Siri doesn’t understand me either. I have to repeat myself numerous times and in an increasingly bad American accent to make myself understood. And since I am the Dick Van Dyke of American, this can get very tedious. Why not use British Siri, you ask? British Siri understands me perfectly, but unfortunately it has been programmed to say "I can only search for businesses, maps and traffic in the United States, and when you’re using US English’, which seems very unreasonable to me. Why can’t I search for US businesses in British English?"
Froggy, I think it has something to do with the Swedish meaning of my name ("fun, amusing, comical"); curiously, I'm told that in Danish, "rolig" means "calm".
People are welcome to leave comments for me here, if they so desire. I would also suggest that they add their own name to my "Wordizens/Wordnikians" list and use this space for keeping in touch with each other. I would add a few names myself, but I'm not sure whether people want to be capitalized or not, and I am also afraid of forgetting someone and having all sorts of umbrage taken and fufluns flung.
Once I was editing a text and this word came up, only with a hyphen: "post-colonialism". I suggesting removing the hypen in order to be consistent with the style we were using, but the author insisted that there was an important difference between "post-colonialism" and "postcolonialism". I bit my tongue.
In American (and I suppose British, too?) English the idiom "go to the bathroom" doesn't mean go to a certain room, it means "to urinate and/or defecate". Which is why the sentence: "The dog went to the bathroom in the kitchen" makes sense. So the original example is misleading. Also problematic for Americans is that a room with just a toilet can certainly be called a bathroom, but it is just as likely to be called other things as well, ranging from "the head" and "the john" to "the powder room" -- terms that, I think, would never be used for a room that had a bathtub but no toilet. Unlike in Europe, where having a separate room just for the toilet (with or without a sink) is not unusual in homes, especially older ones, in the standard American home the toilet and the bathtub are usually in the same room, though there may also be another room with just a toilet and a sink ("the powder room"), which is there for convenience (e.g. it will be on the floor where one does one's entertaining, or in the basement; it will probably not be on the floor with the bedrooms).
Comments by rolig
rolig commented on the word God's country
In our family, God's country meant only one thing: Virginia. At least as far as my mother was concerned.
July 29, 2023
rolig commented on the word Porlock
Today as I was working on a translation of a poem, I got a call from someone offering my company security services (which I don't need). I wanted to tell him that he must be from Porlock, but of course he would not have understood. The reference is to a note Coleridge appended to his poem "Kubla Khan". Writing of himself in the third person, he says:
"On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"
June 1, 2022
rolig commented on the word nicotine
I just learned that the origins of this word, which represents a costly nightmare, a rite of passage, a crutch, a refuge, and a pleasure – and enormous profits – for so many, comes from the name bestowed on the tobacco plant in a self-aggrandizing act by the 16th-century French diplomat Jean Nicot de Villemain, who brought the plant and its seeds from Portugal to the French King Charles IX in 1560. He introduced snuff tobacco to the French court, thus making a name for himself, so to speak. The rest is tragic history. So nicotine goes on my Suprisingly Eponymous list – the first word to be added in many years.
May 18, 2022
rolig commented on the word porajmos
The conversation we had in 2008(!) about the word porajmos are the kind of Wordie conversations I miss. By the way is chained_bear still around? And reesetee?
March 25, 2022
rolig commented on the word panthea
tankhughes Perhaps a panacea with a lisp?
March 25, 2022
rolig commented on the word -dle
My favorite is still dawdle, which of course includes all the other -dles, but evntually the old -dles dull and I look for some new -dle thing to whet my noodle.
March 25, 2022
rolig commented on the word protestware
This is just sad. In so many ways.
March 25, 2022
rolig commented on the word nesciophobia
A cousin to the Fear Of Missing Out, then?
March 22, 2022
rolig commented on the word 7457
vendingmachine, so sorry to hear about the stalker (the price of fame?), but it's great that you're having such success with your comic creations! It's nice to be back.
March 18, 2022
rolig commented on the word 7457
Hi everyone! I've been missing you all. Are a lot of the old gang still here? Hi, ruzuzu! Hi, vendingmachine! (what was your old name?)
March 17, 2022
rolig commented on the word 7457
Has nobody figured this out yet! Jeez. What have you all been doing all this time?
March 16, 2022
rolig commented on the word sooterkin
Seconded.
January 10, 2019
rolig commented on the word BLUF
Bottom Line Up Front – a useful acronym. See the post on Fritinancy: https://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2018/11/three-acronyms-and-an-ism.html#more
November 18, 2018
rolig commented on the list john-keats--1
Lovely words, lovely poem, lovely list!
October 17, 2018
rolig commented on the list antonomasia
My pleasure, ru.
August 24, 2018
rolig commented on the list antonomasia
Hi, ruzuzu! For more examples see my list bywords.
August 22, 2018
rolig commented on the word Mrs. Danvers
The creepy housekeeper from the Hitchcock/DuMaurier film Rebecca</i>, whose name I recently saw used as a byword for, well, creepy housekeeper types.
August 22, 2018
rolig commented on the word shithole
Brilliant, qms!
January 15, 2018
rolig commented on the word philautia
Compare the French amour propre, which English has adopted as its own.
January 15, 2018
rolig commented on the word aglaja
Thanks, ruzuzu!
January 8, 2018
rolig commented on the word aglaja
Sadly, my beloved cat Aglaja, born in September 2004, passed away on December 27, 2017. Fondly known as "the Clowness" for her lively and amusing facial expressions and body positions, she brought love and warmth and energy to all those who had the good fortune to know her. She leaves behind a heart-broken family: myself, my partner and her sister, Erazma. Rest in peace, dear friend.
January 7, 2018
rolig commented on the word mufgel
Really? Did nobody read this as muff gel? Did nobody read? Does anybody read?
August 18, 2016
rolig commented on the word totentanz
Bilby, sorry to spoil your otherwise excellent pun, but if you had been in Southern Africa in the 16th or 17th century, you might well have seen such events, and I'm sure it you would not have wanted to:
"The Khoi (known as "Hottentots") first encountered European explorers and merchants around AD 1500. The ongoing encounters were often violent. Local population dropped when the Khoi were exposed to smallpox by Europeans. Warfare against Europeans flared when the Dutch East India Company enclosed traditional grazing land for farms. Over the following century, the Khoi were steadily driven off their land, which effectively ended their traditional life." – Wikipedia, "Khoikhoi"
July 10, 2016
rolig commented on the word syria's serious
When I added this to my homophone/homograph list in 2009, it was done in pure jest. Sadly, it's now a daily headline (when not pushed out by other atrocities closer to home).
July 10, 2016
rolig commented on the user mollusque
Much-belated (8 years belated) thanks for your help with my Pocketful of -ry list!
April 16, 2016
rolig commented on the word varletry
I need to start using this word.
April 16, 2016
rolig commented on the word sharenting
Isn't this what housemates do? Sharent? I think the word the author of the Telegraph article is looking for is "co-parenting" or perhaps "shared parenting". Must everything be crammed into a portmanteau? In fact, I thought this faux word, or "fauord", meant the very opposite, that is, exclusively female parenting (derived from "she-parenting"). Not for the first time, I am calling for a moratorium on portmanteaux, or rather, a portmantorium.
January 8, 2016
rolig commented on the word privelobliviousness
With all due respect to Rebecca Solnit, wouldn't a clearer, more elegant, and more pronounceable way to express this idea be "privileged obliviousness" or "the obliviousness of privilege"? (And does she not know how to spell "privilege"?)
December 23, 2015
rolig commented on the word music-master
Vendingmachine, don't be upset with the Century Dictionary definition; it was written more than a century ago when there were both music-masters and music-mistresses, just as there were both authors and authoresses and murderers and murderesses.
December 23, 2015
rolig commented on the word schmedium
More commonly, and more traditionally, a word used in response by somebody who is either (a) offended by the suggestion that they should buy something in medium or (b) proud of their build and dismissive of those who might, in kindness or flattery, suggest a medium:
a) "Medium, schmedium, I need a small!"
b) "Medium, schmedium, I'm an extra-large!"
December 23, 2015
rolig commented on the word mammoth
Interestingly, this word came into West European languages via Russian; hence I place it on my list of slavonicisms.
December 23, 2015
rolig commented on the word logboat
Curiously, this word is not listed in the standard unabridged dictionaries.
November 3, 2015
rolig commented on the word fearful
Reading Blake's famous poem "The Tyger", with its reference to the animal's "fearful symmetry", I realized (among other things) that "fearful" is a contranym. In Blake's poem, it means "able to stir dread, fear" -- "awesome" in its more traditional meaning -- but of course today it more usually means "feeling fear, being afraid".
October 28, 2015
rolig commented on the list autantonyms
Fearful belongs to this list, I think.
October 28, 2015
rolig commented on the word inmdeascent
It seems to me to be even more modern and appropriate, and more civil, to refer to people's ethnicity (if that's even necessary) by standard, non-derogatory descriptors: Osama bin Laden was an Arab (more specifically, a Saudi Arabian); Palestinians are, well, Palestinians; and Nina Davuluri is an Indian-American (more specifically, a Tulugu-American, if the Wikipedia entry about her can be trusted). Why group Arabs (or Moroccans, Algerians, Libyans, Egyptians, Palestinians, Saudi Arabians, Emiratis, Qataris, Bahrainis, Omanis, Yemenis, Iraqis), Berbers, Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Israelis, Iranians, Pakistanis, and Indians under such a peculiar label? What good does it serve?
October 17, 2015
rolig commented on the word gimlet-eyed
"I, as a speaker and writer of English, am descriptivist. I look at what it is doing at the moment, puzzling it out, making my own choices. Prescriptivism comes in when as a gimlet-eyed editor or teacher I advise which available product is best suited to the customer. I do not lay down the law, for there is no law."
– John E. McIntyre, "Free-market English", "You Don't Say" blog, Baltimore Sun, 16 Oct. 2015
October 17, 2015
rolig commented on the word chief content officer
Is this what used to be called "the editor"?
October 16, 2015
rolig commented on the word cariated
Used in the sense of "decrepit", "decaying":
"This time, I started out again, with the misconception common to Anglo-Saxons, that the real Rome is the Rome of the ugly ruins, the Rome of all those grey cariated temples wedged in between the hills and the slums of the city."
– Thomas Merton, The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948)
October 11, 2015
rolig commented on the word emmet
"Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my Angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay."
– Wm. Blake, "A Dream", Songs of Innocence (1789)
October 9, 2015
rolig commented on the word nice
Writing in the late 1940s, Thomas Merton in his first memoir, The Seven-Storey Mountain, described his Aunt Maud as follows:
"Nice, in the strict sense, and in the broad colloquial sense, was a word made for her: she was a very nice person. In a way, her pointed nose and her thin smiling lips eve suggested the expression of one who had just finished pronouncing that word. 'How nice!'"
I'm not sure what he means by "the strict sense" - perhaps "respectable", perhaps "fastidious"; by "the broad colloquial sense", he almost certainly means "pleasant and agreeable", the way most of us use the word today.
October 4, 2015
rolig commented on the word natural language
Reading another comment on Wordnik that referred to "natural language", it struck me that the term is a retronym. I'm not sure when it originated, but I imagine the term was first used to distinguish human communication from machine communication.
October 4, 2015
rolig commented on the word screed
An article today in The Guardian on the mass-killer in Oregon reminded me of this word (perhaps my focus on words is a way of distracting myself from the hideous reality):
"The 26-year-old, obsessed by the macabre hoopla surrounding other mass shootings, left a note – a multi-page, angry screed, it was reported – and murdered with apparent yearning for posthumous notoriety."
"Screed" seems exactly the right word here, and this convinced me that it should be on my Fibrous Words list. By the way, notice the apt use also of the word notoriety.
October 4, 2015
rolig commented on the word auth
The question was: "Do authors auth?" My response is that they don't. Somebody who auths would be properly called an "auther", though I am not sure what that means, since I don't know what "auth" means. It has not yet obtained a meaning that is widely understood. (Though with a little effort on someone's part and the Internet, perhaps it will in a few days.) Speaking of how words are formed, the relation between the stem word and its derivative, whether by back- or forward-formation, is not always self-evident. Escalators, for example, do not escalate, at least not in the way that crises do. Similarly, authors are not people who authorize things. If you ask, "What, then, do authors do?" The answer is simple: "Authors author." The noun is easily and regularly verbed.
October 4, 2015
rolig commented on the word auth
No, if you auth, then you're an auther, not an author, which is something else entirely.
September 29, 2015
rolig commented on the word sovdepia
A derogatory name for the Soviet Union especially in the early years. It comes from the acronym "Sovdep" for Sovet deputatov, or "Council of Deputies". As a state of mind, Sovdepia is connected to the worst excesses of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as embodied by the Communist Party of the USSR.
September 29, 2015
rolig commented on the word lace into
"Determined to prove their mettle, several Republican presidential candidates showed new aggressiveness in lacing into Donald J. Trump on Wednesday night, seeking to elevate themselves as leaders of substance and shake up a race that Mr. Trump has dominated all summer."
– Jonathan Martin and Patrick Healy, "Candidates use second G.O.P. debate to taunt Donald Trump", New York Times, 16 Sept. 2015
September 17, 2015
rolig commented on the list the-end--1
lithe and blithe are adjectives; withe is primarily a noun and also ends in a voiceless <i>th</i> (θ).
September 12, 2015
rolig commented on the word Pulitzer prizes, full of surprises
It's rather curious how close these two phrases are.
July 27, 2015
rolig commented on the word disspelling
Just a brief morphological note in the hope of dispelling confusion about the nonce word "disspelling". The "dis-" particle in the word derives from the verb "to dis", which is slang for "to disrespect", which itself is slang for "to show disrepect" or "to treat disrespectfully". It is not a misspelling of "dispelling", which derives from the Latin "dispellere" and means "to drive away", in the sense of making something (usually bad) disappear.
July 2, 2015
rolig commented on the word bish
In the sense of the aggressive tag phrase, am I right to assume that "ya bish" derives from the gangsterish Italian word "capisci?" (pronounced "kapeesh"), meaning "Have I made that clear enough?"
July 1, 2015
rolig commented on the word lodestar
There is a nice discussion of the origins of this word on Languagehat's website: http://languagehat.com/lodestar/#comments. The related word "lodestone" also came up.
July 1, 2015
rolig commented on the word antilibrary
I don't like this term. All the best libraries contain books waiting to be read. The term "antilibrary" suggests something that stands in opposition to the library, like a Board of Censorship or book-burning fascists. Taleb makes an excellent point in the quoted passage, but he's hit on the wrong term. But why do the books look at you menacingly? My unread books (and they are many) look at me invitingly.
June 30, 2015
rolig commented on the word Baälites of pelf
Used by Keats in "Isabella" (stanza 57) to refer to Isabella's mercenary brothers.
June 30, 2015
rolig commented on the word pelf
In John Keats' narrative poem "Isabella", the heroine's materialistic brothers are referred to as "those Baälites of pelf" – invective worth remembering.
June 30, 2015
rolig commented on the word tmesis
Tmesis, by the way, is part of Russian grammar when it comes to prepositional phrases with negative pronouns such as никто (nikto, "nobody"), ничто (nichto, "nothing"), and никакой (nikakoy, "no kind of"). So if you want to say, "We were not talking about anybody", that would be "Мы не говорили ни о ком" (My ne govorili ni o kom), literally (more or less), "We were not talking no-about-body" (Russian uses the double negative).
June 27, 2015
rolig commented on the word ride herd on
According to the Oxford American, "ride herd on" is "N.Amer. , keep watch over" -- an idiom I did not know before. An example, from a NYT article on the Alice show at the Morgan Library in NY: "Carroll often rode herd on Tenniel, one of the most successful illustrators of his day; 'Don’t give Alice so much crinoline' was typical of the detailed degree of his authorial involvement." ("Looking at the birth of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice,' 150 years old", New York Times, June 25, 2015)
My first thought was a mistake for, or the origin of, the phrase I know: "to ride hard on somebody", which I understand as meaning "to keep the pressure on someone, often mercilessly, to get the work done". But maybe I have adopted this as an eggcorn.
June 27, 2015
rolig commented on the word virtue
Interesting that this word in its origin meant "manliness".
June 26, 2015
rolig commented on the word Samsquanch
Sounds like an eggcorn rather than slang.
June 26, 2015
rolig commented on the word tmesis
That's a-whole-nother story.
June 26, 2015
rolig commented on the word swelt
This word is used by John Keats in a striking, and perhaps surprising, condemnation of capitalist exploitation of workers, colonial exploitation, and cruelty to animals:
With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize;
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver'd loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip; – with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gush'd blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half-ignorant, they turn'd an easy wheel,
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.
"Isabella" (1819), stanzas 14 and 15
June 20, 2015
rolig commented on the word Maynard G. Krebs
The iconic beatnik, played by Bob Denver, in the classic TV sitcom "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis".
June 14, 2015
rolig commented on the word charactery
Wonderful! The image of a poet's work as garners (granaries) holding the grain of thought is found also in Baratynsky's poem "Autumn" (1837), though with different implications:
But you, as you enter the autumn of your days,
O plowman of the fields of life,
and your earthly lot appears before your eyes
in all its generosity,
and as the furrows of this life get ready
to offer up their bounty to you
and so reward the labor of existence,
and as the precious harvest ripens,
and you, in grains of thought, gather it in,
now at the prime of human destiny—
are you rich, too, like the tiller of the soil?
June 13, 2015
rolig commented on the word boring
In the early 1990s a song that never failed to move me, that seemed to weld me to my life in its fullest, truest experience, was "Being Boring" by the Pet Shop Boys. I was intrigued by the central quotation from "the wife of a famous writer" and wondered exactly where it came from. I guessed that it must be from Zelda Fitzgerald, but never bothered finding the exact quote (finding such things was harder in those days). Now, today, I found a website devoted to the song: www.10yearsofbeingboring.com, and the quote itself, acknowledged as being from ZF, but without the specific reference, which I then easily found on Google Books:
"… the Flapper … bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure; she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do."
– Zelda Fitzgerald, "Eulogy on the Flapper" (1922), The Collected Writings (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
June 12, 2015
rolig commented on the word charactery
What a lovely word! Here it is in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where Brutus tells his wife, Portia, that he will soon reveal to her why is worried and pensive:
And by and by thy bosom shall partake
The secrets of my heart.
All my engagements will I construe to thee,
All the charactery of my sad brows.
(Act II, scene i)
June 11, 2015
rolig commented on the word fleer
Of course, someone could come along and start talking about Obama's or Boehner's fleering at some question, and then when asked about the word, say: it's when you flinch and sneer at the same time. And then if people start using it a lot to mean simultaneous flinching and sneering, well there you have your portmanteau. But it won't be the same old Scandinavian-born fleer that Shakespeare knew.
June 9, 2015
rolig commented on the word thew
… for Romans now
Have thews and limbs like to their ancestors…
– Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, scene iii
June 8, 2015
rolig commented on the word gamesome
Brutus:
I am not gamesome: I do lack some part
Of that quick spirit that is in Antony.
– Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, scene ii.
June 8, 2015
rolig commented on the word fleer
This is a word that needs reviving.
June 8, 2015
rolig commented on the word zombie rules
Rules of style that may have once held a certain (dubious) validity but are now long dead; nevertheless they continue to live on various websites devoted to the general issue of how English is going to the dogs. Examples: never split an infinitive, don't end sentences with a preposition, don't start sentences with a coordinate conjunction, avoid the passive voice, etc. etc.
June 6, 2015
rolig commented on the word neat
"I am indeed, sir, a surgeon
to old shoes; when they are in great danger, I
recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon
neat's leather have gone upon my handiwork."
– Second Commoner (a cobbler), in Shakespeare, Julius Ceasar, Act I, scene i.
June 6, 2015
rolig commented on the word algorithm
Named after the Persian mathematician Muhammed ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780-c. 850), referred to in Latin texts as Algoritmi or Algaurizin (acc. to Wikipedia). The "al-Khwarizmi" part of his name, which gave us the word "algorism", which then became "algorithm", means "from Khwarezm", a medieval country in Central Asia that was also known as Chorasmia. Hence, our word is both eponymous and toponymous.
May 23, 2015
rolig commented on the word dittography
An interesting word for a certain kind of mistake occasionally encountered in occasionally encountered in medieval manuscripts manuscripts and on the Web.
May 19, 2015
rolig commented on the word sugarity
Ah, the sugary vagaries of marketing!
May 19, 2015
rolig commented on the word sugarity
What's wrong with saying "sugar content"?
May 15, 2015
rolig commented on the word convuloquacious
Shouldn't this be spelled "convoloquacious"? Why is there a "u" after the "v"?
May 15, 2015
rolig commented on the word sinceriously
So Stephen Amell defines "sinceriously" as 1) a noun ("the ability…") and 2) a verb ("to initiate…")? But its form suggests that it is in fact an adverb. And what is the difference between "sinceriously" and "sincerely"? Sincerity usually implies a serious attitude, doesn't it? This strikes me as just another worthless portmanteau that is neither sincere nor serious in intent.
May 15, 2015
rolig commented on the word subjunctive
It's still alive and healthy in my idiolect.
May 8, 2015
rolig commented on the word 契诃夫
Chekhov's full name in Chinese: 安东·巴甫洛维奇·契诃夫 (Āndōng Bāfǔluòwéiqí Qìhēfū).
March 26, 2015
rolig commented on the word Qìhēfū
The Romanized spelling of Chekhov's name in Chinese: Āndōng Bāfǔluòwéiqí Qìhēfū (安东·巴甫洛维奇·契诃夫), which, probably because of a typo, was transformed to "Anton kowolski vicki Chekhov"! See the discussion at Languagehat, http://languagehat.com/anton-kowolski-vicki-chekhov
March 26, 2015
rolig commented on the word malvasia
A very popular and delicious wine produced in the Primorska region of Slovenia (malvazija); in English traditionally called malmsey.
February 21, 2015
rolig commented on the word nutricious nutrias
Not really homophonic, but approaching it. Weirdly, this phrase crossed my mind as I was admiring the nutrias who congregate on the banks of the river near where I live. I have never tasted a nutria, though I used to own a hat, a shapka, actually, a wonderful and much loved shapka, made of nutria fur.
February 11, 2015
rolig commented on the word catchpoll
See John McIntyre's delightful discussion of this word (originally meaning "tax-collector") at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-in-a-word-catchpoll-20141222-story.html
December 27, 2014
rolig commented on the list monosyllabic-words-i-can-t-find-rhymes-for
(Sorry about that last one.)
August 16, 2014
rolig commented on the list monosyllabic-words-i-can-t-find-rhymes-for
A man kin git a mahty tharst in the Karst.
August 16, 2014
rolig commented on the list monosyllabic-words-i-can-t-find-rhymes-for
Have you ever played a fugue on a Moog?
August 16, 2014
rolig commented on the list monosyllabic-words-i-can-t-find-rhymes-for
limp'st (what thou dost when thou hast twisted thy ankle) rhymeth with glimpsed, methinks.
August 16, 2014
rolig commented on the word UKoGBaNI
Perhaps we should start using UKoGBaNI more in colloquial speech. We could pronounce it "ooko gbanee" with an African inflection, or "yookog banny" (more Southeast Asian, perhaps?). It also makes a convenient demonym: Ukogbanian.
August 16, 2014
rolig commented on the word žled
A word very much in the news these days in Slovenia. The closest English word for it is "sleet". It's the icy covering that forms on branches, electrical cables, and other things, and it has been doing a great deal of damage this week, bringing down trees and cables and resulting in power outages and road closings across a large swath of the country.
February 5, 2014
rolig commented on the word nail
Just missed this on a crossword, where the clue was "A digital plate"!
December 28, 2013
rolig commented on the word in god we trust but verify
This occurred to me yesterday while listening to the news about the Iran nuclear deal, and it begged me to put it here. It's more than three words, but i can't remember where we put STF-like collocations of this sort.
November 26, 2013
rolig commented on the word Sotadic Zone
According to the theory of the Orientalist Sir Richard Burton, this is the region in which different-generation male homosexuality was prevalent and even celebrated by the indigenous peoples. (See the Wikipedia article for details.)
November 26, 2013
rolig commented on the word vzbrst
Here the "v" and the "r" both serve as (semi-)vowels, to give you a pronunciation that is something like oozBURST -- which is nice, considering that the word means "a budding".
October 8, 2013
rolig commented on the word vzbrst
Slovene: budding, efflorescence; (in medicine) eruption of a rash. The deverbal noun of vzbrsteti
September 30, 2013
rolig commented on the word izba
What are izbas doing in Mexico? Are there a lot of Russian peasants living in Xochimilco?
September 18, 2013
rolig commented on the word Bullycide
So I suppose "matricide" is killing yourself after watching the whole Matrix series a dozen times and still not being able to figure out what's real not.
August 23, 2013
rolig commented on the word kilonova
Or now that I think of it, from Tolstoy. After all, he wrote kilonovels Inot to be confused with killer novels).
August 7, 2013
rolig commented on the word kilonova
And here I thought this was a character from a Gogol story, some Pelageya Arkadiyevna Kilonova.
August 7, 2013
rolig commented on the word levity
Came across this yesterday reading Henry James and I thought, what a nice word. I was looking for such a word recently in one of my translations and it didn't occur to me (I used "mirth" instead, another great word). And yet it's not an unusual word, not archaic, just a little dusty. When was the last time I used "levity" in a sentence when I wasn't saying, facetiously, "This is no time for levity"?
July 29, 2013
rolig commented on the word pandorable
Just tell those pandorable creatures to beware of Greeks bearing gifts and not open any boxes.
July 11, 2013
rolig commented on the word alfin
Fascinating. In Russian, the piece is still called "elephant" ("slon"), and in Slovene, it's a "hunter" ("lovec"), which I assume is connected with the old "archer" name. I did not know the word "alfin" and am surprised to learn that it was ever used in English, but it must have been, if the Century has a definition for it.
July 7, 2013
rolig commented on the word information dump
I wasn't familiar with this term until I came across it in this PartiallyClips comic: http://partiallyclips.com/2013/06/17/flowers-at-work-2/
and looked it up on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_(narrative)
It actually describes something that amuses and annoys me on so many US TV shows, as when the CSI guys explain to each other exactly the process they are use ("and now I'm going to run the fingerprints through the database"). I keep waiting for one of them to say, "Yes, of course you are. You always do. That's your job. Why are you telling me this? Do you think I don't know what goes on in a CSI lab? I've been working here 15 years, forgodsake!"
July 7, 2013
rolig commented on the list frequentative--le
I am so glad you made this list. I find this particular form fascinating. How about waddle (from wade) and dazzle (from daze)?
June 9, 2013
rolig commented on the word refection
In Canto XV of Don Juan, Byron describes a sumptous dinner, listing all the dishes. But in the midst of his list, he breaks off with this aside:
But I must crowd all into one grand mess
Or mass; for should I stretch into detail,
My Muse would run much more into excess,
Than when some squeamish people deem her frail.
But though a 'bonne vivante,' I must confess
Her stomach 's not her peccant part; this tale
However doth require some slight refection,
Just to relieve her spirits from dejection.
Of course, what he describes, is hardly "some slight refection".
June 8, 2013
rolig commented on the word peccant
In Canto XV of Don Juan, Byron lists all the foods served at a sumptuous dinner. At one point, he breaks off to say of his Muse:
But though a 'bonne vivante,' I must confess
Her stomach 's not her peccant part; this tale
However doth require some slight refection,
Just to relieve her spirits from dejection.
Presumably, in Byron's case, the "peccant part" of his Muse was located a few inches lower than the stomach.
June 8, 2013
rolig commented on the list adjectives-ending-in-id
Feel free to pilfer from my list exploring-the-i-id-i. (No idea why I have to add -i to the name of the list to make the link work!)
June 8, 2013
rolig commented on the word pahljača
This is the Slovene word for a fan (the old kind of folding fan people, women especially, or rather, ladies) would use to cool themselves on hot days. I like the way it sounds. It sounds cool (in both sense of the word): the puff of pah- with the release of -ljača.
May 16, 2013
rolig commented on the word hebetude
Someone needs to create a tude list. I'd do it myself if it weren't for this damn hebetude going around.
April 30, 2013
rolig commented on the word villeggiatura
And for the effeminate villeggiatura—
Rife with more horns than hounds—she hath the chase,
So animated that it might allure a
Saint from his beads to join the jocund race;
Even Nimrod's self might leave the plains of Dura,
And wear the Melton jacket for a space:—
If she hath no wild boars, she hath a tame
Preserve of Bores, who ought to be made game.
— Byron, Don Juan Canto 13
"She" is England. Byron is describing the fall hunting season in the English countryside.
April 25, 2013
rolig commented on the word notch
Come again?
April 25, 2013
rolig commented on the word gorgeous gorges
The tourist agency drives them every day to a different natural wonder in the mountainous country: cliffs and ravines, rivers and streams sparkling in sunshine. There is always something else to be oohed at, photographed, and always some arduous narrow trail to be followed to get to the breathtaking vista. It is beautiful but exhausting. The group is bloated from the beauty, as every day it gorges gorgeous gorges.
April 24, 2013
rolig commented on the word macedoine
Not to be compared, however, with the macedoine of Macedonia, the doyenne of macedoines.
April 21, 2013
rolig commented on the word guerdon
Of all tales 't is the saddest – and more sad,
Because it makes us smile: his hero 's right,
And stil pursues the right; – to curb the bad
His only object, and 'gainst odds to fight
His guerdon: 't is his virtue makes him mad!
But his adventures form a sorry sight;
A sorrier still is the great moral taught
By that real epic unto all who have thought.
– Byron, Don Juan, Canto 13 (about Don Quixote, aka Don Kwix-oat)
April 21, 2013
rolig commented on the word bedraggled
Thanks, Pro! It's interesting how some words are only used in certain contexts.
March 28, 2013
rolig commented on the word bedraggled
Pro! First - Hi! It's been a long time.
Second: Is that any different from saying "drenched in sweat"?
Third: I always associate "bedraggled" with being wet, though being in a generally miserable-looking state is essential too. It would sound strange to me to say: "Gene Kelly was cheerfully bedraggled as he celebrated the joys of crooning in precipitation."
March 27, 2013
rolig commented on the word qiviut
"To wear the arctic fox
you have to kill it. Wear
qiviut — the underwool of the arctic ox –
pulled off it like a sweater;
your coat is warm; your conscience, better."
— Marianne Moore, "The Arctic Ox (Or Goat)"
March 27, 2013
rolig commented on the word frfotajke
Colloquial Slovene for "wings", as in chicken wings. A cute word derived from the onomatopoetic word "frfotati" – "to flutter", hence: "flutterers".
March 8, 2013
rolig commented on the list distinguishing-marks
Great list, hernesheir! I added a few: the obvious signature and tag, as well as crest and tell (in the sense of a sign that someone is lying), though I'm not sure that this last one fits with the idea of the list. With open lists, especially, I think it's wise to say what sort of words you're looking for.
January 7, 2013
rolig commented on the word truant
I love the older sense of truant, as "stray, displaced, wandering", used by George Eliot in this passage from The Mill on the Floss, describing the Red Deeps, an area of hollows and hills where Maggie Tulliver enjoyed taking her walks. The place, she says, had a charm for Maggie:
especially in summer, when she could sit in the grassy hollow under the shadow of a branching ash, stooping aslant from the steep above her, and listen to the hum of insects, like tiniest bells on the garment of Silence, or see the sunlight piercing the distant boughs, as if to chase and drive home the truant heavenly blue of the wild hyacinths.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), Book V, chap. 1, "In the Red Deeps"
December 31, 2012
rolig commented on the user ry
Thanks for the "evanid" suggestion, ry!
December 31, 2012
rolig commented on the word Wiener sausage
Those crazy mathematicians. Wiener, indeed.
August 23, 2012
rolig commented on the word množica
Slovene: "crowd, multitude"
August 23, 2012
rolig commented on the list prolaguss-bucket-list
Pro, good luck on your future endeavors! Have you got something lined up? Returning to Italy? Drop me a line if you're interested in visiting neighboring Slovenia!
August 2, 2012
rolig commented on the word spirit level
By 1979, "gay" in the sense of "homosexual" was already widespread among gays and lesbians themselves, so I expect that there is a play on words going on here. Bishop was a lesbian, who like most lesbians of her generation had to be very discreet; it may indeed be the case that this poem about freedom and escape (from the mirror!) indicates a new acceptance of her own homosexuality.
July 25, 2012
rolig commented on the word spirit level
Sonnet
- by Elizabeth Bishop
Caught—the bubble
in the spirit-level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed—the broken
thermometer's mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!
1979
July 23, 2012
rolig commented on the list words-to-describe-bad-arguments
specious, meretricious
July 12, 2012
rolig commented on the word scratchish
I thought mortal enemy of polish is russish, or maybe germanish.
July 12, 2012
rolig commented on the word effulgent
That is hardly surprising, dailyword. This is a word that a lot of aspiring poets use when they are human.
June 5, 2012
rolig commented on the word pyrrhic
The sense you mention, alasdair17, pertains to the noun phrase Pyrrhic victory, not to the word pyrrhic per se, which is why I do not give it here. I do, however, provide it under "Pyrrhic victory" (note the capital "P", which I prefer since in this sense the word derives from the proper noun Pyrrhus). By the way, there really was no need to use four question marks in a row. I hope you have calmed down a little.
June 5, 2012
rolig commented on the word macabre
Were the Maccabees especially macabre?
June 2, 2012
rolig commented on the word rampid
As far as I can tell, "rampid" is (still) non-standard English. People often use it (mistakenly, I would say) for "rampant". The standard phrase is "run rampant".
June 2, 2012
rolig commented on the word codename
"According to anonymous senior administration sources quoted in the New York Times, Obama decided to speed up a programme first launched by his predecessor, George W Bush, codenamed Olympic Games, whose aim was to use computer viruses to attack Iran's nuclear enrichment programme."
– Peter Beaumont, "Obama 'sped up cyber-attacks on Iran's nuclear programme'", The Guardian, 1 June 2012.
The lack of a hyphen in "codenamed" (read "code-named") here is annoying. I initially read this as "co-denamed" and imagined Bush and Obama together "denaming" this programme as Olympic Games. Why do people hate hyphens? Hyphens are our friends!
June 1, 2012
rolig commented on the word gripeing
This is a misspelling. Note that the correct spelling is griping. As a general rule, verbs that end in a silent -e, drop the -e when the ending -ing is added. There are exceptions (the only ones that come to mind are dyeing, to distinguish it from dying, and ageing, though here many prefer aging) – but "gripeing" is not one of them.
June 1, 2012
rolig commented on the word erinaceus
The adjective exists, only it is spelled differently: erinaceous. Feel free to use this word, spelled correctly with the adjectival -ous suffix, to describe any hedgehoggy acquaintances you may have.
May 21, 2012
rolig commented on the word sublime
Outstanding! Thank you, Ruzuzu, for this.
*feeling a little sad, and a little curmudgeonly about the fact that modern dictionaries don't make references like "the leap of Curtius into the chasm, or the death of the martyr Stephen". Today it's all about quantifiable information with little thought to knowledge and none to wisdom.*
May 19, 2012
rolig commented on the word cloud-built
Interesting, mtc. Baratynsky's "wondrous city" has a very different connotation than "Cloud Cuckoo Land", but the latter certainly belongs on my states-of-mind-from-absurdistan-to-zion list.
Ruzuzu, Baratynsky and I go way back. I was introduced to him by Pushkin and Nabokov, with an added endorsement from Brodsky.
May 15, 2012
rolig commented on the word Cloud Cuckoo Land
Originally mentioned by a character in Aristophanes' play The Birds.
May 15, 2012
rolig commented on the word cloud-built
I love the Century Dictionary.
Btw, in my real life I am translating the poems of the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky. Here is one that seems appropriate:
Now and then a wondrous city
from floating clouds will coalesce,
but the wind need only touch it,
and it’s gone without a trace.
Thus the momentary inventions
of poetic fantasy
vanish at the merest breath of
meaningless activity.
(1829)
Translated by Rawley Grau
May 15, 2012
rolig commented on the word MacGuffin
Coined by none other than Alfred Hitchcock. I placed this on my bywords list (for now at least) because this sounds like a person's name; presumably the MacGuffin in movie could be an (unnamed) character.
February 24, 2012
rolig commented on the user RamonaF
As someone who doesn't play violent role-playing video games I am not interested in having my images taken anywhere near WOW, thank you. And if I want any jism-layered group montages (especially of the fraternity variety), I know a few select websites where to find them.
And by the way, SPAM ALERT!!!!
February 16, 2012
rolig commented on the word Pied Piper
I think the Piper is called "pied" because he wears clothes made of different colored patches, like a harlequin.
February 5, 2012
rolig commented on the word auroch
Sadly, in his notes to Lolita (The Annotated Lolita), the otherwise seemingly erudite Alfred Appel Jr. believes that "auroch" is the singular of "aurochs", a word Nabokov uses in the all-important penultimate sentence of the novel.
February 5, 2012
rolig commented on the word turpid
"I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'amais, je t'amais!"
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, ch. 32.
February 5, 2012
rolig commented on the word pornography
"In modern times the term 'pornography' connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which demands the traditional word for direct action on the patient. … Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust."
— Vladimir Nabokov, "On a Book Entitled Lolita"
February 5, 2012
rolig commented on the word klarnica
2010, kakovostno, suho, Vipavska dolina, Mansus - družinsko posestvo Makovec, Brje na Vipavskem 79, SI-5263 Dobravlje
January 29, 2012
rolig commented on the word pinela
A dry white wine indigenous to the Vipava valley in Slovenia (according to the Slovene Wikipedia, for what it's worth, this variety was first mentioned in 1324). The excellent bottle I tried (2006 vintage) came from the Sončni škol cellar in Renče.
January 29, 2012
rolig commented on the word hryvnya
The difference between the spellings hryvnia and hryvnya for the Ukrainian гривня is one of English transliteration, specifically how to transliterate the Ukrainian Cyrillic letter я. In both transliterations the letter before the "a" does not represent a separate syllable, but only the softening (palatalization) of the "n". Other possible renderings would be "hryvnja", "hryvňa", "hryvn'a", and "hryvña", since the letter "j", the caron, the apostrophe, and the tilde are all conventional ways (in separate systems) of indicating such palatalization. Curiously, the Oxford American Dictionary gives "hryvna" as its main headword (despite indicating the iotization of the a in its pronunciation guide), with "hryvnia" as an "also". (I can understand why it might make sense to reserve the y-transliteration for the Ukrainian vowel "y"/"и", though the same argument can be made for preserving "i" for the Ukrainian vowel "i".)
LesHerasymchuk is right, though, about the history of the Ukrainian language: both Ukrainian and Russian (as well as Belorusian) come from Old East Slavic (the language of the medieval state known as Kievan Rus); Ukrainian does not come from Russian. In terms of continuity, it is more accurate to say that Russian comes from Old Ukrainian (though linguists don't usually use that anachronistic term, preferring instead "Old East Slavic"). And it is also true that Russian was profoundly influenced by Church Slavonic, a by-product of Old Bulgaro-Macedonian (a South Slavic language). I don't know whether modern Ukrainian has been as deeply influenced by Church Slavonic.
January 21, 2012
rolig commented on the word Vegetable Lamb of Tartary
Which is the correctly cased form, yarb? I would guess the lowercase barometz, since this is the name of a type of (mythical) entity (like unicorn), not a personal name (like Pegasus).
January 21, 2012
rolig commented on the list ada-or-ardor-vladmir-nabokov
Well, since it's Nabokov, there could well be a Slavic solution. In Slovene the verb gugati means "to rock"; a gugalnik is a rocking chair, while a gugalnica is a swing. The Russian word for "to rock or swing" is different (качаться / kachat'sya), but I wondered anyway if there was a cognate. It turns out that Dahl's mid-19th-c. dictionary includes the word гугала / gugala (from a northern Russian dialect) which means "swing" (noun) and, indeed, the verb гугаться / gugat'sya, "to swing". So I would suggest that Nabokov playfully Englished this as "google", meaning something like "sway back and forth".
January 21, 2012
rolig commented on the list stuffie-you-haven-t-lived
Jenn, I love the list but don't understand the title: "You haven't lived unitl you've had…" Is that it? Am I missing something idiomatic?
January 16, 2012
rolig commented on the word -trix
Ah, Ru! This -trix is for dames.
January 12, 2012
rolig commented on the word erazma
Erazma / Erasma (2004– ), a.k.a. Razmica, Razmička, Razma-Taz, Tazma-Raz, Tazma, Razi, or just Raz.
January 12, 2012
rolig commented on the word aglaja
Aglaja / Aglaia (2004– ), a.k.a. Glajca, Glajko, Glajkica, Glajka, Glajči, Glajči-Glu, or just Glaj.
January 12, 2012
rolig commented on the word nastasya
My beautiful, beloved, sweet-spirited, wise and deeply mourned feline companion Nastasya / Настасья (1986–2003), a.k.a. Nastenka, Nastechka, Nastka, Nastusya, Nusya, Nuska, Nus / Настенька, Настечка, Настка, Настусья, Нусья, Нуська, Нусь, or more formally, Anastasia / Анастасия.
January 12, 2012
rolig commented on the word gam
A curious choice as a collective for an order of gamless mammals!
January 11, 2012
rolig commented on the word Maecenas
In Russian and Slovene and, I expect, many other languages this name has become a common noun referring to a patron of the arts, especially someone who supports a particular artist, writer, or art institution.
January 5, 2012
rolig commented on the word conventional implicature
In a statement, this is "a commitment to an extra message that (metaphorically speaking) comes through on a second channel, without adding anything to the factual content of what is said." –Geoffrey K. Pullum, "A wee conventional implicature", Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3650#more-3650
Pullum gives the examples of "damn" in such statements as "Somebody stole my damn guitar" and "wee" in Scottish usage: "I'll just be going off for a wee cup o' tea":
"It seems to me that wee has a similar syntactic privilege of occurrence — you can just pick a salient noun at random and stick wee on that — but the semantic contribution is just an optimistic and comforting attitudinal overtone: rather than the vague impression that the speaker is pissed at the situation, which is what damn conveys, wee supplies a vague impression that the speaker is being helpful and optimistic and that things are going to be just fine."
December 25, 2011
rolig commented on the word notional
This is a word I've been encountering recently -- it feels academically faddish -- in the sense of "ideological" or perhaps simply "purported": In an article in the New York Times Book Review on the (obviously) important role of the Bible in Western literature, the author, referring to Faulkner and Dostoevsky, writes: "The failure of the notionally Christian worlds of Russia and Mississippi to be in any way sufficient to the occasion of Christ among them would be a true report always and everywhere." (Marilynne Robinson, "The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible," NYT Sunday Book Review, 22 Dec. 2011)
December 25, 2011
rolig commented on the word apricity
Thanks, ru! But Nancy's citation there simply confirms my point. Ammon Shea (the guy who read the OED), writes about the word: "The OED does not give any citation for its use except for Henry Cockeram's 1623 English Dictionarie." This is a white elephant of a word, a verbal knick-knack: it sits on the shelf and people say, "Oh, how pretty!" but nobody really knows what to do with it except display it as a pretty word. And when you do try to use it (right now, a certain @impropaganda has Tweeted®, "Hope the weather holds for some beautiful southern apricity!") you end up sounding precious, arch, or pompous.
December 22, 2011
rolig commented on the word apricity
The fact that all of the examples, and even the Tweets®, merely cite this word and do not use it make me wonder if it is in fact a word that people say (or more likely, write). This seems more like a museum piece than an "actual word".
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the list king-in-uruk
Ah, yes, the world's first story was also its first same-sex love story.
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word grocery
This is astonishing. I was born and grew up in Baltimore, where I lived for some 30-odd years, and I never noticed that anyone said "groshery".
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word stood god
A rhyme in the hymn "O God, Our Help in Ages Past".
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word gone sun
A rhyme in "O God, Our Help in Ages Past".
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word blessing ceasing
A rhyme in "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing".
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word come home
A rhyme in "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing", "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" and many other hymns.
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word ebenezer pleasure
A rhyme in "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing".
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word ebenezer-pleasure
From "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing".
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word blessing-ceasing
From "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing".
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word come-home
From "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" (and many other hymns).
December 21, 2011
rolig commented on the word homeschooling
It occurred to me today that this is a retronym, which only appeared once it became standard practice to send young children out of the home to receive a primary education. Until the 19th century, or thereabouts, young children, if they received any education at all, were educated at home.
December 18, 2011
rolig commented on the word Never let a time traveler have his picture taken with you if you don't know why he's smiling.
Spooky.
*Disappointed there are no visuals.*
December 16, 2011
rolig commented on the word pointing at the moon
Thanks, leaden! What beautiful work this is! So I suppose one message in the image is that happiness points the way to enlightenment but is not enlightenment.
December 16, 2011
rolig commented on the word pi-stachio
I suppose this is a much larger version of the µ-stachio (mu-stachio)?
December 15, 2011
rolig commented on the word needless needles
In her view, acupuncture was little better than quackery; "needless needles" she called it.
December 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word pointing at the moon
This is a wonderful image! Very Zen. Do you know anything about where it comes from?
December 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word union
the opposite of ion.
December 9, 2011
rolig commented on the word wears
I could imagine "wear" being used as a count noun in a situation where someone was comparing the durability of different items (their various "wears" after a year of use, for instance), but it's hardly elegant English. It is simply a matter of count-nouning the already existent deverbal noun "wear".
December 7, 2011
rolig commented on the word giant weta
Apparently, one of these, recently found on Little Barrier Island in New Zealand by Mark Moffatt, is the biggest insect in the world. Click on the following link (if you dare), for more:
http://gizmodo.com/5864195/the-worlds-biggest-insect-is-so-freaking-huge-it-can-eat-a-carrot
December 3, 2011
rolig commented on the word semiotically nostalgic
me too.
December 1, 2011
rolig commented on the word pyroscaphe
An early word for a steamship.
December 1, 2011
rolig commented on the list dyslexic-s-delight
Wonderful!
A simple but evocative (meta-)palindrome is mirror rim.
December 1, 2011
rolig commented on the word spongiform pustule of Kogoj
Apparently, this was named after the Croatian Dr. Franjo Kogoj, of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zagreb.
I suppose in certain circles it's a wonderful thing to have a pustule named after you.
December 1, 2011
rolig commented on the word kaiserschmarrn
See comments on Kaiserschmarrn and kaisersmarrn.
November 30, 2011
rolig commented on the word Kaiserschmarrn
Delicious Austro-Slovene dessert.
November 30, 2011
rolig commented on the word šmoren
The Slovene vernacular term for cesarski praženec, or Kaiserschmarrn. See comments on kaisersmarrn.
November 30, 2011
rolig commented on the word cesarski praženec
See comments on kaisersmarrn.
November 30, 2011
rolig commented on the word kaisersmarrn
This is very popular in Slovenia, where it is called šmoren (from the German word Schmarrn), or more formerly cesarski praženec, a calque on Kaiserschmarrn, meaning something like "the Emperor's pancake" (for a recipe, see http://www.austria.info/uk/austrian-cuisine/kaiserschmarren-1561302.html). According to the Slovene culinary website www.kulinarika.net, this treat got its name when an innkeeper in Ježica served it to the Austrian and Russian emperors, who were stopping there on their way to the 1821 Congress in nearby Ljubljana (Laibach). Today Ježica is part of Ljubljana, and that same inn, or gostilna, is still there; it is called "Pri ruskom carju" ("The Russian Czar"), and it has lent its name to the surrounding neighborhood: the Russian Czar neighborhood.
November 30, 2011
rolig commented on the user timberlandsalgs
For the time being, we could use the "Feedback" tab. I suggest going to the Feedback (a different website), clicking "Problems" and titling the comment, for example, "SPAM: timberlandsalgs profile".
November 30, 2011
rolig commented on the word ACT UP
AIDS Committee To Unleash Power: ACT UP! FIGHT BACK! FIGHT AIDS!
November 29, 2011
rolig commented on the word turnsole
What a lovely word!
November 29, 2011
rolig commented on the user Prolagus
Pro, for your question about comments on tags, try writing Erin directly by email (erin (at) wordnik.com) -- if you haven't already.
November 29, 2011
rolig commented on the user bilby
But the comment box is hard to find.
November 29, 2011
rolig commented on the user bilby
Yes.
November 29, 2011
rolig commented on the word intermedial
In contemporary visual-art practice, this refers to works that cross different media (for instance, that combine painting and video; installation and social action; intervention and performance, etc.).
November 25, 2011
rolig commented on the word feedback
Is anybody else using the "feedback" tab on the left side of the new Wordnik Preview? It seems like I am the only one asking questions and pointing out problems, which is crazy, since I know many other people should have comments about the new interface.
November 24, 2011
rolig commented on the word zap
This word brings back memories of ACT UP.
November 24, 2011
rolig commented on the word still still still
Headline meaning: The booze-making system remains idle.
November 22, 2011
rolig commented on the word jealous
In fact, the distinction is still very much alive in certain contexts. I don't think anyone would disagree that "a jealous husband" means something very different from "an envious husband". But whereas "envious" still cannot mean what "jealous" has traditionally meant (fearful about losing something one thinks one possesses); "jealous" has been encroaching on the territory of "envious".
November 19, 2011
rolig commented on the word vernis mou
This is a printmaking technique, generally known in English as a "soft-ground etching".
November 19, 2011
rolig commented on the word dispositif
A term from French philosophy, notably the work of Michel Foucault, usually translated as "apparatus", "deployment", or just left as "dispositif".
November 19, 2011
rolig commented on the word jealous
Ru, that is the way I have always understood the distinction. But since the phrase, "I'm so jealous!" (which really is a kind of compliment when said to a friend -- meaning, essentially and paradoxically, "I celebrate your good fortune") has become ubiquitous, the finer distinction may be lost on the hoi polloi.
November 18, 2011
rolig commented on the word semicolon
Very curious. The semicolon comments have come full circle.
November 18, 2011
rolig commented on the word rhonchus
What a great word!
November 17, 2011
rolig commented on the word new interface
Perhaps it's ultimate iteration, in which case Wizard Alex, aka He Who Started Monday, would, perhaps, specialize in repeating things to the point where no further repetition is necessary.
November 17, 2011
rolig commented on the word listing
Ah, wonderful. I should do the same. And thanks for the word drupe!
November 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word listing
Hern, I actually meant first to comment on your apply day: it sounds lovely. Do you have apple trees? That's one of the things I miss in my urban life.
November 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word listing
GHibbs's grasp of grammar is less than firm, I fear. Not every modifier is an adjective -- or more precisely, it's neither standard practice nor useful to label every modifier an adjective. In the case of the listing ship, we are dealing with a present active participle (as it was termed when I was learning grammar some 40 years ago) from the verb "to list" ("lean to one side").
November 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word nouse
According to Urban Dictionary, this is Portland, Ore., slang for penis, among other definitions.
November 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word abcdefghijklmnñopqrstuvwxyz
Ru, perhaps it's a short story by Poe (http://www.yeoldelibrary.com/text/PoeEA/purloined/index.htm).
November 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word occide
So does it follow, then, that Occident means "characterized by killing"? A lot of postcolonial theorists would say that's true.
November 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word froward
Compare the word untoward, which has a similar, though not identical, meaning ("inappropriate, unacceptable, etc.). Surely, the words must be derived from to and fro (which I guess meant originally "toward and away from").
November 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word abcčdefghijklmnoprsštuvzž
Yes, it is actually, though that had not occurred to me before, since it shows up in some very common words, like fant ("boy") and in a lot of slang: ful ("completely", from the German voll), zafrkniti ("to mess up, screw, cause problems"), and of cours fukati (another borrowing from the Germanic languages) and its derivatives. But these are all borrowings (fant comes from the Romance infant, but most of the others are Germanisms) or, occasionally onomatopoeic forms (frfotati, for example, means "to flutter"). Historically, the Slavic languages did not have a separate "f" phoneme; the f-sound existed only as the devoiced allophone of the "v" phoneme. But Slovene, having lived in very close quarters with German (and Friulian) for some 14 centuries, has made "f" its own, although I guess, compared to the other letters, it is still somewhat rare. But then, the other 10-pointer, "ž" is a full-fledged Slavic phoneme and doesn't strike me as particularly rare either.
Thanks for the Scrabble counts, Froggy. That's very interesting!
November 14, 2011
rolig commented on the word mirror rim
The edge of the looking-glass brings together two inversely symmetrical worlds: a palindrome that is the image of a palindrome.
November 13, 2011
rolig commented on the word spiegeleisen
Would that be mirror rim?
November 13, 2011
rolig commented on the word If Ruzuzu is infinitely powerful, can she also be infinitely good
But can-canning (i.e. reduplicative canning) and sinning may, in fact, be related. Allow me to cite Irving Berlin: "She started a heat wave by letting her seat wave in such a way that the customers say she certainly can can-can." Here the "heat wave" caused by the can-canning of the woman in the lyric is, clearly, a not-so-subtle reference to what one may argue is, at least, a pre-sinning state or even, to be sure, a sinning one, if we accept the Gospel dictum that lustful thoughts are themselves sinful. Hence, reduplicative canning may in fact possess a relation of causality with regard to non-reduplicative sinning.
November 11, 2011
rolig commented on the word If Ruzuzu is infinitely powerful, can she also be infinitely good
But I don't think you can parse it that way. And why would you want to? Obviously, omnipotence and omniscience are not equivalent; they are different concepts. The question is, does one presume the other?
November 11, 2011
rolig commented on the word If Ruzuzu is infinitely powerful, can she also be infinitely good
I beg to differ. If knowledge is a form of power, then omnipotence -- the possession of all power -- must include omniscience -- the power of knowing all.
November 11, 2011
rolig commented on the word aābcčdeēfgģhiījkķlļmnņoprsštuūvzž
done.
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word aābcčdeēfgģhiījkķlļmnņoprsštuūvzž
Strange that "o" should be the only vowel without a macronic partner.
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word su risu de sa mela granada
But I'm glad you did. This is beautiful.
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word aswage
Don't you mean "assuage"?
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word aābcčdeēfgģhiījkķlļmnņoprsštuūvzž
Khrushchev didn't rehabilitate them with Stalin's other victims?
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word абвгдђежзијклљмнњопрстћуфхцчџш
The Serbian/Bosnian alphabet, or азбука / azbuka (Cyrillic version, or ћирилица / ćirilica).
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word new interface
I sure hope "UI" doesn't mean "under the influence" here.
*crossing fingers*
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word abcčdefghijklmnoprsštuvzž
Done: "Ab C. Defghi & Co." It's an open list, so please contribute as you can. (Milosrdenstvi, I'm looking forward to seeing the Georgian alphabet up there, and the Indonesian from Bilby, the Irish from Fox, etc.)
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word abčćddžđefghijklljmnnjoprsštuvzž
The Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian alphabet, or abeceda (Latin version, or latinica), in which "dž", "lj", and "nj" are treated as separate letters.
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word new interface
Erin, any progress on list and profile comments?
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word абвгдежзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюя
The official Russian alphabet, called азбука / azbuka, from Old Church Slavonic names of the first two letters ("az" – "I"; "buka" – "beech").
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word abcčdefghijklmnoprsštuvzž
The official Slovene alphabet (abeceda)
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word hvalnica
Slovene: hválnica: encomium, song of praise, homage
November 10, 2011
rolig commented on the word abcedfghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
The d and the e have been reversed. But I have always pronounced this something like "abseh défghi jekyll minópker stoov wyxes". Once you've tackled a Slavic language, you can find a way to pronounce almost any string of letters.
November 9, 2011
rolig commented on the word l'esprit de l'escalier
"Writers, by nature, tend to be people in whom l'esprit de l'escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte after the moment for saying it has passed. So they take a few years longer and put it in print."
– Louis Menand, "Bad Comma" (a review of Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, The New Yorker, June 28, 2004.
November 6, 2011
rolig commented on the word elegant
Apparently not. There is something rather sad about GHibbs's postings.
November 6, 2011
rolig commented on the word hagiolatry
So Christinerick, in your opinion, devout Catholics do not practice hagiolatry? If you agree with that statement, then you would agree that "hagiolatry" is a word. We don't get to choose what is or is not a word on the basis of whether we support the concept the word represents.
November 2, 2011
rolig commented on the word Dick Van Dyke
In the UK, Van Dyke's name has become a byword for someone can't imitate an English accent successfully – the result of the American actor's woeful imitation of a Cockney chimney sweep in the film Mary Poppins.
Cf. the following usage:
"I’m a Londoner with a very neutral British accent living in the US and my (American) Siri doesn’t understand me either. I have to repeat myself numerous times and in an increasingly bad American accent to make myself understood. And since I am the Dick Van Dyke of American, this can get very tedious. Why not use British Siri, you ask? British Siri understands me perfectly, but unfortunately it has been programmed to say "I can only search for businesses, maps and traffic in the United States, and when you’re using US English’, which seems very unreasonable to me. Why can’t I search for US businesses in British English?"
– A reader writing on Andrew Sullivan's blog "The Daily Dish", http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/10/hogmanwhat-ctd.html
October 29, 2011
rolig commented on the word vigorish
This one is going on my Slavonicisms list.
October 20, 2011
rolig commented on the word prebendalism
And here I was thinking this had something to do with Uri Geller.
October 19, 2011
rolig commented on the word stores
Bravo, Foxy! Excellent!
(*Putting on my copy-editor hat* The comma after "squibbs", however, needs to go.)
October 19, 2011
rolig commented on the word unmasked media
fbharjo, you were there? I remember watching that game on TV.
One correction though, we natives call our town Bawlmer (the standard spelling for the native pronunciation).
October 17, 2011
rolig commented on the word awrite
Not a great word, but I guess it's aw rite.
October 16, 2011
rolig commented on the word Rolig
Froggy, I think it has something to do with the Swedish meaning of my name ("fun, amusing, comical"); curiously, I'm told that in Danish, "rolig" means "calm".
October 12, 2011
rolig commented on the word Rolig
Thanks, guys. Glad to see there's been some response to my suggestion.
*Trying to imagine Louis Armstrong with a foxy Irish brogue.*
October 12, 2011
rolig commented on the word Rolig
People are welcome to leave comments for me here, if they so desire. I would also suggest that they add their own name to my "Wordizens/Wordnikians" list and use this space for keeping in touch with each other. I would add a few names myself, but I'm not sure whether people want to be capitalized or not, and I am also afraid of forgetting someone and having all sorts of umbrage taken and fufluns flung.
October 12, 2011
rolig commented on the word Treppenwitz
For more discussion, see l'esprit de l'escalier.
October 11, 2011
rolig commented on the word get into itness with our gym lasses
I suppose one of those lasses must be Clara Bow.
October 11, 2011
rolig commented on the word postcolonialism
Once I was editing a text and this word came up, only with a hyphen: "post-colonialism". I suggesting removing the hypen in order to be consistent with the style we were using, but the author insisted that there was an important difference between "post-colonialism" and "postcolonialism". I bit my tongue.
September 20, 2011
rolig commented on the word writhle
This must be related to wriggle, surely.
September 20, 2011
rolig commented on the word kurunj
Good one, Dan.
September 17, 2011
rolig commented on the word loo
In American (and I suppose British, too?) English the idiom "go to the bathroom" doesn't mean go to a certain room, it means "to urinate and/or defecate". Which is why the sentence: "The dog went to the bathroom in the kitchen" makes sense. So the original example is misleading. Also problematic for Americans is that a room with just a toilet can certainly be called a bathroom, but it is just as likely to be called other things as well, ranging from "the head" and "the john" to "the powder room" -- terms that, I think, would never be used for a room that had a bathtub but no toilet. Unlike in Europe, where having a separate room just for the toilet (with or without a sink) is not unusual in homes, especially older ones, in the standard American home the toilet and the bathtub are usually in the same room, though there may also be another room with just a toilet and a sink ("the powder room"), which is there for convenience (e.g. it will be on the floor where one does one's entertaining, or in the basement; it will probably not be on the floor with the bedrooms).
September 16, 2011
rolig commented on the word loo
Like the first CD definition here. A Scot might say he's looking for loo, but don't believe him. He's just cottaging.
September 15, 2011
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