Surprising words

[truehobbit]

Or even synchronous? Or synergetic?

Although this thread may well be considered synecdochical for HoF.

[baby tuckoo]

Blast the synechdotal evidence; I stand as poor evidence of HoF itself, and I would not be unhappy to be used litotally as a counter example. Not unhappy at all.

I ran into "desulpherisident" while looking for another word in the RanHouUnAb, a tome that has sucked many days out of my life while I was looking for a different word dammit. The previous is an agent that takes the sulpher out of another substance, and I don't think you can pronounce it without sounding drunk. Just try.


"Bedight", my dear hobby, is a delightful word, and is best described as the opposite of "bedim," both of which made it into late Middle English, but no further. They both have Anglo-Saxon pedigrees, which is obvious from the "be-" prefix, as in "beloved," "betwixt," and "between," and many others, including "unbeknownst."


I wouldn't use it in a modern translation, ms. hob. The "be" part we would understand, even if used uncommonly, as in "beholden" or "benempt."

But "dight" didn't make the cut. It survives only in the Scottish dialect, where they still "dite" the pantry, lad, or I'll take a cane t'ya. All three dictionarys I trust declare it related to the Latin "dictare", which makes sense, but it was in Anglo-Saxon well before the Normans, and maybe before the Priests, but not the Picts. (The "i" is long; morphemic vowels that survive have gone short [see Grimm] as in "dictate" and "dictator.")


But I like it. Bedighten and adorn was the Yule tree, saeyes he. Neyet to bespoken was the wassail.

[baby tuckoo]

Oh, yeah, and I just remembered . . .


I went to Synecdoche once. It's Upstate. I was on the way to Rensselaer to receive a reward for a bunch of us who did something. The rest of them couldn't make it.

[truehobbit]

I'm glad you like 'bedight', and thank you for the explanations. The hours with RanHouUnAb, who seems to be of Arab extraction, have been well spent.

I wouldn't use it in a modern translation, ms. hob. The "be" part we would understand, even if used uncommonly, as in "beholden" or "benempt."

But if the reader were to find they don't understand the word, they could look it up, and learn something.
A translation shouldn't be more 'modern' than the original anyway.
Or else you might just as well read Krege's new LOTR translation and see Sam call his master 'boss', as beseems a modern employee.

[vison]

(About "boss".)

You could say "redd up" the kitchen, if you wanted to.

[MithLuin]

I like fey and doom - hence my love of Tolkien . Or is that the other way around?

But they aren't sufficiently strange enough for this thread. Hapax legomenon, a word appearing only once in a work, is a fun word. I once had an excuse to use it outside Roäc's thread on TORc, even . I was hanging out with a bunch of English majors preparing for comps, but apparently "these" is used only once by Joyce in one of his novels, and it is in a significant way. They were surprised there was a word for that, and dismayed they didn't know what it was (since they were supposed to know all literary terms at that point in their lives!)

I wanted to be clever, and make Abulia an elvish character, but that is harder than it looks. There is no quenya word that begins ab-, and even if I wanted to make "a" a prefix, there aren't any that begin with b either, apparently! Silly elves... Though 'ablative' is a grammar word, apparently...

Aha! She's a Grey-elf! ab- means 'after' in Sindarin. uilos is Simbelmynë, meaning 'everwhite', while uil is 'seaweed.' lû is an 'occasion,' while luin means 'blue' (I shouldn't have had to look that one up...) ia means 'pit,' as in Moria.

So...poor Abulia fell into a pit after missing some momentous occasion, it would seem. Or maybe she just has to clean up the kitchen.

[Inanna]

So...poor Abulia fell into a pit after missing some momentous occasion, it would seem. Or maybe she just has to clean up the kitchen.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

So...poor Abulia fell into a pit after missing some momentous occasion, it would seem. Or maybe she just has to clean up the kitchen.

And she can't decide which...


BrianIs AtYou

PS

Poor Abulia!

[Inanna]

PS

Poor Abulia!

PS may refer to:

* Paddle steamer
* Palau, FIPS PUB 10-4 territory code
* Palestinian territories, ISO 3166 country code
* Parametric Stereo
* Peta siemens, an SI unit of electric conductance; see: Peta (prefix) and siemens (unit)
* Pferdestärke, German DIN definition for "horsepower"
* PokerStars.com, an online pokerroom
* Physically sequential, data set (IBM mainframe)
* Police Sergeant, uniformed senior police rank
* Polystyrene, a common plastic
* Postscript, a message appended to a letter after the writer's signature
* Professional services, especially those provided by a vendor
* Program stream, an MPEG-2 container format
* Proton Synchrotron
* Public school, e.g., P.S. 31
* Publish/subscribe, an asynchronous messaging model used in distributed computing systems
* Ukraine International Airlines, IATA airline designator
* Porous silicon
* Pulmonary Stenosis
* Polystyrene, the resin identification code
* Power steering
* Power supply
* Phosphatidylserine
* Portable Spectrometer
* Plastic surgery
* Pen spinning, using one's fingers to manipulate a pen
* Princess Sarah

Which one did you mean?

[Frelga]

So...poor Abulia fell into a pit after missing some momentous occasion, it would seem. Or maybe she just has to clean up the kitchen.

And she can't decide which...

Maybe she can't decide which is worse?

[truehobbit]

Aha! She's a Grey-elf! ab- means 'after' in Sindarin. uilos is Simbelmynë, meaning 'everwhite', while uil is 'seaweed.' lû is an 'occasion,' while luin means 'blue' (I shouldn't have had to look that one up...) ia means 'pit,' as in Moria.

So...poor Abulia fell into a pit after missing some momentous occasion, it would seem. Or maybe she just has to clean up the kitchen.

Fantastic, Mith!

See, I said we should have had a story competition about poor Abulia.


Mahima, you's crazy!

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

Pantechnicon (used in Tolkien's "Farmer Giles of Ham" to describe the dragon Chrysophylax when he is loaded up with jewels and gold):

From Wikipedia:

Pantechnicon is an old British word for a furniture removal van. It was originally coined in 1830 as the name of a craft shop or bazaar, in Motcomb Street in Belgravia, London; the name is Greek for "pertaining to all the arts or crafts". The shop soon closed down and the building was turned into a furniture warehouse, but the name was kept. Vehicles transporting furniture to and from the building, known as pantechnicon vans, soon came to be known simply as pantechnicons.

A pantech truck or van is a word derivation of "pantechnicon" commonly currently used in Australia. A pantech is a truck and/or van with a freight hull made of (or converted to) hard panels (i.e. for chilled freight, removal vans, etc).

I came across this by accident when glancing at the Tolkien Reader. I don't remember it from previous reads, and I would have thought that I would remember it.

So I have entered it here for posterity.

BrianIs AtYou

[Lily Rose]

I really like the word vituperation.
I think that Maria used it on B77 yesterday or something. I was very happy to add it to my mental dictionary.

[vison]

The word "ugsome" was once as common as "handsome". I wish it still was.

[Primula Baggins]

"Ugsome"! My brother used that word when he was a little boy! I never knew it was an actual word. Maybe he didn't either.

(He's a writer now, of course.)

[Frelga]

roué. a dissolute and licentious man; rake.

The scary part is the derivation:

[French, from past participle of rouer, to break on a wheel (from the feeling that such a person deserves that punishment), from Old French, from Latin rotāre, to rotate; see rotate.]

[baby tuckoo]

Frelga, there is an English equivalent, and it doesn't (I think) relate to "breaking" on the wheel.

It is "rounder." It's still in use as noun and adjective. I don't think it has anything to do with punishment, or the wheel. I think it simply refers to a man who "gets around" in the most literal of ways, if you know what I mean.



On another topic . . .




Yesterday, an administrator at my school gave a presentation regarding "breach of integrity" referrals. That means cheating.

Several times he mentioned the gravity of "multiple incidences." Most of us weren't listening (teachers are the worst audience) but for some reason I was, and I wondered what were these "incidences." It's not a word.


Any native speaker would understand it, and many make the mistake, if it is one. It's a conflation of "instance" and "incident," either of which is acceptable, but they are distinct words. The plurals simply add an "s." On and on he went while mostly we focussed on the middle distance. That's what I should always do.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

Actually, "incidences" is a word. It is the plural of incidence (which is closely related to incident), but may have been improperly used in this case by the speaker.

It is most commonly use is in science, especially in fields like epidemiology and medicine. In such cases, it is frequently used as an adjective rather than a noun, such as "the incidence rate of a disease".

As a noun, it is defined as follows:

Incidence - the number of new occurrences of a condition (or disease) in a population over a period of time.

Similar usages appear in sociological sciences, such as criminology, where one might refer the the incidence of rape or murder in a given population.

If one was looking at more than one condition, one might speak of incidences.

The incidences of several classes of violent crimes have increased year over year.

In a similar context, if the speaker in your example was referring to multiple classifications of violations, he could properly speak of incidences. But using the term "multiple" makes me think he intended "incidents".

Incident, in contrast to incidence, refers to a specific event, not the rate of occurrence of a class of events/conditions.

Similarly, incidents, in contrast to incidences, refers to several specific events, as opposed to the rates of occurrence of several classes of events/conditions.

BrianIs AtYou

[baby tuckoo]

*Swoons for Brian*


But I ask for other opinions.

[Frelga]

Brian's right. Incidence is a familiar word in epidemiology.