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WORD/QUOTATION of the DAY Resurrected
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From The Oxford English Dictionary:nullibiquitous, adj.
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Existing nowhere.
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1820 Examiner 632/2 Mr. Dadikey’s nullibiquitous hat and waistcoat.
Mod
nullibiquitous, adj.
. . . .
Existing nowhere.
. . . .
1820 Examiner 632/2 Mr. Dadikey’s nullibiquitous hat and waistcoat."
I've always wondered what happend to the king's PR man after the small boy shouted out that the king was naked... Now we know. He was nullibiquited.
Heh-heh!
From The Oxford English Dictionary:Drake equation, n.
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An equation devised to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that may potentially be detected in our galaxy.
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1964 W. Sullivan We are not Alone xvii. 264 There is no immediate way to determine the chief unknown..—that of the longevity of a technological civilisation. The other factors in Drake’s equation can be assessed by experiment or observation.
Mod
Rubbish. The Old Egyptian Kingdom of the Pharoahs was a technological society -- they had the wheel and chariots and domesticated horses and other animals while others still lived in the late Bronze Age. That civilization lasted 3000 years in near stasis.
I would say instead that it is near impossible to destroy a technological civilization totally. The technology will, to some extent, always survive, even if those who conquered the civilization that invented it merely use the artifacts of the technology without understanding it completely or even partially. The conquerers of the Roman Empire could think of no higher aspiration than to turn themselves into pseudo-Romans.
It's just the people of the civilzation who don't survive, but their three score and ten would have run out anyway. The technology almost always survives.
We live at a moment when a barbarian ideology -- Islam -- is trying to conquer and destroy Western Civilization (they really mean it when they shout "Death to America!"), so our children or grandchilden will be able to tell who is right, Drake or me.
One more item of information: after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, sure uncivilized actsJapanese technology instead of stultifying, took huge leaps. Dresden ditto. In Chernobyl the technology survives.
I agree. The world is in a strange place - I'm still worried about the upcoming election. The US economy hasn't recovered most of the people I know are still struggling to make ends meet. The majority are sliding further into poverty. If there is anything to Peal Oil and if the Islamic factions succeed in messing up the world while we struggle to convert to an post-oil civilization - we could be back to the the horse and buggy days.
I've got enough land to feed us and a couple of horses so we can get around. Not too worried.
From The Oxford English Dictionary:philodox, n.
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A person who loves or vehemently propounds his or her own opinions; a dogmatic or argumentative person.
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1609 A. Craig Poet. Recreations sig. D2v, No greater fools then Philodoxes fond, And such as loue opinions of their own.
Mod
mondegreen n.. . . .
A misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing, esp. of the lyrics to a song.
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1954 S. Wright in Harper’s Mag. Nov. 49/1 The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.
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1994 S. Pinker Lang. Instinct vi. 186 The interesting thing about mondegreens is that the mis-hearings are generally less plausible than the intended lyrics.
Mod
Here's one Dakota thought up that fits the better than original category, or at least more apt to our times:
Gilbert and Sullivan original:
"I never thought of thinking for myself at all."
Dakota Franklin mondegreen:
"I never took a tickey for myself at all."
It occurs in her book about a lesbian NASCAR racer, NASCAR FIRST.
A tickey was once a three penny coin, the smallest silver coin.
From The Oxford English Dictionary:psychrophobia, n.
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Fear or hatred of cold, esp. of cold water.
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1863 Harper’s Mag. Aug. 401/2 One bright, icy afternoon..little Philly was suffering in the hands of his nurse, under a severe attack of Psychrophobia.
1958 Morgantown (W. Virginia) Post 10 Feb. 6/6 February, in the Northern states anyway, is no month for victims of psychrophobia.
Mod
Well found, Kat; most apt.
yes, and with a broken finger, I'm more psychrophobic than ever!I'll be glad when I can really type again.
From The Oxford English Dictionary:anythingarianism, n.
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The fact or phenomenon of not holding any fixed or established beliefs; (also) the rejection of all fixed or established beliefs, regarded (often humorously) as a creed or philosophy.
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1797 C. Nisbet Let. 31 Oct. in Bull. N.Y. Public Libr. 2 (1898) 285 Mr. Whitfield was a great Promoter of Anythingarianism in this Country, but he was not aware that he was advancing the Nothingarian Interest by his Preaching.
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2006 A. Errishi in J. Kultgen & M. Lenzi Probl. for Democracy iii. xiii. 217 Political realities do not allow for philosophical anythingarianism.
Mod
From The Oxford English Dictionary:pungle, v.
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Origin: A borrowing from Spanish. Etymon: Spanish póngale.
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To hand over or come up with (money); to ‘shell out’. Also intr. Usu. with down or up.
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1851 Alta California (San Francisco) 19 July 2/3 A singular genius..was ‘pongaling down’ huge piles of gold at a monte table.
1851 Oregon Statesman 23 Sept. 2/6 He accordingly ‘pungled down’ two of Moffat’s $50 slugs, and of course, cut the black, there being no red spots in the pack.
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1884 ‘M. Twain’ Adventures Huckleberry Finn v. 41 ‘I’ll ask him; and I’ll make him pungle, too, or I’ll know the reason why.’..Next day..he went to Judge Thatcher’s and..tried to make him give up the money.
Link to the rest at The Oxford English Dictionary
Mod
Nice one, Kat!
Mod
A word I can only use in the summer because in the winter it is too painfully close to current weather is phrygophobia.
Mine is fear of Air Conditioning Cold. It's 92F or 33C which is too hot to play outside.
But we've got good AC which means it gets freezing inside.
Mod
dirigisme |ˈdɪrɪʒɪz(ə)m|
noun [ mass noun ]
state control of economic and social matters.
DERIVATIVES
dirigiste adjective
ORIGIN 1950s: from French, from the verb diriger, from Latin dirigere ‘to direct’.
***
Maybe the personal description could be
dirigismatic
for a pol or her voters (Democrats) who believe in big government.
mumbudget, n., int., and adj.. . . .
1. to play (at) mumbudget: to keep silent.
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1639 Deloney’s Gentile Craft: 2nd Pt. (rev. ed.) ii. sig. D, Harken hither three dayes hence, and you shall heare more, but in the meane space looke you play mum-budget, and speake not a word of this matter to any creature.
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C. adj.
Silent, mute; = mum adj. Obs.
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1622 J. Mabbe tr. M. Alemán Rogue i. 146, I was Mum-budget, and durst not open my lips to him..in that businesse.
Link to the rest at The Oxford English Dictionary
Mod
. . . .
1. to play (at) mumbudget: to keep silent.
. . . . ..."
Oh, Mummy, where's your Budget?
From The Oxford English Dictionary:duergar, n.
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In (esp. Scandinavian) folklore and mythology: (with the and pl. concord) dwarves or similar supernatural beings as a class or race.
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1810 Scott Lady of Lake 384 This jealousy was also an attribute of the northern Duergar, or dwarfs.
Mod
Now that's what I call showing off your learning, using a word so rare that you have to explain it in a subclause. The only thing worse would be to have to explain it in parenthesis.
Heres one I lifted from the internet:A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y is not all you need to know about vowels. There's more to these workhorse members of our linguistics inventory than you might think.
1. ENGLISH HAS MORE VOWELS THAN THERE ARE LETTERS FOR THEM.
A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y are the letters we define as vowels, but vowels can also be defined as speech sounds. While we have six letters we define as vowels, there are, in English, many more vowel sounds than that. For example consider the word pairs cat and car, or cook and kook. The vowel sounds are different from each other in each pair, but they are represented by the same letters. Depending on the dialect, and including diphthongs, which are combinations of two vowel sounds, English has from nine to 16 vowel sounds.
2. THE MOST COMMON VOWEL IS SCHWA.
The most common vowel sound in English doesn’t even have its own letter in the alphabet. It does have a symbol, though, and it looks like this: ǝ. It’s the "uh" sound in an unstressed syllable and it shows up everywhere, from th[ǝ], to p[ǝ]tato, to antic[ǝ]p[ǝ]tory. You can discover nine fun facts about it here.
3. YOUR SPANISH SOUNDS AMERICAN BECAUSE OF DIPHTHONGS.
In addition to pure vowel sounds, there are diphthongs, where the sound moves from one target to another. American English is full of them. The vowel in the American pronunciation of no is a diphthong that moves from o to u (if you say it in slow motion, your lips move from a pure o position to a pure u position). The vowel in the Spanish pronunciation is not a diphthong. It stays at o, and that what makes it sound different from the English version.
4. SOME SOUNDS CAN BE EITHER VOWELS OR CONSONANTS.
The u sound (pronounced "oo") is a vowel. It allows an unrestricted airflow through the vocal apparatus. Consonants, in contrast, are created with a blockage of air flow, or point of constriction. A u sound can sometimes serve as that point of constriction, and it that case the u is considered a w. In the word blue, the u is the most open part of the syllable, and a vowel. In want it is the constriction before the main vowel, and thus a consonant. Similarly, an i (or “ee”) can also be a y, which helps explain why is Y a sometimes vowel.
5. MOST LANGUAGES HAVE AT LEAST THREE VOWELS.
Most languages have at least i, a, and u, or something close to them, though it may be the case that the extinct language Ubykh had only two vowels. It is hard to say what the highest number of vowels for a language is because there are features like vowel length, nasalization, tone, and voicing quality (creaky, breathy) that may or may not be considered marks of categorical difference from other sounds, but in general, 15 seems to be a pretty high number of distinct single vowels for a language. The International Phonetic Alphabet has symbols for 34 different vowels. You can listen to the different sounds they represent here.
6. SOME LANGUAGES REQUIRE VOWEL HARMONY.
In English, we can add an ending like –ness or –y onto any word and the form of the ending doesn’t change. I can say “the property of vowelness” or “his speech is very diphthongy.” In languages like Hungarian, the vowels of the ending must harmonize with the vowels in the word it attaches to. For example, the multiplicative ending, for forming words like twice, thrice, etc. is –szor when it attaches to a word with a back vowel (hatszor, “six times”), -szer when it attaches to a word with a front vowel (egyszer, “once”) and –ször when it attaches to a word with a front rounded vowel (ötször, “five times”). Other languages with vowel harmony are Turkish and Finnish.
7. TODAY’S ENGLISH IS THE RESULT OF MASSIVE CHANGE CALLED "THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT."
Many words we have today were pronounced very differently before the 14th century. Boot sounded more like boat, house sounded like hoos, and five sounded like feev. English underwent a major change in the 14th and 15th centuries. Words with long vowels shifted into new pronunciations. The changes happened in stages, over a few hundred years, but when they were complete, the language sounded very different, and spelling was a bit of a mess, since many spellings had been established during early phases of pronunciation. The change may have been initiated by the volume of French words that entered English shortly before the shift, or by the movement of populations with different dialects during the Black Plague.
8. YOU DON’T NEED ALL THE VOWELS TO WRITE A NOVEL.
In 1969, George Perec, a member of the French experimental literature group known as Oulipo published La Disparition, a 300-page novel written only with words that did not contain the letter e. It was published in English as A Void, also without using the letter e. The Spanish translation, El Secuestro, used no a. Works created with this kind of restriction are called lipograms, explained here in an e-less lipogram.
November 8, 2016 - 8:00am
Mod
The links to the examples are missing. Perhaps you can give one main source link and people can follow up the sub-links from there.
lip·o·gramˈlipəˌɡram,ˈlī-/
noun
a composition from which the writer systematically omits a certain letter or certain letters of the alphabet.
http://phrontistery.info/lipogram.html
Mod
ˈlipəˌɡram,ˈlī-/
noun
a composition from which the writer systematically omits a certain letter or certain letters of the alphabet.
http://phrontistery.info/lipogram.html"
Thanks!
mulct, v. . . . .
1. To punish (a person, an offence) by a fine; to exact money from (a person); to tax.
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1903 ‘T. Collins’ Such is Life iv. 153 Alf had been mulcted in five shillings trespass, with six guineas costs.
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2. b. To swindle (a person); to defraud, cheat (of property, money, etc.).
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1857 J. Stewart Sketches Sc. Char. 145 The gawcy change-house luckies lauch and mulct the drucken fule.
Link to the rest at The Oxford English Dictionary
Mod
An excellent word for those who write period pieces.
Mod
One who contemplates or meditates upon one's navel; one who engages in omphaloscopy.
Adjective
omphaloskeptic (not comparable)
Likely to, prone to, or engaged in contemplating or meditating upon one's navel.
Usage notes
Both the noun and adjective are often used in a derogative fashion, to indicate that a person is not in tune with reality.
Comment
I'll say!
jackalope, n.. . . .
A mythical animal depicted as a hare or rabbit with horns and said to exist in parts of North America.
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1950 Altoona (Pa.) Mirror 2 Mar. 12/7 The Douglas [Wyoming] Chamber of Commerce reports, with tongue in cheek, that the ‘jackalope’ still survives in Converse county.
1977 N.Y. Times 27 Nov. 26/3 He does not know how many of the legends surrounding the jackalope began.
Mod
. . . .
A mythical animal depicted as a hare."
A rabbit-sized miniature goat, good for single-serving roasts!
Faster than a speeding bullet, and dangerous because of the horns.Kench
From The Oxford English Dictionary:pluviculture, n.
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The art or science of rainmaking; the production and implementation of schemes for inducing rain.
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1925 D. S. Jordan in Science 24 July 81/2 The modern diversions of pluviculture, chiropractics and hormonism are everywhere treated with respect. Of these none can be more scientific than is pluviculture.
Mod
The Pluvicultist
[Alt] Title of a novel by John Grisham
I steal the best stuff!1. Nice
These days, we often say “Nice!” sarcastically to mean “That’s really ignorant!” If we traced the word nice back to its source, though, it wouldn’t be sarcastic at all. Today’s bland sense of “good” comes from the meaning “precise, fastidious” (still sometimes used, as in “a nice distinction”), which in turn came from a use in the 1400s to mean “overrefined, excessively delicate,” which was a narrowing down of the broader sense “foolish,” which is the meaning it had when it came into English via French from Latin. But the Latin original was nescius, which literally means “unknowing, ignorant.” And here we’ve all been using it without knowing where it came from. Nice!
2. Silly
So okay, nice comes from “ignorant.” Well, ignorance is bliss, right? Sure, and so is silliness… historically, at least. Silly started out as Old English sælig, “happy, blissful, fortunate” and by the 1200s it had gained the sense “blessed, pious,” which expanded to “innocent,” and then shifted to “pitiable” and so also “insignificant, poor.” By the 1500s it was being used to mean “ignorant, foolish,” and from there we got our more innocuous modern senses of “inane” and “giddy.”
. . . .
4. Throw
So why didn’t they just use throw to mean “throw”? Because — wait for it! — throw originally meant “twist.” Yeah, that’s right. That twisting motion your body makes when throwing? It may have led to this word for “twist” coming to mean “toss” — trading places with warp. If you’re wondering how people clearly spoke of the throwing motion while throw and warp were twisting around each other, the answer is that they mainly used cast.
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6. Awful
If down is up, good is bad, right? Well, awesome is awful, anyway. The word awful originally meant something rather like “awesome.” Its Old English form, egefull, meant “causing dread”; as ege became awe and came to mean not just “dread” but “profound respect,” awful came to mean “commanding profound respect or fear.” In the 1600s, it could mean “sublimely majestic” and was uttered as high praise to such things as a great cathedral. But a slang usage of awful to mean “monstrous, frightful, very ugly” caught on in the 1800s, and now it’s the only way you can use the word. A shadow of the original sense can be seen in our use of awfully to mean “very.”
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9. Surly
Not everyone was always impressed with the manners of the nobility, though. We may retain a certain respect for the kingly and lordly, but if we expand “ly” to all those called “sir” we run into sirly, which was respelled surly. At first it meant “lordly, majestic,” but then it got resentful and went downhill into “haughty, arrogant” and from that to “ill-tempered.”
Mod
Nice!
Or is it?
From The Oxford English Dictionary:nimble-chops, n.
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A talkative person. Used chiefly as a form of address.
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1763 I. Bickerstaff Love in Village ii. ii. 30 Who bid you speak Mrs. Nimble Chops, I suppose the man has a tongue in his head to answer for himself.
Mod
nimble-chops, n.
. . . .
A talkative person. Used chiefly as a form of address.
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1763 I. Bickerstaff Love in Village ii. ii. 30 Who bid you speak Mrs. Nim..."
Nimble Chops sounds like a fat little girl gymnast, surprisingly good and fast... Just saying.
Mod
rheology |rɪˈɒlədʒi|
noun [ mass noun ]
the branch of physics that deals with the deformation and flow of matter, especially the non-Newtonian flow of liquids and the plastic flow of solids.
DERIVATIVES
rheological |-əˈlɒdʒɪk(ə)l| adjective,
rheologist noun
ORIGIN 1920s: from Greek rheos ‘stream’ + -logy.
Mod
*For our American friends, a queue is British English for a waiting line, not a bullfighter's badge of office.
sonnettomania, n.Compare sonnettomaniac n.
. . . .
Great enthusiasm for sonnets; extreme fondness for the sonnet as a literary form.
. . . .
1821 New Monthly Mag. 1 644 Nothing..is on record as a specific for the sonnettomania.
Link to the rest at The Oxford English Dictionary
Mod
Compare sonnettomaniac n.
. . . .
Great enthusiasm for sonnets; extreme fondness for the sonnet as a literary form.."
To me it sounds like someone who falls asleep and snores at poetry readings. Sorry about that. Not very poetic, I know.
I might immigrate somewhere off the beaten path."
No need. The American president has just about zero executive power. He can't even start a decent war by himself. Hell, Johnson couldn't even conduct the existing war against a third world nation on the other side of the world without hourly interference by a bunch of pork barrel rollers from his own party; that's why, after one of the most successful legislative programs of any president, he decided not to run for a second term. (Johnson had been the darling of Congress, a very effective lawmaker, until he got to be president...) All candidates talk up a storm on the campaign trail -- and then they get elected and discover that their power to deliver on their promises is severely limited, the more so when Congress, as usually happens, is controlled by the other party.