Subject: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Peter T. Date: 17 Aug 03 - 02:35 PM A student in Britain just won 1,500,000 dollars for knowing what an "arctophile" is -- someone who collects teddy bears. I think she deserves it -- I had no idea there was such word. There is also a recent film, Spellbound (fun film, by the way), which had a word "terrine" (or was it "terrene"?) I had never heard of, and I pride myself (well into flaming arrogance) on knowing all kinds of words that are actually in use, but out of the ordinary. A friend of mine, upon hearing about spelling bees, said they were "nugatory", which turns out to mean "worthless". Anyone know of any words that you have actually run across recently, in use, that might be worth storing away? yours, Peter T. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 17 Aug 03 - 02:48 PM Of interest re nugatory is its descent from a word meaning jokes or trifles. (Latin, nugae). Currently meaning without force or validity. I am completely undone by arctophile. I'ld have thought it was someone fond of northern climes, but lo and behold the word in fact comes from t he same root by means of the Great Bear constellation:Alteration (influenced by Latin arcticus) of Middle English artic, northern, from Medieval Latin articus, from Latin arcticus, from Greek arktikos, from arktos, bear, the northern constellation Ursa Major . As to unusual words I offer baccaceous ( like a berry; bearing berries). And, for other purposes altogether, babuina, female baboon. For hours of interesting exploration I suggest the Dictionary of Difficult Words found at this site. Regards, A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: katlaughing Date: 17 Aug 03 - 02:52 PM Good for her! Timely thread, Peter. I just read in today's paper that Utah's governor Mike Leavitt, the Resident's new choice for the EPA, is using the newly coined term "Enlibra" which is supposed to mean "balance and stewardship." If one reads his words and looks at his record, though, it is just a new form of double-speak for raping and pillaging our natural resources. From the article: Enlibra envisions moving environmental decision-making down from the federal level as much as possible -- a move that raises environmentalists' fears that state and local governments will engage in a 'race to the bottom,' luring industry with loose rules or enforcement. Leavitt has distributed his own "Enlibra principles" sheet. One of them requires that costs be strictly considered in setting environmental policy. Carol Brown, Clinton's EPA administrator says that such rigid cost-benefit analyses traditionally overestimate costs to industry and underestimate environmental benefits. All one may ever want to know about Enlibra. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Leadfingers Date: 17 Aug 03 - 03:13 PM I have always had a great difficulty in remembering peoples names,and find it somewhar ironic that I CAN remember tha ANOMIA is the technical name for the inability to rmember peoples names! |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: open mike Date: 17 Aug 03 - 03:22 PM ursa-phile? |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Rapparee Date: 17 Aug 03 - 03:56 PM I should think that arctophile meant a lover of bears, not teddy bears. Someone like Uncle Walter. I've always been partial to "dottle," but since I gave up smoking have little occassion to use it. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 17 Aug 03 - 04:18 PM Terrene means mundial, of the earth. I can't speak to the difference between terrene and terrestrial, though. A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Bill D Date: 17 Aug 03 - 04:56 PM "And, for other purposes altogether, babuina, female baboon." ...and, for that strange, garish display on the south end of a Baboon headed north... "ischial callosity" |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: open mike Date: 17 Aug 03 - 05:15 PM dottle? a tittle and a jot? by the way for you word lovers out there (there must be a word for that word-o-phile or something?) I am looking for a word to name a new kitty that just adopted me.. she (he?) is grey (gray?) and so i am looking for a word that means smoke or ash.... in some other language perhaps? spanish? there is also a blaze-like marking on her fore head (or his? haven't looked that close yet) if it was a horse it would be called a blaze... so if you have any suggestions, i am open to considering them... |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: McGrath of Harlow Date: 17 Aug 03 - 05:52 PM Artos - alternative name for King Arthur, means the bear. Cognate with Latin Ursus. Rhodomontade is a good round word. Means vain and empty boasting, and sounds like it does too. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Peter T. Date: 17 Aug 03 - 05:55 PM I think in Spellbound the word is "terrine" which I had never heard of (and can't remember the meaning,not "terrene"). yours, Peter T. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: McGrath of Harlow Date: 17 Aug 03 - 06:19 PM Isn't "terrene" more or less the same as what Americans call a meatloaf? |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Rapparee Date: 17 Aug 03 - 06:50 PM Dottle: the unburned tobacco left in a pipe when it goes out. Collected by Sherlock Holmes at the end of each day and dried so that it became his first smoke of the next day. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 17 Aug 03 - 06:51 PM No -- dottle is the clot at the bottom of a well-smoked pipe, formed of compressed tobacco, ash, carbon and other byproducts of burning. A terrine is an earthenware container for cooking and serving food, or various dishes prepared or cooked in a terrine. A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Joe_F Date: 17 Aug 03 - 06:53 PM I'm an arcterast myself. I have always been enamored of the names for the three types of liquid crystal: nematic, smectic, cholesteric. One seldom gets a chance to use them in ordinary conversation, but if one recalls that the first comes from the Greek for needle and the second for soap, there are obvious applications of all three to persons of various temperaments. Another set of technical terms makes a poem in itself -- the six motions of a ship: Roll, pitch, yaw, Surge, sway, heave. If there is ever a song about seasickness, that could be the chorus. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Rapparee Date: 17 Aug 03 - 06:55 PM Isn't heave what those aboard do when the ship makes the other five motions? |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Bill D Date: 17 Aug 03 - 06:56 PM 'philtrum' - the mid-line groove in the upper lip, from the nose to the lip |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 17 Aug 03 - 07:38 PM Philtrum--what scientists do to various strains of bacilli... |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: The Walrus Date: 17 Aug 03 - 08:02 PM If you have philtrum, you might as well have 'ullula', the 'dangly thing' at the back of the throat. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Bill D Date: 17 Aug 03 - 09:25 PM ummm..uvula, perhaps? ullula is an aboriginal community in Australia |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Mudlark Date: 17 Aug 03 - 09:55 PM Quidnunc has always been a favorite of mine...means gossip, busybody. Sphygmomanometer has always sounded a lot more icky/scary than it really is. Mumchance...dopily silent, blighted by fairies. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 17 Aug 03 - 10:51 PM Mumchance!! I love it!!! Bemused by Mab's sprites, dazzled by elvin doings, phazed by fairies, enthralled by the ethereal, lip-locked by leprechauns, entranced by trolls and gobsmacked by goblins!! Loverly word!! A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: GUEST,misophist Date: 17 Aug 03 - 10:53 PM My 3 favourite words of all time must be merkin, smegma, and quiddity. Quotidian isn't bad, either. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 17 Aug 03 - 11:02 PM Woooeee!! Joe F stops the clock with a BRANDNNEW WORD, plausible in form and function! The first human known to coin the term arcterast, a back-formation from arctophile, lover of bears, and presumably meaning one who engages in sexual intercourse with teddy bears. Or perhaps real ones.... Well, in ANY case, congratulations on a fine neologism, Joe F!! A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 18 Aug 03 - 12:07 AM Merkin: What Georgians are proud to be one of. Seriously, ...A pubic wig for women. Alteration of obsolete malkin, lower-class woman, mop, from Middle English, from Malkin, diminutive of the personal name Matilda. Smegma:A sebaceous secretion, especially the cheesy secretion that collects under the prepuce or around the clitoris. Latin smgma, detergent, from Greek Quiddity:.The real nature of a thing; the essence. 2. A hairsplitting distinction; a quibble. Medieval Latin quiddits, from Latin quid, what. Ya gotta wonder, out of all the 100,000 plus words in use in English, why these three rise to the forefront of misoph's attention! :>) Are the some sort of delicate links of association involved? A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: McGrath of Harlow Date: 18 Aug 03 - 07:34 AM I'm getting discombobulated by all this. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Peter T. Date: 18 Aug 03 - 08:20 AM quidditas -- the essential "whatness" of something (Hamlet of Yorick: "Where be your quips and quiddities?"); related to the Scotist term "haeccitas", which is the essential "thingness" of something. I have always been big on Gerard Hopkins' word "inscape" -- the unique graininess of something that makes it what it is, unlike anything else in the world. yours, Peter |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: McGrath of Harlow Date: 18 Aug 03 - 09:58 AM Hence the term "quid" for £1. I've long held that half the opposition in Britrian to joining the euro would dissipate if it could been refer to buy that eminently european name. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Allan C. Date: 18 Aug 03 - 10:57 AM Anyone remember Firesign Theater's quotation? "...from far away places with strange sounding names...like Smegma." I've always liked fulgent but can rarely work it into a conversation. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Jeanie Date: 18 Aug 03 - 11:27 AM I saw the girl on Saturday winning all that money for knowing "arctophile" - it was wonderful to see her, totally beside herself with delight. I don't think she stopped squealing for about 5 minutes ! Peter T - you asked if anyone had come across any words lately that might be worth storing in the recesses of the brain, for future million-winning gameshow use. Well, how about : "dioscuric" ? It means, literally, "(boys) sons of Zeus", referring to the twins Castor and Pollux (Greek: Dioskouroi) and is used to describe twin gods following the Castor/Pollux model in other mythologies. You always wanted to know this ! I came across it last week in this sentence: "Hengest and Horsa can be most plausibly interpreted as dioscuric horse-gods." Yes - I read weird things. Now, there are going to be dozens of people posting saying "Dioscuric ? Hadn't she ever heard of that before ?" - well..it was new to me. Hoping it will be my "lucky word" if ever I get on "Who Wants to be a Millionnaire". - jeanie |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 18 Aug 03 - 11:35 AM I hope so too, Jeannie -- you deserve it!! I never heard of it before. A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 18 Aug 03 - 11:38 AM A brief dissertation on the whole Cult of the Dioscurii can be found on this page. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Mudlark Date: 18 Aug 03 - 12:38 PM Amos..." lip-locked by leprechauns"...I love it...better even than mumchance! Scaramouch has always tickled my fancy, being a posture-master and poltroon. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Bill D Date: 18 Aug 03 - 01:03 PM just by coincidence, this cam in Michael Quinions newsletter recently Weird Words: Apocope /@'pQk@pi:/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Leaving out the last letter, syllable, or part of a word. When you hear about the "huntin', shootin', fishin'" aristocracy of eighteenth-century Britain, the speakers are committing apocope. In the same way, when you talk about "mag" instead of magazine, "fab" when you mean fabulous, or "cred" for credibility, these are all apocopic cases. Perhaps it's our rush-hurry-urgent age, but it seems that such energetic abbreviations are becoming more common, not merely with students who produce slangy in-terms such as "psych", "chem" and "maths" ("math" in the US). "Apocope" comes from the Greek word "apokoptein", to cut off, made up of "apo-", from or away, plus "koptein", to cut. Incidentally, if you instead cut the sound off the start of a word, the right name is "aphesis" (an example being "squire", an aphetic form of "esquire"); if you drop sounds in the middle (for which the classic - and extreme - example is "fo'c's'le" for the crews' quarters on board ship, in full "forecastle"), the process is called "syncope". (that was folllowed this week by this!! "APOCOPE I walked into a minefield of definition while trying to explain this word last week. If you check various dictionaries, you find that some give much the definition I supplied ("leaving out the last letter, syllable, or part of a word") while others have a more restrictive meaning ("omission of the final sound or sounds of a word"). This is a subtle but significant difference. Linguists prefer to restrict this word to situations in which one or more sounds (technically, phonemes) are lost from the end of a word. Spelling differences or changes in pronunciation don't count. As Professor Larry Horn pointed out, the definition I quoted would allow "catalog" to be an apocopic form of "catalogue", which he is sure it isn't - the loss of the final letters is to him irrelevant, because they're not pronounced. Other linguist subscribers have similarly argued that words such as "huntin'" (an example I used) cannot be apocope, since the missing last letter signals a change in the value of the final sound, not its loss. The problem for mere interpreters of language such as myself is that some reference works take a wider view that includes this sort of abbreviation. I place in evidence, as one example, The Columbia Guide to Standard American English of 1983: "Common examples in American English are singin', dancin', and raisin' cain". " |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 18 Aug 03 - 01:14 PM Finally, an answer that is Blowin' in the Wind! A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: McGrath of Harlow Date: 18 Aug 03 - 01:34 PM And if you combine "apocope" with "aphesis" and "syncope", I suppose you get the sound of silence. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Peter T. Date: 18 Aug 03 - 01:46 PM A really useful set of words no one ever uses is "paratactic" and "hypotactic" -- "paratactic" sentences are sentences with no subordinate clauses, characteristic of John Bunyan and teenagers -- "and then I did this and then I did that and then this happened and then this happened". "Hypotactic" clauses refer to sentences that have subordinate clauses, which are often derived from Latin constructions that signal an educated elite whose background often involved the study of classical languages. Like the last sentence. yours, Peter T. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Bill D Date: 18 Aug 03 - 02:03 PM "And if you combine "apocope" with "aphesis" and "syncope", I suppose you get the sound of silence." ...or mime...or sign language..(maybe sign language has it's own version of those terms) |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 18 Aug 03 - 02:18 PM Wonderful to know someone actually pinned words onto those extremes, PT. Another piece of wasted nineteenth century genius!! A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: McGrath of Harlow Date: 18 Aug 03 - 02:49 PM "syncope" is also another word for fainting. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Joe_F Date: 18 Aug 03 - 07:42 PM Amos: Little do you know. See e.g. www.resourcesforbears.com. Another lovely word that is hard to fit into conversation is "epitaxy". It means laying down atoms on a solid surface so that they conform to the structure of that surface. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 18 Aug 03 - 07:58 PM JOE -- Just wow 'em with epitaxial depositions. Tell them it's a nanotech word!! They'll just go crosseyed, for sure. That bear site is a wonder...every place I went, I went "I wonder....". LOL! A |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: dick greenhaus Date: 28 Aug 11 - 01:06 PM Oe can play with autological---words that describe themselves, like polysyllabic, and heterological---words hat don't, like monosyllabic. THe eternel debate is whether the word heterological is autological or heterological. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: GUEST,999 Date: 28 Aug 11 - 01:36 PM The Grelling–Nelson paradox. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: mayomick Date: 28 Aug 11 - 02:46 PM Apocope might get some street cred if it was shortened to "apo" ? |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Amos Date: 28 Aug 11 - 03:54 PM How grand to see this five-year-old thread revived!! S |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Bill D Date: 28 Aug 11 - 05:12 PM Yes....I am enthralled! Previously, I was merely 'thralled'. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: GUEST,Paul Burke Date: 28 Aug 11 - 05:19 PM You can have great fun with a Greek dictionary. Archaeologists talk of "grave goods", but wouldn't "synthaptochremata" add cachet to their reports? A small town can be called a "monippopolis". And "ecdysichorist" gives Classical tone to strippers. |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: Mrrzy Date: 28 Aug 11 - 09:40 PM Yes, I knew about arcto from reading about King Arthur as well. But I'm not sure I would have come up with it in a game... Some of my early favorites were ubiquitous and antepenultimate. Now I'm partial to callipygean (nice ass!) and liripip (little tassel tail of a monk's hood)... But I thought it was liririp. Then again I also thought conspicuous was consuspicious, after all, it's sticking out so much that people are wary of you rather than just aware of you! |
Subject: RE: 'Arctophile' -- Who knew? From: BrooklynJay Date: 29 Aug 11 - 10:08 AM "Antepenultimate" - Flanders and Swann immortalized that one for me in Madeira, M'dear - and didn't the Limeliters use "callipygean" in Vikki Dugan? Jay |
Share Thread: |