Recently, in my spare time, I
discovered the world's smallest particle. I named it the goog because it weighs exactly one billion to the minus
googol grams. Is the goog
infinitesimally small?
Answer:
no
That which is so small that it cannot be
measured is infinitesimally small.
So it was measured - therefore - it can
not be that which CAN NOT be measured - and therefore be - infinitesimally
small.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh - where do you
come up with these things!!! I will not be detered (even if I never get these
questions right) - there have been times when I've hovered over the correct
answer.
Still This is immensely
engaging - frustrating - but engaging! Let me leave you with this question -
who, exactly, is your intended audience?
In Galileo's time many things were not yet
measured, therefore these particles, according to their perception, were
infinitesimally small, although, now that they can be measured, they're
not.
So, it all comes down to whether
we can measure them or not!
Like multiplying any number by zero (or
vice versa) the result must be zero. Infinity by zero is still zero. Googool is
the mathematical infinity; so is zero. Multiply any thing by googool and the
result is still, by definition, googool.
[Mootguy: The word googol denotes
the number 10 raised to the power 100. This is a whole number; thus, has a
finite value. If you multiply x times googol, the result is x googols.]
The answer to this question *could* be
yes, depending on what counts as a discovery and what counts as a measurement.
You can discover things by inferring their necessity without measuring them (we
did this with black holes, for instance). Measurement is a very untidy concept.
It can't be "yes." The question
defines a quantity that has an exact measurable weight. That which is
infinitesimally small is by definition not measurable.
Technically,I agree with
this answer. However, language is useful for its intent as well as its
accuracy, so I would also be inclined to accept "infinitesimally small" as a
description of anything that's smaller than minute. The goog, hence, qualifies.
As a board game, MooT has to be strict
with its definitions: there has to be either a right or a wrong answer. This is
achieved by using the definitions provided by the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
Outside of MooT world, the meaning of words is less precise, but the words are
no less useful.
Which is the Calamity Jane: the Jane
who causes the calamity or the Jane who predicts it?
Answer:
the Jane who predicts it
According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a prophet of disaster is a
Calamity Jane. The name was coined as a nickname for Martha Jane Burke, an
American marksperson.
According to the
Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane
(By
Herself)
"After that campaign I
returned to Fort Sanders, Wyoming, [and] remained there until spring of 1872,
when we were ordered out to the Muscle Shell or Nursey Pursey Indian outbreak.
In that war, Generals Custer, Miles,
Terry and Crook were all engaged. This campaign lasted until fall of 1873. It
was during this campaign that I was christened Calamity
Jane.
It was on Goose Creek,
Wyoming, where the town of Sheridan is now located. Capt. Egan was in command
of the Post. We were ordered out to quell an uprising of the Indians, and were
out for several days, had numerous skirmishes during which six of the soldiers
were killed and several severely wounded.
When on returning to the Post we were ambushed
about a mile and a half from our destination. When fired upon Capt. Egan was
shot.
I was riding in advance and on
hearing the firing turned in my saddle and saw the Captain reeling in his
saddle as though about to fall.
I
turned my horse and galloped back with all haste to his side and got there in
time to catch him as he was falling.
I
lifted him onto my horse in front of me and succeeded in getting him safely to
the Fort. Capt. Egan on recovering, laughingly said: "I
name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains."
I have borne that name up to the present time."
[Mootguy: I have no
idea and have been able to find no source that explains or tries to explain how
the denotation "prophet of disaster" eventually became attached to Calamity
Jane's name. Perhaps the "Calamity" part led English speakers to naturally
gravitate towards a usage that made the phrase more meaningful.]
My Webster's New World Dictionary lists only the
proper name, with no denotation or connotation. I've never heard it used as a
synonym for "Cassandra," which I thought had held that ground unchallenged for
a few thousand years. So I wonder how widespread the usage you report is.
[Mootguy: All MooT
questions are base on definitions derived from the Concise Oxford
Dictionary.]
You might want to check into the history of the old
west as well; while your rendition of the coining of "Calamity Jane" may have
substance,
[Mootguy: The passage was written by Calamity Jane
herself - have you got a better source?]
it is equally true that
Calamity Jane was a diseased carrying woman that infected many men in her day;
it was my understanding from historical texts and references to such, that that
was inasmuch a reason for being called Calamity Jane as her wild west
adventures.
[Mootguy: What is your source?]
I urge you
to check some of the historical facts. There was also a show on A&E or
history channel recently that subordinated these thoughts; something to do with
the Wild West and sexual practices of the women there.
Hmmm! I don't know about this suspiciously folky
etymology.
[Mootguy: It was written by Calamity Jane. She IS
the authority on this etymology.]
I'm almost old enough to have ridden
with Calamity Jane, and for as long as I've been aware of the term, a Calamity
Jane is someone who is attended or accompanied by... calamity, whether causing
it or not.
In reference
to Willis's letter about Calamity Jane being so-named because she "was a
disease-carrying woman that infected many men": I believe he's getting her
confused with Chlamydia Jane.
Her presence at high-school parties in my neck of
the woods was indeed both an accurate predictor AND a cause of
calamity.
I just chanced to get it right, simply
because I sensed that the "head" of a column or pillar (...or is it pillor?),
would be akin to the governmental city "head" of a state.
But then, considering that it would be near chance
that would render most guesses right or wrong, I began wondering what the two
relative derivations are that would leave them spelled so
similarly?
Just looked them up in one
dictionary, and it's as befuddled as ever; since both derive from Latin "head,"
although with a few derivative variations.
Thanks for that. I always get so confused with this
word.
In Spanish, my native language,
it is very clear. The CAPITAL is the city, the CAPITOLIO is the building, and
the CAPITEL is the top of the column. As I tell my Spanish 1 8th graders,
English is so much tougher.
Way back in 7th grade I saw a filmstrip
with series of mnemonic devices for tricky spellings, still remember the
mini-crossword with picture: the capitOl has a
dOme.
Do you know the
poem (I think it is Whittier) "Pied Beauty"? He uses the word
"couple-coloured". It starts "Glory be to God for dappled things". Just a
thought prompted by your word. I remember my grandfather's draught horse (as in
Clydesdale) was described as "pie-bald", or is it "pi-bald"?
Wonderful. What
interesting tid-bits. (I don't know the origin of that word either.) My Dad
played in a wild jazz band in the 30's called the Pie-eyed Piper and his
Dungeon Rats!
The OED
gives 1382 as the earliest use. I had no idea the word was related to the pie
of magpie, itself from the Latin pica (=magpie). Fascinating. cf also Hopkins
"Pied beauty" of 1877.
When I used to raise Parrots and Parakeets - the
mutil-colred ones where indeed refferred to as 'Pied' but not restricted to
black and white. Also Pied parrots have spots. A milti-colored parrot without
spots isusually refferd by where the colors are most prominent. i.e. blue
throated, yellow tailed, and sometimes just miticolored such and
such.
The Latin word
for either is utrum. (In Utrumque Paratus, ie "Prepared for either,"
is a poem by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888).)
The opposite is neutrum (not either = neither),
whence the adjective neutral.
There are
two genders in the Swedish language: utrum (words that were once masculine or
feminine) and neutrum (a gender found in German, Latin and Greeek).
Ah, you're too kind.... I figured this
out fairly easily. Now, if you'd asked what name is to sea as Pangaea is to
earth, I'd have drowned. - Shane McCune
In Greek nomos means "law"; what do you call those who believe
that they are not constrained by the prevailing moral law?
Answer:
antinomians
The word antinomian originally denoted a 16th-century Christian
sect that believed that the quality of your faith, not the prevailing morality,
determined whether you went to heaven.
Since then the word has come to label anyone who believes that
they are outside of normal moral constraints - e.g. Abstract-Expressionist
painters, totalitarian dictators, and professional wrestlers.
Seems that would apply to
Hillary and Bill Clinton, and the rest of the narcissistic Leftists? (Hope you
are not one of them, of course.)
[Mootguy: I'm a
Maoist.]
My initial, impulsive
reaction was "Outlaw," but I quickly dismissed this as the term designating
them, from the legal authorities reacting to them, after they commit some
atrocious crime. Have always been fascinated by the term, beyond the use in
usual "cowboy movies," since I read that the term in the old West actually
meant "beyond the law," in the sense that since they had no respect for the
law, they would be treated as though actually "outside" the law.
Consequently, as I understand it, anyone would be
free to do anything they wish to them upon capturing them, up to and including
killing them, and then suffer no legal consequences. Can you imagine such a
fate upon being so designated, with the impulses of the crowd loosed upon them;
not much different than a legal lynching.
H. L. Mencken defined it as: "an
illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable." What word is
it?
Answer:
faith
According to Mencken: "A man full of
faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and
realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill."
However: Francis Bacon wrote "A little philosophy
inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds
about to religion." (from Of Atheism )
An interviewer in the
Atlantic Monthly (from Atlantic Unbound , May 20, 2004 -
The Universe Made Simple ) posed the following
question to physicist Brian Green:
As
you study all this [String Theory] in depth, do you find yourself moving toward
religion or away from religion?
" It's
hard to say. It really depends on what one's definition of religion is. Some
people define religion in a rather abstract way, as the order and the harmony
and the wonder of the universe. And from that point of view, yes, string theory
is revealing great order, great harmony, and great beauty. So if you define
religion in that way, then we are going toward it."
"But if you use a more conventional notion of
religion, which involves some divine being that set all things up, I think the
best we can say is that string theory has nothing to say about it one way or
another."
We can't ever rule a divine
being out using science, because the divine being, of course, could have set it
up so that we could discover what we have but see no direct imprint of the work
of that divine being."
My own feeling,
therefore, is that if we are revealing God's handiwork through our research,
I'm happy to be part of that journey. If, on the other hand, all we're doing is
revealing laws of physics that have governed the universe from the beginning
until today, then I'm happy to be part of that journey, too. So whichever
framework it fits into, I think the work itself is noble and interesting and
very, very worthwhile."
To learn of the marvelous complexities of our being
and environment, the infinite ones of the human body, plants and animals and
all creatures, our world and environment, the universe and the macro-universe,
must in any thinking person beget wonder and awe, and appreciation of the
shallowness of our understanding.
But
to, in this lack, invent a creator in our own image, or even a creator at all
(logically like a hall of opposing mirrors that never end) is to display in the
most simplistic fashion, our own abysmal ignorance, and an illogically
superstitious resort to "faith" in "Him!" as a substitute.
And to endow this imagined "creator" with traits of
our own needs; good or bad, forgiving or wrathful, merciful or cruel, humble or
vain (in so many humanly contradictory fashions) is to further display our
ignorant self-interest in projecting them into "Him."
Moreover, to insist that such a narrow religious
belief is requisite for morality is totally false, as the creators among us are
the truly moral ones, hardly necessarily of such belief, while there are many
non-believers more moral than many of the believers. "Faith" never looks at, or
simply blinds itself to, the monstrous inhumanity, natural and man-made
tragedies, and evil that permeates our existence, as any sort of contradiction
to its beliefs, except for the occasional, chance-escape from them that seems
to enhance its validity, while ignoring the vastness of experiential evidence
against it.
So, let us merely
recognize that we do not understand, never have, and in all probability, never
will; while nonetheless recognizing, in all humility, the great beauties of our
existence, yet the high likelihood that we will end up destroying ourselves,
because the better ones of us simply could not prevent it, while the worst
pursued it with the stolen fruits of the best.
For since the creation of
the world God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature --
have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men
are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)
I'm sure there will be a
breathtaking mish-mash of gobbledygook from people who agree with
Mencken.
The problem is that Mencken
made a sweeping generality and like all such generalities there are exceptions.
In this case there significant exceptions.
It's true that anyone who has blind faith in
something he's never tested is a fool. It's even worse if you have faith in
something you've tested and NOT found it to be true. And there are millions who
fit that description. They blindly continue having faith in something that's
never proved itself true.
It's not
only religion where this happens. It also happens in politics and even, (GASP)
science!!!! But I won't elaborate with examples because then we'd just get off
into side debates that are off the issue.
The issue is that faith in God should not be blind
faith. If God truly is God, then he can prove himself to a person. And this is
the whole point. "Taste and see that the Lord is good" wrote the psalmist. And
the writer of Hebrews wrote, "he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek
him."
The God of the Bible promises
substantiation of faith and I can personally testify that it is true.
Mencken chose to wallow in cynicism
instead of humbling himself. I suppose he looked at the many phonies,
hypocrites, and religious liars and decided that all "faith" is a lie.
It makes an arrogant man feel superior
when he can look down on everyone else and see himself as the only one with any
brains. Arrogance and pride may or may not have been Mencken's major
malfunction but it certainly is in many of those share his sentiments about
christian faith.
This frank treatment of religion is a pleasant
surprise, when you think of its country of origin. But what has it got to do
with etymology?
[Mootguy: MooT's domain is etymology, semantics, and grammer.
The country of origin is Canada where - as in the United States - frank
treatment of all things is quite possible.]
The first
story of the bible has Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
Why? Because they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge. So, what's the
message? Seek knowledge and you will be punished.
Religion requires that you not question its
validity; any thoughtful consideration leaves one realizing its absurdity. And,
it's not divine -- it is based upon Gilgamesh.
Also, the story of the son of god - with a virgin
mother - who had trials in the wilderness, died on a hill surrounded by his
followers, returned to life after three days, then ascended to heaven -- gee,
isn't that the story of Hercules?
Green is a joy to read when, as I am,
one has an avid interest in physics, but... sadly... very little talent. He
helps make the obscure far more clear... for which my thanks; and, to say the
least, when considering strings or any other explanation of what is currently
the most fundamental understandings in physics, one needs a helping hand along
the way.
However, I think that I would
add to his beginning thoughts that there are some things about religion...
let's be up front... and say BELIEF... which are not going to fit well with the
rules of science.
Still, I offer the
words of a friend whose spiritual connections were so clear that he was
eulogized by many often adversarial religions. He once told me... "Sometimes
you don't have to understand something to know that it is true."
The statement fits well for me both with my
"faith" which is not based on science and not a game of the intellect... and it
fits well with what I read of strings. I believe in God... the one whom I
learned about as a Catholic, but whose reality was confirmed by personal and
very unscientific... perhaps one might call them miraculous events.
I cannot duplicate these for
science... I just know that they were as real as any scientific things which I
have ever fully understood by scientific methods.
Strings have that ring of truth about them too.
Honestly... I cannot follow all the connections from the basics to the
esoterical... but having first been confused, then having rejected the idea...
then having read some more... I do not currently need to understand it all to
know that there is something ringing true.
I cannot handle the math to get there by that
method. So, I depend on good explainers. And yet... I sense that we are not
really there yet. We still need to look for the turtle on whose shell the
strings dance. And when we find it, we will probably need to look beneath that
turtle for another one.
Faith is not
scientific... but it is real and it is, in my experience, based on personal and
very tangible events. Pushed to its edges it is philosophy... and, as Bacon
knew long ago... one finds the beginnings of our most profound understandings
of science there as well.
[Mootguy: Faith's existence is not in question, but the
existence of that which faith has faith in is.]
Brian Green's reply, far from waffling, reflects a
great positivist belief in the essential goodness of the universe - that order,
harmony, and beauty are to be identified and appreciated, and that we humans
have the capacity, even the imperative, to participate.
Could there be a more compelling religious
statement?
It is very difficult as I grow older to
accept the absence of knowlege concerning "life before and after death". I
admit I am abject in my ignorance. And, really, we must all be so. The illusion
of an orderly created universe certainly helps to maintain an orderly society.
But we are only observing a hope, an illusion.
Historically 'faith' comes from the word 'trust', ie. "I put my faith in you". The reason we place our trust in God is because He shows himself to the individual, if asked (as Jesus tells us to). It isn't signs he wishes to give us, which only constitute evidence: rather He proves his own existence.
This is the opposite of the definition of faith that has reared its false and ugly head recently : "Belief without knowledge". Totally irrational, of course, and makes believers look pretty stupid. But it is a false and modern definition.
Authentic religious belief is totally reasonable/logical, though not based on reason, rather 'pure knowledge'. Of course, it is not possible for another to know that one has authentic belief, unless God were to tell us directly.
In Theology 'faith' is distinguished from 'trust' or 'beleif' by adding in the business of free will, as in this technical definition (Roman Catholic) :
"Faith: assent to Divinely Revealed Truth"
In other words : even God's revelation can be refused because of the gift of freewill.
Any real scientist knows that science is all about evidence of material things, and not suited to judging the existence of God (disclaimer : I am a scientist, as are many members of my family on my mothers side). Menkel's "improbable" can't come from science, and definitely not philosophy, probably more likely from two possible sources : creationists christians, who make chritianity look pretty silly, and the suffering of innocent children.
The former are highly vocal, but don't represent the majority of christians who have never been bound to the literal interpretaiton of the bible that is the source of creationists ideas. The latter are addressed by the suffering and death of the most innocent Son of God, Jesus Christ, in whom all the innocent are united and with whom they suffer for the sake of the redemption of the guilty.
They make up for what lacks in Christ's suffering, as mentioned in a letter of St Paul.
Ironically atheists, who believe that God does not exist, are irrational because their belief does not have proof (unlike the Christina mechanism of 'faith'). However, when you prod them it turns out that most atheists are agnostics in disguise. Really they are of a strong opinion. An opinion doesn't have the certainty of belief. Or they are "unbelievers": they claim simply to have no belief either way, but really that is a form of agnosticism.
To give additional emphasis, authors
sometimes end interrogatory exclamations with ?!. What is this punctuation mark called?
Answer:
the interrobang
I haven't been able to find any
etymological information for the interrobang. If anyone knows anything, please
send it to me and I will post it on the site.
This is the first site thrown up by Google -- but
only if you spell it with the double-R. This yields more than 15,000 hits, as
opposed to 54 for interobang, yet for some
reason Google doesn't ask "Did you mean interrobang?"
That's the lesser of two problems with this
question. The greater problem is that the term refers, not to the question and
exclamation marks used together, but to a single punctuation mark combining the
two.
American Martin K. Speckter concocted the
interrobang itself in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter
believed that ads would look better if advertising copywriters conveyed
surprised queries using a single mark.
He proposed the interrobang concept in an article in the
magazine TYPEtalks. Speckter solicited possible
names for the new character from readers.
Contenders included rhet, exclarotive,
and exclamaquest, but he settled on
interrobang. Speckter chose the name to
reference the punctuation marks that inspired it.
Interrogatio is
Latin for question or query; bang is
printer's slang for exclamation point. Graphic
treatments for the new mark were also submitted in response to the
article.
In 1966, Richard Isbell of
American Type Founders issued the Americana typeface and included the
interrobang as one of the characters. In 1968, an interrobang key was available
on some Remington typewriters.
The
interrobang was in vogue for much of the 1960s, with the word 'interrobang'
appearing in some dictionaries and the mark itself being featured in magazine
and newspaper articles. The interrobang failed to amount to more than a fad,
however, never becoming a standard punctuation mark. Most fonts don't include
it.
But it has not disappeared:
Microsoft provides several versions of the interrobang character as part of the
Wingdings 2 character set available with Microsoft Office; it is present in the
fonts Lucida Sans UniConcise Oxford Dictionarye and Arial UniConcise Oxford
Dictionarye MS; and it has the 0x203D UniConcise Oxford Dictionarye.
My dad was a printer of
the hot-metal type era and I know this symbol was in use then though it was
just a single character with the exclamation point superimposed on top of the
question mark.
As I recall, the name
is an acronym from combining "interrogative" with "bang" (printer slang for an
exclamation point). My dad left behind a number of printing reference books
which unfortunately I got rid of a few months ago when we moved. Don't know if
they would have had more info on this or not.
This is mentioned in an old TV special called "The
Strange Case of the English Language"...I think it was a precursor of the 60
minutes show. One of the interviewees mentions the interrobang and (I think)
identifies himself as the source. The film used to be available at BCIT, but
may have been "retired" as it's well over 30 years old. It's well worth
watching ...especially for clips of interviews with Peter Ustinov.
I remember seeing a poster in high
school, 1967-71, that showed this to be a question mark superimposed upon an an
exclamation point. "bang!" is printer-speak for an exclamation point.
Actually, I think "?!" and
not "!?" is the interrobang, since interrobang suggests the question mark
first, then the exclamation mark. In Britain, "bang" is slang for the
exclamation mark; and "?" is sometimes called the "interrogation mark"
(certainly in French it is "point d'interrogation")
Mr. Speckter called his mark INTERROBANG from the
Latin for query and the proofreader's term for exclamation. Most dictionaries
have spelled the word correctly, although several other spellings with no
logical genesis have appeared.
You can
find an interrobang in Microsoft Word's Fonts. Go to Format, choose Fonts, then
Wingdings 2. You'll find 4 different versions of the interrobang. Hit the ` ~
key, the ] } key, the 6 ^ key, or the - _ key.
Actually, I think "?!" and not "!?" is the
interrobang, since interrobang suggests the question mark first, then the
exclamation mark.
In Britain, "bang" is
slang for the exclamation mark; and "?" is sometimes called the "interrogation
mark" (certainly in French it is "point d'interrogation")
It may be that "!?" is essentially the same as "?!"
and therefore carries the same name of "interrobang," but for example as a
chess notation, there is a definite difference ("?!" is a strange move that is
probably bad, whereas "!?" is a strange move that might actually be good). To
me, "?!" is about expressing incredulity, whereas "!?" is just about yelling a
question.
The primordial Greek loan word used
to label them was tribades
which means "those
who rub each other." What are they more commonly called nowadays?
Answer:
lesbians
According to the Guardian magazine (Emily
Wilson's essay Lady of Lesbos): " The Greek verb lesbiaze means "to fellate".
Until the end of the 19th century, the usual
English terms for lesbian practices did not draw on classical literature. Women
could be "lovers of their own sex" or, in the more frank Greek loan word,
tribades (literally "rubbers"; the words
rubster and fricatrice were also used in the 17th century).
The OED cites no usage of
lesbianism in the modern sense before 1870,
when it was used to argue that Swinburne's obsessive interest in Sapphic love
was just as "loathsome" as sodomy.
The
words matter. It was through Sappho that female homosexuality came to be
understood as a distinct sexual orientation, and as a distinctly sexual set of
practices. Sex between women was often not seen as sex, but as harmless
touching and kissing. Sappho's poetry was a reminder that desire between women
could be as intense as heterosexual desire."
Call me old fashioned, but isn't the phrase "lovers
of women" [is] actually more descriptive and accurate than "rubbers"? I think
you'll find there's more to lesbian love than just "rubbing"! Think about it,
that's all I'm suggesting.
According to Wired magazine: "When they write the account of the 2004
campaign, it will include at least one word that has never appeared in any
presidential history." What word is it?
Answer:
blog
As quoted by Wired, Stanford law
professor Lawrence Lessig said:
"When
they write the account of the 2004 campaign, it will include at least one word
that has never appeared in any presidential history: blog . Whether or not it elects the next president,
the blog may be the first innovation from the Internet to make a real
difference in election politics."
The
above was taken from The Revolution Will Not Be
Blogged by George Packer (Mother Jones, May/June 2004 Issue). He goes
on to say:
"The constellation of
opinion called the blogosphere consists, like
the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive
⦣x20AC;” that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They're so easy to
consume, and so endlessly available. Their second-by-second proliferation means
that far more is written than needs to be said about any one thing.
To change metaphors for a moment (and to deepen the
shame), I gorge myself on these hundreds of pieces of commentary like so much
candy into a bloated ⦣x20AC;” yet nervous, sugar-jangled ⦣x20AC;”
stupor. Those hours of out-of-body drift leave me with few, if any, tangible
thoughts. Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech,
with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The
entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too
brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or
ramifying into qualification and complication.
There's a constant sense that someone (almost
always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that
happens in the blogosphere every point, rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or fisk
(dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical reading) is a knockout
punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost
unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.
They are also nearly without exception men (this
form of combat seems too naked for more than a very few women). I imagine them
in neat blue shirts, the glow from the screen reflected in their glasses as
they sit up at 3:48 a.m. triumphantly tapping out their third rejoinder to the
WaPo's press commentary on Tim Russert's on-air recap of the Wisconsin
primary."
Yes, but what exactly is a blog? I guess by
accretion of example I can sort of infer what it is: it's a kind of
sound-bitey, meme-y thing whose trumpeting of itself carries little substance.
Is that a blog? And is "blog" itself a blog?
[Mootguy: A blog (i.e., web-log)
is a series of postings to a website. There is special software that allows you
to do this quickly and easily. It allows individuals to have a kind of public
diary. As some individuals are more interesting than others, some blogs are
more interesting than others. Check out:]
What diplomatic term originally
denoted "the first flyleaf glued onto a manuscript"?
Answer:
protocol
The first rough draft of a treaty is
called the protocol .
The word derives from the Greek
protokollon , first gluing, which denotes "a
sheet glued to the front of a manuscript," which itself derives from the Greek
protos , first, and kolla , glue.
This is a nice one. I use this word
several times a day, heretofore in complete ignorance of its origin. The
question is hard but tractable. Another thought: you often hear an admonishment
"adhere to protocol".
It used to be that a picture was worth a thousand
words. Now, with Photoshop and digital cameras, spectrum filters on spacecraft,
and so on, it might *require* a thousand words in order to understand the
genesis of a picture.
I'd guess from this then that when
Moses asked God his name and He replied "I am (that I am)," He actually uttered
what we take to be his name, Yahvew, learned
folk?
What information I can
provide is that four Hebrew letters (Yod, He, Waw and He) are called the
"Tetragrammaton".
The four characters
are the four Hebrew letters that correspond to YHWH and are transliterated IAUE
or Yahweh. Many Hebrew names contain the first part of Yahweh's name which is
Yah. This is true in the name Isa-YAH (Hebrew: YeshaYAH), which means "Yah is
Salvation". Also in Jeremi-Yah (Hebrew: YermeYAH), Obadiah, Zechariah, and so
on.
However the Tetragrammaton is
never pronounced and the true sound of it is unknown.
The four letters are all consonants and the name of
God was never said except by the High Priest on the day of atonement. Since
there is no temple in Jerusalem and hasn't been for years, there is no High
Priest, the original pronunciation has been lost as no one has been able to say
the name.
When Jews read the name in
scripture it is pronounced Adonai (Lord) rather than Yaweh or Jehovah. Yaweh
and Jehovah are both guesses at the correct pronunciation. Since hovah means
ruin or mischief, it's unlikely that these are the correct vowel sounds to
insert.
Maybe Ya-ha-va-ha would be
better? who knows? unless the ark, order and meaning of the 12 stones of the
high priest's breastplate, and the Urim and Thummin are found... it's doubtful
any sure pronunciation will be agreed upon.
I think I see a web of metaphors
developing here. Were you reading a book about medieval armour or what? I
suspect "maillon" is the origin for our "mail" (as in "suit of
mail").
[Mootguy: No.
The only book I read is the Concise Oxford Dictionary.]
According to Loose Cannons, Red Herrings, and Other Lost Metaphors
by Robert Claiborne, an adjective was coined because a plant found on an island
caused facial convulsions that resembled scornfully mocking laughter; what was
the adjective and what was the island?
Answer:
sardonic and Sardinia
According to Claiborne, the Greeks called
the plant sardonion, plant from Sardinia.
If you ate it, you would make facial
convulsions that resembled sardonic (scornfully or cynically mocking) laughter
— and then you would die.
What archaic five-letter suffix
denotes "poor quality imitation"?
Answer:
aster
The archaic suffix
-aster is used to express poor imitation or
incomplete resemblance. For example, a poetaster is an inferior poet and a
patraster is someone who plays at being a father.
The suffix derives from the Greek suffix
-aster, which was originally used to form nouns
from verbs ending in -azein.
Note that the Greek suffix -aster is not the same as the Greek word
aster, star.
Geez, I'm devastated. All along, I was under the
impression that my collection of statuettes were the real deal. Now I find out
that they're made out ersatz alab. So much for
the Antique Roadshow.
The
"separateness" refers more specifically to adherence to laws of ritual purity,
but the "sect" is hardly defunct, as the question says. Far from being a sect,
the Pharisees were the Jewish mainstream and the guardians of Rabbinic Judaism-
to which observant Jews adhere today. The view of the Pharisees as
sanctimonious reflects the bias of the early Christians, who naturally opposed
the religious Establishment of the time.
I thought it was the Essenes, who
clearly were the separated ones.
[Mootguy: According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the
word Essene is "perhaps from Heb. tzenum 'the modest ones,' or Heb. hashaim
'the silent ones.' Klein suggests Syriac hasen, pl. absolute state of hase
'pious.'" ]
Speaking of mystical
types, the Chasidim, as I understand it, developed as a reaction to sanctimony
and the type of Judaism that could only be achieved by a lifetime of studying
Torah, a possibilty hardly available to most poor shtetl Jews.
[Mootguy: The
Sadducees (the Jewish sect that ran the temple) were named forZadok, a high
priest in the time of Solomon. His name derives from the Hebrew sadaq, to be
just. ]
Which threads are stretched
lengthwise in the loom: the warp or the weft?
Answer:
the warp
In weaving, the threads that are
stretched length-wise in the loom are called the warp and the threads that are interlaced horizontally
are called either the weft or the
woof.
The word "weft" may not be as strange
as it looks. I suspect that it is an archaic past participle of "weave,"
following the pattern of "leave" and "left," and "bereave" and "bereft." At
some point, I guess, it simply weft the Engwish wanguage.
"Woof" looks suspiciously similar to "wove," and
isn't the double "o" spelling characteristic of Old or Middle English (e.g.
Moot)for the sound "o" as in "grow"?
, when was the word sex first used to mean "sexual intercourse" — as in
"have sex with someone": 1929 or 1729?
Answer:
1929
In the article 101
years in 101 words (as reported by the BBC):
"A study
of when new words became common during the past century has had some surprising
findings, such as the word celebs being used in
1913, the word sex meaning "sexual intercourse"
being first used in 1929, and mobile phone
dating from 1945."
Some others:
Egghead (1907), Punk — in the sense Punk
rock — (1971 in a Dave Marsh article in Creem
Magazine),beatnik (1958),
dumb down (1933), and MooT — in the sense "really tricky board game" —
(1987).
jacko^@&mailcity.com ...which really makes one
wonder what they used to call it before 1929. "Making Whoopee" certainly
predates it (Gus Kahn, 1928); but what did they use to say when they wanted to
sound neutral, without being as clinical as Krafft-Ebing (i.e. "sexual
intercourse")?
[Mootguy: The OED's first citation for the word copulation (in
sense "join sexually") is from 1483: "Made one flesshe by carnal copulacyon or
bodily felawshyp" [Caxton].]
I believe
that the term 'punk' as in "young punk" was quite common in American rebellious
youth movies of the 1950's. I have heard the reference of 'punk' that goes much
further back, say a couple of generations...such as, if something doesn't
'measure up to a standard it is punk', i.e. a fruit that doesn't taste right is
considered punk or punky...
[Mootguy: Note that the first citation date for "punk" —
which I took directly from the article — was incorrect. Thanks to all those
who pointed this out.]
Very interesting. "Punk" as applied to
punk rock and its practitioners may have come in in 1974, as the OED confirms
(it gives 1971 for "punk rock"); but surely the practitioners merely adopted as
a self-description a word that (again according to the OED) had existed in the
sense of "a no-good" since about 1930. So I'd give 1930 as the date for that
word, still of interest as I might have guessed earlier.
The word "punk", used in
several ways including "a young, tough, obnoxious ruffian", was very common
around the Boston, MA area when I was growing up there in the 1960s. It
certainly predates 1974, as the Who use it in the title of one of their songs
on the 1973 album Quadrophenia.
Punk? 1974? I doubt that,
except in referring to those Hippie successors. Punk was used to dismiss young,
petty thugs in at least the 1950s. Also, in that era, the slow-burning sticks
we used to light firecrackers were called punks.
The science of bodies in motion is
called dynamics; what is the science of bodies
at rest called?
Answer:
statics
The word dynamics derives from the German dynamisch, a term coined by Leibnitz in the late 17th
century from the Greek dynamikos, powerful.
The word statics derives from the Greek statikos, that which causes something to stand. The
sense "balancing forces" is first recorded in 1802.
Static, in the
sense "radio noise" is from 1913; the sense "verbal hassle" is from
1926.
According to an
OED
editor-at-large, it derives from an African-American
pronunciation of a disparaging term for a Hungarian laborers; what epithet is
it?
Answer:
honky
Many philologists claim that the word
honky derives from the Wolof
honq, of light complexion. According to Jesse
Sheidlower in his article
Crying Wolof
, it
actually derives from an African-American pronunciation of
hunky, a disparaging term for Hungarian
laborers. The first recorded use of the word honky "as an insulting term for a white person is found
only in the 1950s."
Source:
Crying Wolof -- Does the word hip really hail from a West
African language?
I grew up in
Detroit, where the term seemed to mean a guy who 'honked' at the ever-present
hookers on Cass Avenue. Some local philologists claimed that this was the
origin of 'honkey'.
I would be
surprised to find your
[Mootguy: Sheidlower's?]
'Hunky' theory to be true... what part of the USA had enough Hungarian workers,
(who were distinct from other european workers) and an urban black culture to
make (or care about) the distinction between Hungarians and, say, Romanians?
This one smells a little like a fishing expedition... maybe Sheidlower and some
philologists should try fishing in the Detroit River...)
Now wait
just a dog-gone minute! I am one of those drivers who used to honk at the
hookers on Cass, and I'm here to tell you that I have never been to Hungary.
And I only wanted them to get out of the way, not into my car. That's my story,
and I'm sticking to it. Beep Beep.
The point is well taken
that blacks might not make distinctions between Hungarians and other Eastern
Europeans. However, the meanings of words often become more general as they
evolve. Thus, "hunky" and bo-hunk" came to mean any Eastern European (at least
in my neck of the woods. One could thus easily imagine it generalizing even
further and coming to mean all white labourers, and finally all
whites.
What country's name means "he that
fights with with God"?
Answer:
Israel
The name Israel derives from the Hebrew yisra'el, he that fights with God, which in turn
derives from sara, he fights, and
El, God. This is the name that God gave to
Jacob (and all his descendants) after their Greek-myth-like wrestling
match.
Source: Genesis 32:
24
And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking
of the day.
25 And when he saw that he
prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow
of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.
26 And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh.
And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
27 And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he
said, Jacob.
28 And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but
Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast
prevailed.
29 And Jacob
asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is
it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.
30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel:
for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.
31 And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon
him, and he halted upon his thigh.
32
Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is
upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of
Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank."
Interesting that you chose as your
translation of the Bible a version (King James, I'm supposing?) that in fact
chooses to translate the operative word (sarita) as "you are a prince" from
"sar" (prince), and not from the more accurate "you have
struggled/wrestled/striven" from "sarah", (to strive). Also, a small footnote:
the Hebrew Bible renders that verse as 29, as their numbering starts the
chapter with "And Laban awoker early in the morning..." (called in Xtian
versions 31:55)
I guessed correctly and enjoyed the
irony of having an almost wordless game's being named after a word meaning
"conversation." Thanks for sending these.
What game's name means "grope
frantically" in English?
Answer:
Scrabble
Here's a brief history of the game
Scrabble written by journalist, historian (and
MooT player) Chuck Davis:
"It was
Alfred Mosher Butts' fondness for anagrams that inspired him to create
Scrabble. Butts was an architect who found himself out of work during the
Depression. He'd always enjoyed board games, so he decided to create one of his
own.
It was 1931. He came up with a
game that combined the vocabulary skills of crossword puzzles and anagrams with
the additional element of chance. He called it Lexico at first, but eventually changed that to
Criss-Cross Words. It wasn't until 1948, though
- 17 years after his initial idea - that the modern game of Scrabble was born.
Butts got help from a fellow games
enthusiast, who rearranged the premium squares and simplified the rules. To
work out the frequency of the letters players would use, Butts took a copy of
the New York Times and very carefully counted out how often each of the 26
letters of the alphabet appeared on the front page. With some modifications
(the h and the s cited earlier, maybe others we don't know about)
Butts' ratio of letters, and the value he gave each letter, have been unchanged
for more than 50 years, and through billions of games....
It wasn't until he met up with another word game
enthusiast, a fellow named James Brunot, that Butts' game took off. They
changed the name of the game to Scrabble, a
real word that means to "grope frantically," and began trying to sell the game
to major game manufacturers.
It was
1948, the official starting date for the commercial version of the game, and 17
years after Butts' first rough shaping of the idea. That 1948 beginning was
rather modest: the partners found an abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington,
Connecticut and began to turn out 12 games an hour. The letters were stamped on
wooden tiles one at a time.
The first
four years were hard work. In 1949 the little company made 2,400 sets and lost
$450. But they kept plugging away. Then, in the early 1950s, the president of
Macy's (the huge New York department store) discovered the game while he was on
vacation, and ordered some for his store. That's all it took."
In addition to writing about language, Chuck Davis
is fond of digging into the history of Vancouver (the home of the MooT player
and the land of the Frisbee). Check out his website at:
As far as Vancouver being the home of the Frisbee,
you'll have to change that to flying disc since
(1) frisbee players were not successful in
their legal quest to free up the term frisbee
as a generic and (2) no disc-sports enthusiasts actually call the said item a
frisbee, anyway. (This, by the way, is a
natural development, not political correctness.) If you do call it a
frisbee, however, be aware that you are helping
line Wham-o's pockets.
Hmmm...I always used kAddish as a prayer for the
dead; kIddush is a prayer of praise. You say kaddish over a departed relative,
friend, or loved one. You say kiddush before anything else, like eating,
drinking, bathing, etc. But I may be wrong....
[Mootguy: According to the
Encyclopedia Britannica Online
: a kaddish is a:
"Jewish doxology (hymn of praise to God) that is usually recited in Aramaic at
the end of principal sections of all synagogue services. Originally recited in
the rabbinical academies, it later became a regular feature of the synagogue
service. The prayer expresses, in addition to the praise of God, the plea for
the speedy realization of the messianic age." See
]
Interesting; my church (Unity Faith of
Christianity in Houston, TX) has a "Unity doxology", which is in fact a long
prayer, and not just the end of a prayer. Should I point out the error of their
linguistic ways? Or is there more than one meaning? (after all, "doxology"
broken down could also mean "study of praise" as well and therefore be applied
to a whole prayer or even religion, no?)
[Mootguy: Again, according to the
Encyclopedia Britannica Online
: a doxology is a:
"an expression of praise to God." See:
]
Close, but not exactly.
"May His great name be glorified and sanctified," is in fact the beginning of
Kaddish, but the word itself simply means, "holy."
[Mootguy: He or she is right. I'm
wrong. Kaddish does mean "holy" in Aramaic.]
A doxology is a short prayer or hymn of praise that
extols the glory and majesty of God. It isn't used solely at the end of a
prayer but can be found by itself ie: The Doxology (Praise God from Whom all
blessings flow...), or found at the beginning of larger pieces (Psalm 100) as
well.
What city caused the coining of a
word meaning "a person devoted to sensuous luxury"?
Answer:
Sybaris
If you said Edmonton you are incorrect.
The inhabitants of Sybaris - a Greek colonial city
in Southern Italy - were famous for their love of luxury; hence, the term
sybarite came to denote a lover of luxury.
What do Los Angeles real estate
agents call abdominoplasty ?
Answer:
Tummy Tuck
The word abdominoplasty derives from the Latin
abdomen, belly, and the Greek
-plastos, molded or formed.
According to the American
Society of Plastic Surgeons:
"
Abdominoplasty, known more commonly as a
tummy tuck, is a major surgical procedure to
remove excess skin and fat from the middle and lower abdomen and to tighten the
muscles of the abdominal wall.
The
procedure can dramatically reduce the appearance of a protruding abdomen. But
bear in mind, it does produce a permanent scar, which, depending on the extent
of the original problem and the surgery required to correct it, can extend from
hip to hip."
[Mootguy: To be fat or to be scarred — that is the
tradeoff.]
Hmmm, Ok. But why real estate agents? The term
"tummy tuck" has nothing to do with real estate. Was the question so easy that
this red herring was needed? My own response to the question was "Well, that's
a tummy tuck, but what does it mean in the world of real estate?"
[Mootguy: It was a lame and
misguided attempt at a joke.]
What type of newspaper was named
for a small Venetian coin?
Answer:
the gazette
The word gazette derives from the Italian phrase
gazeta de la novita , a half-penny worth of
news, so called because it sold for one gazeta (a small coin).
It means "acknowledgement" in
10code; what response is it?
Answer:
10-4
10codes are abbreviated radio
communication codes. There are many sets of 10codes but almost all of them use
10-4 to indicate "acknowledgement."
Some other example 10codes - drawn from the
Savary-Island County Sheriff's office - are:
10-11 (Lunch break)
10-49 (Drunk driver)
10-62 (murder)
10-99 (bomb threat)
10-1199 (lunch break bomb threat)
10-6249 (murdered Drunk Driver)
10-62499911 (murdered drunk driver who made a
lunch break bomb threat).
As a former professional marine radio operator (Canadian Coast
Guard) I never liked hearing local fishermen using 10-4 to acknowledge radio
transmissions; international radio shorthand for message received is
'Roger.'
It describes hen behaviour and was
coined by translating the German word hackliste; it eventually came to denote "human status
hierarchy"; what phrase is it?
Answer:
pecking order
The word hacklist entered German in the early 1920s. By the
late 1920s, its English loan translation, pecking
order, had appeared in English writing. By 1955, the phrase was
carrying the sense "human status hierarchy."
His name has come to denote a long,
adventurous journey; who is he?
Answer:
Odysseus
I.e., an odyssey
The word odyssey
derives from the Greek Odysseia, the name of
Homer's poem.
It tells the story of
the 10-year wanderings of Odysseus (the Romans called him
Ulysses ) after the Trojan War.
Note that the figurative sense of the word - long,
adventurous journey - was first recorded in 1889.
Great
question. We have owned a Moot game for many years and still get much pleasure
from playing it both in Vancouver, B.C. with our dear friend who introduced it
to us, and here in Seattle. It is by far the best family game out there. Thank
you for providing us with so much family enjoyment.
According to the
Washington Post, the US's first political
mass-media stunt was during the Whig campaign for William Henry Harrison in
1840. During it: "They constructed a 10-foot-high ball of twine, wood and tin,
covered it with Whig political slogans, and rolled it first from Cleveland to
Columbus and then from town to town across the country."
What for four-word expression resulted from
this?
Answer:
Keep the ball rolling
Quoted from the Washington Post: "Consider, for example, the first
'modern' political campaign - the Whig campaign for William Henry Harrison in
1840.
Apart from some success as an
Indian killer, Harrison had minimal credentials, but the Whigs figured out how
to use the tremendous organizational apparatus of their party to promote
him.
They fabricated the image of
Harrison as the 'log cabin and hard cider' candidate, despite his more
patrician roots, and used the party organization to enforce discipline around
the fabrication - to get everyone to say the same thing at the same
time.
In America's first political mass
media stunt, they constructed a 10-foot-high ball of twine, wood and tin,
covered it with Whig political slogans, and rolled it first from Cleveland to
Columbus and then from town to town across the country (hence the expression
'Keep the ball rolling')."
Which economist coined the term
conventional wisdom?
Answer:
John Kenneth Galbraith
The phrase - which denotes that which is
customary and acceptable - first appeared as a chapter heading in his 1958 book
The Affluent Society .
According to Paul Theroux in his book
Riding
the Iron Rooster
, what city's name means red
hero in Mongolian?
Answer:
Ulan Bator
The place now known as
Ulan Bator was founded in 1649 as a monastery
town named Urga. When it became the capital of
the Mongolian republic in 1924, it was renamed Ulaanbaatar ("red hero") in honour of Sukhbaatar, who
liberated Mongolia from Chinese rule by calling in the Soviet Army.
What politico-religious sect's name
derives from the name of its founder Muhammad ibn
Ismail al-Darazi?
Answer:
the Druze
The Druze are an Islamic sect based near
Mt. Lebanon.
According to Orientalist Historian Bernard Lewis, there is no word
in Arabic for this country's name; what country is it?
Answer:
Saudi Arabia
According to Lewis: "Most remarkable of
all, there is no word in the Arabic language for "Arabia," and modern Saudi
Arabia is spoken of instead as "the Saudi Arab kingdom" or "the peninsula of
the Arabs," depending on the context.
This is not because Arabic is a poor language-quite the
reverse is true - but because the Arabs simply did not think in terms of
combined ethnic and territorial identity.
Indeed, the caliph Omar, the second in succession
after the Prophet Muhammad, is quoted as saying to the Arabs, "Learn your
genealogies, and do not be like the local peasants who, when they are asked who
they are, reply: 'I am from such-and-such a place.' "
Source:
The Revolt of
Islam
by BERNARD LEWIS.
For
further info, see:
The word caryatids is to women
as what word is to men?
Answer:
atlantes
According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
standing or kneeling figures of a man used as a supporting column for an
entablature are called atlantes; whereas
supporting columns sculptured in the form of draped female figures are called
caryatids.
The former is a plural of the name
Atlas; the latter derives from the Latin
Carytides, maidens of Caryae, from Greek
Karuai, a village in southern Greece.
[Note: It turns out that there are actually two answers:
atlantes and telamones ; the latter also denotes male figures used
as pillars to support an entablature.]
What country's nickname means "land
of winter" in Latin?
Answer:
Ireland
The word Hibernia, which means "land of winter" in Latin, was
the Roman name for Ireland.
According to the Online
Etymological Dictionary, the word derives from the Old Celtic
*Iveriu, which is also the root of the word
Erin .
Ireland is no more winter-like than England but because the
local name was similar to Latin words pertaining to winter (e.g.,
hibernare, to winter - as in
hibernate ) the name was coined.
Which adverb best translates the
Latin ubi as in the word
ubiquitous
Answer:
where
In Latin ubi means "where"; thus your
whereness (i.e., the fact that you are in a definite place) is
your ubiety and the state of being everywhere at once is called ubiquity. Note
that on the Internet, the unit of ubiety is the URL because it denotes a
precise location in that namespace.
For
more on ubi, here's a neat article about the
Mathematical
Art of George W. Hart
from
Ubiquity the The
Online Journal of the Ultranet
:
According to the
Wikipedia, it was coined by Andy Nimmo in
December 1960 for a talk on the Everett many-worlds
interpretation of quantum physics. It originally denoted:
"an apparent universe, a multiplicity of which, go to
make up the whole universe." What word is it?
Answer:
multiverse
According to the
Caltech Knowledge-base for Extragalactic Astronomy and
Cosmology
- - the word
multiverse denotes a: "Hypothetical
enlargement of the cosmos in which our Universe is but one of an enormous
number of separate and distinct Universes."
If you think about it, the neologism
multiverse introduces some cosmological
cognitive dissonance. Doesn't the word Universe denote: "all that there is." Thus a
multiverse being another universe is another "all that there is."
A complete explanation of the term multiverse and
its etymology can be found in the Wikipedia at:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
According to Thomas Pynchon, it is
used for ideological enforcement and it denotes "a set of techniques said to be
based on the work of IP Pavlov, who had once trained dogs to salivate on cue";
what Cold War term is it?
Answer:
brainwashing
According to Dictionary.com, the word
brainwash denotes: "Intensive, forcible indoctrination, usually political or
religious, aimed at destroying a person's basic convictions and attitudes and
replacing them with an alternative set of fixed beliefs."
The word was coined as a direct translation of a
Mandarin term: xinaoxi nao, to wash the brain. This question derives from an
introduction to Orwell's 1984 recently written by Pynchon.
Source: The road to 1984 - Thomas
Pynchon
It turns out that when you play the
Star Wars
theme in reverse, it becomes the song
Born Free
. Is there, thus, an inverse
relationship between the two songs?
Answer:
yes
That which is the reverse of something is
its inverse. Suprisingly, it also turns out that if you play the movie
Star Wars
backward, it becomes the Movie
La Cite des enfants perdus
. This is partly due to
the fact that English spoken backwards is, in fact, French.
Some other movies that have this interesting
relationship:
1. 101 Dalmatians
(viewed backwards =) La Chien Andalou
2.Odd Couple = La cage aux folle
3. Dirty Dozen = La grande illusion
4. Oceans 11 = Le salaire de la peur
Similarly, American foreign policy done in reverse
is French foreign policy.
Richard Dawkins, professor of the
Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, defines it as: "that set of
practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail
tests." What type of medicine is it?
Answer:
Alternative Medicine
For further info, see:
Be wary of alternative medicine
by Carl E.
Bartecchi at
Some other Professorships of note
are:
Professor of the Private
Understanding of the Public Interest (Wharton Business School)
Professor of Things that go Bump in the Night
(Gallaudet)
The George Bowering
Professorship of Ineffable Poetry (Simon Fraser University)
The word Oriental is to eastern and the word occidental is to western as what two words are to
northern and southern?
Answer:
boreal and austral
The word boreal denotes "that which relates to the north"; the
word austral, denotes "that which relates to
the south."
They are about as close as
you can get in form and meaning to oriental andoccidental, however, they don't
carry the same connotation.
Source:
Concise Oxford Dictionar
What literary character's name means
"son of the Dragon" in Romanian?
Answer:
Dracula
According to
Wikipedia
(the Free Encyclopedia):
"Bram Stoker loosely based his character on the
historic Wallachian (southern Romania) ruler Vlad III, also known as Vlad Tepes
("Vlad the Impaler"). In his six year reign (1436-1442) he is estimated to have
killed 100,000 people, mainly by using his favourite method of impaling them on
a sharp pole.
However, it should be
noted that the history of Romania at this time was mainly recorded by German
immigrants, a group with which Vlad Tepes is known to have clashed several
times. Indeed, Vlad Tepes is revered as a folk hero by native Romanians for
driving off invading Turks with his brutal techniques.
The name "Dracula" is derived from a secret
fraternal order of knights called the Order of the Dragon, founded by King
Sigismund of Hungary (who became the Holy Roman Emperor in 1410) to uphold
Christianity and defend the Empire against the Ottoman Turks.
Vlad III's father (Vlad II) was admitted to the
Order around 1431 because of his bravery in fighting the Turks. From 1431
onward Vlad II wore the emblem of the order and later, as ruler of Wallachia,
his coinage bore the dragon symbol. The word for dragon in Romanian is "drac"
and "ul" is the definitive article. Vlad III's father thus came to be known as
"Vlad Dracul," or "Vlad the dragon." In Romanian the ending "ulea" means "the
son of". Under this interpretation, Vlad III thus became Vlad Dracula, or "the
son of the dragon."
Source:
Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia
(
)
According to Felipe Fernandez in his
book Near a thousand tables: A history of food, its inventor gave it this name
because its white sheen reminded him of the pearls known as marguerites; what
is it?
Answer:
margarine
According to Fernandez, the French navy
needed a butter-like foodstuff that would last through long voyages, and
Margarine was invented in 1869 to solve the problem.
Source: Near a thousand tables: A history of food (
Felipe Fernandez)
According to IMACE,
the International Margarine Association of the Countries of Europe:
"Margarine was discovered in 1869 by Hippolyte
Mège Mouriès, a French food research chemist, in response to Napoleon III's
request for a wholesome butter alternative. It is not entirely clear whether
the primary aim was the betterment of the working classes or economics in the
supply of food to the French army. In a laboratory, Mège Mouriès solidified
purified fat, after which the resulting substance was pressed in a thin cloth,
that formed stearine and discharged oil. This oil formed the basis of the
butter substitute."
Hippolyte Mège Mouriès: He invented margarine.
Here's a MooT crossword-puzzle
question: what might a Portuguese call "acts of faith performed in the city of
Holy Faith"? (16 letters)
Answer:
Santa Fe autos-da-fe
In Spanish, Santa
Fe means "Holy Faith" and autos-da-fe
means "acts of faith".
Notes: (1)
hyphens are not letters (2) the plural "autos" is necessary, and (3) I know the
accent is missing on "fe" - I couldn't find the proper character.
In Greek mythology, Apollo often
assumed the form of a dolphin; what Greek place-name reflects this?
Answer:
Delphi
According to
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
, the name Delphi
derives from the Greek delphis, dolphin ;
Apollo's oracle was located there.
What information source's name means
"the peninsula" in Arabic?
Answer:
Al Jazeera
My source for this was a very interesting
New York Times article called: What the Muslim World Is
Watching By Fouad Ajami. It can be found at the following link:
What seafaring people did the
ancient Greeks call the "purple people"?
Answer:
the Phoenicians
The name Phoenician comes from the Greek
phoinix, purple. The Phoenicians were so named
because they exported a famed purple wool; the dye for which they derived from
a shellfish that inhabited the coastal waters of the eastern
Mediterranean.
It was derived from the name of a
Greek maiden who beat Athena in a weaving contest; what entomological term is
it?
Answer:
arachnid
The word arachnid - which derives from the Greek
arachne, spider - denotes arthropods of the
class Arachnida, such as spiders, scorpions,
and ticks.
They have segmented bodies.
In mythology Arachne was a Greek
maiden who was turned into a spider after defeating Athena in a weaving
contest.
Which psychiatrist added the words
introvert and extrovert to our daily discourse?
Answer:
Carl Jung
He also added the psychological senses of
the following: complex, collective unconscious, archetype, animus and anima,
and persona.
According to
writer/physician Anthony Daniels: "This is not the same as saying, however,
that he contributed to human knowledge: for it is perfectly possible to give
names to non-existent entities."
For
Daniel's further opinions on Jung, see
According to the
New Yorker Magazine , its name was derived from
a phrase that means "word war" in Croatian; what game's name is it?
Answer:
Scrabble
According to the New Yorker Magazine, the game's name comes from the
Croatian skra abbu, word war.
As many of you have pointed out, this of course is
massively incorrect. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary the source is
unknown; however, according to the
Online Etymological
Dictionary
the proprietary name Scrabble is "probably from scribble-scrabble, hasty
writing, a reduplication of scribble."
Their name literally means "thunder"
in Greek; which writers are they?
Answer:
The Brontes
In Greek bronte means thunder.
According to
Mark Simpson, who coined the term in 1994,
it denotes: "a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of
a metropolis because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and
hairdressers are." What term is it?
Answer:
metrosexual
According to Simpson in
"Meet the Metrosexual" (Salon.com, July 22,
2002):
"He might be officially gay,
straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly
taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference.
Particular professions, such as modeling, waiting tables, media, pop music and,
nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity
products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere."
The
"Word Spy"
(www.wordspy.com) defines the term as:
"A dandyish narcissist in love with not only himself, but also
his urban lifestyle; a straight man who is in touch with his feminine
side."
What two words were combined to coin
the religious name Shaker?
Answer:
shaking and Quaker
Shakers are Quakers who shake with
religious ecstasy.
In Spanish it denotes both "people"
and the places where people live; what word is it?
Answer:
pueblo
The word pueblo means "people" in Spanish; in English it labels
a town or village in Spain or Spanish America.
In Greek derma means "skin"; what art form's name means "skin
arrangement" in Greek?
Answer:
taxidermy
The word taxidermy derives from the Greek
taxis, arrangement, and
derma, skin; it denotes "the art of preparing,
stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals with lifelike effect."
According to Fowler, it actually
denotes a "group of repressed emotional ideas responsible for an abnormal
mental condition," but it has evolved into a synonym for "a bee in one's
bonnet"; what word is it?
Answer:
complex
Source: Fowler's Modern English Usage
(1919)
Imitative of a sound used by
Australian aboriginals, it is used to attract attention from a distance; what
word is it?
Answer:
cooee
The emission "Cooee" is pronounced coo -
ee.
The punch line of the wartime joke
is: Send 3 and 4 pence, we are going to a
dance; what was the original message?
Answer:
Send reinforcements we are going to advance.
What country celebrates
Zanzibar Revolution Day?
Answer:
Tanzania
When Zanzibar and Tanganyika united in 1964, the new country was named
Tanzania.
In Latin ala means "wing"; what part
of the human body does its diminutive label?
Answer:
the armpit
The Latin diminutive of ala is axilla,
armpit.
What nut got its name because the
base of the shell resembles a face?
Answer:
the coconut
The word coconut derives from the Spanish
coco, grimace - the base of the shell looks
like a grimacing face.
What sport captivates
toxophilites?
Answer:
archery
The word toxophilite comes from the Greek
toxon, bow, and philos, love; it denotes "a student or lover of
archery."
What word was altered to coin the
word heist?
Answer:
hoist
The word heist which denotes a robbery was coined as a
dialect pronunciation of the word hoist.
What support structure's name was
coined by combining the words gallon and
tree?
Answer:
the gantry
An overhead support structure - e.g., a
dangling crane - is called a gantry.
The word burger is to hamburger as the word cello is to what?
Answer:
violoncello
The word burger was derived from the word
hamburger and cello was derived from violoncello by a process of language change linguists
call fore-clipping.
What synonym for
names names a mountain chain?
Answer:
appellations
An appellation is a name; the
Appalachians are a mountain chain.
What card game's name means "basket"
in Spanish?
Answer:
canasta
Need info
In Old English its name means "spear
leek"; what bulb-type is it?
Answer:
garlic
The word garlic derives from the Old English
gar, spear, and leac, leek.
Its previous name was a Portuguese
word meaning "beautiful"; what island is it?
Answer:
Taiwan
Previously, it was named
Formosa - which in Portuguese means
"beautiful" - by 16th-century Portuguese explorers.
In Arabic its name literally means "man of wool." What
Islamic sect is it?
Answer:
the Sufis
The word Sufi means "man of wool" in
Arabic. It ultimately derives from the Arabic suf, wool.
The Sufis are a Muslim sect of ascetic mystics (i.e.,
they are not shop-aholics) who got their name because they wear woolen garments
(labs-as-suf) as one demonstration of their religious
devotion.
According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the first known appearance of the word in English writing
is from 1653 -- from Greaves Seraglio
"Those Turks which
would be accounted Sofees ... do commonly read, as they walk
along the streets."
According to the Concise
Oxford Dictionary, what mishap is a motion out of time?
Answer:
a contretemps
According to the Concise Oxford
Dictionary, the word contretemps denotes "a mishap"
in English and "motion out of time" in French. It was coined by combining the
Latin contra, against, with the French temps,
time.
What Norfolk parish was famous for a fine smooth yarn
that was spun from combed wool?
Answer:
Worsted
The word worsted, which entered English
in 1296, derives from the name Worstead (in Old English
Wurðestede), the name of the Norfolk parish where the cloth
was invented and first manufactured.
This between becomes a bury (meanings change when stresses vary). What word
is it?
Answer:
inter
As a prefix (stress on the first
syllable) inter means "between"; as a
transitive verb (stress on the second syllable) inter means "to bury."
[Mootguy: Thanks to Jack Ognistoff
for a great MooT question.]
Whether this is standard American
pronunciation or not, I've heard quite frequently here on the east coast a
stress difference that takes place depending upon which noun the adjective is
modifying. CERebral palsy and ceREbral hemorrhage.
To get pedantic on you, strictly speaking the first "inter" is not a
word, but a morpheme--an indivisible semantic unit which . It isn't a word
since it can't stand on its own. The second "inter" is both a word and (at
least, I think so) a morpheme. Thus, the better (but granted, more pedantic)
question would be "What semantic unit is it?"
[Mootguy: True. For simplicity's sake, I stuck with "word"
because MooT is a game, not a treatise.]
This was a fun one! I got it in about 15
seconds, which I think is pretty good. Technically, all words are free
morphemes (with the exception of things like borrowed latinate phrases such as
"quid pro quo"--quo is not a "word", it behaves more like a syllable); "inter"
is a bound morpheme that cannot stand alone. But since most people are not
linguistics scholars, it's ok to call it a "word" for the sake of the riddle.
Thanks to everyone for the interesting discussion.
Which digital storage unit is a unit
of musician employment?
Answer:
the gig
The musician's term gig - which denotes a
job - first appeared in English in the early 20th century; its origin is
unknown.
The computer term gig - which
denotes 1,000,000,000 bytes (to be precise: 1,073,741,824 bytes) - was coined
by contracting the word gigabyte. The latter first appeared in
English in the late 20th century, and derives from the Greek
gigas, giant, which in Greek Mythology denoted the savage and
gigantic sons of Gaia and Uranus.
One gigabyte is NOT 1,000,000,000 bytes Bytes are to be numbered in
binary unit. 1 Kilobyte is 2exp10 = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 (10 times) = 1,024
bytes 1 Megabyte is 1,024 Kilobytes 1 gig is 1,024 Megabytes = 1,048,576
Kilobytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes, yes it is roughly 1 billion I give you that
one.
Utter pedantry alert: the first 'g' in 'gig[abyte]' should really
be pronounced with a soft 'g', like Back to the Future's 1.21 gigawatts. I
don't know anyone who actually pronounces it that way, though. Of course a
'jig' is *also* something which often employs a musician.
As a singular, its domain is
metaphysics; as a plural, marketing. What word is it?
Answer:
logos
In metaphysics Logos is reason as the controlling principle in the
universe. In communications logos (e.g., the Golden Arches) give evidence that
branding is the controlling principle in marketing.
Good question. I got it, but came
up with another answer because I read the question two ways.
Good and goods -- "good" as a matter for
ethical debate, "goods" for what marketers sell. It wasn't clear from context
whether "singular" and "plural" meant identical spellings of the
word.
[Mootguy: Good point. I'll post
your response to the site and see if any of the others were getting confused by
this.]
Didn't get it. I don't think logos as used in marketing is the
plural form of the Greek for "word," but a corruption of it. That would be
consistent with marketing generally. :)
Cute question, but in fact they are different words (despite the
identical spelling and common etymology). (And of course, linguists are not in
agreement about what constitutes a word.)
Anyways, the
singular "logos" is pronounced with an /s/ at the end, whereas the plural
"logos" is pronounced with a /z/ at the end. The dictionary entry for the
latter word would of course be "logo."
[Mootguy: So I have to say something like
What
homonyms are they?]
[Mootguy: to make the
question work. Yuck. The question's a dud. I promise to do better next
time.]
A logo (i.e. logotype) is not a plural word, just an ordinary noun
formed from the first syllable of a compound, and having a regular plural form.
My guess was "good" and "goods" respectively. Niels Homvoller, Stockholm,
Sweden
I like this definition much better: 1 : the divine wisdom manifest
in the creation, government, and redemption of the world and often identified
with the second person of the Trinity (Jesus)
My response was medium/media--the singular in reference to a
metaphysical vehicle for seeing into the netherworld, and the plural (print,
tv, film, etc) to denote the various forms by which information is passed.
I thought it was a great question and very
fun. The picky comments are all valid and their existence just shows that it's
a great question because it makes you think about interesting and important
points, not the other way around (that they might show the question was
"invalid" in some way).
I'm with stephen yeh: a GREAT question, specifically because of its
ambiguity and multiple issues/pathways. (And yes, I also loved the picky
points; otherwise why be a word-nut?) Luckily for me, though, I didn't spend
much time on it before peeking! All reward, no strain.
I thought of "good" and "goods," but I like "logos" and
"logos"; I don't think the question is a dud at all. Because others thought as
I did, I don't feel stupid, but I also got to think about words in a different
way. Thanks!
Re: moot-jacko debate - possibly in Latin the form rictus can be
used as both noun and adjective? rictus, -a, -um = "open-mouthed," as in ricta
agricola, "open-mouthed farmer"
This was a difficult question! I just wanted to say how
much I enjoy your questions - I think some of my favorites were about the Punic
war and the mujahidin :) Thanks for sending them. I hope you continue to come
up with more and more questions. Regards,
[Mootguy: Thanks Nadia. Glad to hear you enjoy the
questions.]
Your answer, "rictus," is a noun; however, the phrasing
of your questions leads one to believe that the response should be in
adjectival form ("How open can your mouth get?" "Extremely open.").
[Mootguy: But it's the same as this
question:
"It's a number and it stands for 'how tall you are.' What
number is it?"
And this question doesn't lead you to believe that the
response should be an adjective.]
Re: "It's a number and it stands for 'how tall you are.'" First of
all, were it not for the "it's a number" telling one what sort of word to look
for, you could easily be led to think you should be looking for and adjective.
Secondly-- and this is the clincher-- just parse the
questions grammatically by putting them into the syntactic form of an
assertion: "Your mouth can get how open?" or "You are how tall?" "How open" and
"how tall" are clearly both adjectival phrases which demand an adjectival
response. (The "how"s are adverbs that modify the adjectives "tall" and
"open.")
The first comment posted mentions rictus, -a, -um =
open-mouthed.
I'm no expert, but I believe that Latin
nouns are usually basically listed giving their nominative and genitive forms,
so that rictus is nominative and ricta is genitive (and rictum - I dunno).
In that case, ricta agricola might literally mean "a
farmer with an open mouth", and hence "an open-mouthed farmer". This would be a
case of a noun (via its genitive) functioning as an adjective. This doesn't
happen as much in English, because usually when a noun is used as an adjective
(e.g. tennis ball, dinner plate) it is unchanged.
Now,
English doesn't properly have a genitive case - the closest we get is the
possessive, donated by an apostrophe. Although consider fool's gold - the gold
doesn't belong to any fool; rather, "fool's" describes the fallacious apparent
value of the stuff.
There are two adjectives that mean
"having to do with the city of Carthage." Carthaginian is one. What is the other?
Answer:
Punic
Anything pertaining to Carthage is
described as either Carthaginian or Punic.
Thus, the wars between Rome and Carthage are called the Punic
wars (Carthage lost). The word Punic ultimately
derives from the Greek Phoinix, Phoenician -
an etymological allusion to Carthage's founding as a Phoenician
colony.
The word Dodekathronon derives from the
Greek dodeka, twelve (from duo, two, and
deka, ten) and thronos, high
seat.
According to William Dalrymple's From the
Holy Mountain, during the Byzantine era, Constantinople's collection
of holy relics was the finest in Christendom.
"In one
shrine alone ... were secreted the holy nails used in the crucifixion, the axe
with which Noah built the Ark, and the Dodekathronon, the twelve baskets in
which had been collected the leftover loaves and fish from the feeding of the
five thousand...."
However, according to the
Jerusalem Post, "An old Byzantine manuscript enumerates the
Christian holy sites around Tiberias and its lake. The ancient text mentions
familiar sites such as Capernaum, and the Jordan River, but also a hill called
Dodekathronon (twelve seats), where Christ sat down and taught
and where, as tradition has it, he also multiplied the seven loaves and fed the
four thousand."
[Mootguy: If anyone has
further info about the Dodekathronon - which is it: a place or a set of
baskets? - please pass it along.]
Given the frequency with which artifacts are
named after their places of origin or discovery, there is no reason why both
would not be correct. Famous examples include Sutton Hoo, Rosetta, and Lascaux.
For most people, the place names have come to signify the archaeological
materials found there. Presumably, only to local residents do the places rank
before the finds when the names are spoken or read.
According to Historian Bernard Lewis in his essay
The Revolt of Islam:
"Followers of many
faiths have at one time or another invoked religion in the practice of murder,
both retail and wholesale. Two words deriving from such movements in Eastern
religions have even entered the English language...."
Assassin is one of them. What is the
other?
Answer:
thug
According to Lewis, "Two words deriving from such movements
in Eastern religions have even entered the English language: "thug," from
India, and "assassin," from the Middle East, both commemorating fanatical
religious sects whose form of worship was to murder those whom they regarded as
enemies of the faith."
The word
assassin derives from the Arabic
hashishiyyin, hashish-users. It denotes an Ismaili Muslim
political-protest movement whose members ate hash and stabbed opponents - in
that order.
The word thug derives from
the Marathi thag, swindler. According to somebody at the
Wikipedia, "The thuggee religion was allegedly a cult with
Hindu, Muslim and some Sikh members who practiced large-scale robbery and
murder of travellers." [I'd find a better source but I'm too lazy.]
I believe that Thuggees specialised in garrotting their victims,
using a sacred scarf for the purpose. However, the victims were not chosen on
the grounds of religion or because they were "enemies of the faith" but, as
your Wikipedia source says, because they were travelling through and had
something worth stealing.
Good question, but Bernard Lewis is notoriously innacurate regarding
Islam. Despite his reputation, he is an "orientalist" who imposes a Western
prejudice on the Muslim world. His "clash of civilizations" falderall is
typical of his simplistic, Judeo-Christian mentality.
Dear mootlist people: as language buffs, could you think
of another phrase besides the deplorable phrase "Idiom-wise" Thank you.
[Mootguy: I use
constructions like "idiom-wise" and "etymology-wise" because they use a small
number of characters to convey a lot of information, and this makes it easier
to print MooT questions on game cards.
Note: The purpose is to give
players a hint; thus, "idiom-wise" tells you that the answer has to do with
idiom and "etymology-wise" tells you that it has to do with
etymology.
Perhaps, if you think of it strictly as a convention of
the board-game MooT, it might seem like less of a
solecism.]
To the ancient Hebrews salt symbolized
hospitality, durability and purity. To eat the salt of the King was to owe him
utmost fidelity. Eating bread and salt together sealed an unbreakable
friendship. Jesus said if it lost its taste is was good for nothing.
As worded, I think this question is bad. I suggest,
"Etymologically speaking, what part of a circle is a beam of light?" Except in
an etymological sense, no part of a circle is a beam of light.
[Mootguy: Good point. I'll change
it.]
Actually, the radius isn't PART of a circle at all, it's a
characteristic of a circle. Perhaps "one radian" would be a more appropriate
answer, since this actually represents PART of a circle.
[Mootguy: An analogy: We know that Bob's arm is
part of Bob. But is Bob's height part of Bob? Maybe "aspect" is a better word.
Thus the questions becomes: "Etymology-wise, what aspect of a circle is a ray
of light?"]
The
wording is a bit tricky since, as you point out, the radius is not part of a
circle in the same way that Bob's arm is a part of Bob.
The latter is a constituent part: if you removed it, part of Bob would be
missing. However, the radius is a mental extrapolation; remove it from the
circle and the circle would still be there.
Now there's
a good piss-you-off moot question for you: Is the circle's radius part
of the circle? That question homes in on the meaning of
part, a word that we all thought we knew the meaning of before
this question.(I would also change "the circle" to "a circle.")
[Mootguy: I agree. Done. I'll try your question out at the
next live MooT game we have in Vancouver.]
What literary technique's name
derives from a Greek word that means "feigned ignorance"?
Answer:
irony
In general, the word
irony denotes a way of speaking in which the intended meaning
is the opposite of what is said. An example of this (in its most basic form) is
saying "That was bright" when someone does something stupid.
However, as a literary technique, irony is when
authors allow audiences to perceive meanings and ramifications that the
characters don't. [If anyone can think of some good examples of this from
movies, please let me know.]
The word
derives from the Greek eironeia, simulated ignorance. The
Greek word denoted the discussion technique used, for example, by Socrates,
where: (1) you pretend NOT to know something; (2) you get your
opponent to explain it to you; and then (3) use this explanation as the
starting point for picking apart the opponent's argument and presenting
yours.
Have you seen
the old Alfred Hitchcock movie, Rope? It is full of irony. It is a murder
mystery, but there is no mystery for the audience, as you see the murder right
at the beginning and you know who the killers are. The irony is in knowing all
this while the rest of the characters in the movie don't and then you get to
see one of them figure it out.
"I see dead people" is an example of irony since the Bruce Willis
character is unaware that he is dead. I can't remember tha name of the movie
though.
[Mootguy: The Sixth Sense - but I don't know if this
is a good example because the audience doesn't know that Willis is dead, so
they don't have any more information than the characters
do.]
I would think that "That was bright" in the light of something
stupid would be sarcasm and not irony.
[Mootguy: According to
the COD, it IS an example of irony because intended the meaning is the opposite
of what is said. However, it is also an example of sarcasm, because words are
being used to inflict pain.]
The
contrast between what one says and what one means is the simplest form of irony
called verbal irony. Sarcasm often takes this form, although
not all sarcasm is ironic nor is all verbal irony sarcastic.
Your example is correct and there are many others built into our
language as cliches. ("Good job!" can mean literally what it says or be ironic
by suggesting that a person goofed. You can probably think of
others.)
The second kind of irony you're referring to is
called dramatic irony which is related to situational irony,
the two being closely related and often difficult to tell apart (and maybe
don't have to be separated anyway).
If you want to use
films as a source of examples, there are zillions to choose from:
TOOTSIE (We know Dustin Hoffmann is a man, but many of the
other characters think he is a woman. This leads to ironic complications in
many scenes.)
THE FASTEST GUN ALIVE (We know Glenn Ford
used to be a gunslinger, but the townsfolk don't.)
UNDERWORLD (Situational Irony that differs slightly from
dramatic irony in that even the audience doesn't learn certain truths until
late in the story--Michael Corvin is a mutant who has traits of both vampires
and werewolves)
Hope this helps. P.S. The writer's
example of THE SIXTH SENSE is situational irony because it's
kept from the character as well as the audience. The truth, when it comes out,
has ironic consequences.
Captain
Dudley Smith: Have you a valediction, boy-o?
Jack Vincennes: Rollo
Tomasi.
Smith (played by James Cromwell) doesn't know that Rollo
Tomasi doesn't exist. But the audience knows it. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) tells
Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) that Tomasi is Exley's personification of the generic
bad guy, or something like that. And following Smith's murder of Vincennes, and
Vincennes' last words, when Smith mentions the name of Tomasi to Exley, Exley
knows something's fishy. Vincennes used the name of Rollo Tomasi to point the
finger of suspicion, and ultimately trap, Smith.
It derives from a Late Latin phrase that means
"greatest premise" and it denotes "a general truth expressed in one sentence."
What word is it?
Answer:
maxim
The word maxim derives from the Late Latin
maxima propositio, greatest premise. When it entered English
in the 15th century, it denoted "a self-evident proposition used as a premiss
in reasoning." Within 150 years, it had come to label "a pithy expression of
general truth."
This is the first one I answered
correctly in a long time! In fact, Aristotle is the first Rhetorician to coin
the phrase and use it to define "a self-evident proposition used as a premiss
in reasoning" which can only be used by "elderly" men.
[Mootguy: Why can maxims only be used by elderly
men?]
Aristotle believed that a maxim could only
be used by "elderly" men because only older men were capable of knowing a
"self-evident proposition." In his time, for a young man to use a maxim was
“like telling stories – unbecoming; to use them in handling things in which
one has no experience is silly and ill-bred” (Aristotle, 840 B.C., p. 224 of
Rhetoric).
I actually applied a lot of Aristotle's
beliefs about maxims to our contemporary Maxim magazine and discovered that the
use of maxim in the magazine is no where near what Aristotle would consider a
"correct usage." (He's probably rolling over in his grave)
How about Axiom? Does it not
also conform to the rubric of your question? I may be missing something, but
the two words both occured to me, and of the two Axiom may be the better
choice.
[Mootguy: "Axiom" doesn't
derive from a Late Latin phrase that means "greatest premise," so it doesn't
fit the question's requirements. ]
The name Heptanesos -
which derives from the Greek hepta, seven, and
nesos, islands - denotes an Ionian Island group off the west
coast of Greece that stretches south from the Albanian coast to the southern
tip of the Peloponnese. Similarly: Polynesia, many islands,
Indonesia, Indian islands, and Melanesia the
black islands.
and Micronesia, small islands. Why
not call Australia Macronesia ?
[Mootguy: I believe that the name is already taken: the Canary
Islands are in Macronesia. Paul Theroux in "The Happy Isles of Oceania" calls
Australia and New Zealand "Meganesia."]
What hyphenated word meaning "weakly
sentimental" was coined to describe the poetry of Ambrose Philips?
Answer:
namby-pamby
Literature, especially poetry, that is
insipidly pretty or sentimental is namby-pamby.
The word was coined from the name of the poet
Ambrose Philips (died 1749), who wrote yuckily sentimental pastoral poetry that
was ridiculed by fellow poets Henry Carey and Alexander Pope.
The first OED citation for the
word is by Carey from his 1726 poem Namby Pamby - "So the
Nurses get by Heart Namby Pamby's Little Rhimes."
Note
that this poem was such a successful demolition of Philips that Carey himself
became known as Namby Pamby Carey and Philips became known as
Namby Pamby.
Equally efficient demolition of visual artists and their following
of culture vultures: artsy-fartsy. When did that phrase first
appear, I wonder? I would guess the 60's, but probably earlier.
[Mootguy: The first OED citation for artsy-fartsy
is from 1971.]
I know, Mr. Moot, that you are a busy guy and rattle
these things off in your spare time, but just a little note on your
punctuation: "Yuckilly" (by the way, I think there's only one "l")should have
no comma after it, since it modifies "sentimental." Now take that comma and
re-insert it before "who wrote...," which requires one, being a non-defining
clause. Sorry to be such a stickler, but this being a language column and
all...
[Mootguy: Changes made. Thanks
for the feedback. I was focused on my email problems this
week.]
What Odyssean sea nymph's name means "hidden" in
Greek?
Answer:
Calypso
Calypso was the sea nymph in Homer's
Odyssey who loved and detained Odysseus for seven years, and
died of grief when she was forced to free him. Her name - which derives from
the Greek kalyptein, to cover or conceal - literally means
"hidden" or "I will conceal" in Greek.
Similarly, an
apocalypse is an "uncovering" (from Greek apo, off, and
kalyptein). And, as that which is uncovered is revealed, the
Apocalypse of John of Patmos was renamed the Book of
Revelation when Wycliff translated it into English in the 14th
Century.
The Romans nicknamed it Arabia Felix,
fortunate Arabia. Nowadays, it's called Yemen. What is it
called in the King James Bible?
Answer:
Sheba
The Arabs called it Saba and the Greeks
(and Romans) called it Sabaea.
The name belladonna - which denotes the deadly poison
nightshade - means "fair lady" in Italian.
Belladonna was once used as a cosmetic because small doses cause the pupils to
dilate, thus making the lady's eyes sparkle.
And, by the way, Cleopatra is said to have used it. In addition to
dilating the eyes, it has other anti-parasympathetic nervous system effects
-including dryness of certain mucosal membranes...
Isn't it useful in small doses as some sort of potion? I'd assume
it'd be an aphrodisiac, as it makes a woman more appealing, what with the
dilated pupils and all.
In the 14th century the name denoted
"the stupid man personified." By the 19th century, the given and surnames had
been fused into an noun denoting any type of stupidity. What word is
it?
Answer:
tomfoolery
The word tomfoolery (foolish behaviour) derives from Middle
English Thom Foole, the mentally-deficient man
personified.
I think foolishness and
stupidity are different. Foolish people can be quite intelligent (Bill Clinton
was foolish to become involved with Monica Lewinsky, but he certainly isn't
stupid).
The opposite of foolish, I believe, is wise;
the opposite of stupid, intelligent; and the opposite of ignorant, informed. We
use the negative words interchangeably, but inaccurately, I think.
[Mootguy: Good point. Thanks for emphasizing the
distinction.]
Should be the fusion of given name and surname ("tomfool), plus the
addition of a suffix ("-ery").
[Mootguy: Another good point. If this question makes it into
MooT 2, it will be much better than the one I sent out to the mailing list.
Thanks for the feedback.]
Intelligent, informed points these folk make.
Let us dig deeper. From whence does the connotation of Thom Foole as
"mentally-deficient man personified" come? Does anyone know?
There are just two extant English
words that use the Middle English suffix -head. What are they?
Answer:
godhead and maidenhead
The suffix -head carries the same sense as the suffix
-hood. Thus, godhead is god-hood, the state of being a god, and
maidenhead is maidenhood, the state of being a
maiden - i.e. a virgin.
Note that the
suffix -head is not the same as the combining form
-head, as in masthead. Combining forms CREATE
the sense of the word (e.g., the bio- in
biology), whereas prefixes and suffixes modify a pre-existing
sense.
You're right in your distinction between words created through
suffixes and prefixes, where the newly coined words nevertheless have a single
discernible "stem," and compound words, where the constituent words are, shall
we say, equal partners in a joint venture.
According to the Atlantic
Monthly, which political organization's name means "conquest" in
Arabic when read in one direction and "death" when read in the
other?
Answer:
Fatah
According to David Samuels in the Atlantic
Monthly, "the title that came first on his [Arafat's] personal
stationery was head of Fatah, which means "conquest" - a
backward acronym for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Falistiniya, the
Palestinian Liberation Movement.
Spelled forward the
acronym yields Hataf, which means "death."
Source: In a Ruined Country - How Yasir Arafat destroyed
Palestine by David Samuels (Atlantic Monthly, September
2005)
What about the name of one of our,
(in the Netherlands and about), banking institutions i.e. RABO
Bank. Not spelled backward but straight, the acronym means robber in
Chechoslowakian.
And Leica a renown
camera brand name, in reverse it reads aciel, which means heaven in French.
Another one: Our Dutch privatised Postal system will change its name from
PTT/TPG to TNT, ominous isn't it?
Please don't pass this on to any Danish
newspapers, OK? And by the bye, did you realize that "Allah,"
read backwards, is "Hallah," a traditional Jewish bread eaten
on the sabbath? Mere coincidence -- or is there really a solid basis for mutual
understanding?
In Latin apere means "to fasten." What do we call the word that fastens the subject to the predicate?
Answer:
the copula
The word copula denotes a word, usually a verb or a verb-like part of speech, that is used to link a sentence's subject to its predicate. For example, in the sentence Girls are nice, the word are is a copula.
It derives from the Latin copulatus, which is the past participle of copulare, join together, which in turn derives from the Latin apere, to fasten.
I have never heard this term used in the teaching of grammar. In standard grammar parlance the predicate is the verb plus the modifiers relating to the verb. Thus the predicate joins itself to the subject without assistance. If you are referring to verbs that indicate state of being, like to be, to seem, to appear. Those are sometimes given a different status. Is that what you meant?
[Mootguy: I got this definition right out of the Concise Oxford Dictionary: "A connecting word, especially a part of the verb "be" connecting a subject and a predicate."]
I agree with "emm451". A copula is part of the predicate. A sentence has only two parts -- the subject and the predicate -- and that's it. What a copula does join, however, is the subject and the subject complement, acting something like an equal sign. I don't know what the Oxford says, but in current grammar this is what it is. Sounds like the question is confusing predicates with complements.
[Mootguy: In the end, guys, MooT is only as good as the dictionaries used: the Concise Oxford Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary. Here's the latter's definition of the grammatical term "copula": "That part of a proposition which connects the subject and predicate" According to this definition, it seems that the copula is not necessarily part of the predicate. Note that in logic, the predicate is what is said about the subject — and the connecting words are not part of what is being said about the subject. What I think you are really disagreeing with is how the people at Oxford have defined the term.]
My mother tongue is Dutch and as a child I learned to call the verb between the subject and the predicate the "coupling verb" [my literal translation of koppelwerkwoord). Same idea it seems.
I agree with the Moot Guy - grammaticaly, the copula is quite distinct from the predicate; although I can understand the confusion, given the poor level of grammar taught in the U.S.
I figured it out this way: I got to the sound by playing around with the word apere -- first changing unvoiced consonants to voiced (p to b). When that didn't work, I dropped initial vowels. Bere didn't help. Pere didn't help.
Then I tried to remember my graduate school grammar course and came up with copula, and remembered that that's the word they use for the verb to be because, in a sense, subjects copulate with their objects in a sentence. (Grammar is sexy in graduate school. Actually, everything is sexy in graduate school.) I decided that co is used to mean that the two co-fasten and then took a wild guess.
I now see that we are being asked whether standing and complaining is a subset of repining. I read the question as asking whether one needed to stand up in order to repine. Tricky.
Hi Mootguy! Since repine doesn't correlate to a physical position, I think the "stand up" part of the question is misleading, especially since repine and recline sound so similar. Or did you do it on purpose for just that reason? Anyway, love the questions, love the game. Thanks!
The 'stand up' part was needlessly obfuscating. I thought at first I knew the word but lost confidence as I thought about it more. Couldn't make it jive with opine, presumably from the same root, with the prefix ob-, yearn on behalf of, or have an opinion. Interesting question, as always. Thanks.
[Mootguy: My goal IS to try to mislead you by throwing in things like "stand up." The purpose of the board game — which is played in groups — is to provoke debate. These little tricks force people to clarify their understanding a word's meaning.]
I didn't connect repine with recline. I connected it with supine, which means to lie on your back, face or front upwards. I hesitated, wondering if the root "pine" in repine was similar to the root in supine.
Great questions! I like digging around for the answers.
When we were kids in scouts, we would chant a marching "song" that went "Left, left, left, my wife with 49 kids in a starving condition and thought it was right. Right, right from the country from where I came, hay foot, straw foot, feet, by jingo, left, left, left my wife with 49 kids in a starving condition....
I have no idea where it comes from, probably some military, sometime, I'm guessing British, since it works in English, and pre-HMV, as it would have developed when guys had to walk where they were going, to pass time and keep up their spirits. Now they get rides more.
I love your e-mails, and have sent them to intelligent friends over the years who have also loved them.
Dear MooT Guy,
Thanks for your message. I heard about the game from a friend, who spoke of it in the most superlative terms. I haven't actually played it yet--there will be a MooT party on December 30.
A question for you: Is MooT a noun or a verb in this context? Or deliberately ambiguous?
Regards,
Tom
[Mootguy: It's a proper noun because it's the name of a game. Please check out the Online Dictionary of Language Terminology for all your lanugage needs ().]
I doubt if that's quite what the OED says, as our word chauvinism comes from the French 'chauvinisme' (with an -e). It is derived from the name of Nicolas Chauvin, an ultra-patriotic soldier of the Napoleonic era.
In modern usage, both in English and French, the word has partly lost its bellicose sense, and mostly refers to people and institutions who consider their nation, region, sex (e.g. male chauvinism) etc. to be paramount.
Jingoism, in contrast, is still restricted to bellicose patriotism. It is derived from a popular Victorian song that went, I think:
'We don't want to fight, but by jingo! if we do...'
Jingo is probably a euphemism for Jesus.
So they are not really 'equivalents', at least today.
I haven't heard of 'hockey fever' before, but wonder if it has the sense of either 'jingoism' or 'chauvinism'. It sounds more like exaggerate support for one's favourite sporting team, originally (ice) hockey. Perhaps one of your Canadian readers could confirm if it has extended its meaning beyond the field of sport?
[Mootguy: Thanks for the info. Here a direct quote of the OED's first definition of the word chauvinsm:
"Exaggerated patriotism of a bellicose sort; blind enthusiasm for national glory or military ascendancy; the French quality which finds its parallel in British ‘Jingoism’."
PS: The hockey fever part was supposed to be a joke.]
A couple of points here. You mention that this is the
first OED definition, but it is not the commonest
sense today, which I assume are included in other OED
definitions. You don't hear neo-con warmongers like
Dick Cheney being called chauvinists, for example, and
chauvinism has shrunk somewhat to refer almost
exclusively to non-military matters, such as foreign
policy, culture, race, sex...whereas jingoism seems to
have taken over the military sense. Also, a parallel
is not necessarily an equivalent.
Since my earlier comment I've done some more research
into both words. The words of the song I mentioned
were written by George William Hunt (b. 1829). It goes
like this:
'We don't want to fight, but by jingo if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the
money too.'
The song was written in support of British
belligerence towards Russia, and became popular in
1878. Plus ca change!
Another interesting theory is that the mild oath 'By
jingo!' might not after all be a corruption of Jesus,
as most authorities believe. Chambers 7th edition says
it was first used as a 'conjuror's summoning call' and
may be derived from the Basque 'Jinkoa', meaning God!
I've also discovered that most of your clients are
Canadians, so I suppose you are too. Could you
therefore add some comments on 'hockey fever', please?
I write from the UK and the term is not known on this
side of the Atlantic, where hockey usually means field
hockey!
As your website is aimed at expanding people's word
power and knowledge of etymology, I feel your comments
on jingoism and chauvinism could be usefully expanded.
As a keen etymologist, working in a dozen languages, I
admire your efforts in this field, which is not yet an
independent academic discipline. Even in British
universities, etymology is considered merely a branch
of philology or comparative philology and not a
subject in its own right. Popular etymology and urban
myths are also worthy of closer study. I'd like to see
all that change, and your project is most helpful.
The French named it after M. Chauvin, an eggregious practitioner of phoney, chest-thumping patriotism ("the last refuge of the scoundrel"). Perhaps we're ready to coin the American version of chauvinism - Bushism? Cheneyism?
Where do we get "chauvinism"?
French, chauvinisme, after Nicolas Chauvin, a legendary French soldier famous for his devotion to Napoleon.
And, "jingoism"?
Origin: orig. conjurer's call hey jingo appear! come forth! (opposed to hey presto hasten away!), taken into general use in the phrase 'by Jingo', euphemism for 'by God'; chauvinistic sense from by Jingo in political song supporting use of British forces against Russia in 1878
And, the hockey thing?
Well, it IS Canada afterall...what else could there be??? Go, Stars!
In Greek phero means "to bear." Etymology-wise, what given name
means "bearer of the anointed one"?
Answer:
Christopher
The name Christopher was
coined by combining the Greek khristos, the anointed (a
translation of the Hebrew mashiah, messiah), and
pherein, to bear. The St. Christopher of legend was a giant
who helped travellers by carrying them across rivers.
I named two of my children Jennifer and Christopher. I named a dog Guinevere and called her Eve. I have always taken Jennifer (with no research whatever) to be a modernized spelling of Guinevere.
[Mootguy: Jennifer is the Cornish form of a Welsh name, Gwenhwyvar. Guinevere is the Norman French version of the name.
]
I had guessed "Jennifer." I see I was wrong, but while we're at it, let me ask what the etymology of Jennifer is, and let me add that we've loved your game for years and want to thank you a thousand times for the hours of joy (and knowledge) you have given us.
-- Zev Shanken
[Mootguy: Does anyone know what the etymology of Jennifer is?]
I thought (St.) Christopher carried the holy family across a river as they left Palestine and travelled to Egypt to escape King Herod who wanted to kill the sweet baby Jesus.
He is also the patron saint of travellers.
It is worth noting that the Hebrew word "mashiakh" means "the annointed one" and was applied in the Hebrew Bible, notably in the case of King David, but also to anyone else who was anointed.
Just FYI, x-dtalling at telus.net wrote about "... left Palestine and traveled to Egypt to escape King Herod...". Sorry, but it was the other way round. PRE-Jesus, the Jews fled Egypt and travelled to "The holy land" (Palestine). Whether there was a "Christopher" involved or not is a bit of an interesting thought....
Very interesting; I had heard that before, but you confirmed it. Sounds very much like the Egyptian word Pharoh (sp?), who was also an anointed leader and considered a god. But I suppose that's taking it a bit too far. Thanks for the interesting words! I enjoy it. Regards Vicky Schoeman
Re: the comment from xdean.psaras at gmail.com: dtalling was right -- the story of "the flight into Egypt" appears in Matthew 2 (although any association with St. Christoppher would be by way of later apocrypha or legends). The story was a very popular subject for medieval and renaissance painters.
The word cryometer is to cold as what word is to hot?
Answer:
pyrometer
Cryometers measure very low temperatures; whereas pyrometers measure very high temperatures. The former derives from the Greek kryos, frost; the latter from the Greek pur, fire.
While 'thermometer may have been the first word that came to everyone's mind, it is not the best answer or even a right answer since what is called for is not something that measures temperatures but (to be parallel to 'cryometer,' that measures very high temperatures. I went with 'thermometer' but I recognized its inadequacy when prompted.
[Mootguy: Thanks for nailing down the distinction.
]
Thermometer works, too. Root is therm--heat--and -meter.
[Mootguy: What can I say. You're right. This is a weak question. Normally, I test them out at a MooT game before I send them out. I didn't get around to it this time — look what happened.]
Dear Mootguy,
A friend who loves crossword puzzles, as do I, signed me up when she signed up herself. I must admit to eating humble pie when reading the first message not having gotten one correct answer, but I love a challenge so this is right up my alley. Also, I am very impressed with your online dictionary
[Mootguy: [at ]]
and expect it to be a great addition to my reference sites.
A New Fan.
Just to let you know that I enjoy these little questions very much, even though (despite my public pretensions) I hardly ever know the answer, perhaps ESPECIALLY because I hardly ever know the answer
Thanks, Annie Gladden
Hey MootGuy,
I enjoy your questions, try to answer them every week, but I do have some feedback, perhaps a little whining or complaining: has anyone ever told you how hard it is to read red on blue -- whenever I look at your site, the highlighted words (in red) are just dancing on the background (blue) and it is not many minutes before I get a headache and have to leave. I sure would appreciate your site a lot more if it weren't so hard on the eyes.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, what do you call someone who is "addicted to the use of … Ellipsis in argument or discourse"?
Answer:
an ellipsist
The first OED citation for the term ellipsist is from 1859: "These … would hold in contempt the timidity of the ellipsists." (Source: I. Taylor, Logic in Theology, pg. 42)
According to Tom Wolfe, it was originally a Hells Angels' term for a bad motorcycle trip, but it eventually became a Hippy term for a bad LSD trip; what word is it?
Answer:
bummer
According to Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:
"The Angels were adding LSD to the already elaborate list of highs and lows they liked: beer, wine, marijuana, Benzedrine, Seconal, Amytal, Nembutal, Tuinal. Some of them had terrible bummers — bummer was the Angels' term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and it very quickly became the hip world's term for a bad trip on LSD."
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as: "An unpleasant or depressing experience, esp. one induced by a hallucinatory drug."
Note: The OED's first citation for the term is from 1967 (Joan Didion in the Saturday Evening Post): "I ask if he found a ride to New York. ‘I hear New York's a bummer,’ he says."
The English copula to be has eight forms: be, am, and is are three of them. What are the other five?
Answer:
are, being, was, were, and been
Most English verbs have just four forms - e.g., start, starts, starting, started. Verbs like these are called weak verbs. There is also a large set of verbs that have five forms - e.g., begin, begins, beginning, began, begun. These are called strong verbs.
Hi,
I enjoy the moot questions and I also think that your new project will be
a very useful resource for students. My only reservation about it so far
is that it tends to present English as a unitary whole in which rights
and wrongs can be unprobematically assigned to particular forms. I don't
think this is in line with a consensus view among linguists and
(particularly) sociolinguists - David Crystal's numerous books on the
subject argue quite strongly against this line of thinking for instance.
I don't think you would need to change very much in your questions or
other resources if you wanted to accommodate this critical viewpoint. If
anything, it would enrich your resource.
This week's question is an
example of what I'm getting at.
The English copula "to be" has eight forms: be, am, and is are three of
them. What are the other five?
You state that the answer is: are, being, was, were, and been
this is no doubt true for the vast majority of English speakers. But not
for instance for my father, whose English dialect included the form
'be's' as a third person habitual contrasted with 'is' which was
restricted to stative meanings. (He also had 'does be' as an intensified
form of this meaning and 'doesn't be' as the negative. It was clearly a
fully functioning part of his basic English grammar.)
But your answer
would suggest that this component of my father's grammar was wrong. And
yet, very similar variations can be found in nearly every other area of
English grammar and vocabulary. I'm not suggesting that you need to
include or even refer to them in your answers, but I feel that at least
implicitly such inherent variability needs to be acknowledged by
avoiding giving the impression that something is true of English when it
is in fact true only of certain varieties of English (even if these
varieties enjoy a high status). Otherwise, if systematic sociolinguistic
differences are interpreted as error, I feel that we are outside the
realm of linguistic facts.
Having said that, please don't stop sending me MOOT!!!
I suppose your question implies this already, but "to be" is also a form of the verb "to be." "Duh!," you might say in response to this circular assertion, but what I mean is this. When a verb has another verb as a complement, that complement can sometimes be in gerund (-ing) form (e.g. "I like being pedantic"); sometimes in base form ("If you'll let me be pedantic for a moment..."; and sometimes in full infinitive form ("I like to be pedantic"). All three are forms of the verb "be" in the sense that they are realizations in discourse of the "pure," (but sidembodied) verb "be." Now there's a piss-you-off type Moot question: "Is 'to be' a form of the verb'to be'?" Crawl into Plato's cave and contemplate that one.
And then there are the verbs with only three forms: bid, hit, put, set, and ten more. How many forms does the verb read have?
And what verbs are the same in the present (and infinitive) and the past perfect? (There are two or three of them). And finally: what verb (there is just the one) is the same in the present (and infinitive) and in the past (preterite) but not in the past perfect?
I could add some information to your dictionary about runic script if you are interested (no charge).
Re Martin's comments: Your point is well taken that language can't be reduced to a "unitary whole." For the purposes of a game, however, the unitary whole is a necessary fiction, and "standard" English--admittedly not necessarily better or worse than any other English-- must be the arbiter, or referee, if you will. Games are by nature binary: right, wrong; win,lose.
On another note, standard English also has some examples of the verb "be" combined with the auxiliary "do." These are, however, restricted to the imperative voice, and might be explained by the imperative form weakening the stative meaning of "be" and imbuing it with a more active, volitional meaning: "Don't be a fool!" or "Do be on time tomorrow." In both cases, the speaker assumes that the other person has the choice to be or not to be.
Further to the comments by some of your readers I'd
like to add a couple more forms of the verb 'be',
although they are archaic.
These are 'art', and 'wert', the forms of the second
person singular, present and past respectively. These
forms are to be seen, for example, in the King James's
Version of the Bible, and in the earlier versions of
the Lord's Prayer: (Our Father, which art in
Heaven...)still used by many traditional Christians,
especially in the UK.
There are probably still other forms, but I don't have
access to a good dictionary here in Prague, from where
I'm writing. 'Be-eth', perhaps, for the third person
singular.
We may also note the subjunctive forms,
although in writing they are the same as the ones you
give in your answer - e.g. 'were', as in 'If I were
you', and 'be', as in 'Lest it be thought', which are
still in modern use, especially in formal written
English.
What archaic word meaning "conceited
show-off" once denoted a jester's cap?
Answer:
coxcomb
An ostentatiously conceited man is a
coxcomb. The word, which originally denoted a jester's cap, was coined from the phrase cokkes
comb because jesters' caps resembled the comb of a cock – i.e.,
the fleshy crest on the bird's head.
The word fiat is to let it be
done as what word is to let it be
printed?
Answer:
imprimatur
In Latin fiat means "let it be done" and imprimatur means "let it be printed." In English, the word imprimatur denotes an official license to print something.
I had it correctly. I know Latin. Imprimatur is used by the Holy Catholic Church when they see that a certain book or some other printed work does not harm Catholics.
I googled the term and apparently it can mean an official approval in the sense of "Sanction". Most sources gave the literal meaning (That is the latin translation of the word). However many sources also mentioned that "Imprimatur" also refers to the first few stamped panes of paper from a fresh pressing plate. These are reviewed and filed before the press starts printing in earnest.
Which east-African country's name
derives from a word that means "burnt face" in Greek?
Answer:
Ethiopia
The word Ethiopia derives from the Greek
aitho, burn, and ops, face. In English, Ethiopia was also called Abyssinia, which derives from the Arabic Habasah, which was the Arabic name for the region.
What missile-type's name means "flying fish" in French?
Answer:
the Exocet
The name Exocet is the proprietary name of a rocket-propelled short-range guided missile that was
trademarked in 1970 by the Société Nationale Industrielle Aerospatiale.
The word derives from the French exocet, flying fish, which ultimately derives from the Greek
exokoitos, fish that sleeps upon the beach (from exo, outside + koitos, bed).
What ocular invention got its name
because its double-convex shape resembled a lentil?
Answer:
the lens
Eyeglasses were called
lenses because their double-convex shape
resembles a lentil seed. Note: In Latin the word lens means "lentil" and oculus means "eye."
It was coined because World War I
soldiers heard this type of shell fly past them before they heard the gun's
report. What hyphenated show-biz term is it?
Answer:
whiz-bang
Originally, the word
whiz-bang denoted a high-velocity shell from a
small-caliber gun; eventually, it came to describe fast-paced
entertainments.
It's a hard
question, is an English word Yiddish or German? Yiddish is essentially a group
of German dialects, with some distinctive vocabulary. If one knows that a word
entered English directly from general German with no Yiddish intermediary, then
it is clearly German.
And if it is a word that is common
in Yiddish but not German (or wasn't common in German when it came into
English), then it is Yiddish. But if it is a word shared by Yiddish and German,
and the word is known to have come into English via people who spoke Yiddish,
is it then a Yiddish or German word?
In a sense, Yiddish
and modern German are dialects of a more recent Germanic language, and English
(while being so different as to be called another language) is also of the
Germanic family. Who owns a word that is shared by all three?
Steve: Don't worry, buddy! Vocabulary isn't like land:
English-, German-, and Yiddish-speakers can all rightfully claim ownership of
"spritzer" without coming to blows.
I always thought it was German. We use this exact same word in the
former Yugoslavia--I'm from bosnia. Quite a few german loanwords there, but no
yiddish ones as far as I know. O wait, maybe it came into American English via
immigrant Yiddish speakers, but into the Balkans via German speakers.
Clever! First I thought of sui generis (too many letters), and then
ibid (right number of letters, but not DISTINCT letters). I had a feeling I was
wrong, but came to the site anyway. Too soon! I would have thought of per se
eventually.
In a learner context this would be considered an unreasonable task
as you have not stipulated that one of the letters can be used twice. It is the
same as saying in mathematics: Use two numbers to make eleven and then giving
the answer as 1 and 1. Your emails and thoughts, however, are always
interseting and thought-provoking. My daily wade through my emails would not be
the same without them, for which I thank you.
The question was not fair "per se" has x5 letters not x4 Also, "per
se" is not a single word. Sure this expression has only x4 different letters
but you should have indicated that in your question
That's a bit misleading. One ordinarily thinks of letter tokens,
rather than letter types. (E.g. is 'element' a 7 letter word or a 5-letter
word? Most people would say 7, I think.)
Flashed on your little trick right away, but only because, as a former student
of Latin, was SO familiar with the answer. The fans have a right to be furious
(learner context, etc.) YET at heart I'm with the one who wrote, "That was
evil!!..more please."
Hmmm...I guessed it but "maraschinio cherries" are not the same thing. I grew up in the fruit sheds and participated in the making of said cherries; I won't ruin them for y'all by telling you how they are made but they are not made from the marasca cherry.;-)
Derived from a Latin word meaning "very deadly," it was mis-defined by Samuel Johnson in his dictionary as “mutually destructive” — which is what it has meant ever since. What word is it?
Answer:
internecine
The word derives from the Latin internecinus, very deadly or murderous (from Latin necare, kill).
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Johnson misinterpreted inter to mean "mutual," when in this case the prefix was an intensifier; hence, the term should have been defined as "very destructive" not "mutually destructive."
Any chance the last week in Canadian federal politics inspired this question? I think this word nicely describes what transpired between Harper and Dion.
I have to agree, almost with the "cousins" response. I've always seen and heard the word in the context of strife or warfare between members of the same family or clan, or between erstwhile or supposed allies. In this context, the US Civil War would be an example of internecine battle. Of course, war of any kind carries with it, almost by definition, the idea of mutual destruction.
Here I beleive you have come upon a word that might truly be an enigma. Every etymology of "internecine" mentions that the original Latin definition of both "internecinus" and "internecivus" was "FOUGHT to the death, murderous". Since it takes at least two to fight, we immediately have the usual "inter" prefix significance.
Why would the original Latin scribe choose "inter" when there are other prefixes which are used as simple intensifiers? My guess is that he wanted that rapport from the start. Do you know of any other word beginning with "inter" where it does not have the "between" or "among" significance in its etymology? Who can deny that a word originally meaning "mutually destructive" couldn't evolve or branch out and therefore later come to mean "very destructive? It sounds logical to me. On the other hand "mutually destructive" is definitely "very destructive" because it's doubly so; however, all that is "very destructive" isn't always "mutually" so.
It seems to me that Johnson went straight to the Latin words for his defintion; what we've done to it by this time is another "kettle of destruction".
When is a mistake not a mistake? In language at least, the answer to this question is “When everyone adopts it,” and on rare occasions, “When it's in the dictionary.” The word internecine presents a case in point.
Today, it usually has the meaning “relating to internal struggle,” but in its first recorded use in English, in 1663, it meant “fought to the death.” How it got from one sense to another is an interesting story in the history of English.
The Latin source of the word, spelled both internecnus and internecvus, meant “fought to the death, murderous.” It is a derivative of the verb necre, “to kill.” The prefix inter- was here used not in the usual sense “between, mutual” but rather as an intensifier meaning “all the way, to the death.”
This piece of knowledge was unknown to Samuel Johnson, however, when he was working on his great dictionary in the 18th century. He included internecine in his dictionary but misunderstood the prefix and defined the word as “endeavoring mutual destruction.” Johnson was not taken to task for this error.
On the contrary, his dictionary was so popular and considered so authoritative that this error became widely adopted as correct usage. The error was further compounded when internecine acquired the sense “relating to internal struggle.” This story thus illustrates how dictionaries are often viewed as providing norms and how the ultimate arbiter in language, even for the dictionary itself, is popular usage.
I do agree with some of the other responses, that "internecine" strife refers to strife within the family or group, and that this use is the most common.
[I just looked it up in the COD and they define it as "mutually desctructive." Sounds like the meaning is evolving.]
Originally a legal term, it derives from the Old French nonper, odd number, and it initially denoted
a person whose role was to arbitrate between two others. What
sports term is it?
Answer:
umpire
The word entered English circa 1400 as noumpere. The n was dropped almost
immediately due to faulty separation: a noumpere being heard as an
oumpere.
First one I got since starting MooT a month or so ago. Maybe it's because I am back, at least for the holiday weekend, in the environs of my Alma Mater, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
The correct answer to the question as spelled in your email, [what sport's term ..] would be either tennis, cricket, or baseball, or any of the many other sports in which the arbitrator is called an umpire.
[None of those derive from the Old French nonper, so I don't see how they could be correct answers.]
It's curious to see the linguistic voyage that "umpire" had to travel with its multiple metamorphoses when the word in French for "uneven, odd" (in reference to numbers) is simply a visual close cousin: "impair".
I hope I can clarify what two respondents have, directly but without explanation, said. I don't know how you punctuated the origonal email, but had you used the word "sport" in the *posessive*, the question could be translated as "... of *what sport* is this term?" or "*what sport* possesses the term that is derived from the French ..."
[The original punctuation was "sport's term," which I changed when someone pointed out the error. Though at the time, I didn't think it really made much difference. However, now, on reflection, I can see how that leads to baseball, tennis, etc. — i.e., any sport that has an umpire — being correct answers. I hate apostrophes! I also hate the tilde, but for different reasons.]
It's not clear at first glance if the "i" is long or short, so the repetition may not be useful for everyone. It might help if you spelled it "at-chitt-a-mon." Interesting etymology, though I don't know of many instances of t>p mutations.
I don't think it's really t>p. It's much more likely a mutation in response to the m that already exists. so something more like tm>pm (because both t and p are voiceless stops).
You have 99 bottles of wine. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, do you have umpteen bottles of wine?
Answer:
no
According to the COD, to have indefinitely many or a lot of something is to have umpteen of that thing. For some reason, I initially had the answer as yes, but as everyone on Earth has noticed, 99 is a definite quantity, so the answer must be no.
The adjective umpteen derives from the noun umpty, which denotes an indefinite, but fairly large number.
Hm... but if you give an exact number as the example, can you really call that an "umpteen"? From the way the question was phrased, I took it to mean "Does the word umpteen mean 99?" to which I answered "No."
[I agree with you: My answer is wrong, so I'll have to change it.]
I think "maybe" would be a better answer. After all 99 bottles is a definite number, not "indefinitely many." Also, 99 bottles is "a lot" for me to have, but a minuscule number for a wine store or a good restaurant.
Sorry to be all curmudgeonly and pedantic, but 99 is not indefinite, nor (depending upon your wallet or your cellar) is it particularly "a lot" when it comes to bottles of wine. If you were talking about kittens in a studio apartment, I'd be inclined to be more lenient.
Umpteen apologies for needless pendantry.
[As a rule, the best MooT players are both curmudgeons and pedants. You fit right in.]
I disagree with your question, I think you should have said that you have "more than 99 bottles of wine" this would be an indefinite number, 99 bottles is a definite number, another alternative would be that "you have nearly a 100 bottles".
Hmm. My interpretation is that you 'could' have 99 bottles, or 98, or 101 uncounted bottles and refer to the quantity as umpteen. But to say 'if you have 99, do you have umpteen?' takes it out of the realm of indefinite. I know I'm being picky here, but what's etymology if not a place to be picky. Boo!
I'll have to be the contrarian here. According to the definition provided (i.e. "OR a lot of something", the answer must logically be yes, since "a lot of something" doesn't preclude its being a definite quantity. While "indefinitely many" is uncountable, "a lot" is countable. (I'm presuming that the word "indefinitely" doesn't modify "a lot" -- that would be ungrammatical.) In short, the definition given provides for umpteen being either a definite or indefinite quantity.
I said no, but for a different (incorrect) reason. I thought the upteen might refer to the "teen" part of numbers from 13-19. As the Germans say: Man lernt nie aus!
Dictionary.com: 'umpty--1905, "of an indefinite number," originally Morse code slang for "dash," influenced by association with numerals such as twenty, thirty, etc.; umpteen (1917) is World War I army slang, from umpty + teen.' In other words, "[dash] tens" or "[blank] tens," so i'd have said "any number of tens," including 9.9 tens, but apparently the number of tens MUST be unspecified.
I said no as I was thinking about the "nth" equating to umpteenth or umpteen which is an undefined and indefinite number but denotes several or more. "I told you for the nth/umpteenth time, I don't have 99 bottles of wine!" LOL, Cheers!
My experience with the word "umpteen" was more in the Southeast than in the Northeast, and there 99 bottles of wine to me have never been within the range described as "umpteen"; maybe an "umpty" bottles of wine. If we look at the word and its root, we see that "ump- (times) -ty (the value of ten), e.g.: 2x10=20, 5x10=50, etc. = umpty or anything between 20 and 99. "Ump- (plus) -teen (another version of ten), e.g.: 2+10=12, 5+10=15, etc. = anything between 13 and 19. Also, I fear many have forgot the original meaning of "lot": "an allotted share or a portion", be it food, land or an entity to be sold intact at an auction which might be one object or a group of objects. Its numerical value of "a lot" depends upon the noun described: "You have a lot of wine in your glass." "My Grandmother had a lot of children." and "It takes a lot of flowers to fill a garden of one acre."
Oddly, I had the response "no", even though I know of "umpteen", because I would say that 99 falls in the category of "umpty-ump", being a two digit number abover 19....
I'm another in the 'yes' camp, based on the COD's 'or' qualifier (although I too assumed an implication of 'a large amount of something likely to be between 13 and 19' based on '-teen'.
Maybe my confusion stems 99 bottles of wine I've just consumed for research purposes.
In Greek it means "young green
shoot." What feminine given name is it?
Answer:
Chloe
The name Chloe derives from the Greek Khloe, young green shoot, and is related to
khloros, greenish-yellow; hence chlorophyll,
which mean "green leaf" in Greek.
So, similarly would Veronica be derived from the Latin for green?
[No. It ultimately derives (via Macedonian Greek) from the classical Greek name Pherenike, which literally means "bringer of victory" (from pherein, to bring, + nike, victory).]
KHLOE MEANS "GREEN SHORT GRASS"
KHLOROS MEANS "GREEN AND TENDER" THE OPPOSITE OF "DRY"
CHLOROPHYLL DERIVES FROM KHLOROS + PHYLLON AS YOU MENTION "GREEN LEAF"
It denotes ostentatious movement, and it derives from a mangled Anglicization of a French word meaning "gliding step." What square-dancing term is it?
Answer:
sashay
To walk either diagonally or ostentatiously (or both) is to sashay. The word — which also denotes a square dancing move — derives from the French chassé, gliding step, the past participle of the French chasser, to chase.
Well, even trying to cheat didn't work on this one. I Scroogled [scroogle.org] "square dancing terms," hoping to pick the right one out of the list, but it didn't include sashay.
Impossible, since I didn't know that sashay was a square-dance term. If the question had been about dosy-do (dos á dos, back to back) I would have got it.
nielshovmoller at gmail.com (Niels Hovmoller, Stockholm, Sweden)
Ok, where does alamand left, which is the answer I guessed, come from? Actually, I've never heard sashay used in a square-dancing call or I might have thought of it.
In response to those who were wondering about the origin of "alamand," it's actually "allemand(e)," the French word for German. It was a type of courtly dance, as I remember from classical music--although I don't know how it got into square dance terminology. It makes sense, however, that terminolgy for dance moves would have carried over through the centuries and travelled from Europe to N. America. I suspect strongly that "a la main" is a false etymology.
What of, glissante? Or glisten, i.e, to perhaps skate/sparkle, even ostentatiously? Yet I'll concur with sashay. But poking my nose where it doesn't belong, might the term, alamand left derive from a French compilation of ala plus main, meaning roughly "to the hand"? Many thanks! susan eaton, Taos, NM
It derives from a Latin word that denotes a "two-wheeled Celtic war chariot." When it entered English in the thirteenth
century, it denoted "any wheeled vehicle." In the 1890s it was first used in the sense it is most commonly used today. What
word is it?
Answer:
car
The word car derives from the Latin carrum, which denoted a two-wheeled Celtic war chariot. It ultimately derives from the Proto-Indo-European base *kers, to run. Note that the first OED citation for the term car-sick is from 1908.
As always Moot challenges the mind an sends a fiery storm across ones
synapse. Just to let you know that by playing Moot as a family our children have excelled academically beyond belief. My son graduated from College w. honors,our oldest daughter has been accepted to one of the oldest and most selective and elite Ivy League schools in the nation and is the valedictorian for her class; and lastly our youngest girl is a member of the Society of High School Scholars and speaks fluid Italian. They are all well-balanced children and enjoy learning;still as a family.
Moot:Excelsior!
[I did not write this myself. Playing MooT is also a good way to quit smoking.]
I thought this was a great question. Sure the "two wheeled" part was slightly misleading, but a fun quiz question ought to feint at some thing obvious. I love it. More like this one please. :)
In a set of similar things, that which is the most excellent is called "the Cadillac of." For example, in the set of all Toyotas, the most excellent Toyota would be the Cadillac of Toyotas.
It is interesting to notice haw people interpret words in terms of grammar and history only. The superlative mentioned in here is a semantic-metonymic construction, a linguistic game with meaning. I congratulate you for the way you manage this exercise with language. It is most useful. It is a Cadillac of exercises.
Ah, yes, but that's a context thing. i was actually wracking my brain, trying to think of an extant superlative, like dodge paragon or GMC avatar, you know? these are bad examples of superlatives, but i am tired & momentarily brain-dead. yes, you have now listed a new entry into the lexicon, & you have described its etymology — more or less — as coming from our culture.
Sorry, no sale.
The question asked for a superlative, not an analogy with a superlative. A better question would be: "Which type of car is synonymous with excellence?"
Specious at best; the use of Cadillac as a superlative is a parochial phrase which harkens back only a few decades to when Cadillac motorcars were indeed the most excellent. That time has long gone by, with many other marques far exceeding GM's flagship in all matters of excellence. Furthermore, Cadillac as a brand has no etymology related to excellence, but rather to Antoine Laumet (1658-1730)also known as sieur Antoine de Lamothe-Cadillac, the French explorer who founded Detroit in 1701 and whose name was given to the car line in 1902 to (somewhat belatedly) commemorate the city's bicentennial.
When I was a child and read a lot more words than I ever heard spoken aloud, I mispronounced quite a few basic words, including one that comes to mind here: misled, which I pronounced "myzelled", along the lines of "bamboozled". The sound of it was right to describe that wicked thing that happened to innocent young maidens who were too trusting. Anyway, you have myzelled me by making me spend several minutes trying to think of a car name that means "excellent" (something along the lines of Toyotest or Mercurissimus). I do thank you, however, for prompting me to find out who Cadillac actually was.
Maybe there is a good answer to "What is the Rolls Royce of Cadillacs?", but one then has to wonder, "What is the Cadillac of Rolls Royces?" Surely not the superlative, but merely the second-best? How can a term with identical usage be a superlative in one context but faint praise in another?
I think you're stretching a bit on this one. To call the most excellent Toyota a Cadillac would be an insult even if most North Americans would know what was meant.
We enjoy your game-keep up the good work
In response to xrlbnospam at pobox.xcom's question: "How can a term with identical usage be a superlative in one context but faint praise in another?",
I'd ask him to consider the use of quite on both sides of the Atlantic. When we, in Britain, say the book was quite good we mean it was almost good, whereas our American cousins would mean that it was really good. To further complicate matters, when the British say "Quite!" they mean absolutely, exactly, thoroughly and not something less than.
It means "rough speech" in French, and it denotes the dialect of a region's common people as opposed to the dialect of its upper classes. What word is it?
Answer:
patois
According to the Oxford English Dictionary: "French scholars distinguish dialects as the particular forms presented by a language in different regions, so long as there does not exist a common written language. When a common language has become established as the medium of general literature, the dialects lose their literary standing and become patois."
[Any language that is particular to a place is that place's vernacular, so a patois is, thus, a type of vernacular.]
If you want to explore the distinction between patois, argot, vernacular, lingua franca, etc., check out the Online Dictionary of Language Terminology at:
http://www.odlt.org
If you meet people who have emigrated from Jamaica or other places in the West Indies, they will tell you that they speak " Patois" which is a unique combination of English and other languages with lots of abbreviated words and a lilting pronunciation. It's a kind of short hand. In other countries it is called Creole. In the Cape Verde Islands it is called Crio.
In Greek xenos means "foreign" — as in xenophobia, fear or dislike of foreigners. Two words that are derived from this root denote "the ability to speak a language you have never learned." What are they?
Answer:
xenoglossy and xenoglossia
Both words derive from the Greek xenos, foreign or strange + glossa, tongue.
For more information about xenoglossia (as well as glossalalia, coprolalia, embolalia, and Witzelsucht), check out the Online Dictionary of Language Terminology at http://www.odlt.org
In Greek the word strephein means "to turn." Etymology-wise, which punctuation mark turns away?
Answer:
the apostrophe
The word apostrophe derives via Middle French and Late Latin from the Greek apostrophos prosoidia, the accent of turning away (from apo, from + strephein, to turn).
Note: The "turned away" aspect of the word's etymology derives from Greek rhetoric where apostrophe denoted a part of an oration that turned away from the subject at hand to address an absent thing or person.
I would like to have the ODLT to download free, but was interupted by a Windows update and lost the capabiilty to download is there any way I can get another stab at downloading it?
[Actually, it can't be downloaded. It's a web application. This means that you always go to the same location on the internet to use it. Just click the link below.]
hi there - great game. played it here in Philadelphia last night. lots of fun.
one complaint - why do you include people's email addresses in the online reviews? seems like a very 1996 thing to do...
that aside, keep up the good work!
[I've been prefixing "x-" to the email addresses when I display them. This should mess up the harvesters.]
They got their name because they demanded that the Church of England be cleansed of all remnants of Catholicism. Who are they?
Answer:
the Puritans
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Puritans were members of:
"that party of English Protestants who regarded the reformation of the church under Elizabeth as incomplete, and called for its further ‘purification’ from what they considered to be unscriptural and corrupt forms and ceremonies retained from the unreformed church [i.e., the Catholic church]…."
Note that H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy."
Every time I know the answer, the responses all state that it was an easy one. Finally, I knew it and there are no responses yet; it's always "easy" if you know it! :)
Thanks for the education I am receiving by playing!
It was once called a camelopard. What is it now called?
Answer:
a giraffe
According to Samuel Johnson's dictionary, the camelopard is "An Abyssinian animal, taller than an elephant but not so thick. He is so named because he has a neck and head like a camel; he is spotted like a pard [i.e., a leopard], but his spots are white upon a red ground. The Italians call him giaraffa."
According to the OED, the word camelopard was coined as a compound of the word camel (for the long neck) and pard (from leopard) for the spots.
New competitor enters the etymology game. Does MooT stand a chance?
I knew this one from astronomy. Camelopardalis, The Giraffe, a sort of lack-lustre constellation in the Northern Sky. I did not know the etymology behind the name, however, so thanks as always for the tidbit.
The Afrikaans etymology is interesting because there "pard" meaning spotted seems to have become "perd" meaning horse. The latter is - I presume - etymologically identical to the German "Pferd" (= horse). Would I be right in thinking that "pard" is close to the English word "pied", meaning black-and-white spotted, as applied to birds such as the Pied Wagtail, and - I presume - the Magpie?
Etymology-wise, what climate phenomenon is a male child?
Answer:
El Niño
The phrase El Niño denotes the inter-annual oceanic warming of the eastern tropical Pacific. It means “THE male child” (i.e., the Christ child) in Spanish, and it was so called because the warm current appears around Christmas.
Right back at you, what climate phenomenon is a female child?
Tom Clewis
La Niña - the other part of the Southern Oscillation, the irregular inter-annual climate fluctuation between El Niño and La Niña. It is sort of a surface pressure see-saw across the tropical Pacific ocean.
This one was easy. We get very informative weather bulletins here on TV in Australia and are very familiar with the terms SOI (Southern Oscillation Index), El Nino and La Nina because of our arid climate and our droughts.
I also got this one quickly. When I was a commodities broker, we used the term quite often to impress our clients and to explain why the price of heating oil or gasoline would go up or down.
Jan Polatschek, Bangkok
Now I know by why commodities brokers are called "brokers" — they make you broker.
What weapon was named for a town in southwestern France?
Answer:
the bayonet
The weapon - a blade that is attached to a gun and then used to stab the enemy in close combat - was named after Bayonne, a town in southwestern France. The weapon either originated there or was first used there in the early 17th century.
Here's another: What weapon, or component of a weapon, was named for a town in India? Ans: the dum dum bullet, named for the then town of Dum Dum, now the site of the Calcutta Intl Airport. The British Bengal Artillery had an arsenal there.
Apparently, the English sound for being pummeled also comes from a town in SW France (Pau, in Aquitaine), as does the English response to being pummeled (Auch, in the Mid-Pyrenees). However, while the English thrust, the French parry (Paris).
I'm sorry to have to argue that at least two of Jack's French etymologies are simply wrong. 'Pummel' comes from 'pommel', part of a saddle or sword, and that from the Latin 'pomum' (apple). 'Parry' is also from the Latin, and has nothing to do with the French capital. 'Auch' seems to be a joke.
Even the derivation of 'bayonet' is uncertain, as it might be from 'bayon' a crossbow arrow.
The etymology of Bayonne itself is also not clear: it's either from the late Latin for a bay + 'on', the Basque for good, or from 'ibai' the Basque for river. It was originally a Basque settlement, not a Gascon one.
Curiously, two of the very few English words derived from the Czech are weapons: 'pistol' and 'howitzer'. So is the first half of the Bren, a WWII machine gun, as it was designed in Brno, and later manufactured in Enfield.
Roger Cooper, OXON, UK
My guess is that Jack was cracking jokes, but you never know.
It was coined as a loan translation of a German word that implies that the dead are sown to yield a Resurrection. What phrase is it?
Answer:
God’s acre
The word was coined as a
loan translation of German Gottesacker, from Gott (God) + Acker (field). It denotes "a cemetery" but it implies that the dead will be resurrected.
A quasi-inspired reading of Longfellow's "God's Acre"
[No, that's not me. It's a random YouTube person, and he's YouTubular.]
In Yiddish it denotes "an expert" and it derives from a Hebrew word that literally means "one who understands." What word is it?
Answer:
maven
The word derives from the Yiddish meyvn, which ultimately derives from the Hebrew mebhin, which literally means "one who understands" (two of them are mayvinim). William Safire described himself as "the language maven".
A related Hebrew word, bet-yod-nun-heh, BiNah, means "intelligence, understanding" and is related to English "beans" in the idioms "... doesn't know beans about ..." and "spill the beans".
Israel "izzy" Cohen, Petah Tikva, Israel
There is definitely a future MooT question lurking there. Thanks.
This is what the mavens and pundits would call a win-win situation: If I can guess the word I feel refreshingly quick-witted and if I can't, then I have the fun of adding another interesting tidbit to my magpie brain! Thanks again.
Have I mentioned Quadrivial Quandary to you? It's a fairly new site for logophiles where the puzzle is to use four different (and often hilariously unrelated) words in one sentence that not only makes at least rudimentary sense, but also allows the reader to infer the meaning of the words.
When the Greeks first met these Indian philosophers, they called them gymnosophists. What was their defining quality?
Answer:
nakedness
Etymology-wise, the term gymnosophist means “naked philosopher” – from the Greek gymnos, naked, and sophos, wise — similarly, a gymnosperm
is a "naked seed" and a gymnasium is a place for exercizing naked.
The term was first used by Plutarch in the First century CE, when describing an encounter Alexander the Great had with ten gymnosophists in the Punjab.
The fellows the Greeks met were probably Jains who, like their founder Mahavira, would sit naked on the ground while teaching.
Our local elementary school calls their multi-purpose room a "gymnatorium" which presumably would be a place to watch your child's music programs naked!
Deborah Carver Pennsylvania
At this point, legal issues start to make an appearance.
Well, this is the easiest Moot question I've ever seen! I think we've lost something beautiful in our western cultures, insisting that the human body should always be clothed or that nakedness is always sexual or titillating.
Re: "gymnasium," etymology is no guarantee of ultimate meaning of a word.
It puts me in mind of the Canadian editor who, in an editor's mag, misguidedly objected to her son using the term "anniversary" in conjunction with "one-month" on etymological grounds: It violated the etymological sense of "year turning."
By the way, in Germany (and other Euro-countries) "gymnasium" refers to a type of high school preparing students for university (and presumably for naked frat parties).
Awesome! I remember learning about the word Gymnos in 6th grade. The idea of a bunch of naked guys wrestling in a "gym" has unfortunately made its way into my subconscious. Sofist is one of those easy ones, too! Fun!
As an art historian, I particularly enjoyed this question and the responses; it gets us back to the original ideal for people (men only at that time) to excercise - therefore perfect - themselves naked, and why Greek sculpture represented ideal man naked.
The God-given Body Beautiful (or in the case of the Jains, the Body Pure, perhaps) required no further adornment. In most other ancient cultures, complete nakedness in its perceived vulnerability indicated slave status or shame.
Sadly, we seem to have inherited mixed messages based chiefly or only on the latter.
Also, reply to Mr. Ognistoff's comment re unattractive construction: "one-month anniversary": let's not simply give up on learning and using words according to their original roots and logically derived meanings. Let's instead coin new words where needed; I propose 'moniversary' (month turning) for all those people with short-lived romances: "At the high school dance, I gave Dickie a ring for our 2nd moniversary."
Re: Ms. Lundgren's response to my response about etymology and meaning. Understanding of etymology may enrich one's understanding of a word, but to restrict the meaning of a word based on its etymology would probably render the majority of the English lexicon incomprehensible and deny the most basic processes of linguistic change. If one took Ms. Lundgren's argument to the extreme, a sentence like "The knight was astounded" would actually mean "The boy was struck by lightning."
I knew this one, but seeing Roopinder's response I'm now puzzled as to why - in the UK, at least - gymkhana means a one-day outdoor event where people, many of them children, compete on horseback for tiny cash prizes or even just rosettes. They're usually organised by the Pony Club, and were gently satirised in the cartoons of a man called Thelwell.
(re: Tom Empson) Sir, the British borrowed a lot of words from India and applied their own meaning to them. The word Jungle in India means Wood or Forest, whereas in England, it means a Tropical Forest. The British may use the word Gymkhana but they have applied a different meaning to it.
According to the Wikipedia, in Greek its name suggests that it's from France, whereas in French its name suggests that it's from India. Where do English speakers think this bird is from?
Answer:
Turkey
In Greek it's called the gallopoula, French chicken. In French it's called la dinde, which is short for poulet d’inde, chicken from India. For the complete Wikipedia list, go here. Thanks for Shane McCune for the question.
In Hebrew, its called "Hodu," which has two interesting and related meanings: It means "India" and it means "Thanks." Ironic, no? So if you bought your holiday turkey from India, and you want to give thanks for it in hebrew, you must say, "Hodu l'Hodu l'hodu!" (Which, if you ask me, sounds like turkey gobbling.)
I followed this up: on Wikipedia there is a whole list of names for the turkey in different languages. The Hindi name is taken from the Portuguese, who are the only ones to have gotten it remotely right: they call it a "peru"--the (now common domestic) turkey being a bird originating in the Americas (although, as I understand it, not South America).
It seems that part of the confusion comes from the resemblance of the turkey to guinea fowl, which are African in origin, but traded in Europe in Asia through various countries. In particular, the North American turkey was so named in English due to its resemblance to this other bird, called by the English at the time "turkey fowl".
One thing is clear in most of those languages: that bird ain't from these parts!
OK, so how come there is a fish in Cajun country called "canard d'Inde"? Duck of India? Turkey duck?
In Spanish, the rooster is called "Gallo". I think in Italian, too.
FYI, a new-ish word-lover's site called Quadrivial Quandary offers another sort of puzzle for people carrying around spare vocabulary! Thanks for this delightful game. I either get the answer right away or not at all. Forehead-crinkling doesn't seem to help. Or maybe I don't keep it crinkled long enough....
We may call it a turkey (much to the chagrin of a Turkish student of mine who was thoroughly insulted by my using the name turkey to refer to his country), but the Turks call it a hindi. The Hindi-speakers, meanwhile, call it a peru. Let's face it: no one wants to be a turkey, do they?
As I understand it, the reason for a turkey to be so called is not because it was thought to be from the country Turkey, but rather because its plumage resembled a particular style of Persian carpet, which it does.
In the 18th century when the name arose, such carpets were traded through Constantinople, so became known as Turkey carpets, in, for example, the writings of Jane Austen.
When they discovered the bird in North America, some Europeans thought it looked like a guinea fowl, which in French was indeed called poulet d'Inde, as it originated in Abyssinia, so India was not far wrong.
I don't think English-speakers thought it was actually from Turkey in those days.
By extension, also bicentenary (200th), tri-, etc., and of course, bimillenary, etc. Maybe not in a dictionary, but there are things in dictionaries that tell you to keep going with a theme, e.g., dis-, tri-, bi-, many others....
Pace joe Phibbs' comment below about Jamestown's quadracentenary, I thought that the word for 400th was quatercentenary. As a schoolboy stamp collector in the UK in the sixties, I remember getting excited when a beautiful set of stamps was issued to commemorate the quatercentenary (in 1964) of Shakespeare's birth. I'm sure I've also seen tercentenary used for 300th. By extension, 'sencentenary' would be logical but look and sound a bit odd for 600th.
Tom Empson, Cambridge UK
It looks like you're right. The OED cites "quatercentenary" but not "quadracentenary." It was coined from the Latin quater, four times, based on the example of "tercentenary."
I would have expected 12 to be based on dodeka.... My artist son and I once did a series of twelve paintings with poetry to celebrate the 12 calendar months of the year. We named it Dodecatry.
Its name derives from a Hebrew word meaning "order" or "procedure." What Jewish ceremony is it?
Answer:
Seder
The name derives from the Hebrew sedher, order or procedure. It denotes a ritualized Jewish ceremonial dinner that is held on the first evening of Passover.
The OED's first citation for the word Seder is from an 1865 Chambers's Encyclopedia entry, whereas its first citation for the word Passover is from Tindale's 1530 Bible.
How is it possible that the first citations are relatively recent? This stuff is in the Old Testament! 1530 and 1865 seem a bit late in the game to acknowledge something so major. :-?
Todd in Bangkok, Thailand
I don't know. Maybe someone else on the mailing list does.
"The name derives from the Hebrew sedher, order or procedure."
Indeed it does, but where does the intrusive 'h' come from?
The Hebrew is סדר, the equivalent of s-d-r, with no hint of aspiration.
C. Fletcher, Utopia
Again, I don't know. That's taken directly from the OED, so it was their decision. Maybe someone else can explain why. What say you out there in internet-land?
Yes, and the three consonant root, S-D-R, also gives us the following:
Sidrah, the order of the reading of the Torah Scroll for the day/week;
Siddur, literally the arrangement, referring to the order of the prayers to be delivered at any service, arranged in the form of a printed compendium or book;
MeSader, literally the arranger, usually of a wedding ceremony, where the officiant is known as MiSader Kiddushin.
To answer some of the questions on this thread, let me say this:
The reason that Seder and Passover are cited by the OED as being 1865 and 1530 respectively is becauss the OED speaks of ENGLISH usage of the word. Refernce to the Seder in Jewish sources comes from the first century A.D., when the actual Seder for Pesach took its form; William Tyndale's masterpiece English translation of the Jewish Scriptures translated literally the passing over -- P-S-CH or PESACH -- of the angel of death in the tenth plague in Egypt. (Of course, King Henry VIII did not authorize this, so Tyndale fled to Brussels, where Henry's hit men whacked William in 1536.)
As far as Seder being spelled with the aspirated, intrusive 'h', that would reflect a Sephardically accented pronunciatoin, as opposed to a European or Ashkenazic one. While I would actually pronounce the word SAY-dehr, the OED was using effecting the pronunciation as
SEHD-her. it is a case of "you say toe-MAH-toe and I say toe-MAY-toe, as I see it.
I believe that Tydale's Bible was the first translation of (most of) the Bible into modern English (although Wyclif's Bible, in Middle English, appeared some 150 years earlier). It may not be surprising that 1530 is the first citation in English, particularly as Wyclif could have used a different word, e.g. "Pasch" whose derivation OED gives as Old English.
As a follow-up to the above, Wyclif apparently uses "pask" as in John 13:1:
"Bifor the feeste dai of pask Jhesus witynge, that his our is comun, that he passe fro this world to the fadir ...".
Etymology-wise, the word peninsula is to almost island
as what word is to almost
shadow?
Answer:
penumbra
In Latin paene means "almost," insula means "island" and umbra means "shadow."
Hence, a peninsula is an almost
island and a penumbra is an almost shadow. Similarly, the penultimate is the almost last and the penannular is almost ringlike.
The nicest semi-cognate is UMBRELLA, so when the typical icy Bora wind blows here in Trieste from karst [coast?] to sea, you'll find yourself with a penumbrella - i.e. half (or less!) of it.
I have a friend who *always* gets the answer right. Like Jonathan, above, I got this one right away, probably because I'm well-versed in astronomical terms. And I like Lukas' penumbrella -- something that I've often experienced, but now have a good name for!
Jon Alexandr, Marin County (just north of San Francisco)
It's "antepenultimate" rather than "anti-". "Ante-" means prior or before, as in antecedent, antediluvian, and anteroom. "Anti-" means against or opposing. The two prefixes are often confused in spelling.
Would you take an "umbrella" out in the sunshine or in the rain? Probably in the sunshine, since it creates shade/shadow, like a parasol. On the other hand, you might choose a bumbershoot or bumberchute, but wait--that comes from a mashup of ombre and parachute, so that's not good in the rain either. We may have to borrow from the French and use a parapluie against the rain, and finally, end up with a "peneparapluie" in Trieste.
I used to work in the Istrian peninsula of Croatia, where the bora was also strong: it could even blow vehicles into the sea! 'Karst' (from the German) is not connected with 'coast' by the way. It's the name for the limestone plateau near Trieste, which is used to describe similar geological formations elsewhere.
What toy — once popular as a fairground prize — is named for a Roman god?
Answer:
the kewpie doll
The kewpie doll is a chubby doll with a curl or topknot on its head. It derives from a design by R. C. O'Neill (1874–1944). According to O'Neill, "The reason why these funny, roly-poly creatures are called Kewpies … is because they look like little Cupids [the Roman god of love]." (Source: OED s.v. kewpie)
Thanks to Shane McCune who submitted this great question.
I agree with Dave. This question definitely falls in the easy category. A fun fact to know and tell, but not the most challenging.
Paul F. Meyerhoefer, Columbus, Ohio
In the board game MooT, the cards are colour-coded (from least to most difficult: red, green, yellow, and blue). This question would be a yellow question; the really hard ones are blue.
This is Corporate doublespeak. A 10% decline in anything is, etymologically, a "decimation." People seem to have confused this perfect word with "devastation," such that saying, "The village was decimated" means that it was totally (not merely 10%) destroyed. Since many dictionaries accept the "total destruction" version of "decimate," it is perhaps too late to argue the fine points of Latin derivations. However, I still feel that calling a 10% decline in the stock market a "correction" is a euphemism designed to shield stock owners from the warning that the market might become "decimated" in the popular sense.
Barbara Basbinah, Massachusetts
Actually, I think it is just economics' terminology.
I suspect you may have missed the irony seeded into the Economist's article. I hear usage of the word 'correction' here in the UK on the financial programmes and the news commentary, and I have a no impression that it implies a precise figure. If the Economist wrote: "He lies, you falsify, I am economical with the truth", we wouldn't take it as an authoritative comment on the use of English.
David Churchill, UK
I've seen this definition used elsewhere, so I don't think that they were being "ironic." For example, a quick browse found this definition at About.com: "A stock market correction is usually when the stock market, usually the Dow Jones Industrial Average, declines 10% or less in a relatively short period of time." I wasn't able to find an OED citation for it, but perhaps someone else can come up with futher info.
Etymology-wise, which diacritical mark's name means "little z" in Spanish?
Answer:
the cedilla
Cedilla is the name of a diacritic used under the c to indicate a soft pronunciation in, for example, French words such as façade.
The word derives from the Spanish cedilla, the feminine diminutive of the letter z, thus it means "little z." It was so called because originally a z was written after the c to indicate that its pronunciation was soft; eventually, it was written underneath.
I knew the French word "cedille" and was able to guess the correct answer. I didn't know the Spanish origin and didn't even know the term had an English version. Thanks for teaching me something again!
Françoise, Ottawa
Given your given name, I'm not surprised you got it right. That has to be some sort of an advantage.
Hard question if you don't know Spanish... but I do. First I was going with 'tilde', that little waggle over the 'n' that gives an 'ny' sound, as in 'canyon'. But just as I clicked to verify I exclaimed "No! It's cedilla!" And I was right. Gosh, that was exciting.
Yes! Finally one I can answer. I thought, zeta... zetita... zetilla... CEDILLA! Interesting that the t seems to have gotten voiced over time, so now it's pronounced [.se.'di.ja.] instead of [.se.'ti.ja.]and that it's spelled with a c and d instead of a z and t.
Etymology-wise
is not acceptable English.
Can you think of another way of saying that?
Thank you.
[Can you explain to me why it is unacceptable?]
I am thrilled to see that you care enough to inquire.
Thank you for that.
The suffix -wise means: in the manner of,
as in lengthwise, clockwise, likewise, otherwise.
These are are adverbs commonly used in English.
-wise does not stand for: with regard to, concerning, with reference to ...
To illustrate, look at this paragraph:
"Sleepwise, I haven't been obeying orders doctorwise. Healthwise, this affects my work energywise and my profits salewise. Marriagewise, I am in trouble doghousewise."
This from the Book WORDS ON WORDS by John B Bremer.
The author states:
This preposterous paragraph illustrates the abomination of indiscriminately adding -wise, in the sense of "concerning" or "as regards" to any old noun to form an adverb.
And William Strunk, in his Elements of Style, denounces the indiscriminate use of -wise, and urges writers to avoid this colloquialism.
-wise. Not to be used indiscriminately as a pseudosuffix: taxwise, pricewise, marriagewise, prosewise, saltwater taffy-wise. Chiefly useful when it means "in the manner of: clockwise. There is not a noun in the language to which -wise cannot be added if the spirit moves one to add it. The sober writer will abstain from the use of this wild additive.
There you have it.
[I base almost everything in MooT on definitions and other information supplied by the Concise Oxford Dictionary. According to the COD: "the use of -wise in more fanciful phrase-based combinations, such as employment-wise (= as regards employment), is colloquial and should be restricted to informal contexts."
Now, it is important to keep in mind that MooT is a board game and these list questions are essentially diversions. Is that not a sufficiently informal context?]
Informal is fine.
Incorrect is not, in my mind.
"I ain't got time is considered informal."
I would never say that.
It is clearly wrong.
Especially on a website devoted to the joy of language.
Informal, to me , is something like this:
"Hey, dude, what's going on for you?"
That is informal, and correct English at the same time.
"Cooking-wise, I am a real pro" … is maybe informal, but certainly poor English.
You can do whatever you want, of course.
And I enjoy your website tremendously.
[I'm very familiar your point of view and have thought about it before. Ultimately, I like using "etymology-wise" because I find it a very convenient shorthand for giving a clue as to where MooT players should look answers. It's concise, and I know from many years of testing MooT questions at live games that it gets the point across very clearly. So with that utility in mind, I intend to keep using it. Consider it a convention of the board game MooT, sort of like yelling "fore" when you hit a golf ball.
Also, linguistics-wise, because of this process, the suffix -wise is evolving into a more productive form (i.e., it's being used to create a larger set of adverbs and adjectives). Making this is a good example of how languages evolve through the novel use of existing structures. However — and here's the conundrum — this process is also the bane of prescriptivists like you and Bremer who are doing their best to uphold the conventions we need to make sure that we can communicate clearly with each other and with future generations of English speakers.]
So, let's apply the Mimi's advice to the sick paragraph she quoted. Here goes:
"With regard to sleep, I haven't been obeying orders with regard to my doctor. With regard to my health, this affects my work with regard to energy and my profits with regard to sales. With regard to my marriage, I am in trouble with regard to the doghouse."
Boy, that paragraph sure sounds a whole lot better now.
"With regard to" the -wise debate: Mimi Macht makes valid and important points; in fact, her setting out this argument brings with it significant relief to us beleaguered English purists. However, perhaps MooT can be allowed the occasional -wise, especially as introduction of a note of humor, rather than as an "informality."
In rebuttal to Mr. Ognistoff, we would not of course correct the ridiculous paragraph by substituting "with regard to" for each -wise; we would recast the whole syntax, e.g. "my doctor's orders." His re-write was good for a laugh, though. Thanks.
Portuguese has this too....they call it cedilha, pronounced the same as Spanish. It can be created on the keyboard by holding down the alt key and typing 0231, or using the ANSI keyboard.
It was coined as a Hobson-Jobson of the Shia Muslim cry
Ya Hasan, Ya Husayn. What language term is it?
Answer:
Hobson-Jobson
The process of altering a foreign expression so that it fits the speech and spelling patterns of the borrowing language is called Hobson-Jobsonism, and the word that results from the transformation is called a Hobson-Jobson.
For example: (1) The Algonquian arakhun became the English racoon, and (2) the Spanish juzgado, a tribunal, became the English hoosegow, jail.
The term Hobson-Jobson was coined as a Hobson-Jobson of the Shia Muslim cry Ya Hasan, Ya Husayn, O Hasan! O Husain! — Hasan and Husain were grandsons of Muhammad who were killed while fighting for the faith.
I have to admit I was extremely confounded while reading this question several times over. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what other term is used to describe a Hobson-Jobson as I presumed you were looking for a different answer. Isn't using the answer in a question asking for the answer considered bad form, or at the very least misleading and confusing? I'm certain my logic professor would figuratively bonked me upside the head if you'd tried something like this in his class, but that was many years ago: perhaps the rules have changed since then.
Dude! I consider myself a fairly intelligent person. Plus I am fluent in Arabic. Your question is totally tricky and backwards. But an interesting tidbit of info you have provided us with this week. For that I thank you.
Interesting. My guess was "yahoo," someone the speaker deems to be from some "backwater" (as the mid-East is to some Americans.) Probably "yahoo" comes from the vocalizations of backwaterites under the influence of moonshine. I'd never even heard the expression "Hobson
-Jobson" before.
But why this particular, specific combination? What's the origin? Why not Hansen - Hudson for example?
David Smith, Charlotte
I don't know. When the Shiites said "Ya Hasan, Ya Husayn," some or most Brits heard "Hobson-Jobson." Perhaps, Americans would have heard "Johnson and Johnson."
The French called part of the passage between Martinique and Guadeloupe Le cay qui gene. The Brits turned it around and called it, logically, if not poetically, Kick 'em Jenny.
Great question and lovely formulation! But while "Hobson-Jobson" itself may be an entertaining and colourful illustration of a hobson-jobson, I in fact wonder whether it is a true hobson-jobson at all: It sounds to me like the originators of the word went beyond modifying the sounds a bit to "fit [English] speech and spelling patterns." It sounds to me like they willfully went out of their way to change the sounds to express their disdain and dismissal of the heathens.
'Hobson Jobson' is what was heard by the Brits, or rather mis-heard, and there's a whole compendium on Anglo-Indian English called Hobson-Jobson, to commemorate that. Since what was misheard was already in your question, I thought you were looking for the term MONDEGREEN which describes a similar phenomenon.
Punita Singh, New Delhi
Still, the term "Hobson-Jobson" is a hobson-jobson, whereas the term "mondegreen" is not.
Note: If you want to find out what a mondegreen is and how it was coined, click here and then find its entry in the ODLT.
Maggie from New Jersey reminded me of a few of my favorite mondegreens in songs. One is the first line of the chorus of Elton John's "Tiny Dancer". 'Hold me closer tiny dancer' sounds like 'Hold me closer Tony Danza'. In the Tragically Hip's "Another Midnight", the line 'Can't they let us run wild' sounds like 'Can't the lettuce run wild'. And of course everyone knows the one in Manfred Mann's "Blinded by the Light"...
It certainly was a tricky question, with the answer being part of the question! It's also difficult to see that Hobson-Jobson is itself a hobson-johnson, since phonetically it fails the test, and the example of "raccoon" is also a dubious one. My guess is that "Hobson" is related to the Cambridge liveryman who gave rise to the phrase "Hobson choice", which meant no choice at all, thus injecting some humour into the disrespectful interpretation.
"Lady Mondegreen" is a far better example. In Victorian London some church collections were "for the vicar's stipend", which my mother, born in 1894, heard as "for the vicar's tie pin", which she and her siblings thought strange, as he always wore a dog collar.
A contemporary mondegreenism is the nickname for the controversial Iranian president: "I'm in a dinner jacket". By the way, Hasan, the Prophet's grandson, died of poisoning in a harem intrigue, while his brother Husayn was killed in a failed attempt to claim the caliphate, and not, strictly speaking, "for the faith", although the event did give birth to the Shiâ branch of Islam, always opposed to the mainstream Sunnis.
Roger Cooper, Oxon
Thanks for the info. My source for the Hobson-Jobson etymology and definition is the "Oxford Companion to the English Language." They claim that both "Hobson-Jobson" and "raccoon" are hobson-jobsons.
Ok, it's a trick question. But is there a solution technique? I think so: it relies on giving the author the benefit of the doubt.
The question includes a technical term that is surely unknown to practially everybody. Assuming the question was crafted, and this strange term wasn't tossed in just to make the author look smart, why is it there? Why, it must be a clue itself.
Steve White, Potsdam, DE
Yes it is a clue, but it was also put in there to make me look smart. Did it work?
Note: In Canada the act of using Latin to make people laugh is called a "Wayne-and-Shuster." For example: Julius Caesar walks into a bar and orders a "martinus." The bartender says: "Don't you mean a martini." Caesar replies: "If I'd wanted two, I would'a ordered two."
Although I had never heard this term, I am a linguist, so I recognized immediately that Hobson-Jobson was a mangling of the Arabic words (this is one of the few I've gotten). A girl I traveled with in Mexico could not pronounce Tlaquepaque, so she said plucky, plucky. Takay Pakay would have been closer to the real pronunciation and still pronouncable by an English speaker, but not as fun to say or as meaningful. I'm sure a lot of Hobson-Jobsons are given an extra dose of mutilation for the same reasons. Hobson-Jobson is definitely not a mondegreen.
Another mondegreen, just for fun. When my husband was young, he thought the last line of Silent Night was "sleep in heavenly peas," and thought it sounded very lumpy.
Its name derives from a Portuguese word meaning "home-born slave." However, ultimately, it derives from a Latin word meaning "to produce or create." What language-type is it?
Answer:
a creole
A creole is a language that arises from continuing contact between a European language and a non-European language, especially an African language. Some West African Creoles are: Aku (Gambia), Krio (Sierra Leone), and Kamtok (Cameroon).
The word derives from the Portuguese crioulo, home-born slave. Ultimately, it derives from the Latin creare, to produce or create.
It originally denoted the setting out of the first three gospels in parallel columns for the sake of comparison. Now it denotes a summary. What word is it?
Answer:
synopsis
The word derives from the Greek synopsis, general view, from a stem that means "to all at once" (from syn-, together + horan, to see).
The Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke were called the Synoptic gospels because they told the story of Jesus' life from a very similar point of view. As opposed to the Gospel of John, which seems to have a very different rhetorical purpose.
I came up with exegesis and was convinced that I had it right, but now I realize that exegesis usually refers to the comparison of various translations of the same gospel.
In Hebrew ebhen means "stone." What given name means "stone of help" in Hebrew?
Answer:
Ebenezer
The given name derives from the name of a stone that the Old Testament prophet Samuel raised to commemorate a victory over the Philistines at Mizpeh (I Sam. vii.12). It derives from the Hebrew ebhen ezar, stone of help (from ebhen, stone + ezer, help).
This one was easy for me because I grew up with a hymn that said, "Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I'm come. We carried stones to the top of a hill as we sang.
This is the FIRST ONE I got right in the two years or so I've been subscribed! Of course, it was pretty easy, compared to most. But man, I'm disproportionately happy about guessing it!
Found this one easy--a payoff from a little Old testament knowledge. I remember finding it interesting that Scrooge's name meant "stone of help." Correction, though. Samuel was not a king. He anointed two kings for Israel but told them they needed no king but God.
Dean Phillips, Missoula, MT
Thanks. Correction made: Changed "king" to "prophet."
In Old English dis means "bunch of flax". Originally, it denoted a stick that held flax while it was being spun, but eventually it came to label the spinsters themselves. What word is it?
Answer:
distaff
The word distaff — which denotes "the female sex" — derives from the Old English distæf, stick that holds flax for spinning (from dis-, bunch of flax + stæf, stick or staff). By the late 13th century, it had become a synonym for females probably because spinning was deemed women's work.
I had heard this only in the expression 'the distaff side'. Can you quote examples of the word used alone to mean 'women'?
C Fletcher, Ramat Bet Shemesh, Israel
This is from the OED entry for "distaff":
"b. Hence, symbolically, for the female sex, female authority or dominion; also, the female branch of a family, the ‘spindle-side’ as opposed to the ‘spear-side’; a female heir."
And here's the example citation they give (from 1709):
I got it today! And my husband, the English major, with a fabulous vocabulary, did not! Not that I will spend the entire day gloating, but perhaps a few hours!
The slang term Jones (for) denotes "intense desire or addiction" — as in "He's got a Jones for food."
This denotation probably arose from the earlier use of Jones as a synonym for "heroin." No one knows who Jones was or why the name was associated with heroin. If any of you Mootlist junkies have any idea, please let me know.
Oh Brother! Here I was racking the ol' noggin for something sophisticated and here it was just plain street lingo. I think I've got a jones to whap someone at MooT for that one! It was fun anyway.
I think that there's a problem with this question: the use of "surname" seems to indicate there is another, first, name. This could be misleading to the potential solver.
Chuck Davis, Surrey, BC
Mmm. I don't know. Does anyone else agree with this? This is obviously a very tough question. When I tested it out on the expert MooT players that I try these questions out on, no-one got it.
Could it possibly be from Davie Jones locker??
Where all ships of gold and treasure worth is beyond understanding
resides in waiting of discovery to give you a euphoria like a high..
I just came to mind when I read this little ditty..
Not sure this has any currency in Britain, though I might be wrong. Also, I agree with the problem: the use of "surname" seems to indicate there is another, first, name. I was looking for a first name that would lead me to a surname.
David Churchill, UK
It seemed to me that if I'd just used "name" you would have all been looking for a given name. I thought that saying "surname" would narrow it down and make it easier.
I can see how some people found the question's phrasing confusing. They must have read it to mean that "intense desire" acts as a given name (i.e. "What is [Jack's} surname?" and that it has an additional name which is a surname.
Thus, according to this reading, if intense desire has a surname, it must also have a given name, which they set out to find. This is different than reading the question to mean that intense desire's surname is simply another way of expressing intense desire.
The question, I suppose, is ambivalent, although I didn't have any problem with it--and it is consistent with the phrasing of other Moot questions.
I was thinking along the same lines as Chuck, actually. So I was trying to think of possible two-word combinations that would mean "intense desire" and seeing if either turned out to be a name. Either way, I DEFINITELY didn't get this one.
Might it come from the expression "keeping up with the Joneses?" That term also denotes want, as opposed to need.
There is also an old R&B tune called (I think) "Me and Mrs. Jones". Perhaps the lyrics refer to a drug dependency, rather than a guy. I led a sheltered childhood, so hidden meaning in lyrics is usually lost on me…
Liz Nash, Saskatoon
If heroin addiction has a soundtrack, that song is probably on it.
Its not Jones, but "Harry Jones"! It started in the 1960s. Marijuana was known as "Mary Jane" (English sound approximation on the word that sounded like the Spanish name Maria Juana), and heroin as "Harry Jones". The entire thing was simply based on first letter common name association. Mary Jane was first, so "Harry Jones" followed with the J after the Mary Jane fashion with Harry sounding like the first two syllables of he-ro-in. When smoked together as a cigarette they were known as the A-bomb, appropriate for the time of the Cuban crisis and the Vietnam War.
When I was in college, I worked as a waiter. Many of my colleagues were professional waiters who lived in Harlem or The Bronx. I learned some of the Black slang. "Jones" is a synonym for penis! Definitely. Hence the connection to desire and eventually to "H."
A poster on Yahoo Answers suggests that the term originates from Great Jones Alley in Manhatten, apparently a haunt for heroin addicts (tinyurl.com/am5w7x).
The song "Basketball Jones" by Cheech & Chong (which features excellent guitar work by George Harrison) was a parody of an R&B song (I got a) "Love Jones". Young as I was when I heard that song in the early seventies (pre-teen), I somehow understood what the phrase meant.
It's nice to see a modern(-ish)slang term used in this game. It makes it seem less stuffy,
[ [Stuffy?] ]
and seriously widens the pool for what type of answers we should consider. Our language is continually evolving. Words that are so widely understood for this long, like "Jones" should be fair game. Give the "Slayer-Speak" from "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" a few years and it will be part of our language as well. -That was fun.
For example, the Jesus described in the Gospel of John is called the johannine Jesus. Note that the adjectives "johnian" and "jonian" denote "that which belongs to St. John's College, Cambridge."
Granted, it wouldn't be in the dictionary, but an argument could be made for "Johnish" as an adjective. "-ish" is what linguists call a productive suffix, which basically means you can stick it onto any noun and come up with a colloquially acceptable word. That, however leaves us with an almost endless list of adjectives which, of course, wouldn't be found in the dictionary.(Neither, by the same token, would you find, say, all the plural words derived by the addition of -s; it is regular and therefore taken for granted.)
I suppose John-like would be another example of a similarly productive suffix. On the other hand, I don't think "Johnny" works as an adjective because, despite -y being a fairly productive suffix, it already exists as a diminutive.
Wow, my third right answer in five or so years! I guess that theology degree is starting to pay off!
Megan, Poulsbo
People who have theology degrees tend to be good MooT players. It could be because they know some Latin and Greek, or perhaps it's because they've spent a lot of time disputing terminology. Thomas Aquinas would have been the Wayne Gretzky of MooT.
Why specifically St John's College, Cambridge, I wonder? At Oxford, where the dictionaries come from, there is also a college of that name, but when I was an undergraduate there in the 1950's I don't recall any such adjective for matters connected with the college. We were just 'John's men' or such. True, 'Johannine' (with upper case J) does refer in theological circles to the doctrines of St John, though only the gospeller, not the baptist, and it is the latter after whom the colleges are named.
While Johannine is recognized as the adjective of St John, it is not used as an adjectival form for the name John in general.
Similarly, 'Pauline' refers to St Paul, rather than to anyone named after him, male or female. Regarding the reference to the Cambridge college, perhaps OUP was having a little joke, or recording a nonce word. Ever since Sam Johnson (Johannine Samuel?) lexicographers have occasionally shown a sense of humour, perhaps to mitigate the drudgery. It's probably true to say that few first/Christian names have adjectives, unless they refer to historical persons, such as 'Arthurian', 'Elizabethan', 'Carolin(g)ian', Victorian'...
PS: I've just googled St John's College, Cambridge, and found that it is so named after the Evangelist, and not the Baptist, as I had thought, whereas my old Oxford college is definitely named in honour of St John the Baptist.
In Italian it means "bottle." In English it means "a complete and ridiculous failure." What three-syllable word is it?
Answer:
fiasco
When it entered English, the word initially denoted "a failure or break-down in a dramatic or musical performance."
According to the OED: "The figurative use of the phrase far fiasco (lit. ‘to make a bottle’) in the sense "to break down or fail in a performance" is of obscure origin; Italian etymologists have proposed various guesses, and alleged incidents in Italian theatrical history are related to account for it."
A fiasco is a particular type of bottle, one with a rounded bottom, shaped rather like a standard light bulb. It could not stand up unsupported. If not supported, it would fall over and spill the wine. It was the standard bottle in Chianti long ago. This why cheap Chianti is sold today in bottles with a decorative wicker-like wrap around the bottom.
This is curiously similar to a question posed on the Car Talk program on NPR. It allegedly arose from a common test of glass artisans - making a flask - and the term for a failed attempt.
Jamie Read, Seattle
Are you implying that we might steal MooT questions from Car Talks shows? If you are, you're correct. We would. That's how we come up with this stuff.
Thank you! One of my favorites! My Italian friends define "fiasco" as not just a bottle, but a bottle with a round base that requires a basket to keep it up-right... sort of a "failure of design"... (but it is easier for glass blowers to create bottles with round bases-- think of blowing a bubble.) So it "fails to stand up" hence the etymologic link to the idea of "a plan gone awry". But of course, in the same breath, my Italian friends started to argue about this etymology, and I have had trouble validating this origin.
PS: Love the board game. Thanks.
You should mention the direct English cognate "flask." (The Latin "i" will grade to an "l" in such blends, like flame-fiamma, blank-bianco, plate-piatto, clear-chiaro, and thousands more.)
"Fare Fiasco" or "to fail" derives [from] dalla Commedia dell'Arte Italiana. Actors did not have a script, but did improvise their part after given a cetain object to elaborate on. When an actor received a "fiasco", his theatrical representation failed to amuse the public.
The OED and Italian etymologists are both in denial, as are the linguists in general. If one looks at the history of Latins, one first finds that they are not from Italy (Latin oral history), and secondly that they, and the Greeks, emerged as literate populations at a time when the 'lingua franca' of the Mediterranean was Semitic, either Phonecian or Hebrew, for the most part due to trade activity of Carthage or Israel (Egypt was insular).
So, why is it that the word for failure should come from a word for bottle, and why is it that this is the word for bottle in Italian?
If one looks at Modern Hebrew, one sees the word oseik, to exert oneself, or to engage in doing. The word "fiasco" can therefore be broken up into two Hebrew words, Peh (speak) and Oseik (engage);Peoseik->feoseik->feaseik->feasko->fiasco. The graphic presentation of this would have been an expression of the orator's/actor's face that is not unlike that on a glass blower's face, which is how bottles were made in the Ancient World (as in being full of hot air), and the inability to produce a blown glass object, would be a failure, the obverse of not engaging one's mouth (and lungs), Lo (not) peh oseik (in a corrupted Hebrew).
However, due in large part to the anti-Jewish sentiments in the 19th century linguistic academia in Europe, and the entire premise that European languages, and particularly Latin and Greek, have nothing to do with the Semitic languages, and notably Hebrew, the possibility that the "great" Latin language should be recognised to have borrowed much from the cultures it vanquished later is denied.
And so the etymological academia invented "proto-Latin" :)
What are the odds? A version of the 'fiasco' question was on Jeopardy last night. Only their clue said it was Italian for 'flask,' which made it easier.
Shane McCune, Comox, British Columnbia
I worked out the odds. They are 245,781 to 1. So this kind of thing CAN happen.
In Latin it means "he holds." In English it denotes "a thing held to be true." What word is it?
Answer:
tenet
A doctrine, dogma, principle, or opinion held by a school, sect, party, or person is a tenet. For example, the Animal Farm tenet "Four legs good; two legs bad."
The word derives from the Latin tenet, he holds (from tenere, to hold).
I got this one. ... Yes, but about the example you give: Some animals are more equal than others! For instance, only man can do self-overcoming; only man's longings and spiritedness can transcend. Even anti-speciesism activists recognize this implicitly: against holy writ (Genesis 1), they demand that man not deem he is higher than other animals. They do not imagine that houyhnhnms could question their tenet of superiority over yahoos.
jp mills, wheaton
I'm just using it as an example. I don't actually agree with it. How bout: "Two legs good; four wheels bad."
Its name derives from the Italian
word for "nephew"; what species of unfairness is it?
Answer:
nepotism
The word nepotism derives from the
Italian nepote, nephew. In the past, the illegitimate sons of Popes were often
called "nephews" - and, evidently, they often received some form of
preferential treatment.
According to David Shenk in the book
Data Smog
, two neologisms can be defined as:
"advertisements disguised to look like journalism"; what are they?
Answer:
infomercial and advertorial
According to Shenk, the genre is designed
to elicit "from the consumer the kind of trust he or she would normally place
in a newspaper article or TV news segment."
What famous battle's name means
"gates of heat" in Greek?
Answer:
Thermopylae
Thermopylae (from the Greek thermos, hot)
was the name of a pass from Thessaly to Locris. In ancient times, it was the
only passage for an army going from northern to southern Greece. In 480 B.C.
300 Spartans defended it to the last man against an invading Persian army.
Originally, a Chinese Communist
motto meaning "work together," during WWII it became an American armed-forces
slogan meaning "zealous"; what phrase is it?
Answer:
gung-ho
Lt. Col. Evan Carlson developed a strong
admiration for the Chinese communists because they fought well against the
Japanese, so he set up what he called gung-ho
meetings for his own troops - the phrase caught on.
The actual Chinese term is gonghe.
During a 1950 radio broadcast, Fred
Hoyle coined the term while using it derogatorily, but it was so compelling
that it stuck; what cosmological catch-phrase is it?
Answer:
the Big Bang
A cosmology is a theory of the
development of the universe - e.g., Genesis.
Hoyle was the most visible proponent of the
Steady State Theory, an alternative cosmology
that is popular amongst air-traffic controllers.
According to Sports Illustrated Magazine, its 1919 defeat of Man
O'War caused its name to become a common sports term; what was the horse's
two-syllable name?
Answer:
Upset
Source: Sports Illustrated, Dec 28, 1998
Etymology-wise, which word doesn't
belong to this set: Kodak,
Nylon, or Vaseline
?
Answer:
vaseline
The words Kodak and Nylon were
coined from thin air - i.e., neither was derived from a pre-existing word,
whereas the word vaseline was derived from the
German wassen, water, and the Greek
elaion, oil.
The London Times claims it derived
from their way of complaining as they trudged along jungle trails; what
American military sobriquet is it?
Answer:
grunt
American foot soldiers are
grunts.
What does the
K in K-Mart
stand for?
Answer:
Kresge
Sebastian S. Kresge founded the SS Kresge
Co., which became K-Mart.
[Mootguy: As they glow larger and more global, a company's
name will often shed that which locally identifies it. For example, the Royal
Bank of Canada is now called RBC, which removes all evidence of its roots and
make it sufficiently amorphous to be a global competitor.]
What words were combined to coin the
company name Nabisco?
Answer:
national, biscuit, and company
What California town got its name
because it has tall trees?
Answer:
Palo Alto
In Spanish Palo
alto means "tall trees."
What activity led to the coining of
the phrase to pull one's weight?
Answer:
rowing
Rowers who don't row are
passengers.
Which surname was sometimes adopted
by butchers: Chandler, Kellogg, or Parker
?
Answer:
Kellogg
Candle-makers became Chandlers, those who
tended the noble's lands became Parkers, and those who butchered hogs became
Kelloggs.
According to Sebastian Junger, it
originally denoted: "estimating your position based on a compass heading,
forward speed, and wind condition - when observation is impossible"; but it has
evolved into a figure of speech; what phrase is it?
Answer:
dead reckoning
Sebastian Junger,
The Perfect Storm
According to Witold Ryzbinski, what
Canadian city's name means "the meeting place" in an aboriginal
language?
Answer:
Toronto
Many meetings are still held
there.
What author's surname was the
Old-English name for the devil?
Answer:
Dickens
What do Norwegians call a sloping
track?
Answer:
a slalom
Originally, it denoted the lowest
note in the medieval sequence of hexachords; now it labels all ranges; what
word is it?
Answer:
gamut
What do logophobics
fear?
Answer:
words
Logophobia is the fear of words - which
means that those who suffer from it probably can't discuss their
problem.
To condemn it, you would call this
behaviour officious; what sesqipedalian
adjective would you use to praise it?
Answer:
supererogatory
Uncalled for work perceived as meddling
is described as officious; similar work felt
to be useful is described as supererogatory.
The word went was once the past-tense of two one-syllable
verbs; go was one; what was the
other?
Answer:
wend
It's another way of saying "10 to
the 12th"; what prefix is it?
Answer:
tera
As in terabyte.
Literally, it means "at one" and it
denotes the act of restoring one's oneness; what word is it?
Answer:
atone
To expiate a wrong is to
atone.
It denotes the syndrome caused by
the excessive drinking of absinthe; what word is it?
Answer:
absinthism
The syndrome is characterized by tremors,
delusions, and convulsions.
France and
the US banned the use of absinthe in the early 20th century.
According to historian John Romer,
its name derives from an Old Byzantine phrase that means "the city"; what city
is it?
Answer:
Istanbul
I believe that this is a false
etymology
How many abbreviations does the word
versus have?
Answer:
two
v. and vs.
Which past participle describes the
steady and sober?
Answer:
staid
Those who are steady and sober are
described as staid; the word was coined from stayed, the past participle of stay.
In the early days of printing
often-used illustrations were set in metal; what two literary terms
resulted?
Answer:
stereotype and cliché
The word cliché derives from the French
clicher, to stereotype.
According to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, it was
perhaps coined as a corruption of the name Connaught, "a name originally applied by the French
Canadians to Irish Immigrants"; what ethnic label is it?
Answer:
Canuck
This is a false etymology. According to
the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the word Canuck probably comes from the word
Canada.
In Greek hodos means "way"; what instrument measures the length
of your way?
Answer:
the odometer
The word odometer derives from the Greek
hodos, way; it denotes an instrument used to
measure the distance traveled by a wheeled vehicle.
In Italian it means "little child";
in English it denotes "childlike thinker"; what word is it?
Answer:
bimbo
In Italian bimbo means "little child."
Derived from a French word meaning
"to cut," it denotes a ticket that is cut off; what word is it?
Answer:
coupon
Similarly, a coupé is a car that has
been cut down to size.
In Greek its name means "a line
measuring through"; what mathematics term is it?
Answer:
diameter
The word diameter derives from the Greek
dia, through, and metron, measure; it denotes a "straight line passing
from side to side through the centre of an object, such as a circle or a
sphere."
It denotes a pedantic, exhaustive,
point-by-point refutation of someone's political position and it was named for
a British news-correspondent who employs it; what one-syllable neologistic
eponym is it?
Answer:
fisk
A point-by-point refutation of a blog
entry or a news story is a fisk; the act of doing this is called
fisking.
The term derives from the name of
Robert Fisk, the Middle Eastern correspondent
for The Independent newspaper in London.
For further info about fisk, see
.
For examples of fisking, see:
.
Noam Chomsky is the real master of this form - see
. Personally,
I'd rather be fisked than chomsked.
This was fascinating! I
had no clue! I plan to follow up some of the recommended web-sites. I'm glad
there's a word for what I am forced to do with Dubya and his cohorts every day!
Using the term
fisking is too much an honour for such a biased
person. I'd rather use that term for unconditionally biased antisemitic
journalists or politicians who seek the source of evil in Judaism in connection
with any international event of a negative nature.
[Mootguy: If you work at it,
perhaps you can add that connotation to the term.]
I wanted to raise a question about the
use of "eponym" in this week's question. According to 2 online dictionaries,
eponym refers to the person for whom something is named, not the new word
itself. I.e. Romulus is the eponym of Rome.
Your question was about the new word, not about
Fisk's name, even though, in this case the proper noun and the new verb are
spelled the same.
I guess my point is
that the neologism is not the eponym. At least not according to the
dictionaries that I read.
[Mootguy: According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, an
eponym is (1) a word derived from a person's name and (2) a person who has had
a word derived from his/her name. It seems that the on-line and off-line
world's are in disagreement - which do you trust?]
This is incorrect. A cursory googling
will reveal that this technique is not named after Fisk because he employs it,
but because it is employed against him by his (numerous) enemies in the
right-wing blogosphere. It's also not a particularly new technique - the
quoting style of newsreader software made it a common 'debating' tactic on
USENET for many years.
Will you find the word
webster in the Concise Oxford Dictionary?
Answer:
yes
A female weaver is a webster.
However, you will not find the dictionary-name
Webster's. According to Dennis Baron in his
essay McLanguage Meets the Dictionary
:
"The name Webster's was the subject of a bitter dispute in the
early 20th century with the courts ruling that G. &
C. Merriam, the lineal publishing descendants of Noah Webster's
dictionaries, did not have exclusive rights to the name.
Webster's in
everyday English has been synonymous with dictionary since Noah Webster hit it big in 1828, but
perhaps because they don't want to get embroiled in further litigation,
dictionaries don't record that generic meaning of the name."
Interesting that "webster" should signify a male
weaver, since the suffix "-ster" was coined to denote female occupations. The
only vestige of this coinage in English is "spinster"-not in the sense of an
old, unmarried woman, but a woman who spins thread on a spinning wheel. The
suffix eventually lost its uniquely feminine connotation, and so the suffix
"-ess" came into use. I would check the eymology of "webster" anyway to comfirm
the accuracy ot the word's gender.
[Mootguy: Guess what - I was wrong, wrong, wrong. A webster is
a FEMALE weaver. Thanks for pointing it out. I'll post your response and make
the change to the web page.]
Webster's is only synonymous with
dictionary in North American and Canadian everyday-English. In Australian-asian
and British English the term is completely meaningless (unless of course you
are, or know, a female weaver).
In Latin fans means "speaking"; the Romans called them "those
who cannot speak"; what do we call them?
Answer:
infants
The word infant derives from the Latin infantem , young child; this is a noun use of an
adjective that means "unable to speak" (from Latin in , not, and fans ,
speak).
Question: What two words have the same
interpretation but denote opposite parts of a town?
Answer: suburb and downtown
(orig. Latin sub urbem, below the town, which was
built on a hill) and downtown (the lowest part of the town, which was built on
the banks of a river).
For example, an oration full of bitter invective is
a philippic. The word derives from the Greek
Philippikoi logoi, the name given to a series
of speeches given by Demosthenes (351-341 BC) urging Greeks to oppose the
rising power of Philip II of Macedon.
Is part of
the challenge to determine the intent of the question? Many of Moot's queries
are convoluted and labyrinthine. The word 'invective' does not possess an
eponym. Certainly on this i'm splitting hairs, but in the past the poser of
questions is indeed in need of an adequate edit. The puzzle wouldn't suffer in
its difficulty.
[Mootguy: Convolution is in the eye of the
beholder.]
This seems to dodge the people's reason for
labeling winds by their source. From my understanding people call winds by the
direction they come from because more often than not this will determine what
kind of weather they are about to get. People naturally care less about where
the wind (and consequently weather) are going next.
What about ridicule? Sarcasm would seem to involve
the verbal expression of feelings as would ridicule. Cynicism can easily be
expressed through a leer, and doesn't need a verbal expression.
Don't agree! Cynicism can
be directed toward morality as well as amorality and sarcasm can be directed
toward people's faults as well as their strengths. It seems moot to
me.
What edition of fowler?
like a lot of his stuff, what was correct 50 years ago sounds dated and
pedantic now. personally, I love the distinction, and think it
useful
No, the parallel is improper - faults are by
definition undesirable, whereas morality is neutral. Change "morality" to
"immorality" and you have a more plausible and tougher issue . . .
I can see Fowler's point, although I
don't believe it is a necessary one. I think I can be cynical about faults and
sarcastic about morality just as easily as the other way around.
According to the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, what
musical genre was named for the color of tobacco leaves?
Answer:
Blue Grass
According to the CBC's
Definitely Not The Opera, the musical-genre
name blue grass was coined by Bill Monroe to
reflect the color of tobacco leaves.
However, According to the Online
Etymological Dictionary, the term was coined as an allusion to the
Bluegrass Boys, a country music band of the
1940s and 1950s, whose name derives from the blue grass found in
Kentucky.
[Mootguy: Is the grass really blue or is it just a Kentucky state of
mind?]
DNTO ain't exactly a biblical font of wisdom, at
least when it comes to bluegrass. I forwarded this question to a friend, who is
also a bluegrass enthusiast.
He
replied, in part:
"I personally asked
Monroe where the name "bluegrass" came from during an interview in Louisville,
Kentucky.. He said that when he named his band "The Bluegrass Boys" in 1939, it
came from his home state, Kentucky, aka "the bluegrass state," bluegrass being
a type of grass that is everywhere down there. I believe Monroe put it thus:
"It came from the state of Kentucky."
Monroe never smoked, he'd never have named it after tobacco.
Following the success of the Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys after they
joined the Opry in 39, and after Flatt and Scruggs joined at the end of WW2,
"bluegrass" came into use as a generic name for that type of music.
The bluegrass music as we know it
today didn't come together until Flatt and Scruggs joined, Bill's 39-45 stuff
is more hillbilly/country/old time. (I realize this is a fine distinction for
most folks, but those of us who know, know.) Hard to pinpoint the exact date of
the generic usage of "bluegrass music," but researchers generally put it about
the early 50s. That's when it started showing up on posters and ads for various
acts beyond Bill.
I didn't think the new folks on DNTO would have
such esoteric interests. As the question came from CBC, shouldn't it be "the
colour of tobacco leaves?"? Should it be "what musical genre" or "which musical
genre" or doesn't it matter?
I think the CBC is nuts. Kentucky Blue grass is
real, and although not extremely blue, has a blueish cast. See
http://plants.usda.gov/cgi_bin/plant_profile.cgi?symbol=POPR
Not that this is all that important, but Bluegrass music came
from Kentucky. Kentucky Blue Grass is a horticultural variety of grass found in
Kentucky (and elsewhere). The name for the music was coined from Bill Monroe's
band, "The Bluegrass Boys," because they were from Kentucky. Some classical
music specialist at CBC may have gotten the facts wrong.
More and more people have begun
calling this symbol the octothorpe; what is its
more common name?
Answer:
the pound sign (#)
According to dictionary.com : the word octothorpe was probably coined as a "humorous blend"
of octaland the name Oglethorpe (James Edward).
Could it be that a dictionary is mistaken!
According to Ralph Carlsen (a retired 34-year employee at Bell Labs), the
history of the pound sign and the word octothorpe is as follows:
[Mootguy: For the sake of link
persistence (and because it is a great example of how a word can be created and
propagated), I have quoted Carlsen's info in full. The original can be found
at: http://www.sigtel.com/tel_tech_octothorpe.html]
The Real Source of the Word
Octothorpe
First, where did
the symbols * and # come from?
In
about 1961 when DTMF dials were still in development, two Bell Labs guys in
data communications engineering (Link Rice and Jack Soderberg) toured the USA
talking to people who were thinking about telephone access to
computers.
They asked about possible
applications, and what symbols should be used on two keys that would be used
exclusively for data applications. The primary result was that the symbols
should be something available on all standard typewriter keyboards. The * and #
were selected as a result of this study, and people did not expect to use those
keys for voice services. The Bell System in those days did not look
internationally to see if this was a good choice for foreign
countries.
Then in the early 1960s Bell
Labs developed the 101 ESS (Electronic Switching System, a pioneer electronic
exchange) which was the first stored program controlled switching system (it
was a PBX). One of the first installations was at the Mayo Clinic. This PBX had
lots of modern features (Call Forwarding, Speed Calling, Directed Call Pickup,
etc.), some of which were activated by using the # sign.
A Bell Labs supervisor DON MACPHERSON went to the
Mayo Clinic just before cut-over to train the doctors and staff on how to use
the new features on this state of the art switching system. During one of his
lectures he felt the need to come up with a word to describe the # symbol. Don
also liked to add humour to his work. His thought process - which took place
while at the Mayo Clinic doing lectures - was as follows:
There are eight points on the symbol so
octo should be part of the name.
We need a few more letters or another syllable to
make a noun, so what should that be?
(Don MacPherson, at this point in his life, was active in a
group that was trying to get JIM THORPE's Olympic medals returned from Sweden)
The term thorpe would be unique, and people would not suspect he
was making the word up if he called it an octothorpe.
So
Don Macpherson began using the term Octothorpe to describe the # symbol in his
lectures. When he returned to Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ, he told us what he had
done, and began using the term octothorpe in
memos and letters.
The term was picked
up by other Bell Labs people and used mostly for the fun of it. Some of the
documents which used the term octothorpe found
their way to Bell Operating Companies and other public places. Over the years,
Don and I have enjoyed seeing the term octothorpe appear in documents from many different
sources.
Don MacPherson retired about
eight years ago, and I will be retiring in about six weeks. These are, of
course, my remembrances and are not any official statement of AT&T or the
subsequent companies.
You might like to consider that the pound sign is
already shown as a crossed L, for currency, and an lb for weight.
While we are about it the word 'thorpe' is an old
English word of scandinavian origin. Originally it meant farmstead or
settlement (I think) and is the name, or part of the name of, several English
towns and villages.
Once again our
friends in the United States decide that their ignorance is better than our
knowledge. Certainly not a word to be promoted... octothorpe
indeed.
It is also known as a "number sign",
since it stands for the word number in such places as in "apartment #2". It is
referred to as a pound sign because it was in some American commerce usage
(back in the longhand days) to stand for the unit of weight ("25# flour
^@&15æ#x201A;¢/#").
Beg to differ! I have an entirely different account
of the origin of octothorp (no "e") courtesy of typographer Robert Bringhurst:
"OCTOTHORP: Otherwise known as the
numeral sign. It has also been used as the symbol for the pound avoirdupois,
but this usage is now archaic. In cartography, it is also a symbol for village:
eight fields around a central square, and this is the source of its name.
Octothorp means eight fields."
Source:
Robert Bringhurst, "The Elements of Typographic Style", ISBN 0-88179-033-8, p.
224)
I suspect Messrs. Carlsen and
MacPherson just may have been having a little pre-retirement fun at our
expense. :-)
Name three of the four most
frequently occurring words in English writing?
Answer:
the, of, and to
According to John Allen Paulos in
The formula for 'success' (
The Guardian, Thursday July 22, 2004):
"In English, for example, the word
the appears most frequently and is said to have
rank order 1; the words of rank 2, 3, and 4 are of, and, and
to, respectively.
Zipf's Law relates
the frequency of a word to its rank order k and states that a word's frequency
in a written text is proportional to 1/k^1;
that is, inversely proportional to the first power of k. (Thus
of occurs half as frequently as
the, and a
third as frequently as the - and
synecdoche hardly at all.)"
Note: Top Twenty Written
English Words (in order of most to least used): the of and to in a
for was is that on at he with by be it an as his
Top Twenty Spoken English
Words (in order of most to least used): the and I to of a you that in
it is yes was this but on well he have for
I have a wonderful book on my shelf titled "A
Russian Learner's Dictionary" which lists the 10,000 most used Russian words
with their usages and translations into English.
It's a fantastic book for understanding the
differences in language usage between Russian and English. I've been on the
hunt for a similar book in English to no avail. If anyone knows of such a book,
I'd love to explore this topic in depth.
It was coined in the 16th century
when the consonants Y, H, and W were mistakenly mixed with the vowels of the
word Adonai; what proper noun is
it?
Answer:
Jehova
The name of the Jewish god is Yahweh,
which was represented by the four letters YHWH. Because of its sanctity, Jews
avoided uttering it when reading scriptures by substituting the word Adonai,
the Hebrew word for Lord.
Ironically, your answer contains a mistake similar
to your question. Although the term Jehovah does indeed come from the
mis-application of the vowels of Adonai in Hebrew, it is not accurate to say
that the Jewish name for God is Yahweh. Yahweh is yet another vocalization of
the mysterious vowels of God's name. Since God's name was pronounced aloud only
by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies of the Temple on Yom Kippur, and since
the Temple was destroyed almost 2 millenia ago, we don't actually KNOW what
God's name is (in the sense of how to pronounce Yod-Hei-Vav-Hei). So Yahweh is
as defective as Jehovah (at least in terms of pronouncing the name of "our"
God). Fortunately, according to all our religious sensibilities, God is without
flaw - no matter what God's name is or isn't. Thanks for your great game.
but the
question I've always asked is: why did they choose those particular four
letters (yud, hay, vuv, hay)? For one possible answer look here:
http://pages.cthome.net/hirsch/tetra.htm [and for a] feminist version:
http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/t/tetragrammatiom.html. Speculation
about this is endless. The best rabbis tell me: we just don't know why it is
so.
Its a sentimental remembrance for an old wound. After time it loses its pain and the wisdom gained grants it meaning. Like people remembering the bad old day and recalling only the good times you could think they were good time, and not bad times punctuated by a few good moments.
That riddle is insoluble: but Mercator found one
clever way of projecting a curved surface onto a flat one. Others have come up
with other ideas, but perfection (distanced and angles are all correct) is
unattainable.
first heard the neologism in
1928, he exclaimed: "The word is half Greek and half Latin - no good will come
of it"; what communication device's name was it?
Answer:
the television
The inventor, John Baird, coined the name
by combining the Greek tele with the Latin
vision. Some language purists - preferring
that coinages have same-language roots - wished the device had been called
either the teleopsis or the
proculvision.
The word Louisianan is to noun
as what word is to adjective?
Answer:
Louisianian
As a noun, the word is
Louisianian; as an adjective, it is
Louisianan.
There are two words that mean
"macadam that has been bound with tar"; what are they?
Answer:
tarmac and tarmacadam
Macadam is a road-making material
consisting of layers of pressed broken stone; when these layers are bound with
tar, it is called either tarmac or
tarmacadam.
In Latin it means "cradle"; in
English it denotes a book printed before 1501; what word is it?
Answer:
incunabulum
A book printed before 1501 is called an
incunabulum; several of them are
incunabula.
What magician's word was contracted
to coin the word hoax?
Answer:
hocus
A deception is a hoax and
hocus is a term used by the professional
deceiver.
The etymology
of hocus pocus is that the phrase is a corruption of the Latin "hoc es corpore
(filii)" i.e. this is the body of the son, said in mass. Or so I have
heard.
What month's name derives from a
word that means "purgations" in Latin?
Answer:
February
The Latin name Februa labelled a festival of purification that the
Romans held on the 15th day of the second month.
Trying to add some precision to its
meaning, Mathematician J.E. Littlewood defined
it as "an event that has special significance when it occurs, but occurs with a
probability of one in a million."; what word is it?
Answer:
miracle
According to physicist
Freeman Dyson:
"The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability
is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often.
A simple way to state the paradox is
Littlewood's Law of Miracles. Littlewood was a
famous mathematician who was teaching at Cambridge University when I was a
student. Being a professional mathematician, he defined miracles precisely
before stating his law about them.
He
defined a miracle as an event that has special
significance when it occurs, but occurs with a probability of one in a million.
This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word
miracle.
Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the
course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one
per month.
The proof of the law is
simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our
lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a
rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us
is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month.
With few exceptions, these events are not miracles
because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per
million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the
average, every month."
I get up at 6 am and go to bed at 12 am, I am awake
for 18 hours not 8. Should I have miracles more often? The calculation is all
wrong, and I think that the whole law makes no sense at all.
I find Littlewood's endeavour
unsatisfactory, because it amounts to begging the question. Miracles are often
associated with divine providence - the notion that god or gods interceded in
human life to make something unnatural occur.
Since god is but a metaphysical postulate, a
miracle cannot be the result of a rational action. it therefore is little more
than a synonym for an unexplainable random occurrence.
Consequently, the attempt to "prove" anything about
a miracle is fruitless.
A miracle is an event contrary to the
laws of nature. A god could perform several miracles a day, and they would all
be miracles. The frequency shouldn't matter. Any rare event will eventually
occur, but it is not necessarily a miracle. It is even possible, although
extremely unlikely, to be dealt two royal flushes in a row, but it is not a
miracle. I think Littlewood is confusing probability with transgressions of the
laws of nature.
For this to
be true, one would have to "recognize" the event as having special significance
... what if an event was specially significant to some but not to others, does
that mean it was not a miracle? Or, what if the event was a commonplace event
but you deem it to be specially significant to you on any given day...is it
still a miracle? Using this definition miracles are subjective to
interpretation...is that really the "common-sense" understanding of the
word?
If you are a
believer, this doesn't hold water. Miracles happen without a mathematical
significance and happen as those who believe trust in a higher being decides
that a miracle needs to happen.
Aside from the religious notion of a miracle -
which I personally believe in - and have received. One miracle a month - is
based on the assumption that events only take a second.
Actually, events could on average take say 10
minutes, and under the same mathematical law - that means one miracle every 10
years - which altogether seems more realistic. Does this mean that you could
lotto once every 10 years - no way - this that miracle is 1:100 million chance,
so that would be once in a thousand years, which means no hope,
really.
The word husband is to wife as
the word sultan is to what?
Answer:
sultana
The feminine form of
actor is actress; the feminine form of sultan is
sultana.
The word
sultan denotes the ruler of a Muslim country,
especially one ruling during Ottoman Empire. The wife, mother, sister, or
daughter of a sultan was called a sultana.
Its name derives from a bridge-like
game known as tarocchi; what is
it?
Answer:
The Tarot
Tarot cards probably originated in
Northern Italy during the late 14th century. The oldest existing set - the
Visconti-Sforza deck - was produced in about 1440. The cards were used to play
a bridge-like game known as tarocchi, which was popular among the Italian
nobility.
For further information on
Tarot, check out the alchemy web site:
C'est ne pas
une carte de Tarot
It derives from the Latin
frangere, to break, and it labels
a set of patterns that cannot be represented by
classical geometry; what word is it?
Answer:
fractal
The word fractal derives from the Latin fractus, the past participle of frangere, to break.
It denotes a pattern created from parts that are
smaller replicas of the whole pattern, which are themselves created from parts
that are smaller replicas of the whole pattern, which are themselves created
....
They were invented by a Frenchman
name Julia Gaston , but the term was coined by
Benoit Mandelbrot.
What word was contracted to coin the
goody in the phrase Goody Two-Shoes
Answer:
Goodwife
The phrase Goody
Two-Shoes denotes a pious person; it
was derived from the name of the title character in the book
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes
(1766).
[Evidently the book has just
been optioned as a Home Box Office mini-series starring Mary Hart.]
The term Goody is
a shortened form of Goodwife, a 16th century
equivalent of Mrs..
Source:
According to
www.wordorigins.org
, originally it labeled any small
thing, but it eventually came to denote 1/8th of a peso. What word is
it?
Answer:
bit
According to
www.wordorigins.org
, the word bit "ultimately comes from the Old English
bita, [which] originally meant a morsel of
food. From there it went on to denote any small thing, particularly a fraction
of a larger whole.
By 1683 in the
English-speaking American colonies bit had come to denote a Spanish/Mexican
real, or one eighth of a peso. The peso was a common form of currency in the
colonies. And in the early days of the United States, pesos were commonly used
as dollar coins and real coins represented twelve and half cents, hence two
bits equaled 25 cents."
source:
How many millenniums are there in a
chiliad?
Answer:
one
The words are synonyms denoting "1000
years." One who believes in the prophesied 1000-year reign of Christ is called
either a chiliast or millennarian.
One
who believes that Christ's reign will last for 1000th of a second is a
millisecondarian.
According to the Concise Oxford
Dictionary, what are the plurals of the word it?
Answer:
they or them
When it
is the subject, they is the plural; when
it is the object, them is the plural. Note that its is the possessive form and it's is a contraction.
What beverage was named for Edward
Vernon, the English admiral who served his crew diluted rum?
Answer:
grog
The word grog first appears around 1770 and is supposedly an
allusion to Old Grog, the nickname of
Edward Vernon (1684-1757), a British admiral who regularly wore a grogram cloak
and who in 1740 ordered his sailors' rum to be diluted - to improve discipline.
This rapidly became the standard way
of serving the naval rum ration until the ration was abolished in
1970.
Note that: When the War of
Jenkin's Ear against the Spanish broke out in 1739, Vernon captured their base
at Porto Bello, Panama with only six ships.
Thomas Arne composed Rule Britannia as a tribute to
this exploit.
I always heard that grog was named due to the
sailors of old being given fruit juice to prevent scurvy. As one might imagine,
the juice became fermented thus making the sailors 'groggy', hence the name.
I'm always interested in hearing origins. Thank you for your site. By the way,
I found it simply by typing the word 'moot' into a search engine.
In response to hppartridge-@carolina.rr.com,
the term "limey" was the nickname given to the British sailors who first
recognized the correlation between vitamin-C rich citrus and scurvy. The
adjective "groggy" came from "grog."
Someone (Barbara Tuchman maybe?) did a book on that war. I guess
I'll have to read it again; that was such an eventful period. I was directed to
MooT by googling odiferous (which is the spelling used by Arianna in her
Arianna's Post).
Name the individual who coined the
acronyms URL, HTML, HTTP, and WWW.
Answer:
Tim Berners-Lee
To invent the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee
also needed to invent the HTTP protocol, the HTML markup language, and the URL
file-location convention.
Its most accurate definition is:
"the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the
transition between two hyperfine levels of cesium-133 in the ground state";
what unit of time is it?
Answer:
the second
A Republican physicist calculated that
Bill Clinton was president for exactly 2.319 x 1015 hyperfine, ground-state
cesium-133 transitions.
In English there are three prefixes
that mean "below"; one of them is "sub"; what are the other two?
Answer:
infra and hypo
For example: (i) that which is below zero
is sub-zero, (ii) sound waves that have a frequency below the level of human
hearing are infrasonic, and (iii) that which grows below ground is hypogeal.
What about "under-" as in undervote, undersell,
underbid, undersupply, etc? English has plenty of prefixes of Anglo-Saxon
origin, besides the well-known Greek and Latin ones.
According to the Concise Oxford
Dictionary, the statement "the waiter announced that he would be seating us
presently" means you will be seated immediately in the US; however, in England
it means that you will be seated after a short time.
I suppose you mean `presently'; but the
use of 'presently' for 'at present' is comparatively recent. Many careful
writers, including myself, think this usage slovenly and ambiguous and make a
point of avoiding it. What's wrong with "at present", or "currently"? For my
generation, the word continues to mean "fairly soon", implying some moderate
delay. In Shakespeare's time and for quite a time thereafter, it meant
"immediately", implying no delay.
In response to your previous question "What adverb
can mean both 'soon' and 'now'?": Everyone seems to have missed a most obvious
answer, which is the word "now" itself. Check it out, using this simple proof:
It can be used with a future tense to mean "shortly" ("Do you want anything at
the store? I am going to go there now."). The problem is that we have a pretty
elastic notion of what constitutes the present. "Now," in fact, can even refer
to the immediate past (as in "I just finished it now"). For that matter, it
can, albeit only in the idiom "now and then," refer to habitual time ("I write
e-mail now and then"). Truly a word for all seasons.
On the "d" = "denarius/denarii" MooT etymology
question, I would like to add two comments:
1. While the quotation from the Oxford Dictionary
was accurate for the word ' denarius', the recent (but not current) use of the
abbreviated "d" is specifically addressed therein under entry D III.
Abbreviations, etc. 1. "d stands for [Latin] denarius and so for 'penny',
'pence'; as 1d. = one penny, £.s.d. = pounds, shillings, pence". The £ or
pound sterling was originally, but certainly not presently, the value of a
pound (Latin 'librum') of silver. The 's' is not "shilling" but the Latin
solidus. The solidus (solidii) was a gold coin of the Roman Empire and worth
about 25 denarii. I believe the system 240d. = 20s. = £1 was in place since
the Norman Conquest. Prior to that the terms were in use but the numerical
ratios varied.
2. On 15 February 1971,
he £.s.d. coinage was changed to a decimal system (£p) wherein 100p. = £1,
thus 2.4d. = 1p. When first introduced, the new coinage was minted and named
'new penny (pence)' and abbreviated 'p' to distinguish it from the old 'd'. As
the old coinage disappeared from circulation and people became familiar with
the system, the word 'new' was dropped. The 5p (= 1s.) coin is the smallest
denomination that corresponds with a coin of the old system, and one can still
hear the term 'shilling' occasionally applied. I enjoy your etymology
Emails!
I think of myself as an amateur linguist - I would
like to have a PhD in Linguistics someday - so my husband asks me odd-ball
questions all the time about how language is used.
One day (some time before I subscribed to this
mailing list) he asked me if there were 2 words in the English language that
were phonetically the same (homophones) but were opposite in meaning.
Almost without thinking, I gave him
raze and raise (he was not familiar with the "obscure" raze).
I also pointed out that RAYS, though not an
opposite, also sounds like the other two. I am going to send him this page to
prove that I'm not the only one who thinks this stuff is cool. Thanks!
, there are four
demonstrative pronouns in the English language: this, that, these, and those;
however, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, there are five - what is
the fifth one?
Answer:
such
A demonstrative pronoun is a pronoun that
designates or points out something; for example: "Such are my beliefs." Some
claim that English has seven of them: the aforementioned five, plus yon and
yonder, as in: "Yon (or yonder) cow is a bull."
(1) The New Shorter OED (on CD-ROM) has this entry
for THEY:"Demonstrative: those (chiefly as antecedent). arch. ME." Admittedly,
it does class it as archaic, though.
(2) If one speaks of "yon/yonder" cow, why is
yon/yonder not an adjective? Demonstrative pronouns are NOT adjectives,
obviously, when used as subjects in "demonstrative" sentences. When in
conjunction with, and directly preceding a substantive/noun, they are
technically adjectives.
(3) But in the sentence "Yon cow is a
bull," wouldn't "yon" be acting as an adjective rather than a pronoun? Still,
your point works, because we could say "Yon is a bull" and mean "yon" to refer
to the THING (tho most often it might replace "there," instead).
(4) How about "themthar" as in "there's
gold in them thar hills" ? Also" that there" and "this here" as in "that there
fella can't hit nothin' in this here league" ?(Casey Stengel). I could go on
but perhaps had better not.
(5) The comments about "yon/yonder"
acting as an adjective are true - except for the fact that every pronoun in the
possessive case is adjectival - "my book," their socks," the cat is mine" - and
yet they are called "pronouns" in English nomenclature. In my Department's
grammar classes, students must call such words "PPPCFA" when identifying the
parts of speech - "Personal Pronoun, Possessive Case, Functioning
Adjectivally"! A mouthful, but one that reveals to them the inconsistency of
the name and the fluid, evolving nature of language.
Confirmed by William Dalrymple in The White Mughals,(Harper Collins 2002) page 410 : "Punch being of course an Indian word, arriving in the English language via the Hindustani 'panch' (five), a reference to the number of ingredients for the drink which traditionally were (according to Hobson Jobson) 'arrack, sugar, lime-juice, spice and water
When the editor of the
Manchester Guardian first heard the neologism
in 1928, he exclaimed: "The word is half Greek and half Latin - no good will
come of it"; what device-name is it?
Answer:
television
The inventor, John Baird, coined the name
by combining the Greek tele, distant, with the
Latin vision, seeing.
Some language purists - i.e., the ones who prefer
that newly-made words be constructed from same-language roots - wished the
device had been called either the teleopsis or proculvision. Of course, those
who watch proculvision should eat PV Dinners and subscribe to the PV
Guide.
The same dilemma confronted us when we were looking
for a name the new quantum-physics effect we discovered in 1993. We called it
quantum teleportation, over the objections of one of my coauthors, who thought
it should be called quantum telepheresis. I overcame his objections by arguing
that teleportation was already a well established word in the science fiction
literature. For more details see:
It was derived from the name of a
Greek maiden who beat Athena in a weaving contest; what taxonomic term is
it?
Answer:
arachnid
The word arachnid - which derives from
the Greek arachne, spider - denotes arthropods of the class Arachnida, such as
spiders, scorpions, and ticks. They have segmented bodies.
In mythology Arachne was a Greek maiden who was
turned into a spider after defeating Athena in a weaving contest. Note: a more
precise answer would be "Arachnida" because the is the taxonomic
classification.
In the spirit of the game I have a nit to pick with
your brief account of Arachne's story. Arachne boasted that she was more
skilfull than Athena. She lost the contest, acknowledging the Goddess's vastly
more beautiful tapestry. Athena changed her into a spider to punish her for her
hubris.(Oooooo! Look! More Greek!)
[Note: The first version of the question asked:
"What entomological term is it?" That provoked this response]
"I am a long time admirer of your game, but I think
you made a mistake this time. Pondering today's question I thought of
"arachnid" at first but then dismissed it because EVERYONE KNOWS SPIDERS AREN'T
INSECTS.
So I began a fruitless effort
to connect actual entomological terms like lepidoptera, hymenoptera (Greek god,
but wrong one), coleoptera, and decided it must be some word I don't know
having to do with silkworms.
Finally I
had to give up and look at the answer. Maybe, I thought, entomology includes
the study of spiders so I looked it up in my American Heritage, and it said no,
just insects. I should have known from the etymology of entomology: en+tom in
Greek = in+sect in Latin."
Concise Oxford Dictionary: A biography of a fish that
changed the world
), what substance etymologically binds the words
soldier and salad?
Answer:
salt
According to Kurlansky's book
Salt - A World History
:
"The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and
for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which
was the origin of the word salary and the expressions worth his salt andearning
his salt. In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning
pay, which is the origin of the word soldier. Furthermore: "The Romans salted
their greens, believing this to counteract their natural bitterness, which is
the origin of the word salad, salted."
Note: this question works as a question because it is
"according to Mark Kurlansky" - so salt is the correct answer because that's
what Kurlansky says the etymologies are. Unfortunately, the question doesn't
work factually because, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the word
soldier actually derives from the Latin word solidus, which denotes a solid
gold coin from the later Roman Empire.
Thus far I have been unable to find any source that shows that
solidus derives from a Latin root that is related to salt - though because of
the silimilarity between sol and sal, it sounds like it should.
If anyone can set me straight on this, please email
me at: moot_mootgame.com
You're right to challenge Kurlansky. These really
do come from two different Indo-European roots, ones that (unusually) haven't
changed their form: salary < sal-; soldier < sol - 'solidus', whence
'soldier' is cognate with 'solid.'
Kurlansky might have become confused by the army story
connected to 'salary.' Or (and this is more complex) by the fact that the sol -
root does, in fact, have a variant form sal - (from the zero-grade form). But
the words that come via that route (pun intended) are related to Latin 'salvus'
(safe), whence also salvage, salvo, save; and 'salus' (health), whence
salutary, salute.
This confusion shows
why historical linguists are so picky about the connections they draw. It's not
enough for the sounds to resemble each other. The roots must match sound and
meaning, and make sense as part of the reconstructed chain of sound changes
that have occurred in the past. For confirmation, see Calvert Watkins's
appendix on Indo-European roots in the American
Heritage dictionary.
, this Crusader cry
was originally derived as an acronym of a Latin phrase meaning
Jerusalem Has Fallen; what 3-letter cheer is
it?
Answer:
Hep (or Hip)
As in Hip, Hip,
Hooray.
According to Spiro,
"the Crusader cry of Hep! Hep! originated at this time. It was an acronym for
the Latin of Jerusalem Has Fallen. With time it became Hip, Hip, Hooray! - a
cheer that Jews never use."
(Source:
)
HOWEVER: According to
Merriam-Webster, the origin of the hip in
hip,hip hooray is unknown - and its first use
in print is in 1827. Further, it is unlikely that the word
hip was derived from hep, because the latter first appeared in print in
1862.
I wasn't able to find a Latin
translation of: Jerusalem Has Fallen. If anyone
knows it or can do it, please send it to me and I'll pass it onto the list.
Okay so I
had learned that "hip" was inappropriate for Jews because of this origin, and
that it stood for "Hierusalem est perdita." Also I later read somewhere that
the "hooray" comes from "hul raj," and I didn't remember what that supposedly
meant. I did a Google search of "hip hip hooray perdida OR perdita" and I got
some interesting hits. Evidently it's not true. Try looking at
http://phrases.shu.ac.uk/bulletin_board/3/messages/585.htmland
http://www.takeourword.com/TOW130/page2.html or just do the same or a similar
search yourself. Thanks for such a great service!
This makes sense: the Latin for it was Jerusalem
est perdita, but there was no "J" sound then. In Hebrew, it's a "Y" sound,
hence Yerushalayim; no J or even much of a Y in Latin, so an aspirated H. But
the "est perdita" gives the EP of HEP.
Even with the qualification from Websters, I can't
believe you gave this story even the credence you did. The Latin phrase that is
probably behind this story is something like "Hierosolym est perdomitum." But
the acronym etymology is unquestionably spurious. First of all, if it really
did come from the crusades, we would expect to see it show up in the written
record much earlier, and exist in other languages than English, since the
crusaders were a pan-European bunch. Second, acronyms aren't really a plausible
form of word formation for crusaders, since it presumes a highly literate group
that thought in Latin. (Acronyms, of course, only make sense if you know how to
write the words out and are looking at them as individual letters, not as units
of sound.) As a general rule of thumb (another frequently mis-etymologized
phrase) virtually every so-called etymology that claims an acronymic origin for
words coined before World War II is false.
Wouldn't the Latin be "Hierosolyma perdita est?"
And HPE isn't really pronounceable. I do know for a fact, however, that several
European languages use "HEP" as a cry to herd animals (like "Git!") So if
you're trying to force someone along the street, "HEP! HEP!" might be the
common cry.
Karl said:
"and exist in other languages than English" - The expression DOES exist in
other languages, at least in the Scandinavian languages and German. "since it
presumes a highly literate group that thought in Latin."
Crusaders were a literate bunch, the knowledge of
reading and writing was not all that uncommon in the middle ages, and the
crusaders were often the elite of society, definitely able to read and write
latin. Acronyms is quite common in mediaeval texts, as are other forms of
abrevations.
To suss something out is to
investigate it; what word was modified to coin the word suss ?
Answer:
suspect
Originally, the word was a British slang
noun: the suss being the suspect in a crime.
It was coined by combining the
French words for hook and
velvet; what synthetic material is it?
Answer:
velcro
Fascinated by the microstructure of burs
- their hook-like snags can attach to passing objects - Swiss engineer George
de Mestral invented a hook-and-eye material.
He named it velours
croche, hooked velvet, which eventually came to be called
Velcro .
What is the antonym of the word
ambilevous?
Answer:
ambidextrous
The word ambilevous derives from the Latin
ambi, both, and laevus, left. It labels those who are left-handed on
both sides. The word
ambidextrous derives from the Latin
dexter, right-handed. It denotes those who are
right-handed on both sides - i.e., adroit.
According to the
American Heritage Dictionary of the English
Language
, what name was modified to coin the word jingo?
Answer:
Jesus
The word jingoism denotes the aggressive pursuit of coercive
foreign policy.
This sense arose from a
19th-century British music-hall song called We Don't Want to Fight written by
George William Hunt (c. 1829 - 1904). The song became popular during the
Turco-Russian war of 1877 because Britain was considering intervention. Here's
a verse:
We don't want to fight, but,
by jingo if we do,
We've got the
ships, we've got the men,
we've got the
money too.
We've fought the Bear
before,
and while Britons shall be
true,
The Russians shall not have
Constantinople.
The Russians never did
get Constantinople - they couldn't find it because the wily Turks had changed
its name to Istanbul.
Derived from the Italian word for
leg, it originally denoted "the act of
tripping someone up while wrestling"; now it often refers to the act of
tripping someone up while playing chess; what word is it?
Answer:
gambit
The word gambit derives from the Italian gambetto, the act of tripping someone up in wrestling,
which in turn is derived from the Italian gamba, leg.
According to
History of God
by Karen Armstrong, what Middle-Eastern
city's name means "springtime hill" in Hebrew?
Answer:
Tel Aviv
The first Tel Aviv was established during
the Babylonian captivity; it was a Jewish settlement along the banks of a canal
that connected to the Euphrates river.
Etymology-wise, the word
orthodoxy is to opinion as what word is to
action?
Answer:
orthopraxy
The word orthodoxy - which derives from the Greek
orthos, correct or straight, and doxa,
opinion - denotes "correct belief."
The
word orthopraxy - which derives from the Greek
praxis, action - denotes "correct behaviour or actions." It
also denotes the use of mechanical devices to treat bodily deformities.
Note: A person whose job is to correct
improperly aligned beliefs and practices is not called an
orthopracter.
According to William Safire, what is
the plural of the phrase Poet
Laureate?
Answer:
Poets Laureate
According to Safire: "The best way to
make a compound noun plural is to add the s to
the most important part" - i.e. the noun part. For example,
attorneys general and courts martial.
Feedback to feedback on pluralizing compunds with
non-nouns: an example might be the ready-mades of Marcel
Duchamps in referring to his "Fountain" (urinal) and other Dadaist sculptural
objects. Would one ever add the s to other than the end of the compound?
Here's an example where Safire's
narrowly circumscribed rule doesn't quite work: When I was growing up (way
before the World Wrestling Federation), we used to watch
10-man, over-the-top-rope battle-royals. Now, despite
battle being the noun there, I defy you to tell me that
battles-royal is the correct plural form. It seems that
when you're talking about correctness, the social register has to be a
consideration: Battles royal is much too fastidious for this
register of English.
From a
prescriptivist's point of view, Safire is right, but from a descriptivists'
viewpoint..well, I don't know. The fact that adjectives so rarely follow the
nouns they modify in English makes it feel more "psychologically" correct to
place the "s" at the end of these noun phrases (i.e. court
martials).
In fact, when we
use these adjectives I suspect most of us aren't very conscious of the fact
that they are adjectives at all. On the other hand, phrases like
mothers-in-law feel completely natural because of the normal
syntactical order.
Since we don't have more than one, when
if ever would we use the term in the plural? Oh, I guess if we said that there
have been X number of poets laureate in America.
True, except as it relates to titles of
books. For instance the title Book of Mormon should not be
changed to "Books of Mormon" or "Book of Mormons" when speaking about multiple
copies. It should be stated, "Copies of the 'Book of Mormon'."
In French the word
briser means "to break." What did the French
call fragments that had broken off?
Answer:
debris
The word debris derives from the French debris
What word was contracted to coin the
word bate, as in bated
breath?
Answer:
abate
The word-formation process by which a
word is created by dropping the first syllable of another word is called
aphesis - e.g., the word
fence was coined by contracting
defence.
According to the
Concise Oxford Dictionary, its title could
have been: The Inability to Cope with Rapid
Progress; what book is it?
Answer:
Future Shock
The COD defines the term Future
Shock as: "the inability to cope with rapid progress."
Those who created Webster's
9th Collegiate Dictionary would have entitled it: "The Physical and
Psychological Distress Suffered by One who is Unable to Cope with the Rapidity
of Social and Technological change."
The book Future Shock (by
Alvin Toffler) was published in the 1970s prior to the invention of the desktop
computer and the expansion of the Internet, etc. Sample:
"In the three short decades between now and the
twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will
face an abrupt collision with the future...ya...da...."
I'm 69 and enjoyed that book tremendously. Possibly
that's why I'm still working and enjoying working on my computer. Also this was
an answer I knew right away.
I am a middle school teacher. I would say a large
number of my coworkers suffer from future shock...Thanks for giving me a good
term for describing why we can't properly teach our students to incorporate new
technology into their daily lives.
I have no qualms about the
definition, but the kamikaze pilots weren't trying to halt the US invasion of
Japan- there was no invasion; Japan surrendered in August 1945 without a single
US soldier setting foot on Japanese soil.
The Japanese Air Force did employ the strategy as
the US closed in on Japan. The JAF resorted to using kamikaze pilots against US
naval vessels when the ranks of their experienced, well-trained pilots had been
decimated by losses (the German Luftwaffe had a similar problem, but no culture
of tactical suicide). Japanese industry could replenish the lost aircraft, but
not the veteran pilots.
Actually, quite a lot of American
soldiers landed on Japanese soil. The island of Okinawa was and is a part of
Japan and was the scene of a particularly nasty battle in 1945 with an
estimated loss of 200,000 lives. It is not a part of what are considered to be
the "home islands
Aside from the question of whether American boots hit
Japanese soil before the surrender... What a wonderfully weird idea that one
can't be trying to prevent something if that "something" doesn't come to
pass... it's flawed, but interesting. I always believed that my uncle was
putting aside money for his retirement, but based on this theory that could not
have been his intent, because he died before retiring.
Is an a fortiori ceteris paribus a reductio ad
absurdum?
Answer:
no
In Latin: (i) a
fortiori means "even more so," (ii) ceteris
paribus means "other things being equal," and (iii)
reductio ad absurdum means "reduction to absurdity."
Thus the question in question
translates to:
Is an even more so other things being equal a
reduction to absurdity?
As
such, this is meaningless. However, if you add quotes, it becomes
answerable:
Is an "a fortiori ceteris paribus" a reductio ad
absurdum?
With this phrasing, the question's
question becomes answerable: the answer is no, because the term a
fortiori ceteris paribus does not denote a type of reductio ad
absurdum.
In fact, the question does make sense, since I did
understand it to mean
"Is Blah-blah a Blah-blah?"
However, it does not conform to English writing
"style," which dictates that words, used as words, be italicized or surrounded
by quotation marks.
That is an altogether different
matter, though; this stylistic covention has nothing to do with sensibility, or
even grammar, for that matter.
[Mootguy: Quoting text is more than just stylistic convention:
it is a semantic convention that tells you how to interpret the enclosed text
(e.g., that it is dialogue). Thus, it is just as meaningful as putting an "s"
on the end of a word to convey plurality.]
You
wrote that "Quoting text is more than just stylistic convention: it is a
semantic convention that tells you how to interpret the enclosed text."
1) I already know how to interpret the text without the
quotes because there is an indefinite article (a/an) to tell me that what
follows acts as a noun phrase.
2) Furthermore, if you
argue that it is a necessary semantic convention, then we would insert quotes
in spoken language as well as in written language.
(We
obviously don't, and this is a proof that this convention is more stylistic
than substantive. (By the way, the plural "s," by way of contrast, is a feature
of both the written and the spoken language.))
The answer offered as proof the fact that the question Is an
a fortiori ceteris paribus a reductio ad absurdum? does not seem to
stand up to logical scrutiny.
The proof states that even
when the sentence is properly punctuated, it would not make sense, as an "a
fortiori ceteris paribus" is not a "reductio ad absurdum."
However, as a question, "Is an 'a fortiori ceteris paribus' a
'reductio ad absurdum?'" the sentence makes sense.
The
answer to this question would be no, a "a fortiori ceteris paribus" is not a
"reductio ad absurdum".
However, as to the question
asked, vis: "Does this following quoted question make sense?" we can answer
that, allowing for proper punctuation, and read as a question and not a
statement, the answer is "Yes, the question does make sense, although the
answer to it would be no."
The proof, as we read it,
says that, as the answer to the quoted question is no, it does not make sense
as a question: this clearly is not correct, as it does not answer the question
originally posed.
[Mootguy: My claim is
that when the question in the question is properly punctuated, it does become
meaningful. Prior to this revising, it is meaningless.]
It derives from the name of a
Spanish political party whose name literally meant "those who will not agree";
what word is it?
Answer:
intransigent
To be uncompromising (you will agree, but
only on your terms) is to be intransigent.
The word derives from the Spanish
Los Intransigentes (literally: those who will
not agree), the name of an extreme republican party in 1870's Spain.
The word
intransigentes, in turn, derives from the Latin
transigere , come to an agreement.
What substance's name derives from a
Greek word meaning "belonging to Ammon"?
Answer:
ammonia
The word ammonia was coined by Swedish chemist
Torbern Bergman because he had gotten the
gas from sal ammoniac - salt that contains ammonium chloride.
These particular salt deposits were found near the
temple of Jupiter Ammon in Libya, thus the name ultimately derives from the
Greek ammoniakon , belonging to
Ammon.
This word parameter(s) has two odd senses: one
explicit, i.e, something that is meseaurable, having limitations and so can be
contained; but on the other side, one that is beyond measurability.
This second sense is not said, but we certainly have it in our two
words, parapsychic and parapsychology.
I always thought of a parameter as an "arbitrary value"
or placeholder in an equation which I believe is consistent with your
definition.
Programmers muddy the waters by applying two
definitions to the word.
They distinguish between a
"formal parameter," which is a place holder for an arbitrary value, and an
"actual parameter," which is the value substituted for the parameter when
computing the result.
In the popular vernacular,
parameter is more often used incorrectly to mean a limit or
boundary. Will this become a new definition of the word in future
dictionaries?
One of a set of measurable factors, such as temperature and
pressure, that define a system and determine its behavior and are varied in an
experiment. I think you got his one wrong!
[Mootguy: I've been wrong before. That's why I send these
questions out. One of you guys will tell me whether the question works or
not.
Does this rephrasing work better?
In Greek para means
"beside"; what do scientists call quantities beside which other quantities are
measured?]
I think that second question works better; does not
specify the "nature" of the initial quantity. Emphasizes the concept of
"beside." Which incidentally, works for definitions of words such as
paranormal, paralegal or parapsychology. Not so much "immeasurable" as
"parallel."
In response to the business of being "beyond
measurability": Don't think this is quite right; "parapsychological" phenomena
might (or might not) be immeasurable, but I think the main idea is that there
is another psychological sphere existing alongside the conventionally
recognized one. Whether it is measurable or not is another question entirely.
I think ambidexterous has more
antonyms than snynonyms. This brings the count of words listed as its antonym
to three. The first is ambisinsiter, next is ambisinistrous and third is
ambilevous.
Maybe the way to phrase this question is "What monosyllabic
suffix..."
Is there no other suffix which can convey the
same three meanings? For example - "ian" as in "Bohemian" (tribe), "Bostonian"
(denizen), or Darwinian (faction). Of course, "ian" is more than one syllable.
So how about "er" - New Yorker(denzien), Flat-earther (faction), um... trying
to think of a tribe here.
Good question, and hate to be picky about it, but "syllable" is not
le mot juste in this case and could lead the discerning MOOT player astray.
"Syllable" refers primarily to a phonological unit, not a
morpholological unit: to wit, Collins defines it as a "division of word as unit
for pronunciation." It's a good word to describe sound (or sound represented),
but not meaning.
[Mootguy: According to
Dictionary.com, the word syllable can be
defined as: "One or more letters or phonetic symbols written or printed to
approximate a spoken syllable."
Can you suggest a juster mot juste
than syllable?]
Re: your reply. A "juster mot juste than 'syllable'" would be
"suffix," or, if you feel that gives it away, "affix." (I notice I wasn't
the only one confused by the question. Also, your Dictionary.com
definition of syllable also underlines the fact that the word
emphasizes sound (or sound trancribed) rather than meaning or morphology.)
[Mootguy: Please note that the second
definition of "syllable" in the Concise Oxford
Dictionary is: "a character or characters representing a syllable."
Thus, it seems to me that using the word "syllable"
with respect to written words is fairly common usage.
But thanks for
the feedback. If I decide to put this question in the next edition of MooT,
I'll think long and hard about your criticism.
Cheers.]
The word cigar is to cigarette
as the word organ is to what?
Answer:
organelle
Etymology-wise, a cigarette is a little
cigar and an organelle is a little organ.
The word organelle - which
derives from the Greek organon, that with which one works
(i.e. a tool) - denotes the parts of a cell, such as mitochondria and
ribosomes, that perform specific functions; the analogy is to the way our
bodily organs perform specific bodily functions.
Note that Bacon called the scientific method the
Novum Organum, the new tool.
With respect to the musical instrument the "organ"... there was a
medieval relative (portable) known as the "organetto" (Check using Google,
please: yourdictionary.com's usual English dictionary lacked this word:()...
Please note that no small *musical instrument* is an "organelle" (Sorry to say,
I had forgotten "organelle" from Biology courses over 20 years ago:(.).
Darn. I was going for the musical
instrument... I was going for 'piano' 'celeste' etc.
I could have had
organelle if I was thinking biology rather than rythmn and blues! Could you
consider eliminating this sort of ambiguity by giving some info in the
question? That way, it is my language skills that are being tested, not my luck
in determining which of two or more options you are after... Thanks for the
fun! -- Joseph
"organette" is also a word according to the OED Online.
It is a small version on the musical instrument. BTW, I knew "organelle"...
Good point. It seems that this question, as it
stands, is a dud: a key rule of MooT is that there can only be one correct
answer. A way to make it more precise would be, perhaps, to rephrase it thus:
Biology- and etymology-wise, etc. Cheers
It's a weak analogy: a large version of a cigarette is a
cigar. An organelle is a subcellular structure that has a specialized function.
One might argue that a stronger analogy would be cigar:cigarette:: organ:cell.
The analogy pertains to the way the words were
formed: the word and its diminutive. The word cell was not formed as a
diminutive of the word organ. Cheers.
A cell is
the smallest unit that does the same thing that the organ does--a quantum of
the work, if you will. An organelle does only a small part of the work: a
mitochondrion does respiration and makes ATP (energy currency for a cell); a
ribosome makes protein molecules. In neither case do either alone do all the
things the organ does, only a small part of it. A cigarette does the same thing
a cigar does, it just usually does less of it, and with slightly different
tobacco.
It derives from the Spanish
papagayo, parrot, and it has come to denote a
"vain, talkative person"; what word is it?
Answer:
popinjay
English speakers now call them parrots,
but they used to call them popinjays. The first recorded use
of the former is from 1525; the latter's first recorded use is from
1270.
The word popinjay derives from the Spanish
papagayo, which in turn derives from the
Arabic babagha, which in turn derives from the
Persian babgha, parrot.
Initially, it denoted a ram's horn that was blown in
celebration, then it came to label a 50th-year celebration, now it denotes any
time of rejoicing; what word is it?
Answer:
jubilee
The word jubilee derives from the Hebrew
yobhel, ram's horn, but in Hebrew it came to denote a
50th-year celebration during which slaves were emancipated and lands sold to
pay debts were restored to their original owners. Note that the word
shofar also denotes "ram's horn."
In
English (via the Late Latin jubilaeus, the jubilee year), the
word has come to denote a time of rejoicing.
Also, note
that the word jubilation derives from the etymologically
unrelated Latin word jubilare, to shout with joy.
I knew that! But it reminds me, I
long ago read something about how a horse "jubilates" when it realizes it is
almost home and speeds up in the "home stretch". I got the idea that the word
"accelerate" somehow was related to "jubilate". This is obviously wrong, yet
there is some nagging feeling in me that there *is* a
connection!
Haven't heard "yovel" before, but the ram's horn blown during the
Jewish new year is called the "shofar." I don't know about rejoicing, but if
there haven't been any pogroms, shoahs, visitations from marauding Cossacks,
etc. we traditionally show appreciation by saying, somewhated mutedly,
"sho-far, sho-good."
Paracelsus coined it to name a medicine that contained
opium, gold, and crushed pearls (among other things); eventually it came to
denote any tincture of opium; what word is it?
Answer:
laudanum
Laudanum also contains alcohol, which is what makes it a
tincture. The word laudanum perhaps derives from the Latin
laudere, to praise, or from the Latin
ladanum, a resin.
Enjoyed
looking up biographical information on Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus
Bombastus von Hohenheim [i.e., Paracelsus], as a result of your
question.
When they were first detected in the 1960s, they were
called radio stars because they emit large amounts of
radiation, including radio waves; what did astronomers call them
next?
Answer:
quasars
When Martin Schmidt and Allan R. Sandage discovered them in
1963, they called them radio stars. This was eventually
replaced by the word quasar, which is short for either
quasi-stellar radio objects or quasi-stellar radio
source.
Nowadays astronomers are calling this
class of celestial objects QSOs, which is short for
Quasi-Stellar Objects, so that the term will include quasars
that don't emit radio waves.
What geographical eponym was evoked
by the North-African corsair Khair ad-Din?
Answer:
Barbary Coast
An eponym is a word or phrase derived
from someone's name. Khair ad-Din's nickname was Red-beard,
which in Italian is Barbarossa; this ultimately derives from
the Greek barbaros, foreign or strange.
According to Bartleby.com:
"Barbarossa (c.1483-1546), having seized Algiers from the Spanish, placed [it]
under Turkish suzerainty [i.e., a position of strong authority, but not quite
control - sort of like Canadian comedy's relationship with the US: we have a
strong authority over American comedy, but we don't as yet have complete
control].
He [then] extended his
conquests to the rest of the Barbary States [Tripoli, Tunisia, Algeria, and
Morocco].
Between 1533 and 1544, as
admiral of the Turkish fleet under Sulayman I [a Turk], he twice defeated
Andrea Doria [an Italian] and ravaged the coasts of Greece, Spain, and
Italy."
Note: A corsair is either a
Barbary-Coast pirate or a Barbary-Coast pirate ship.
Probably too late to add a comment
on this item and its feedback - no one seemed to pick up on HOW
barba(rossa) is related to barbarian. The
Romans generally went clean shaven, associating all "bearded ones" with
foreigners, i.e. barbarians, the uncivilized and unkempt of the outer
empire.
Is Barbarossa a Greek
phrase? I speak Italian and I know it means "red beard" in Italian. I also know
that "beard" ("barba") has Latin roots. So I am surprised it is Greek, as well.
Hmmm....
[Mootguy: The word derives from the Latin barbaria,
foreign country, which itself derives from the Greek barbaros,
foreign or strange.]
All nice and good, but Barbarossa is not Greek but latin
for "red beard". Just to clear the misconception... John Dask Toronto
[Mootguy: Change made. Thanks for the
feedback.]
In response to your comment about "barbaria," are you saying that
"barbarossa" and "barbarian/ous" are etymologically related?
It's not clear from your comment. According to the Online
Etymological Dictionary, they're not. Futhermore, "barbaria" (from which the
name Barbary Coast comes) ultimately derives from the Proto-Indo-European
reduplicative word "barbar," which is "echoic of unintelligible speech of
foreigners (cf. Skt. barbara- "stammering," also "non-Aryan")."
Clearly nothing to do with "red beard" and light years before the
sixteenth century. Nonetheless, the Barbarossa story is
entertaining.
The word Hezbollah (which denotes a Lebanese Shiite - capital
"A" - Activist organization) derives from the Arabic hizbullah, Party of God, which in turn derives from
hizb, party, and Allah, God.
According to American literary
critic Paul Fussell in
Thank God for the Atom
Bomb
, what slang word for intercourse
did World War I soldiers coin by mispronouncing a French word meaning
prostitute?
Answer:
poontang
According to Fussell (and the
Online Etymology Dictionary), the word poontang derives from the French
putain, prostitute; the latter ultimately (and
value-judgementally) deriving from the Latin putidus,
stinking.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if I'm not
mistaken, the current usage of the word is not sex, but the female sex organ,
which seems to follow more directly from Mr. Fussell's theory of origin. No
doubt the putains these soldiers encountered were all
female.
Hi mootguy, Funny story behind that word poontang. It is in a song
by Ted Nugent and when I was younger I was in a crowded restaurant and asked my
date in front of everybody what it meant. Needless to say he put off the answer
till we were in a less crowded spot! Now I even know how it was created! Thanks
and have a great summer.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if i'm not mistaken, the
current usage of the word is not sex, but the female sex organ, which seems to
follow more directly from Mr. Fusell's theory of origin. No doubt the putains
these soldiers encountered were all female.
Rather I think it was because streptococci occur in chain- or
rope-like configurations. Staphylococci (Gk staphylo- bunch of grapes + coccus
berry) occur in irregular clusters. Diplococci occur in pairs. Streptobacilli
are rod-like bacteria that occur in chains.
What are the two adjectival forms of
the word troglodyte?
Answer:
troglodytic and troglodytical
The word troglodyte derives from the Greek
troglodutae, people who live in holes, which in
turn derives from from the Greek trogle, hole, and
dyein, go in.
Dear Mr Moot: These two adjectives have the same meaning, but some
such pairs have usefully different meanings - e.g. economic and economical. I
guess, where there's no difference in meaning, the shorter form is to be
preferred because it is (if you'll pardon the expression) more
economical.
Egyptian novelist Ahdaf
Soueif on a visit to Cairo:
"
Right there, at my feet, the Nile spreads out in a shimmering, flowing mass.
The water reflects the lights of small boats, of floating restaurants, of the
bridges flung across the river. From the centre rises Gezira island, on it the
lit-up dome of the Opera House and the tall, slim lotus of the Cairo
Tower.
The scene is spectacularly
beautiful, and over it all hangs the thick pall that Cairenes call "the black
cloud". No one seems certain where it comes from. They say it's the farmers
burning husks of rice in Sharqiyya province. They say it's Cairo rubbish
burning in several places - two of the fires out of control. They say it's a
component in the new unleaded petrol. It hangs over everything, but
Cairenes live with it, because - so far - they can still
breathe."
My first guess was Cairenes, my second Cairoans. Is there any rhyme
or reason to these -ites (Vancouver), -enes (Cairo), -ans (Calgary), -onians
(Toronto), -ers (Winnipeg), -ians (Paris) -- other than custom or
euphony?
Which American city's nickname
means "goat enclosure" in Old English?
Answer:
New York City
The nickname Gotham derives from the Old English
Gatham (place to keep goats), the name of a
village in Nottinghamshire, England. Since the mid-15th century,
Gotham has denoted "a place with foolish inhabitants" - the
equivalent Canadian term is House of Commons.
Washington Irving first applied it to
New York in his satirical work
Salmagundi
(1807).
In which century was the word
deodorant coined: the 15th or the 19th?
Answer:
19th
The first Oxford English
Dictionary citation for the word deodorant is from 1869; it derives from the Latin
odorem, smell. Before that, people used a
scented powder called empasm. That word derives from a Greek
word meaning "to sprinkle on."
According to Bertrand Russell, it
originally denoted: "everything that is in the province of the muses"; what
word is it?
Answer:
music
The word music derives from the Greek mousike tekhne, art of the Muses (which derives from
the Greek Mousa, Muse). To the Greeks, the word
music meant something similar to what we mean
by the word culture .
What cliche de-emphasizes the
visible 1/9th?
Answer:
tip of the iceberg
The tip of the iceberg is the part of the
iceberg (about 1/9th) that projects above the surface of the water. The phrase
implies that the real magnitude of the problem isn't apparent.
Thanks to all the people who played. The winner is:
James Wood --- @worldnet.att.net
who will receive a free MooT game in the mail.
This was fun, so I'll do it again in November. In the meantime, back
to regular MooT questions.
Cheers
The Mootguy
(Contest) What cliche de-emphasizes
the visible 1/9th?
Answer:
The answer will be posted when someone gets it.
If there is no answer, that means no one
has figured it out yet, and that means you can still win.
To play: put your answer in an email subject line
and send the email to mootlist@mootgame.com
Cheers
the Mootguy
It derives from a Latin word that was used to express
disgust at the smell of a stench, and it is what an Englishman would say to
express outraged propriety. What archaic three-letter oath is
it?
Answer:
fie
As in fie on you. The word derives from
the Latin fi, yuck.
Related, no doubt, to the Yiddish "Feh!," meaning "It stinks! No
good" or expressing disgust, as in "Feh, don't touch that dirty thing," or
"Feh, you didn't clean off your shoes? You just left a trail of dreck on the
carpet."
Originally, it was the name of a
character in a 16th-century English comedy. Since then it has come to denote
"that which is genuine." What hyphenated phrase is it?
Answer:
simon-pure
The original Simon Pure was a character
in the comedy
A Bold Stroke for a Wife
(1717) by
Susannah Centlivre.
If anyone has any idea why the name
came to denote "genuineness," please let me know.
A character in the play impersonated a Quaker preacher named
Simon Pure. Unfortunately for him, the real Simon Pure
appeared and proves himself to be the genuine article. The phrase was then
adopted as slang for genuineness.
The dictionaries also
give a secondary definition as:"pretentiously or hypocritically pure"(Mirriam
Webster) "Superficially or hypocritically virtuous." (American Heritage)
Presumably this definition refers to the imposter and the pretense needed for
his ruse.
British dramatist and actress Susannah Centlivre (1669-1723)
introduced the character of Simon Pure in her 1718 comedy
A Bold Stroke for a Wife
.
In that
play, Colonel Fainall wants to marry Anne Lovely, but to do so he must win the
consent of Anne's guardian, a Quaker gentleman named Obadiah Prim.
Fainall tries to gain the needed approval by impersonating a Quaker
preacher named Simon Pure.
Unfortunately for the
scheme, the real Simon Pure appears and proves himself to be the genuine
article.
People adopted the phrase the real
Simon Pure (which in turn gave rise to the adjective
simon-pure) from the play to refer to things true or genuine.
simon-pure (adj.) 1815, from the true Simon Pure "the
genuine person or thing" (1795), from Simon Pure, name of a Quaker who is
impersonated by another character (Colonel Feignwell) in part of the comedy
A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1717) by Susannah Centlivre, English
dramatist and actress. The real Simon Pure is dealt with as an imposter and is
believed only after he has proved his identity.
The manuscript of the play is the obvious place to start
your search for the answer.
The names of any number of
literary characters (e.g., Scrooge, Falstaff, Milquetoast) now serve to denote
characteristics notable in their roles on the page.
The
very word characteristics may well have come into being to
describe this long-common phenomenon.
If it had been manufactured in
Greece, it would have been called the Pleiades. What Japanese
car-type is it?
Answer:
the Subaru
The Pleiades, also known as the
Seven Sisters (and Subaru in Japan and M45
by astronomers), is the brightest open cluster of stars in the sky. It is
located in the constellation Taurus.
The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in
America
by E. Digby Baltzell was published and a new acronym entered
common discourse. What was it?
Answer:
WASP
The acronym WASP stands for White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
According to the
American Heritage
Dictionary
, it denotes "a white, usually Protestant member of the
American upper social class." Baltzell, a University of Pennsylvania
sociologist, popularized the word.
The
Online Etymology Dictionary
claims that he also
coined it. But other sources state that it was coined in 1962 by Erdman Palmore
[another sociology professor, I believe].
If anyone has further information about this
etymology, please let me know.
Use of the term WASP has broadened significantly
since its coinage.
Today any English-speaking Protestant
of European descent may be called a "WASP", though most are
not descended from Angles, Saxons, or members of closely-related tribes. Jews,
Catholics, and Orthodox Christians are excluded.
This
usage is ahistoric, simplistic, and trite: white Protestants in the U.S.
comprise myriad national backgrounds and denominations. WASP
was also the acroynm used to describe female pilots during World War II: The
acroynm was also used to describe A member of Women's Airforce Service Pilots,
organized during World War II as part of the U.S. Army Air Forces to ferry
aircraft and to test new aircraft. The organization was disbanded in
1944.
A member of the American white
Protestant middle or upper class descended from early European settlers in the
U.S. Freq. derog.
1962 E. B. PALMORE in Amer.
Jrnl. Sociol. LXVII. 442/2: For the sake of brevity we will use the
nickname 'Wasp' for this group, from the initial letters of 'White Anglo-Saxon
Protestants'.
1963 Times 2 May 15/5:
There is such a thing as a 'Human Engineering Laboratory'; whether a man is a
Wasp (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) can decide his career.
1963 New Statesman 10 May 716/2: This year's
executive model will be over six feet tall, clean-shaven, lean, and with large
fleshy ears... He should try to be or pretend to be a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant) and ought to have gone to an Ivy League college, preferably
Princeton.
1964 E. D. BALTZELL Protestant
Establishment (1965) i. 9,: I should first like to show how the
aristocratic process still worked quite well in the case of the family of
Abraham Lincoln, and especially how the WASP establishment authoritatively
retained the leadership of American society in the generation of Robert Todd
Lincoln.
1968 Times Lit. Suppl. 4 Apr. 329/1
: The Jew can choose to leave his ghetto by 'passing' or by breaking
the more and more flimsy barriers put up by Wasp (and non-Wasp) anti-Semitism,
but the Negro cannot....
E. Howard
Assistant Professor Department of English Kent State
University ehoward-@-kent.edu
, the plurals are:
cyclops, cyclopes, and
cyclopses.
It denotes a "fall guy" and perhaps
derives from the nickname of a 1880's minstrel show character who was blamed
whenever something went wrong. What word is it?
Answer:
patsy
The word - perhaps - derives from the
name Patsy Bolivar, a character in an 1880's
minstrel show who is blamed whenever anything goes wrong.
Derived from the name of a character
in George Du Maurier's novel Trilby, it denotes
a hypnotically forceful person who induces others to perform evil. What word is
it?
Answer:
Svengali
Svengali was the hypnotist villain in the
1894 novel
Originally, a nautical command to
keep a ship's head to the wind, it now describes the emotionally distant. What
word is it?
Answer:
aloof
The word aloof derives from the Dutch loef, the weather side of a ship.
The wisdom buried in the etymology is that during
stormy weather you avoid dangerous - and hidden - shores by heading into the
weather (i.e. towards the wind).
Luffing one's sails, by
turning into the wind, releases the pressure in the sails and reduces heeling
and stops forward motion.
More precisely, lying
to, setting the sails so that the ship advances slowly but then turns
into the wind, luffing the sails and stopping the ship and then drifting off as
the sails fill again, the ship advances again but again turns into the wind,
and so on, is a storm strategy only if there are many miles between the ship
and the rocks because the ship will drift slowly downwind.
I think it was more to
avoid being capsized by the wind or driven too fast in any direction.
When you point a sailboat directly into the wind the
sail flaps or luffs ineffectually, and the boat moves more
slowly through the water than if the sail were smooth and providing
lift.
Very interesting, as always. I was further interested to find, on
checking the dictionary, that loef also entered English as
luff, with the original meaning somewhat altered and expanded
but fully recognizable.
The buried wisdom probably has more to do with the
following.
The initial 'a' served as a preposition,
usually 'to' or 'toward' (abaft, alow, aweather, alee, etc.). Also in earlier
times the ships company tended after a while to take on a certain aroma, not
always pleasing to the nose.
The safest place to stand
was to the weather of the crew.
Also, the reason the
crew's quarters (and head) were at the forepeak is that on the most usual
points of sailing the ship's bow was well downwind of the captain's quarters
(and the poopdeck), unlike the modern jagt.
In fact the
captains often insisted on remaining aloef. Kinda stands to reason, doesn't
it?
Hey, I guessed this one correctly! I think of the Moot questions as
particularly difficult (so it's even more fun to get one right), so I am quite
pleased with myself this time.
Thanks to everyone for
the great explanations for this question.
: A Chinese written character was coined
by combining a character meaning "danger" with another meaning "opportunity";
what six-letter English word best translates it?
I have been told that "crisis = danger + opportunity" is
an urban legend; the following two URLs substantiate this and provide more
background information:
It derives from a Latin word that
means "one-tenth of a Roman legion"; now it labels a statistical grouping. What
word is it?
Answer:
cohort
The word cohort - which
derives from the Latin cohortem, which in turn derives from
cohors, enclosure - denotes a generational group in statistics
and market research. In Latin it denoted 1/10 of a Roman Legion - i.e., 1/10th
of 3000 to 6000 men.
In what century did the term
welfare - as in the sense "social effort to improve the
well-being of the poor" - enter English?
Answer:
the 20th
The word welfare derives from the Old English
wel faran, the condition of being or doing
well.
According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, the first instance of
its use in the sense social effort to improve the well-being of the
poor is from the November 1904 issue of Century
Magazine:
"The welfare
manager, who may be either a man or a woman, is a recognized intermediary
between the employers and employees of mercantile houses and manufacturing
plants."
The most famous use of the word
Welfare has to be the one in the preamble to the U.S.
Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in
Order to ... promote the general Welfare, ... do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States of America.
The answer is quite a surprise to me. I would have expected Dickens
or the Salvation Army or the English Suffragettes to have used the word in that
sense in the 19th century. But I have no reference to support my expectations.
[Mootguy: Perhaps they did, but the
OED's first "recorded" (i.e., written) use is from 1904.
]
