Word for the Day

lol u sed panis

Nope, but “widder” is almost certainly cognate with German “wider-,” “back” or “returning.”

@Billikin

The all-knowing oracle says that the opposite term is ‘sunwise’.

@Hix: Eh?

I’ve always liked :

glisk–a brief glimmer, as of light; a glimmer

I think it was a favorite of Sir Walter Scott

A friend of mine years ago pointed me to transpontine. I also like, and occasionally use, epigones, the mediocre successors of the great (Trotsky used it of the Zinoviev-Kamenev group and, especially, of Stalin, “the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus”).

Metempsychosis: a fancy term for reincarnation. I first came across it in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum: “He must be the winner of the metempsychosis relay.” I just love the sound of this word.

Petrichor.

A simple and familar concept that very deserving of a word.

She swallowed a draught of tea from her cup held by nothandle and, having wiped her fingertips smartly on the blanket, began to search the text with the hairpin till she reached the word.
— Met him what? he asked.
— Here, she said. What does that mean?
He leaned downwards and read near her polished thumbnail.
— Metempsychosis?
— Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?
— Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls.
— O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.

(from Ulysses )

Insucken itself means: “Situated within a certain sucken, or jurisdiction having its own mill; astricted to a certain mill in the servitude of thirlage.”

Things become clearer if one looks up “astricted” or “thirlage”:

Astricted: “Confined, restricted; spec. in Sc. Law applied to lands held on such terms that the tenant must take grain grown upon them to be ground at a particular mill, paying a toll called multure or thirlage.”

In my geek family we’d sometimes play a game where we passed around a big dictionary, found words no one knew or unknown definitions of known words, made up plausible but preposterous definitions for them, mixed those together with the real definition and scored points based on whether you’d picked the real one or had your invented one picked. Anyhoo, the consensus favorite word to emerge from this game was “clung,” which does mean, as I recall, the condition of the scrotum in extreme cold.

Otiose. I remember being astonished at the time; I wasn’t used to running into words I didn’t know.

Then I started reading old George MacDonald novels with dialogue in Scots dialect. Humbled me but good, they did. But I’m not sure that it would be fair to post any of those. It would be as unfair as posting words from Hawaiian creole. Can’t expect anyone outside the islands to know what pau hana or kapakahi mean :)

A friend and I had an invented joke word, gruntle that we derived from disgruntled, But I discovered just the other day at the futility closet that it is a real word, meaning to put into good humour.

Also, dentiloquy
n. speech through gritted teeth

#2 & 4 ‘deasil’ is the OED preferred spelling; Auden uses it a couple of times, in Bucolics: Lakes and in The Age of Anxiety.

My nomination would be gloaming, the evening twilight, with crepuscule running a close second (crepuscule can mean either the evening or the morning twilight).

I expect it worked just the same way as the various methods of testing for witchiness did – if they didn’t like you, you lost.

I regard “otiose” as perfectly cromulent, and would use it in normal writing, without expecting that my readers would have to embiggen their vocabulary.

JQ – ’embiggen’ is nice (and yes, I got the reference) but I prefer the coinage French & Saunders casually threw in to a plastic surgery sketch –
Your nose, Madam. I see. And would you like it largened or smallened?

Anyone raised on German folktales ought to be familiar with the term widdershins. If my memory from childhood serves me right, walking around a place (particularly a church, I think) widdershins can cause you to be transported to a troll kingdom, so it’s actually a highly dangerous concept.

Belle – the last time I sang Three Ravens –
Now God grant every Christian man
Such hounds, such hawk and such a leman
– someone came up to me afterwards and said that ‘leman’ specifically means ‘concubine’ or ‘floozy’ rather than ‘lover’. Which would put that couplet in a slightly different light. Don’t know if it’s actually true, though.

Nope, but “widder” is almost certainly cognate with German “wider-,” “back” or “returning.”

The German for back or returning is wieder. wider means countering, against (i.e. against the direction of the sun).

36: the answer is a “leman”

This is also a favourite incomprehensible joke of my mum’s. I wonder if they got it from the same place, or just have the same sense of humour?

phil, it means sweetheart who you’re sleeping with (possibly secretly): which would translate as floozy for some, because your fondness is their pain

“gruntle” is the frequentative of grunt. Other frequentatives: sparkle, twinkle, tipple, fondle. And many more. Nursing pigs, when content, gruntle. If a mother pig is ill and unable to nurse, she is disgruntled.

Then there’s that awful moment when you see a word you’ve never actually looked up in a new context and realise you don’t know what it means after all. For me it was “prevarication”, which I thought meant something like “putting up a smokescreen of trivial objections so as to avoid the real issue”. Then I was reading a French play in which one character suggests some improper tactic and the other replies, horrified,

Mais ça serait la prévarication!

“But that would be waffling!” “But that would be using delaying tactics!” I couldn’t make it fit, and eventually I was forced to use the dictionary.

I first came across widdershins in the lovely (late 50s?) edition of “British Fairy Tales”, ed.Amabel [sic] Williams-Ellis, with pictures by Pauline Baynes — Williams-Ellis is a relation (daughter I think) of the guy who designed and built Port Meirion

Burd Ellen chases a ball widdershins round a church, and is taken to the Dark Tower and held there by the King of Elfland until Childe Rowland rescues her

Metahemeralism.

A friend and I had an invented joke word, gruntle that we derived from disgruntled, But I discovered just the other day at the futility closet that it is a real word, meaning to put into good humour.

Linguists call this a back formation. Wodehouse beat you to it – I don’t have a reference but B. Wooster famously says of someone that “If not exactly disgruntled he was certainly not gruntled,” OWTTE.

OED has “gruntle” in three senses as a noun and two as a verb, but this isn’t one of them.

Back formations can become real words, like Pinocchio or the Velveteen Rabbit. “Choate” is an example, coined from “inchoate” in the mistaken belief that the “in-” is a negative particle. Ignorant or not, tax lawyers have adopted it because it denotes a concept for which no word was at hand.

A benevolent government gives me online access to OED at work, so I can confirm that it says what Bloix says it says at 52.

When I took the GREs last week, they ambushed me with “pelf”. I had to look that one up when I got home. I suppose it must be related to “pilfer” somehow.

There’s a fairly good C. S. Forester short story (collected in The Nightmare, 1954) that works only if you don’t already know what a deodand is.

@47: you might want to bear in mind that the same arrangement of letters in different languages can have different meanings…

Deodands are cool! And often forfeit…

Pelf is entirely obsolete, I think, except in the phrase “power or pelf,”as in, “No men were ever yet discovered who gave up power or pelf without a struggle” (Thomas Carlyle, 1838).

And #54 – I’ve run into eight of those words, the rest are completely unknown to me, and I wouldn’t want to have to define those eight.

#58- this sort of humor was common among students in science and engineering programs when they were all-male. My father’s college yearbook is full of this stuff.

When I took the GREs last week, they ambushed me with “pelf”.

How anyone thought knowledge of rare words like “pelf” should be relevant for one’s admission to graduate school is beyond me.

How anyone thought knowledge of rare words like “pelf” should be relevant for one’s admission to graduate school is beyond me.

Only then, during orientation when the chairman warns them not to expect any, they all stay put, and society ends up with another cohort of malnourished doctoral candidates to support.

spathic!!
a long time favorite song by the Japanese band Melt Banana, although I must admit I never looked up the word until seeing it in this thread…

Plangent comes from the latin verb to “sob while thumping your chest” — this makes me like the Romans more than Elvis Costello, but there you go.

Hey, I haven’t submitted a word yet!

How about “mangel-wurzel.”

Typo at #54: “oestival” should of course be “aestival” for J. Percival Hackworth, or “estival” for followers of American spelling reform. Oppose serotinal (or autumnal), hibernal, and vernal.

the idea, I think, is that possession of a large vocabulary is an indication that someone is well-read.

In particular, the possession of a large vocabulary which one butchers the pronunciation of whenever one speaks is an indication that someone is fairly well-read but was not socialized among the facund. :-(

(Thank goodness for books on tape, I tell you.)

Not to be obsessive, but there are two different “waffle” words -both of them probably frequentatives. The food waffle is from a root meaning “woven” and by adding “le” you get the idea of the repeated weave pattern of the surface. (“Griddle” is similar – it means a repeated grid pattern.) It comes into English from Dutch but Dutch has frequentatives, too.

The “indecisive or evasive” waffle is said to come from an oenomatopeic rendering of the sound a dog makes – “woof” or (in the 17th c) “waff” -with the “le” ending to indicate repetition. So to “waffle” originally meant to go woof-woof-woof-woof-woof, that is, to make a lot of noise without saying anything.

I don’t think testy is a gender-specific word.

Precisely. Neither is “choda,” at least not in the Spanish we speak here.

Don’t provoke a fight, please

But . . . the merkin (I’m only guessing that’s her nationality) called my grandmother a chowderhead.

Merkin? You REALLY do not want to go there.
Oh, what the hell –
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2004/08/29/my-fellow-emmerkinsem/

set-up: pretty much any question to which the answer a word (any word) that people rarely use any more?
hilarious punchline: “the answer is a leman”

this is possibly because “the answer is a lemon” is/was some kind of catchphrase back in the day?

as i say, dad found it funny and none of the rest of us quite knew why

Phil, yes, Meek has it exactly right – “anyone who doesn’t know a word we use is a fool, and anyone who uses a word we don’t know is a snob.”

But seriously, the use of a hard word that he gives from Cormac McCarthy shows that he didn’t quite understand what McCarthy was up to:

“It took me a while before I worked out what Cormac McCarthy meant when he described the American desert thus in No Country For Old Men: “The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant.” Abscissa is, I now know, a mathematical term for the distance to a point along the x-axis of a graph. The desert plain is the remorselessly straight horizontal reference for everything – mountains, men, clouds – that strives to rise above it.”

But the thing is, in this passage we are seeing the world through the eyes of the hero, the working class Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss. Moss is no mathematician, but he would have known and used “abscissa” and “quadrant” to himself as a result of his military training, as words used to describe terrain in a precisely mathematical way. This isn’t the author’s disinterested description of the desert that we’re reading. Moss is viewing the landscape as if it were a battlefield.

McCarthy doesn’t care if we have to look words up – he wants us to have to, because he wants us to feel that his characters are more competent than we are. Here he uses a hard word to make it clear that Moss is perfectly at home as a hunter in the desert, in the way that we, the readers, are not. And he is also foreshadowing the carnage that Moss is soon to witness.

“Why, what’s it mean in North America? ”

Roughly, “to speak evasively”, or “to refuse a clear answer”. “Waffling” in the English sense may be used to evade a question, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient.

Let’s not forget that on at least one occasion the corsned actually worked; Earl Godwin, from memory, fronted up and said “If I am lying, may this piece of bread choke me and I die,” and the piece of bread choked him and he died, generally thought at the time to be proof beyond reasonable doubt.

in this passage we are seeing the world through the eyes of the hero, the working class Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss. Moss is no mathematician, but he would have known and used “abscissa” and “quadrant” to himself as a result of his military training, as words used to describe terrain in a precisely mathematical way.

I doubt it. I have never heard “abscissa” used in a military context, to describe ground or in any other sense. The term used would be “horizon”. And “quadrant” in a military context is an optical device used to check that an artillery piece is level; the military term appropriate for use here would be “arc” or “sector”.

I am open to correction. If soldiers in the US military are habitually taught to call the horizon the abscissa, then Bloix is correct.

McCarthy’s not even using them correctly in a mathematical context, I’d say – if an abscissa is a specific x-coordinate, then it’s a vertical line, not a horizontal line. Maybe the mathematically adept Llewellyn Moss is supposed to be lying down on his side.

*bold* -strikethrough- _underscore_ /italic/ ^superscript^… No idea which, if any, are going to work, and the preview function doesn’t tell me. Sorry for contentless commenting.

Phil: 3 out of 5, really.

To continue off-topicry but reduce its degree: mentioning ‘badinage’ (pronounce to rhyme with ‘Raj’) reminds me of a strange phenomenon that’s emerged in the last few years in the UK – pronouncing ‘homage’ as a French word, dropped aitch, 2nd-syllable stress and all. What’s going there then? It sounds grotesquely pretentious as well as unaccountably wrong to me, but seems to be a new standard in the media – notably in BBC arts magazine programmes, which could really do without such gratuitous additional irritants. Is the context in which this has been happening (artistic tribute) actually supposed to feature a distinct concept which has its own word?

The word they’re using is _hommage_, a French word pronounced “omARZH” and translating as, er ‘homage’. I think it’s a Film Studies thing.

remuda – in the Southwest, a group of extra saddle horses kept as a supply of remounts.