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December 31st, 2010
January 16th, 2008
08:54 am
Linguists put the shine on Strine: "Try these new words, in the Macquarie Dictionary, for today's language lesson: credit card tart, tanorexia, salad dodger, floordrobe, silent disco, lady garden, Chindia, carbon footprint, grapple tackle." (Of these new Australian words, I myself have only ever heard "carbon footprint".)
'Subprime' is word of year 2007 according to the American Dialect Society.
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December 24th, 2007
09:58 pm
The British Medical Journal, which seems to have gone insane for Christmas, reports on the blackly humorous slang used by doctors. How much of this has been invented and how much collected from the field I cannot say.
I encountered the word stoater in Christopher Brookmyre's novel Quite Ugly One Morning (which I strongly recommend to anyone on a diet). This Scottishism is usually used to mean a particularly good-looking woman, but in the novel, an especially bizarre and difficult murder case was dubbed "a real stoater".
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December 17th, 2007
06:45 pm - Languages Other Than English
Lekoudesch, a secret language of German Jewish cattle traders
More on Norf'k
Linear B
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September 21st, 2007
09:09 pm - Languages
Aloha and Mahalo: two of the most important words of the Hawaiian language
Aboriginal languages help more stay on: "Learning an Aboriginal language - in addition to English - will become compulsory in schools with large indigenous populations under a State Government strategy to improve Aboriginal retention rates and literacy standards."
Languages on critical list: "MORE languages are at risk of dying out in northern Australia than anywhere else on the planet, according to researchers who have identified the world's five top "hot spots" of endangered indigenous languages." Read more at the Living Tongues Institute site.
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August 28th, 2007
08:35 pm - From Hunter S. Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear"
witchbag - "There was a carelessness in the way this case was handled that led us to a witchbag of strange problems within the law-enforcement system."
flag-sucker - "The Democrats had lost another election and Bush was still the new President. But not much had changed since the 80s, when the looting of the Treasury was in high gear and the U.S. Mikitary was beginning to flex its newfound money-muscle. When, everywhere you looked, the flag-suckers were in charge."
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February 12th, 2007
09:16 pm
"But coming back to Albania, [learning other languages] was a form of keeping yourself sane, it was a way of keeping up with the rest of the world and what was happening beyond the confines of the place that you were confined to. And it felt very much like a confinement, I grew up in a place that was confined, you could not really move very much, there was a kind of grounding. Because you couldn't leave, at least your imagination, your fantasy, you could imagine other worlds by the languages you spoke, you could at least construct a different understanding, a different reality based on language; the concepts they use, the way in which words and sentences and even meanings were constructed."
- Interview with interpreter and translator Erik Lloga
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February 5th, 2007
05:25 pm - Vanishing Languages: Ladino
An interview with the English translator of In Search Of A Lost Ladino - Letter To Antonio Saura by Marcel Cohen. The book includes a glossary of Ladino terms, many of which are left untranslated; I wish the transcript of the interview had included some of these including the elegant "a cucumber's ass" for "nothing".
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December 21st, 2006
07:59 am - Shed language
The uk.rec.sheds FAQ is full of entertaining words, including the newsgroup's own coinages, several terms from The Meaning of Liff, and the following:
marplot - an interfering busybody who mucks up your plans
esculent - edible
outwith - outside [I heard David Tennant use this in an interview. Is it a Scotism, I wonder?]
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December 5th, 2006
03:08 pm - More Idioms Other Than English: Nahuatl
I dug up some old photocopies about expressions and saying in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. These are from the Codex Florentino.
"Servants are sent" - this refers to a story about the king who spotted two women bathing. He sent two messengers to find out who the women were, but all the messengers did was hang around watching them bathe. He sent another messenger to find out what had happened to the first two, and that one didn't come back either. So "servants are sent" (moxoxolotitlani) is said of a messenger who either goes to the wrong place or doesn't return.
A busybody is said to be "in all places". A "scatterer of friends" is an argumentative person who makes everyone get up and leave.
"On Earth one may toil" - "This is said when sometimes we can save up some little thing; but sometimes poverty overwhelms us. Somtimes it is possible, sometimes it is impossible."
"No-one is the navel on Earth" means one shouldn't belittle or despise anyone: "Although he appear detestable, he is perhaps prudent, perhaps discreet, perhaps able."
"I fly into the fire like a moth" has a different meaning to the English "Like a moth to the flame". Rather than being attracted to the flame, this moth doesn't realise the fire will burn and kill it. The expression is used when an angry person gets into a fight, not realising the consequences.
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November 27th, 2006
10:58 am - Idioms Other Than English
From Lonely Planet's Say What?:
"To have bats in the belfry" = French "To have a spider on the ceiling", Croatian "Crows have drunk his brain"
"To lose your marbles" = Turkish "To kidnap the goats"
"To push up daisies" = German "To look at the radishes from below"
"A liquid lunch" = Dutch "A glass sandwich"
"When hell freezes over" = Slovenian, Portuguese "On Saint Never's Day"
"Get lost!" = Dutch "Walk to the moon", Finnish "Ski into a spruce"
"A fish out of water" = Spanish "An octopus in a garage"
And a wonderful expression from Colombian Spanish: "Swallowed like the postman's sock" = "Hopelessly in love"
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September 26th, 2006
07:40 pm - A few words that've been lying around
bole - tree trunk (askoxford.com).
cantillation - chanting.
cataplasm - poultice (1913 Webster's).
circumforanean - "going about; walking or wandering from house to house" (1828 Webster's).
claustral - of or like a cloister (Merriam-Webster Online).
enceinte - pregnant (Merriam-Webster Online).
gremial - of the lap or breast; a bosom friend (1913 Webster's).
jointure - "an estate settled on a wife for the period during which she survives her husband" (askoxford.com).
quenelles - poached meatballs or fishballs (1913 Webster's).
reft - plundered (Merriam-Webster Online).
skirling - the sound made by bagpipes (1913 Webster's).
usufruct - "the right to enjoy the use of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance" (askoxford.com).
vilipend - to hold in disdain; to express that disdain. (Merriam-Webster Online).
I can't find flutterbudget in any online dictionary, making me wonder if Frank L. Baum made it up.
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07:35 pm - Two unrelated snippets
In nuclear physics, the cross section is the size of the nucleus you're trying to hit with a particle, and the barn is the unit of measurement for the cross section! (The outhouse and the shed are both tiny fractions of a barn.) Check it out in The Language of the Nucleus.
The thorn is the "y" in "ye", as in "Ye Olde Shoppe" - it's actually a "th".
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June 13th, 2006
06:29 am - Greennotebook's Tags
I've been tagging entries here with the words defined therein, which means the list of all tags is a rough, miniature dictionary. I haven't tagged every word (eg I've omitted technical terms) and I still need to add tags for words defined in the comments.
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05:04 am - From the little notebook in my backpack
corybantic - wild, frenzied, like the dancing of the Korubantes, the priests of Cybele.
disjunctive - unconnected.
aspersive - defamatory (Webster's 1913)
ochreous - containing or resembling ochre (dictionary.com)
bolster - a long, firm pillow.
catlap - "Usually weak tea or milk; something fit only for cats to drink" (Cat-ch Phrases)
caucus - "a group of people with shared concerns within a larger organization."
staid - "respectable and unadventurous".
Definitions from askoxford.com unless otherwise noted.
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January 9th, 2006
02:58 pm - Wurdz
abject - in general use this means degrading, completely without dignity; in psychology, it means a state of horror caused when meaning, order, and the boundary between self and other breaks down, such as when we see a corpse and it reminds us of our own mortality, or when we encounter an atrocity. (This is my stab at a definition based on various Web sites - I know very little about this, but thought it was a fascinating concept.)
alloplast - "an inert foreign body used for implantation into tissue" (Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary)
alterity - otherness; the state of being other. (Webster 1913)
assiduous - "showing great care and perseverance". (One of those words I keep looking up and then forgetting the meaning.)
benison - a blessing
canalize - turn a river into a canal; convery through a canal; give something a direction or purpose.
doughty - "brave and resolute"
exiguous - tiny
hotched - wriggled, fidgeted, swarmed (M-W)
langoustine - a type of small lobster (M-W)
palliate - ease the symptoms without treating the cause
pyroclastic - "of or relating to rock fragments or ash erupted by a volcano, especially as a hot, dense, destructive flow."
raillery - "good-humoured teasing"
recondite - little-known, obscure
squit - someone of no importance (an insult); nonsense (Encarta)
wonted - usual
Definitions from Ask Oxford unless otherwise noted.
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02:34 pm
I came across the word "inobvious", Googled it, and found it all over. But onelook.com finds it in precisely no dictionaries. omg word creation in progress!
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January 4th, 2006
04:36 pm - Some more loanwords
arriviste - "a person who has recently gained social or financial status or is ambitious to do so" (French)
au courant - "up to date and well-informed" (French)
catafalque - " a decorated wooden framework to support a coffin". (Italian)
Erse - Scots or Irish Gaelic (Scots Gaelic)
gasconading - boasting (M-W) (French)
habitué - resident of, or frequent visitor to, a place (French)
Bonus trivia! The word mess, meaning a soldier's meal, comes to English via Old French from the Latin missum, "something put on the table". Also, snorkel comes from the marvellous German word Schnorchel. How the Germans came to apply this word to the invention I would love to know.
Definitions from Ask Oxford unless otherwise noted.
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January 3rd, 2006
03:55 pm
A few terms I've encountered while marking up in HTML the journals of Lachlan Macquarie (soldier, traveller, and sixth Governor of NSW).
blue-skins - "the Offspring of European Fathers, by Moor or Gentoo women".
cuddy - "The public or captain’s cabin of an Indiaman or other passenger ship." (The Hobson Jobson Dictionary of Anglo-Indian Terms)
dead-lights - "certain wooden ports which are made to fasten into the cabin-windows, to prevent the waves from gushing into a ship in a high sea." (William Falconer's Dictionary of the Marine)
debark - to get off a boat, to disembark. (The silly-sounding deplane apparently has historical precedent.)
sensibly - detectably, noticeably
ETA: Lachie also mentions that the zebra was also known as the Queen's Ass.
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