I see. Well most of those terms were new to me, so I thought you were introducing them. My mistake, sorry. I agree, that's why I didn't edit it myself. I think that's unlikely so again, that's why I didn't edit it. I just didn't want to start a trend and have the next guy post his entire vocabulary of four-letter words. You could have just said "breasts," dude! Or researched the origin of some of those words I've never heard of. I'm sure that would have been interesting. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The number of synonyms was interesting in itself, linguistically. The eskimos only have seven words for snow. You don't want to set a precedent for body part posts and I can see how that might become troublesome.
snow - kaniktsqaq no snow - aputaitok to snow - qanir, qanunge or qanugglir snowy weather - nittaatsuq or qannirsuq to get fine snow or rain particles - kanevcir first falling - apingaut light falling - qannialaag wet and falling - natatgo naq in the air, falling - qaniit feathery clumps of falling snow - qanipalaat air thick with snow - nittaalaq rippled surface of snow - kaiyuglak light, deep enough for walking - katiksugnik fresh without any ice - kanut crusty - sillik soft for travelling - mauyasiorpok soft and deep where snowshoes are needed for travel - taiga powder - nutagak salty - pokaktok wind-beaten - upsik fresh - nutaryuk packed - aniu sharp - panar crusty that breaks under foot - karakartanaq rotten, slush on the sea - qinuq best for building an igloo - pukaangajuq glazed in a thaw - kiksrukak watery - mangokpok firm (the easiest to cut, the warmest, the preferred) - pukajaw loose, newly fallen snow which cannot be used as it is, but can provide good building material when compacted - ariloqaq for melting into water - aniuk that a dog eats - aniusarpok that can be broken through - mauya floating on water - qanisqineq for building - auverk on clothes - ayak beaten from clothes - tiluktorpok much on clothes - aputainnarowok crust - pukak cornice, formation about to collapse - navcaq on the boughs of trees - qali blown indoors - sullarniq snowdrift that blocks something - kimaugruk smoky drifting snow - siqoq arrow-shaped snowdrift - kalutoganiq newly drifting snow - akelrorak space between drifts and obstruction - anamana or anymanya snowstorm - pirsuq, pirsirsursuaq or qux violent snowstorm - igadug blizzard - pirta or pirtuk avalance - sisuuk or aput sisurtuq to get caught in an avalance - navcite Some of the Inuit definitions for snow, courtesy of one of my favorite books, which I highly recommend for lovers of words: The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words From Around the World by Adam Jacot de Boinod (please excuse any typos, the Inuit languages are a bit difficult to transcribe)
Good Post. The "Eskimos have Seven words for snow" is an old cliche. I wonder who was the first person to say it. But why do the Inuit have a word for snow that a dog eats. Maye they mean it's snow that's no good. Inuit1: "Here's some good snow for building an igloo." Inuit2: "Good Snow? That's Aniusarpok!" btw It's only a few minutes since you posted this, but it's already the top result for a search for aniusarpok on google. google must be trawling this site continuously.
Obviously this language is synthetic, agglutinative, or some other type that combines morphemes to build new "words." You can see that under qanir. With no knowledge of the language beyond what you've posted, I can't reduce this list to seven words, but someone with that knowledge might be able to. An Inuit, at least one from a few centuries ago, might say, "Gosh you anglophones have so many words for 'person': watchman, fireman, brakeman, con man, straight man, front man..." Someone else recommended that. I ordered it yesterday. You need a flatbed OCR scanner. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Actually the definition one of my friends came up with is more accurate: "Fraggle, if a dog won't eat something, it's no good." Dogs will only eat things for hydration, nutrition, or to replenish their intestinal bacterial culture. Perhaps aniusarpok is soft enough to quench thirst, contains frozen insects that are a good source of protein, or has some animal's stool with lots of bacteria. Uh... How many people are googling for aniusarpok anyway? Only the Inuit and the people who bought that book even know the word. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Hey, don't knock it. I originally found this website accidentally by using a search engine. It was probably Dogpile, Google wasn't around yet. I can't speak for all the moderators, but I think we get a really low volume of spam. Trolls, on the other hand, are a big nuisance. I just had to slap one down.
Hypozeuxis A sentence where each subject has its own verb, producing parallel clauses. A rhetorical device. eg "We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!" —Winston Churchill If Winston had got the codebreakers at Bletchley to work on a grammar checker instead of the enigma code, we might have got: We shall fight them on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills, and never surrender. This is a prozeugma. An improvement? Etymology Greek word Hypo=below Greek word Zeugma=yoking Zeuxis was a Greek painter who died laughing at a painting he had just made. Nine people who died laughing: http://www.canongate.net/Lists/Death/9PeopleWhoDiedLaughing
I've never heard the word before. Thanks! You got the definition a little wrong: it should be "A sentence in which each verb has its own subject." If it were the other way around, the example would be: But they gave you a bad example: If this is an accurate transcription of the quote, it is not a hypozeuxis. A hypozeuxis is a single sentence. The classic is: In order for Churchill's pronouncement to be a hypozeuxis, it must be a single sentence like Caesar's: That gets kind of rambly and doesn't seem like Churchill's style. The breakdown of parallel construction in the final clause really makes it suspicious. Any style manual would call that a stylistic error and as an editor I personally would flag it. He would have put the period after "hills" so that all the previous clauses had "fight" as their verb. You can spot such an error by deliberately "dis-hypozeuctifying" Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! it: whoops--"never surrender" cannot be fit into that pattern!
This is the speech. Remember to pronounce Nazi as Narzee, which was something which particularly annoyed Hitler: Churchill had much trouble with his teeth. A problem his Nanny put down to his youthful fondness for pickles. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. The punctuation here is so strange, that I think it must be original. Two sentences.
Nerd, Dork, Geek According to some Dork on another thread, the inhabitants of Sciforamia all belong to these categories, but What's the difference? Nerd A bookish but likeable individual with few friends. Etymology. Numerous. But I like "Drunk" backwards, Knurd, becoming nerd Dork Need not be particularly clever. Socially and physically clumsy. Most likely of the three to end up in prison. Etymology. Unknown. Supposed to be the word for a Whale's Penis. Geek A nerd whose main interest is computers. Most likely of the three to end up being a millionaire. Etymology From an old word for fool. eg in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: Why have you suffer’d me to be imprison’d, Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest, And made the most notorious geck and gull That e’er invention play’d on? tell me why. The words all have four letters. Words with four letters which describe types of people tend to be disparaging eg Yank (American) Prod (Protestant) Brit (English person)
That is just the standard British way of mangling words assimilated from foreign languages. Back in my college days we called it the Don JOO-uhn Principle. I've heard Brits pronounce tequila as tee-QUILL-ah and of course their three-syllable version of the word kha-GWAHR, which they use as an auto marque, is infamous. We don't pronounce any of those words quite right either, but at least they all have the correct number of syllables and the accent on the correct one. We're actually pretty close with te-KEE-luh. The punctuation is nonetheless proper, if indeed strange. I wonder whether he dashed it off, intending for it only to be spoken, not distributed in writing. Even the best writers slack off when aiming for oral rather than written eloquence. It could be that the punctuation was "cleaned up" later. In those days he might very well have never given anyone his own written draft; what we're reading may be a transcription after the fact by journalist on staff. In any case the hypozeuxis form is so weak that it makes a poor example. Caesar's is much more powerful, especially in the original language: Three verbs, all standing alone with no subject, all in the preterit tense. Of course in Latin a hypozeuxis may be far more compact than in English, since the verb inflections include an implicit subject. Churchill's example is woefully deficient in parallel construction, and I doubt very much that such a master of the King's English would have submitted that draft for print media. A definition steeped in irony. Likeable individuals generally have many friends. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! That's suspicious. A common trait of nerds is unflagging seriousness and pedantry, reflected in moderation or total abstinence from alcohol. A drunken nerd is a rare sight and usually confined to first-year university parties. When I first heard the word in the 1960s it was a variation of calling someone a "dick," and occasionally the word was used as a verb for intercourse performed with no thought for the partner's feelings--or even her name. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! So a Dork is indeed a big, clumsy Dick. But in those days there was no overtone of malice or true antisocial behavior. Dorks were unpopular but we would not have expected them to ever be arrested. (The legal doctrine of "date rape" was several decades off, of course.) Missing an important step here. In the early 20th century and presumably the 19th, a geek was a very specific member of circus and carnival troupes. (The squeamish are advised to skip the rest of this paragraph). My father's generation was quite familiar with the word, meaning, "A performer who bites the heads off of live chickens for entertainment." The only true "geek" alive today is Ozzy Osbourne, and he is indeed fairly wealthy. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I believe he has reformed since the "cute little rubber bat" that the fan threw onto the stage turned out to be a real one and he had to undergo the ignominious treatment for suspected rabies. Odd. We Americans don't feel disparaged when Europeans call us "Yanks." Southerners bristle a bit: a Yankee is a Northener, a term that survives from the Civil War. WWII was a strong force for reunification of our country; soldiers were touched by the experience of Yankees and Rebels fighting on the same side and endured being lumped together by the grateful Europeans. I don't believe that any American means "Brit" to be an insult; I toss the word around myself on SciForums and I certainly hope no one has taken offense. I hate to call the present-day inhabitants of the south of Great Britain "Britons," since they are the descendants of Germanic occupiers who marginalized the true Celtic Britons, and of course of the subsequent Norman French occupiers who carried on the tradition. The Scots have a better claim to the name since they are at least a Celtic people.
The nerd being drunk backwards refers to the nerds habit of studying while the jocks (US word) are partying. It is the reverse of drunk. He's sober. Ozzy Osbourne might do well these days to bite the head off his appalling wife, Sharon. Churchill's speech is like the rolling English road. It gets there via a circuitous and picturesque route. Have you got access to an OED. I'd like to see a proper definition of Hypozeuxis. I don't trust these online versions.
` Carcajou 'kaa(r)ku`joo Carcajou is the old French pronunciation for Kwi'kwa'ju, the name given by the Micmac People to the wolverine, a small and fierce carnivore of the Canadian wilderness. In the Micmac People's tongue, Kwi'kwa'ju means "evil spirit".
I don't have an OED. Wikipedia has an exhaustive treatment of zeugma, including hypozeuxis, which is its opposite. It even includes Winston Churchill's example from the OP. I can see how the second and third examples could be condensed, e.g. "Fear leads to anger which leads to hate which leads to suffering." I do not see how the first one can be condensed, so I don't understand why it needs to be identified as a hypozeugma. It is phrased as concisely as it can be without losing details of the meaning, e.g., "People in the diverse group performed various actions."
Someone in Chicago is selling a tiny print 1971 edition of the OED on eBay. I wonder what it will fetch. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/OXFORD-ENGLIS...goryZ378QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD2VQQcmdZViewItem
Why would anyone want: A hard copy that can't be searched with an automated word processor; A 36-year-old edition that doesn't reflect the technology, politics, culture and foreign borrowings of a very lively third of a century; Even more infuratingly small print than a normal dictionary?
As the old saying has it: you can't grep dead trees. Hard copy still has advantages though. [Edit] Pick on Fraggle time; Infuratingly??? WTF? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Hyperhedonia The feeling of an abnormally great pleasure in any act or happening. Etymology From Gk. hyper (prep. and adv.) "over, beyond, overmuch, above measure" and hedonikos "pleasurable," from hedone "pleasure," related to hedys "sweet." Now, whenever I find it amusing to endlessly flip a coin, play with magnets or rubber bands, or otherwise engage in mindless diversions, I will know what to call it.
An old copy of one of the world's greatest works of scholarship is better than none at all. It's the result of tens of thousands of hours of research by hundreds of cloistered supernerds. At the moment, someones going to get that for $30 inc postage. Bargain! A dictionary this size will always be behind anyway. It's like painting the Forth Bridge. Once you're finished, you need to begin again at the other end.