“Wiktionary . . .
n. countable, dated A well-dressed man
n. countable A bonus or other remuneration, . . . .
n. countable, colloquial, Jamaica a hand-rolled marijuana cigarette; a joint . . .
v. to reward (a salesperson) with a spiff.”
Although some, seeking pomposity, substitute fortuitous for fortunate, the words are not synonymous. Fortunate means “lucky.” Fortuitous means “by chance,” “by accident.” Something that is fortuitous can also be fortunate, but unless it happened by chance, fortunate is the correct word.
– Rene J. Cappon, The Associated Press Guide to Writing, Peterson’s, 2000
That’s the usage problem to which the AHD entries refer. Until recently, “fortuitous” meant “accidental”, not “lucky”. (See the CDC definition.) In the twentieth century some English speakers began to conflate fortuitous with fortunate and using it to mean (as you say) serendipitous. Some audiences regard this usage as confused or pompous, and a good dictionary won’t include it without a warning.
I stumbled across a video of David Wolman promoting his book Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling at Google (from March 26, 2009): “Righting the Mother Tongue tells the cockamamie story of English spelling. When did ghost acquire its silent 'h'? Will cyberspace kill the one in rhubarb? And was it really rocket scientists who invented spell-check?”
I don’t know if the book is any good, but I think it likely someone here will enjoy the talk.
I learned this morning that my employer has a new service which is spelled with a lowercase first letter, two medial capitals, and an inexplicable exclamation mark, like so: "xyXxxXxxlxk!",* even if it appears in the middle of a sentence. (I don't know what it looks like at the beginning of a sentence; I doubt anyone who works here is brave enough to try it.)
* That's not the real name, but the pattern of risers and descenders is approximately right.
You’re welcome. It was my pleasure to populate your list instead of attending to things to which I really should be attending. (Feel free, of course, to cull.)
“Your grandfather would as soon have spit In his wife’s best bonnet as in that galluptiouscuspadore, and your grandmother would have got a glass case made for that coal vase and kept It on exhibition in the best parlor.”
The phrase galluptious cuspadore in which it appears† is causing me to swoon. As far as I can tell it hasn't been repeated in the century-and-a-third since.‡ Someone please use this phrase as a name for your book or your band or your child§ immediately. Thank you.
__________
* The spelling “goluptious” is more common, with “about 848 results”, as opposed to 143 for “galluptious”.
† And on April 1st, no less.
‡ At this time, the phrase is a bona fide Googlewhack, although of course that will no longer be true soon after I post this.
§ Or, I suppose, your spittoon.
It’s a right (closing) single-quote (used, as hernesheir said, as an apostrophe) encoded in UTF-8 and subsequently mangled by Microsoft Windows, which obtusely uses its own character encodings in place of Unicode.
Note that omnipotence further implies responsibility for everything, which leads directly to the topic implied by the title of this page, e.g., the problem of pain.
Wait a minute . . . . Is this turning into a panel discussion? Curse you, yarb!
I agree, rolig, that omnipotence implies (at least the capacity for) omniscience. The converse, however, is false. (Consider Cassandra.) Ruzuzu's statement, parsed as claiming the two ain't equivalent, therefore still stands.
This is a 256-by-256-pixel 16-bitgrayscale representation of a Hilbert curve. The relative luminance of each pixel indicates its preimage in 0, 1: the image of 0 is the black pixel in the lower-left corner (0, 0); the image of 1 is the white pixel in the lower-right corner (1, 0).
This word always confuses me; I never know if the speaker is referring to “a stiff felt hat similar to a fedora” or “a stiff felt hat similar to a fedora”.
I’ve decided to start a project devoted to dubbing English machine-translations of foreign-language human translations onto films and programs which were originally in English. Anyone want to help?
I hope to further confound the issue by posting the dialogue as it was originally spoken in English:
Marge: Homie! What happened to you?
Homer: Marge, please. I’m too upset to talk about it.
Marge: But seeing you like this is more than I can bear!
Homer: Bear!
Homer screams and runs upstairs.
I suppose the translator had to improvise in order to maintain the very lame joke that motivated Homer’s sudden flight.
This is a good one. It’s a fine enough name for a province (especially one that isn’t autonomous); that they would spell it in all caps is the icing on the cake. (The definition belongs under Colonial Mexico, by the way.)
Lest an iroquoisity should go unremarked upon, I must call your attention to the following example: “The teacup was back on the saucer, and Mrs. Bunny Arkle was unfolding the napkin in the muffin basket.”
Until last year I lived with a cat named Teacake (after Hurston’s character Tea Cake). His human and all her former flatmates called him “the muffin”.* Does that qualify?
German for predicate; pronounced something like “preddycaught”. It can also refer to a rating (assessment) of quality or a title (appellation) of rank or respect. I think.
I think your analogy works better (poetically and functionally) if we equate the modern media with the intermediaries and ask instead what are the angels.
blafferty: Dunno, but it’s not because of my “coments” sic, ’cause she’s over here, too. (I suppose we could deduce the Magda connection by eliminating words until she goes away.)
[fiddles with a
<a href="/lists/the-universal-calculator">calculator</a>]
(Originally I also had span tags in there, but since you got me thinking about it, I realized I don’t need them in addition to the anchor.)
If you nest brackets, only the innermost are magic; if I had wanted merely a mundane, commonplace, humdrum (dare I say quotidian?) arithmetic-only calculator, I could have just typed
(This sudden riot of Hawaiiousness is very iroquoisy. I just made a joke about Hawaii—I actually reconsidred and changed it to “Polynesian”, but now I know better—based soley on a random stupid metapun. Then I saw the “Hawaii Tours” spam, and now this. Is there a luau* going on about which no one told me?
* Also, I’ve had an urgent need to use the word luau all evening. Luau luau luau. So much better now.)
No, no—the bear seeds used to make the leis, back before that erythrasmatic wasp converted the trees to metric. Nonetheless, it makes me wiliwili angry.
A long-running Hawaiian science-fiction television program in which a mysterious man (known only as “the Doc”) travels through space and time by alternately climbing and falling out of a blue banago.
It also makes a fine emoticon. (It’s the only emoticon Mr. Bill needs.) If, however, your reader is Swedish, she might wonder if you have an unusual form of Tourette’s.
It was nice to see you again! :) Right after you left, the dog was sick. island And I couldn’t get him outside fast enough. island And I couldn’t find the mop! islandislandisland . . .
Likewise, I find your contributions edifying and droll. My knowledge of French is feeble (gleaned mostly from Pimsleur CDs and a girlfriend), and I am in debt to you for some recent additions to my (latent) French vocabulary (as well as my active English vocabulary). I hope to live in France for a while someday (so far I’ve only managed a month a few years ago), so I’m glad that, if you leave Wordnik, I can still live vicariously through the exploits you post on your ’blog (followed).
For the year I’ve been here (most of which was under a different alias), Wordnik has had the most consistently impressive membership I’ve seen in a website. (This is, I’m sure you’ll agree, its greatest asset.) I fear I must remain until it sinks.
Oh, there’s yet another bug I hadn’t noticed before: See how the very long line (in the HTML) in my previous post makes the text in the last paragraph scroll off and get truncated at the right border?
(Note that it won’t display properly on the “Community” or “all comments” pages, thanks to the double-parsing bug I already pointed out elsewhere, not that it does any good to debug someone else’s website when they sabotage it themselves and make it so very clear that they have no intention of fixing it.)
The present definition at Wiktionary is “Simple past tense and past participle of haft.” I don’t know if it’s a Wordik bug, or if it just scraped Wiktionary at a bad time, but it’s going on my list of apocrypha. (This will be the first entry not from The American Heritage Dictionary.)
Wait a minute, you might be on to something there: The game is also known as lant, which also means “stale urine”. If it’s not related, it’s at least iroquoisy.
Curiously, Wordnik lists couchant as an antonym, while the CD&C declares it a synonym. Perhaps this is related to the “rare” confusion the CD&C notes, in its third definition of couchant (which see), between couchant and dormant.
It warms my heart not only to be reminded by the CD&C of the mathematical term superpose, but to learn as well that there’s a French word spelled superposer.
WeirdNet 3.0 1. a musician who plays the pseudola
2. a poet who writes pseudoles
3. A writer of a pseudole or pseudoles.
Inexplictionary 1. a person who plays the pseudol or the pseudola
2. A believer in, or practitioner of, pseudolism.
3. A writer of a pseudole or pseudoles.
“I do not know,” he began, “if you have ever considered the nature of sound. Suffice to say that it consists of a series of waves moving through the air. Not, however, waves like those on the surface of the sea — oh dear no! Those waves are up and down movements. Sound waves consist of alternate compressions and rarefactions.”
“I do not. I doubt if such a word exists, and if it does, it shouldn’t,” retorted Purvis, with the aplomb of Sir Alan Herbert dropping a particularly revolting neologism into his killing-bottle. . . .
sionnach: Please be honest: Did you know when you asked your question that the only “related” word above, syllepsis, is a plausible answer, or is that just a very iroquoisy, very spooky coincidence?
sionnach: You’re right, we shouldn’t. Also, thanks for not letting that stop you. (My vote is skewism, but I just made it up.)
Edit I think it’s technically a faulty parallelism, but I agree that it’s a special case that works by superimposing two grammatically-correct constructions. (I’m tempted to apply the word superposition, but again I’d be inventing terminology.)
ruzuzu: I think that’s an excellent idea (setting up camp until we get list comments back part, I mean, not the being haunted. Not that the being haunted thing isn’t good question—it is. I’m just not saying that anyone should go out of her way to be so haunted. I mean, it was only the former, not the latter, to which I was referring. You know what I mean. Goosnargh).
The query “site:wordnik.com inurl:wordnik.com/lists” gives significantly more (583) results. (Google claims “about 1,060,000”, but says most of them are “very similar to the 583 already displayed”.) Perhaps I’ll begin on those next weekend.
(P.S.: The part of the Wayback Machine that serves pages is down for maintenance this weekend, so we’ll have to wait until Monday to see if the archived list pages have comments.)
Finally (ultimately, if you prefer) and indirectly, (as it’s actually a link on a Google Buzz post which shouldn’t technically match the search criteria, but who am I to dictate search syntax to Google?) the thirteenth and final Wordnik list about which Google claims to know anything:
This one is just weird. Maybe these things I’m taking for bugs represent the Wordnik brain’s jumbled, puerile understanding (speaking metaphorically, I hope) of the lexical universe it inhabits. (It does seem more likely it’s some sort of parsing error specific to the American Heritage Dictionary, but I can dream.)
It was probably “intended . . . to be spoken or sung as a part of worship. The creed itself uses the language of public worship . . . (‘Pew pew pew!’). In the Catholic Church in medieval times, this creed was recited following the Sunday sermon or at the Sunday Optimus Prime.”
— “Eyebeam Creed”. Madeupicalpædia.
I think, due to the buggy double-decoding, this Dr. Z. emoticon (a bilby creation) will look correct on the “Community” and “all comments” pages (but nowhere else).
This emoticon best expresses my feelings about the recent troubles here. I wanted to add :-/ to my Emotinomicon; this was the result. I can see why the URL must be spelled with %2F, but why doesn’t the page translate it back into a virgule? Oh, I see: it URL-encodes it twice; first it encodes the “/” as “%2F”, then it encoded the “%” as “%25”, so we get “%252F”.
Thanks for the list, blafferty. (There’s another evening down the drain.) I hope similar lists for other Elder Wordniks erupt soon.
I’ve been trying to collect best-of-Wordnik-commentary lists in an effort to get caught up with the shared culture here, and in the process realized the most important feature setting Wordnik apart from other online metadictionaries; it’s the same difference between attending a university campus and studying alone at home. (It is, unfortunately, also the feature most emasculated by the new interface.)
1. This one’s a bit creepy.
2. I can’t believe I didn’t know that Turing’s middle name was Mathison.
3. I wonder what happened at 9:19 on September 21st of 2007.
Here’s another ghost word attached to an American Heritage Dictionary biography. (I should make a separate list for these.) Disregarding its obvious etymology, I’m trying to decide whether to pronounce it like the phrase “theirpublican”, or with a voiceless th, a long u, and pronounced second e (a la therapeutic): “θaer-uh-pyoo-bluh-kuhn”.
According to Google Translate, fräck is Swedish for brazen or cheeky (among other things—these are the only two that it translates back to fräck in Swedish). The examples corroborate this translation.
You’re welcome; also, I hope it wasn’t too spammy of me to post so many comments all at once. (There are four left, so if so, say so now.) I was motivated primarily by nostalgia for list and profile comments.
“Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.”
— Mike Lacher. “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.”
is often used for equivalence (iff), in analogy with => for implication. Wordnik indicates that |= is found in contexts similar to those in which iff is. Is it genuine notation for something (other than an emoticon)?
Here in the States, one often sees trailers like this for “the feel-good movie of the summer” and the like. I suppose it’s done to reassure audiences that the film is exactly what it says on the tin (not like, for example, those complicated foreign movies), and they needn’t worry about situations like that time Grandma took the kids to see A Boy and His Dog.
What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that. — Robert Burns. “A Man’s a Man for a’ That”. (source)
Something unmeant occurred when the Wiktionary definition was parsed (and number eight is clearly a bug here or a bad edit there), but it comes off vaguely narrative and poetic.
It’s practically straight out of Lovecraft. I miss that rag. In college I had a giant disintegrating cardboard box full of them. (I had this nutty idea I was going to write a role-playing game in the genre.) I was in a band that was briefly named “Maria, the Horse that Eats Cats” (named for the subject of an article titled “Animal lovers outraged at horse – THAT EATS CATS!”) before the other members decided on something more hackneyed.
I eventually gave them all (the magazines) to an appreciative flatmate. Thank Google they’ve been preserved digitally:
To be fair to bilby, you must admit that Buffy works by acknowledging and exploiting precisely the flaws he cites (and more). (And because Dross* Joss W. is brilliant.)
’nach: A nice thing about Wikipedia is that on second reading, it seems like an entirely different book.
Finally, a philosophy for slackers. Presumably our anthem is “Battle of Who Could Care Less”. Or something. (Everyone’s already familiar with the salute.)
A more parallel equivalent is (please forgive me) clambake. The more common hen party and stag party exploit a less anatomical (and less comestible) metaphor.
leaden commented on the word spiff
“Wiktionary
. . .
n. countable, dated A well-dressed man
n. countable A bonus or other remuneration, . . . .
n. countable, colloquial, Jamaica a hand-rolled marijuana cigarette; a joint
. . .
v. to reward (a salesperson) with a spiff.”
Could you be more specific, please?
May 16, 2013
leaden commented on the word plumbing
I can’t believe I didn’t know the word plumbum. I might have to change my nom de plumb again.
May 9, 2013
leaden commented on the word kerfluflun
n. A flocculent kerfuflun
May 4, 2013
leaden commented on the word fortuitous
@TJay:
Although some, seeking pomposity, substitute fortuitous for fortunate, the words are not synonymous. Fortunate means “lucky.” Fortuitous means “by chance,” “by accident.” Something that is fortuitous can also be fortunate, but unless it happened by chance, fortunate is the correct word.
– Rene J. Cappon, The Associated Press Guide to Writing, Peterson’s, 2000
That’s the usage problem to which the AHD entries refer. Until recently, “fortuitous” meant “accidental”, not “lucky”. (See the CDC definition.) In the twentieth century some English speakers began to conflate fortuitous with fortunate and using it to mean (as you say) serendipitous. Some audiences regard this usage as confused or pompous, and a good dictionary won’t include it without a warning.
http://grammar.about.com/od/alightersideofwriting/a/fortunategloss.htm
http://grammarist.com/usage/fortuitous-fortunate/
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/fortuitous.html
May 3, 2013
leaden commented on the list fingernails-on-my-chalkboard
@arby: Calm down. Have a kerfluflun. Or some kerflunitrazepam.
May 3, 2013
leaden commented on the list unenthusiastic-interjections
This list is unobjectionable.
May 3, 2013
leaden commented on the word acanthopterygian
Spiny, fish of the
acanthopterygian
variety are.
Feb 26, 2013
leaden commented on the word snowmenclature
http://dailyportmanteau.blogspot.com/2010/02/snowmenclature.html
http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/washington/2010/02/snowmenclature.html
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/snomg-its-snowmageddon-2010/
http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/creative-winter-storm-names-like-snomg,-snowpocalypse,-snowmageddon-are-starting-to-spread
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowmageddon
Feb 20, 2013
leaden commented on the word inexplicable exclamation mark
!
Feb 4, 2013
leaden commented on the word misconfigure
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7685/is-misconfigured-a-word
Jan 10, 2013
leaden commented on the word week†™ s
See also mojibake.
Dec 31, 2012
leaden commented on the word antœci
See also antecians.
Dec 2, 2012
leaden commented on the word antecian
See antecians.
Dec 2, 2012
leaden commented on the list some-html-is-allowed
Did the blockquote tag break recently? Or was it broken in the Great Fiasco and never fixed? E.g.:
This is not.
Oct 6, 2012
leaden commented on the word orthography
I stumbled across a video of David Wolman promoting his book Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling at Google (from March 26, 2009): “Righting the Mother Tongue tells the cockamamie story of English spelling. When did ghost acquire its silent 'h'? Will cyberspace kill the one in rhubarb? And was it really rocket scientists who invented spell-check?”
I don’t know if the book is any good, but I think it likely someone here will enjoy the talk.
Oct 6, 2012
leaden commented on the word camel case
See also medial capital.
Aug 8, 2012
leaden commented on the word medial capital
See also camel case.
Aug 8, 2012
leaden commented on the word camel case
I learned this morning that my employer has a new service which is spelled with a lowercase first letter, two medial capitals, and an inexplicable exclamation mark, like so: "xyXxxXxxlxk!",* even if it appears in the middle of a sentence. (I don't know what it looks like at the beginning of a sentence; I doubt anyone who works here is brave enough to try it.)
* That's not the real name, but the pattern of risers and descenders is approximately right.
Aug 8, 2012
leaden commented on the word tyroma
Really, CD&C? “Cheesy”? (Please pardon me while I step out to be sick.)
Jun 3, 2012
leaden commented on the word trichorrhoea
See also trichorrhea.
Jun 3, 2012
leaden commented on the list body-parts--2
I think there might be one or two problems with your list, Emil.
Jun 3, 2012
leaden commented on the list a-shedding-of-the-hair
You’re welcome. It was my pleasure to populate your list instead of attending to things to which I really should be attending. (Feel free, of course, to cull.)
Jun 3, 2012
leaden commented on the word trichorrhoea
Nice find. I hadn’t guessed how many English words (almost all medical or anatomical, of course) derive from this Greek root. I found an extensive list titled “tricho-, trich-, -tricha, -trichia, -trichan, -trichic, -trichosis, -trichous, -thrix, -trichum, -trichy +”.
Jun 3, 2012
leaden commented on the list gates
See also Bilbygate.
Jun 3, 2012
leaden commented on the word nocake
“The cake is a lie.”
Jun 3, 2012
leaden commented on the word cong you bing
I can’t believe Microsoft passed up working this into a slogan — something along the lines of “Cong you Bing, today?”
Jun 3, 2012
leaden commented on the word cong you bing
See also scallion pancake.
Jun 3, 2012
leaden commented on the word battledoor
To clarify, a battledoor is neither a battle nor a door, and is used to strike a shuttlecock, which is neither a shuttle nor a cock. The catgut and hornbook, on the other hand, are more or less what one might expect.
Jun 2, 2012
leaden commented on the word battledoor
See also battledore.
Jun 2, 2012
leaden commented on the word battledoor and shuttlecock
See battledore and shuttlecock.
Jun 2, 2012
leaden commented on the word Memorical Day
I typed this, then realized that I prefer it to the correct spelling.
May 18, 2012
leaden commented on the list lost-for-word
Déjà maid?
Feb 27, 2012
leaden commented on the word expectatorium
I had hoped this word would turn out to mean “a room for anticipating” or “a room for spitting”. Either way, I could have found no end of uses for it.
Feb 24, 2012
leaden commented on the word galluptious
The earliest occurrence of this spelling* I can find on Google Books appears in The Metal Worker, Vol. V, No. 14, published 1876 April 1:
The phrase galluptious cuspadore in which it appears† is causing me to swoon. As far as I can tell it hasn't been repeated in the century-and-a-third since.‡ Someone please use this phrase as a name for your book or your band or your child§ immediately. Thank you.
__________
* The spelling “goluptious” is more common, with “about 848 results”, as opposed to 143 for “galluptious”.
† And on April 1st, no less.
‡ At this time, the phrase is a bona fide Googlewhack, although of course that will no longer be true soon after I post this.
§ Or, I suppose, your spittoon.
Feb 24, 2012
leaden commented on the word tidal wave
(Edit: It appears deinonychus beat me to the punch.)
Feb 4, 2012
leaden commented on the word cursory
Argh.
“But this original name is dying out because sod over here is a cursory so is not used much.”
Sometimes the Internet makes me sad.
Jan 18, 2012
leaden commented on the word pointing at the moon
It’s “Godo no tsuki” (“Moon of Enlightenment”) from the very popular 1885-1892 woodblock print series Tsuki hyaku sugata (月百姿) (One Hundred Aspects of the Moon) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡 芳年). The British Museum has a print. The following website is nice for thumbing through the series:
http://yoshitoshi.verwoerd.info/
Dec 15, 2011
leaden commented on the word pointing at the moon
Dec 14, 2011
leaden commented on the word Eyebeam Creed
See Eyebeam.
Dec 11, 2011
leaden commented on the word reduplicative paramnesia
This looks exactly like the other page about reduplicative paramnesia.
Dec 3, 2011
leaden commented on the word week†™ s
It’s a right (closing) single-quote (used, as hernesheir said, as an apostrophe) encoded in UTF-8 and subsequently mangled by Microsoft Windows, which obtusely uses its own character encodings in place of Unicode.
Nov 11, 2011
leaden commented on the word The Dangers of Epileptic Lagomorph Driving
See comments at the dangers of epileptic lagomorph driving and moro reflex (sic).
Nov 11, 2011
leaden commented on the word If Ruzuzu is infinitely powerful, can she also be infinitely good
Note that omnipotence further implies responsibility for everything, which leads directly to the topic implied by the title of this page, e.g., the problem of pain.
Wait a minute . . . . Is this turning into a panel discussion? Curse you, yarb!
Nov 10, 2011
leaden commented on the word If Ruzuzu is infinitely powerful, can she also be infinitely good
I agree, rolig, that omnipotence implies (at least the capacity for) omniscience. The converse, however, is false. (Consider Cassandra.) Ruzuzu's statement, parsed as claiming the two ain't equivalent, therefore still stands.
Nov 10, 2011
leaden commented on the word Von Kármán vortex street
Please tell me that somewhere a city council has had the wisdom to so name an appropriate boulevard.
Nov 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word tsunamis
(Offpage) [sound of gnawing]
Nov 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word tsunamis
No, no--seething. It's like teething, but comes earlier alphabetically. Good night. Wanders off to find his [tsunamiform seething ring]
Nov 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word tsunamis
Still seething Done.
Nov 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word tsunamis
With a [vaguely tornadoform scribble over his head] Fine.
Nov 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word tessanne@avantgarde-dom.com
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language has once again completely changed my understanding of history.
Nov 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word tsunamis
Why are you imagining when you could be open-listing?
Edit: Were you also not bilby-baiting, I'd have suspected an impostor.
Nov 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word snell
The item described by the CD&C is also known as a snood, sneed, or sed. See also snod and cockernonny.
Nov 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word preimage
“. . . The subset . . . defined by . . .”? Well? (The suspense is killing me.)
Continues [obsessively refreshing the page]
Nov 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word elegant
You take away its debonair card?
Nov 6, 2011
leaden commented on the word Peano curve
See also Hilbert curve.
Nov 6, 2011
leaden commented on the word Hilbert curve
This is a 256-by-256-pixel 16-bit grayscale representation of a Hilbert curve. The relative luminance of each pixel indicates its preimage in 0, 1: the image of 0 is the black pixel in the lower-left corner (0, 0); the image of 1 is the white pixel in the lower-right corner (1, 0).
(I used sed, bc, gawk, and pnmtopng to generate the image.)
Nov 6, 2011
leaden commented on the word Homburg hat
This word always confuses me; I never know if the speaker is referring to “a stiff felt hat similar to a fedora” or “a stiff felt hat similar to a fedora”.
Nov 6, 2011
leaden commented on the word elegant
Perhaps she or he meant “an elephant” (and speaks as a first language one lacking articles).
Nov 6, 2011
leaden commented on the word barrel roll
See also this Google search for "do a barrel roll".
Nov 6, 2011
leaden commented on the word My hovercraft is full of eels.
See also comments at my hovercraft is full of eels.
Oct 31, 2011
leaden commented on the word indecisive teas
Nein! I mean, no! I mean, von Who? I know not about which you are speaking, mein herr.
Oct 23, 2011
leaden commented on the word indecisive teas
I’ve decided to start a project devoted to dubbing English machine-translations of foreign-language human translations onto films and programs which were originally in English. Anyone want to help?
Oct 23, 2011
leaden commented on the word indecisive teas
I hope to further confound the issue by posting the dialogue as it was originally spoken in English:
Marge: Homie! What happened to you?
Homer: Marge, please. I’m too upset to talk about it.
Marge: But seeing you like this is more than I can bear!
Homer: Bear!
Homer screams and runs upstairs.
I suppose the translator had to improvise in order to maintain the very lame joke that motivated Homer’s sudden flight.
Oct 23, 2011
leaden commented on the word spondylolisthesis
This word is so full of words, it’s practically a sentence, e.g., “Spondy LOL is the sis!” I suppose practically isn’t exactly the right word.
Oct 21, 2011
leaden commented on the word list in spondylolisthesis
(Not to mention the LOL.)
Oct 21, 2011
leaden commented on the word devil piñata
See comments at piñata.
Oct 21, 2011
leaden commented on the word butter hamlet
It’ll sell fine in the west provided it actually tastes like Danish butter or buttered Dane.
Oct 21, 2011
leaden commented on the word inscrutability of fbharjo
I know it’s uncouth to quote The Simpsons; I nonetheless can’t resist citing Lisa’s description of Nelson Muntz as “like a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a vest”.
Oct 19, 2011
leaden commented on the word indecisive teas
Incroyable. I assumed it was idiomatic, but I was reading it as “bad bear milk” (by confusing Spanish and French).
Oct 19, 2011
leaden commented on the word CRÉDITO
This is a good one. It’s a fine enough name for a province (especially one that isn’t autonomous); that they would spell it in all caps is the icing on the cake. (The definition belongs under Colonial Mexico, by the way.)
Oct 19, 2011
leaden commented on the word indecisive teas
I didn’t know the word ours,* so I asked Google. It translates “Ours mal leche!” as “Uncouth!”, but suggests “Unlicked cub!” as a possible alternative. Such is the inscrutability of fbharjo that I can’t decide which was intended. Neat.
* The French word ours, of course.
Oct 19, 2011
leaden commented on the word indecisive teas
Your blushing pear appears to have flustered everything below it. Neat.
Oct 19, 2011
leaden commented on the word Pat the cat
Lest an iroquoisity should go unremarked upon, I must call your attention to the following example: “The teacup was back on the saucer, and Mrs. Bunny Arkle was unfolding the napkin in the muffin basket.”
Oct 17, 2011
leaden commented on the word unmasked media
I suspect dielectric materialism would be a more practical philosophy. (I have no opinion on dielectrical maternalism.)
Oct 17, 2011
leaden commented on the word a very plain button with no obvious function
A panel lights up with the words [Please do not press this button again.]
Oct 17, 2011
leaden commented on the word Pat the cat
Until last year I lived with a cat named Teacake (after Hurston’s character Tea Cake). His human and all her former flatmates called him “the muffin”.* Does that qualify?
* By a curious coincidence.
Oct 17, 2011
leaden commented on the word Pat the cat
But not a porcupine or jellyfish.
Oct 17, 2011
leaden commented on the word I wonder what he’s up to.
That’s the most concise example I’ve seen.
Oct 17, 2011
leaden commented on the word unmasked media
bilby & fbharjo: Touché.
fbharjo: First it’s angels, now it’s the masked mystery of the trinity? (Or are you lining up an Abbot and Costello routine?)
Oct 16, 2011
leaden commented on the word Prädikat
German for predicate; pronounced something like “preddy caught”. It can also refer to a rating (assessment) of quality or a title (appellation) of rank or respect. I think.
Oct 16, 2011
leaden commented on the word predicate
Prädikat
★★★★
Erotik Show
Oct 16, 2011
leaden commented on the word unmasked media
I think your analogy works better (poetically and functionally) if we equate the modern media with the intermediaries and ask instead what are the angels.
Oct 16, 2011
leaden commented on the word incent
See also “Words that MUST BE DESTROYED”.
Oct 16, 2011
leaden commented on the word Artiodactyla
You may find the definitions that belong on this page misfiled under artiodactyla.
Oct 15, 2011
leaden commented on the word artiodactyla
A, Yak (Bos grunniens). B, Moose (Alces malchis). C, Peccary (Dicotyles torquatus). Left fore foot of each. s, scaphoid ; l, lunar ; c, cuneiform ; t, trapezoid ; m, magnum ; u, unciform ; p, pisiform ; II, III, IV, V, second, third, fourth, and fifth digits ; 1, proximal phalanx ; 2, median phalanx ; 3, ultimate phalanx. The fifth digit of a moose is moved outward to show its length. In Bos and Alces metacarpals III and IV are fused in a single canon-bone.
Century Dictionary, Vol. I, Page 328, Artificially to Artless
This cut belongs under [Artiodactyla, as do the definitions above. I put it here because I couldn’t bear seperating them.]
Oct 15, 2011
leaden commented on the word dudgeon
Umbrage.
Oct 15, 2011
leaden commented on the word owlery
Now try “sixth owlery squirrel”.
Oct 14, 2011
leaden commented on the word fbharjo
No; eleven divides 29,843. But almost. (Look out for 29,851.)
Oct 14, 2011
leaden commented on the word unbrick
In my mind this word evokes the final moments of “The Black Cat”.
Oct 13, 2011
leaden commented on the word theodolite
Century Dictionary, Vol. VIII, Page 6273, Theodicaea to Theologue
Oct 13, 2011
leaden commented on the word sestertius
Mais oui, je t'en prie (provided we have this exact conversation again, as I’ve now spent all my French).
(Tutoyer gives me an idea for a list.)
Oct 13, 2011
leaden commented on the word sestertius
Ruzuzu: Je vous en prie.
Whispering (Is he OK? Should we call someone?)
Oct 12, 2011
leaden commented on the word rory
See also irrorate, irrorated, irrorating, irroration, Pandrosus, roral, roration, roric, rorid, roriferous, rorulent, and roscid.
Oct 12, 2011
leaden commented on the word If there are no list comments, either comment on word pages or add comments to lists as though they were very long words. (The comments, that is, not the lists. You know what I mean.)
blafferty: Dunno, but it’s not because of my “coments” sic, ’cause she’s over here, too. (I suppose we could deduce the Magda connection by eliminating words until she goes away.)
Oct 12, 2011
leaden commented on the word cobbling
I suspect someone at the CD&C had really bad shoes.
Oct 11, 2011
leaden commented on the word sestertius
An HTML tag anywhere between the brackets disarms them. I usually use a set of span tags, e.g., “<span>stage direction</span>” renders as “stage direction”. (The placement of the tags doesn’t matter; “stage direction<span></span>” works just as well.) Below I used
[fiddles with a
<a href="/lists/the-universal-calculator">calculator</a>]
(Originally I also had span tags in there, but since you got me thinking about it, I realized I don’t need them in addition to the anchor.)
If you nest brackets, only the innermost are magic; if I had wanted merely a mundane, commonplace, humdrum (dare I say quotidian?) arithmetic-only calculator, I could have just typed
fiddles with a [calculator]
to get
fiddles with a [calculator]
Oct 11, 2011
leaden commented on the word moro reflex
Dear Prolagus two years ago,
Thanks! I was wondering about that.
Your pal,
leaden two years later
Oct 11, 2011
leaden commented on the word If there are no list comments, either comment on word pages or add coments to lists as though they were very long words. (The comments, that is, not the lists. You know what I mean.)
And another thing: Who is that woman at . . . oh.
Always two steps ahead, aren’t we, bilby?
Oct 11, 2011
leaden commented on the word If there are no list comments, either comment on word pages or add coments to lists as though they were very long words. (The comments, that is, not the lists. You know what I mean.)
Mortified My spell-checker stopped working! The cat got on the keyboard! Yetis did it! Sunspots! (’Zounds. Nothing spoils a wisecrack like a typo spoils a wisecrack.)
Wait a minute. . . . This wouldn’t have anything to do with my harping on your “hidesous” typo at loo, would it, sionnach?
Oct 11, 2011
leaden commented on the word wiliwili
(This sudden riot of Hawaiiousness is very iroquoisy. I just made a joke about Hawaii—I actually reconsidred and changed it to “Polynesian”, but now I know better—based soley on a random stupid metapun. Then I saw the “Hawaii Tours” spam, and now this. Is there a luau* going on about which no one told me?
* Also, I’ve had an urgent need to use the word luau all evening. Luau luau luau. So much better now.)
Oct 10, 2011
leaden commented on the word wiliwili
No, no—the bear seeds used to make the leis, back before that erythrasmatic wasp converted the trees to metric. Nonetheless, it makes me wiliwili angry.
Oct 10, 2011
leaden commented on the word Doc Tou Who
A long-running Hawaiian science-fiction television program in which a mysterious man (known only as “the Doc”) travels through space and time by alternately climbing and falling out of a blue banago.
Oct 10, 2011
leaden commented on the word touchwood
An anagram of Doc Tou Who.
Oct 10, 2011
leaden commented on the word ö
It also makes a fine emoticon. (It’s the only emoticon Mr. Bill needs.) If, however, your reader is Swedish, she might wonder if you have an unusual form of Tourette’s.
Dear Gunborg,
It was nice to see you again! :) Right after you left, the dog was sick. island And I couldn’t get him outside fast enough. island And I couldn’t find the mop! islandislandisland . . .
Oct 10, 2011
leaden commented on the word isabella
There are also some nice apocryphal definitions amoung the “reverse dictionary” words. (My favorite is sloooowwwww.)
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word Un renard à Paris
You’re too kind, and thank you. (I prefer “god”, but then, as the adage goes, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a god.”)
Likewise, I find your contributions edifying and droll. My knowledge of French is feeble (gleaned mostly from Pimsleur CDs and a girlfriend), and I am in debt to you for some recent additions to my (latent) French vocabulary (as well as my active English vocabulary). I hope to live in France for a while someday (so far I’ve only managed a month a few years ago), so I’m glad that, if you leave Wordnik, I can still live vicariously through the exploits you post on your ’blog (followed).
For the year I’ve been here (most of which was under a different alias), Wordnik has had the most consistently impressive membership I’ve seen in a website. (This is, I’m sure you’ll agree, its greatest asset.) I fear I must remain until it sinks.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word Un renard à Paris
Oh, there’s yet another bug I hadn’t noticed before: See how the very long line (in the HTML) in my previous post makes the text in the last paragraph scroll off and get truncated at the right border?
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word Un renard à Paris
I enter:
<img src="http://a4.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/300067_2537725647930_1397299807_32911430_2030638689_n.jpg" width="100%"/>
I get:
(Note that it won’t display properly on the “Community” or “all comments” pages, thanks to the double-parsing bug I already pointed out elsewhere, not that it does any good to debug someone else’s website when they sabotage it themselves and make it so very clear that they have no intention of fixing it.)
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word craudestopper
I really hope this website doesn’t sink. I don’t even knower the lifeboat yet—what if I don’t liker it?
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word hafted
You mean “Inexplictionary”.
The present definition at Wiktionary is “Simple past tense and past participle of haft.” I don’t know if it’s a Wordik bug, or if it just scraped Wiktionary at a bad time, but it’s going on my list of apocrypha. (This will be the first entry not from The American Heritage Dictionary.)
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word botton plug
See citation at craudestopper.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word brake clever
See citation at craudestopper.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word To hold the children for hand.
See citation at craudestopper.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word Remove off the craudestoppers.
See citation at craudestopper.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word Un renard à Paris
(Also, don’t forget “width="100%"”.)
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word Un renard à Paris
Try adding a slash (/) before the closing angle bracket (>), i.e., “/>”.
P.S.: That’s a lovely and vaguely creepy photo.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word subgenus
Not to be confused with SubGenius
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word Austrasia
This is the home of the bisby (Macrotis sagotis).
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word pseudolism
NOUN (2)
Century Dejectory and Cyclicopedia
1. The worship of pseudols.
2. The worship of pseudol
3. The doctrine of or belief in pseudol; pseudolylism.
Inexplictionary
1. alternative spelling of pseudoleism.
American Heritage® Dictionary of Madeupical English, Fourth Edition or So
1. A pseudolistic investigation or system of treatment.
2. Variant of pseudoleism.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word pseudolist
Haven’t seen it. Did you athk ask Theudoald? (He used to be the mayor of Austrasia—where you live, or close as makes no odds.)
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word loo
Wait a minute, you might be on to something there: The game is also known as lant, which also means “stale urine”. If it’s not related, it’s at least iroquoisy.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word loo
Back from planet [Ambigram, with his letters neatly scrambled and his digits freshly rotated and lowercased]
I think that etymology applies to the card game division loo, which (I assume) has a distinct ancestry.
Suddenly [relieved] (Oh, that’s to what bilby was alluding.)
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word sestertius
So that works out to fiddles with a calculator . . . forty bilbies per ass.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word limerence
Possibly. Try it in a complete sentence. Also, have a look at the examples to the right, above.
Edit Oops. I meant “right”, I typed “left”. Corrected.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word pseudol
Mendaciously Such a singer is also known as a pseudoler (not to be confiused with a pseudolater). I infer that a pseudole is the music performed thereby. (And I believe it’s technically ye olde-timey hobby.)
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word lodged
Curiously, Wordnik lists couchant as an antonym, while the CD&C declares it a synonym. Perhaps this is related to the “rare” confusion the CD&C notes, in its third definition of couchant (which see), between couchant and dormant.
Oct 9, 2011
leaden commented on the word superposer
French: to superimpose. See also superpose and superposition.
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word superposition
It warms my heart not only to be reminded by the CD&C of the mathematical term superpose, but to learn as well that there’s a French word spelled superposer.
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
yarb: More or less.
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word pseudolist
NOUN (12)
1. A worshiper of pseudols.
2. A believer in pseudolism.
Century Dejectory and Cyclicopedia
1. A pseudolater.
2. A performer on the pseudol.
3. A performer on the pseudola.
4. The writer of a pseudole or of pseudoles.
WeirdNet 3.0
1. a musician who plays the pseudola
2. a poet who writes pseudoles
3. A writer of a pseudole or pseudoles.
Inexplictionary
1. a person who plays the pseudol or the pseudola
2. A believer in, or practitioner of, pseudolism.
3. A writer of a pseudole or pseudoles.
ADJECTIVE (2)
WeirdNet 3.0
1. of or relating to pseudolism
Inexplictionary
1. Of or relating to pseudolism.
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word dictyophera
Resisting . . . urge . . . to make juvenile . . . wisecrack . . . .
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word rarefaction
“I do not know,” he began, “if you have ever considered the nature of sound. Suffice to say that it consists of a series of waves moving through the air. Not, however, waves like those on the surface of the sea — oh dear no! Those waves are up and down movements. Sound waves consist of alternate compressions and rarefactions.”
“Rare-what?”
“Rarefactions.”
“Don’t you mean ‘rarefications’?”
“I do not. I doubt if such a word exists, and if it does, it shouldn’t,” retorted Purvis, with the aplomb of Sir Alan Herbert dropping a particularly revolting neologism into his killing-bottle. . . .
— Arthur C. Clarke. “Silence, Please”.
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word lost for word
In [fakey French accent*] Oracle: What eez zee enswer to zeennach’s kestio?
The oracle replies, “resettling”.
* Also known as a hidesous accent; see citation at loo.
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word loblolly
Nautical!
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word lost for word
sionnach: Please be honest: Did you know when you asked your question that the only “related” word above, syllepsis, is a plausible answer, or is that just a very iroquoisy, very spooky coincidence?
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word lost for word
sionnach: You’re right, we shouldn’t. Also, thanks for not letting that stop you. (My vote is skewism, but I just made it up.)
Edit I think it’s technically a faulty parallelism, but I agree that it’s a special case that works by superimposing two grammatically-correct constructions. (I’m tempted to apply the word superposition, but again I’d be inventing terminology.)
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word lost for word
Thanks to Google, we can see the comments on the list at 2011.07.21 23:32:32 UTC, in case your question isn’t enough to get the threat restarted. We can always migrate the conversation back once the former glory of Wordnik is restored.
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word lost for word
ruzuzu: I think that’s an excellent idea (setting up camp until we get list comments back part, I mean, not the being haunted. Not that the being haunted thing isn’t good question—it is. I’m just not saying that anyone should go out of her way to be so haunted. I mean, it was only the former, not the latter, to which I was referring. You know what I mean. Goosnargh).
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
The query “site:wordnik.com inurl:wordnik.com/lists” gives significantly more (583) results. (Google claims “about 1,060,000”, but says most of them are “very similar to the 583 already displayed”.) Perhaps I’ll begin on those next weekend.
(P.S.: The part of the Wayback Machine that serves pages is down for maintenance this weekend, so we’ll have to wait until Monday to see if the archived list pages have comments.)
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
Finally (ultimately, if you prefer) and indirectly, (as it’s actually a link on a Google Buzz post which shouldn’t technically match the search criteria, but who am I to dictate search syntax to Google?) the thirteenth and final Wordnik list about which Google claims to know anything:
“All you need is Lovecraft” by yarb
Read list comments on Google’s cached copy (2011.07.17 13:42:04 UTC).
(Thirteenth result on 2011.10.08; fourteenth on 2011.10.02)
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“Ugliest Words Ever” by onegoodbee
(Twelfth result on 2011.10.08; thirteenth on 2011.10.02)
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“Containers” by ruzuzu
(Twelfth result on 2011.10.02; mysteriously expurgated by 2011.10.08)
ruzuzu: Did you do something to anger the Google?
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“Dinosaurs” by Chained Bear
Read list comments on
Google’s cached copy (2011.07.15 04:12:32 UTC)
The Wayback Machine (2010.02.26 05:14:34)
(Eleventh result 2011.10.02-2011.10.08 )
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word water fountain
Egad! A chocolate-covered monocled unicyclist!
Oct 8, 2011
leaden commented on the word Islamic-oriented
This one is just weird. Maybe these things I’m taking for bugs represent the Wordnik brain’s jumbled, puerile understanding (speaking metaphorically, I hope) of the lexical universe it inhabits. (It does seem more likely it’s some sort of parsing error specific to the American Heritage Dictionary, but I can dream.)
Oct 7, 2011
leaden commented on the word Eyebeam
It was probably “intended . . . to be spoken or sung as a part of worship. The creed itself uses the language of public worship . . . (‘Pew pew pew!’). In the Catholic Church in medieval times, this creed was recited following the Sunday sermon or at the Sunday Optimus Prime.”
— “Eyebeam Creed”. Madeupicalpædia.
Oct 7, 2011
leaden commented on the word biting mania
Aha! This is what afflicts my cat.
Oct 7, 2011
leaden commented on the word monocycle
Finally: a unicycle for the monocled.
Oct 7, 2011
leaden commented on the word velocipede
From the Wikipedia article “Velocipede”. (Click to distend. N.B.: The image is captioned in German.) See also manuped, tandem tricycle, and monocycle.
Oct 7, 2011
leaden commented on the word which see
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.wordnik.com+inurl:words+%22which+see%22
Oct 6, 2011
leaden commented on the word (V) %3B,,%3B (V)
I think, due to the buggy double-decoding, this Dr. Z. emoticon (a bilby creation) will look correct on the “Community” and “all comments” pages (but nowhere else).
Oct 5, 2011
leaden commented on the word Pope D945GCNL
See D945GCNL.
Oct 5, 2011
leaden commented on the word D945GCNL
That’s Pope D945GCNL to you.
(I’m definitely making a separate list for these.)
Oct 5, 2011
leaden commented on the word sustainism
Looks around for bilby, then whispers to ruzuzu (I thought it more polite than “Old Ones”.)
I do so enjoy reading about the old days.
Oct 5, 2011
leaden commented on the word :-%2F
This emoticon best expresses my feelings about the recent troubles here. I wanted to add :-/ to my Emotinomicon; this was the result. I can see why the URL must be spelled with %2F, but why doesn’t the page translate it back into a virgule? Oh, I see: it URL-encodes it twice; first it encodes the “/” as “%2F”, then it encoded the “%” as “%25”, so we get “%252F”.
Now try typing “and/or” into the search box. It doesn’t URL-encode the slash, so you get a broken link. And “http://www.wordnik.com/words/:-%2F” and “http://www.wordnik.com/words/and%2For” just lie.
Oct 5, 2011
leaden commented on the word new interface
I’m sure there are several wordniks who speak code; is there anything we can do to help?
Oct 5, 2011
leaden commented on the word sustainism
Thanks for the list, blafferty. (There’s another evening down the drain.) I hope similar lists for other Elder Wordniks erupt soon.
I’ve been trying to collect best-of-Wordnik-commentary lists in an effort to get caught up with the shared culture here, and in the process realized the most important feature setting Wordnik apart from other online metadictionaries; it’s the same difference between attending a university campus and studying alone at home. (It is, unfortunately, also the feature most emasculated by the new interface.)
Oct 5, 2011
leaden commented on the word rude nation
I live in one of these.
Oct 4, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
Let us call it a new-interface-style pseudolist. (Someone here will think of a better word before you can type “Let’s not”.)
Oct 4, 2011
leaden commented on the word jowlopped
Please tell me it shares ancestry with jalopy.
Oct 4, 2011
leaden commented on the word 4M2-200709210919
1. This one’s a bit creepy.
2. I can’t believe I didn’t know that Turing’s middle name was Mathison.
3. I wonder what happened at 9:19 on September 21st of 2007.
Oct 4, 2011
leaden commented on the word therepublican
Here’s another ghost word attached to an American Heritage Dictionary biography. (I should make a separate list for these.) Disregarding its obvious etymology, I’m trying to decide whether to pronounce it like the phrase “their publican”, or with a voiceless th, a long u, and pronounced second e (a la therapeutic): “θaer-uh-pyoo-bluh-kuhn”.
Oct 4, 2011
leaden commented on the word idiomology
“study of idiom, jargon or dialect” — The Phrontistery. “I”.
Oct 3, 2011
leaden commented on the word haplography
The OCR software appears to have made a Freudian slip in the CDC’s definition.
Oct 3, 2011
leaden commented on the word haplography
N.B. that haplography refers to omissions of letters in written or printed language, while haplology refers to omissions of sounds in speech.
Oct 3, 2011
leaden commented on the word balagan
This word’s etymology (according to WeirdNet—compare with the CDC’s definition) is aptly confused.
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word fräck
According to Google Translate, fräck is Swedish for brazen or cheeky (among other things—these are the only two that it translates back to fräck in Swedish). The examples corroborate this translation.
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
You’re welcome; also, I hope it wasn’t too spammy of me to post so many comments all at once. (There are four left, so if so, say so now.) I was motivated primarily by nostalgia for list and profile comments.
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“winds of the world” by sionnach
Read list comments on Google’s cached copy (2011.07.08 04:41:40 UTC).
(Tenth result 2011.10.02-2011.10.08)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“Words that start with a silent H” by pterodactyl
(Seventh result on 2011.10.08; ninth on 2011.10.02)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“A Galimafrée of Plant Anatomy & Morphology Terms” by hernesheir
(Third result on 2011.10.08, eighth on 2011.10.02)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“emo words” by shawnabowman
Read list comments on The Wayback Machine (2010.05.27 06:11:11).
(Seventh result on 2011.10.02; eighth on 2011.10.08)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“Archaic Occupations” by serendoxity
Read list comments on The Wayback Machine (2010.09.20 00:53:51).
(Sixth result 2011.10.02-2011.10.08)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“It’s Magic!!” by papageno
Read list comments on Google’s cached copy (2011.07.15 11:21:22 UTC).
(Fifth result on 2011.10.02; ninth on 2011.10.08)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“ESL Academic Word List” by Warren Ediger
(Fourth result 2011.10.02-2011.10.08)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“Words to Describe The Taste of Food” by arasmus
Read list comments on The Wayback Machine (2010.05.10 15:07:46).
(Third result on 2011.10.02; fifth on 2011.10.08)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“Most Obscure Words” by papageno
(Second result 2011.10.02-2011.10.08)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
“List of onyms” by mialuthien
Read list comments on
Google’s cached copy (2011.07.12 00:54:12 UTC)
The Wayback Machine (2010.07.06 17:50:15)
(First result 2011.10.02-2011.10.08)
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Google’s Favorite Wordnik Lists
These lists, for whatever reason, have the highest Google ranks. (Only Google knows why.) I’m including cached copies from The Wayback Machine and Google when they contain comments (which are no longer available on Wordnik).
Oct 2, 2011
leaden commented on the word Comic Sans
“Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.”
— Mike Lacher. “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.”
Oct 1, 2011
leaden commented on the word |=
is often used for equivalence (iff), in analogy with => for implication. Wordnik indicates that |= is found in contexts similar to those in which iff is. Is it genuine notation for something (other than an emoticon)?
Oct 1, 2011
leaden commented on the word The entire plot is revealed in the trailer.
Here in the States, one often sees trailers like this for “the feel-good movie of the summer” and the like. I suppose it’s done to reassure audiences that the film is exactly what it says on the tin (not like, for example, those complicated foreign movies), and they needn’t worry about situations like that time Grandma took the kids to see A Boy and His Dog.
Oct 1, 2011
leaden commented on the word accumulate - cumulate
Neat. Consider listing the longer of each pair, so we can click through to definitions.
Oct 1, 2011
leaden commented on the word hodden
What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that.
— Robert Burns. “A Man’s a Man for a’ That”. (source)
P.S.: I’m dubious, fbharjo.
Sep 30, 2011
leaden commented on the word Exxon-Mobil's
This entry appears to describe the city of Holguín (formerly of Cuba, but apparently now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Exxon).
Sep 30, 2011
leaden commented on the word PSX-2，Personal
His close friends just called him “2，”.
Sep 30, 2011
leaden commented on the word RiVER
Is this some kind of Easter-egg hunt? W, as they say, TF?
Sep 30, 2011
leaden commented on the word Fajčíková
?
Sep 30, 2011
leaden commented on the word mean
Something unmeant occurred when the Wiktionary definition was parsed (and number eight is clearly a bug here or a bad edit there), but it comes off vaguely narrative and poetic.
Sep 30, 2011
leaden commented on the word java_one_future
According to Wordnik, java_one_future is found in contexts similar to those in which mean is found. (I gather it’s a synonym of Z score.)
?
Sep 30, 2011
leaden commented on the word Babies living on board Titanic
I don’t remember those. (Of course, that’s just proof they erased my memory. Gonna need a new tin-foil hat.) Are you thinking of the headline “Space alien virus turned sailors into zombies!” (1992 Sept. 29, page 3)? (That saucer sorta’ looks radioactive. Or electrical, which is close as makes no odds from a journalistic perspective.)
Sep 30, 2011
leaden commented on the word Babies living on board Titanic
Sep 30, 2011
leaden commented on the word Animal lovers outraged at horse – THAT EATS CATS!
http://books.google.com/books?id=5-wDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA6
Sep 29, 2011
leaden commented on the word Strange breed of cat found on Saturn's moon
It’s practically straight out of Lovecraft. I miss that rag. In college I had a giant disintegrating cardboard box full of them. (I had this nutty idea I was going to write a role-playing game in the genre.) I was in a band that was briefly named “Maria, the Horse that Eats Cats” (named for the subject of an article titled “Animal lovers outraged at horse – THAT EATS CATS!”) before the other members decided on something more hackneyed.
I eventually gave them all (the magazines) to an appreciative flatmate. Thank Google they’ve been preserved digitally:
http://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:0199574X?rview=1
Sep 29, 2011
leaden commented on the word nautical
sionnach: It reminds me of Smithers’ assertion that “women and seamen don't mix.”
Sep 29, 2011
leaden commented on the word nautical
In case Wordnik is never fixed (which seems more likely every month), see
http://www.wordnik.com/tags/nautical
for the complete list of words tagged “nautical”.
Sep 29, 2011
leaden commented on the word pffiffiffi
According to Wordnik, pffiffiffi is found in contexts similar to those in which ! is found.
Sep 29, 2011
leaden commented on the word vampire pumpkins and watermelons
’zu: Are you saying your book will be like ITGPCB, but Hallowe’enier? I’m totally Bram Stokered.
To be fair to bilby, you must admit that Buffy works by acknowledging and exploiting precisely the flaws he cites (and more). (And because Dross* Joss W. is brilliant.)
’nach: A nice thing about Wikipedia is that on second reading, it seems like an entirely different book.
* Shaking fist Curse you, bilby!
Sep 29, 2011
leaden commented on the word whateverism
Finally, a philosophy for slackers. Presumably our anthem is “Battle of Who Could Care Less”. Or something. (Everyone’s already familiar with the salute.)
Sep 28, 2011
leaden commented on the word sausage party
A more parallel equivalent is (please forgive me) clambake. The more common hen party and stag party exploit a less anatomical (and less comestible) metaphor.
Sep 27, 2011