Monthly Archives: July 2008

Next time I go to the mechanic I am going to ask to have my tires circumgyrated. If he gives me a chance to explain before punching me in the face, I can tell him that although it sounds vaguely dirty, circumgyration is just an excessively long word for rotation.

I found it while clicking on on the Oxford English Dictionary’s online “Lost for Words” button — which gives you a random word — last night.

Definitions:

1. The act of turning round as a wheel; rotation, revolution on an axis.
b. Giddiness, vertigo. Obsolete and rare usage
2. Moving in a circular or circuitous course; circling, wheeling, turning about, traveling round.
b. Circuit. Obsolete usage
3. fig. (No explanation for what this meant. I couldn’t find it in the guide to the dictionary.)
4. Convolution, contortion.

It seems to be an old word, as most of the quotations given were from the 17th century. This was under the first definition:

1603 HOLLAND Plutarch’s Mor. 1198 A certaine turbulent and irregular circumgiration.

1635 N. CARPENTER Geog. Del. I. iv. 75 This circumgyration of the Earth causeth the rising and setting of the Sunne. 1794-6 E. DARWIN Zoon. (1801) I. 336 The apparent circumgyration of objects on ceasing to revolve. a1845 BARHAM Ingol. Leg. (1877) 406.

In the comments of my last post on John McIntyre’s post about dictionaries and bibliomancy, the Editrix was inspired to try her hand at the practice of randomly opening the Bible an pointing at a passage to divine information about herself. Except she used the dictionary:

OK, I got it. Now I’m going to open it at random, close my eyes, and point . . .

“hackle . . . n. 1. Any of the long, slender, often glossy feathers on the neck of a bird, especially a male domestic fowl. 2. HACKLES The erectile hairs along the back of the neck of an animal, especially of a dog. 3a. A tuft of cock feathers trimming an artificial fishing fly. b. A hackle fly . . . | –idiom: GET (ONE’S) HACKLES UP To be extremely insulted or irritated.”

OK, so the definition made me giggle (”erectile”! “cock”!), and I pretty much feel “extremely insulted or irritated” all the time. Maybe there’s something to bibliomancy after all.

I tried it, and:

“old maid 1. A woman, esp. an older woman, who has never married; spinster: a mild term of contempt. 2. A prim, prudish, fussy person. 3. A simple card game played with a deck containing one card with no match, the loser being the player left with that card after all the other cards have been paired.”

Uh, that didn’t work so well for me. I’m a married man. Really, I am. And I am so totally not prim prudish or fussy. Really. I did have an old maid card game when I was a kid.

Try your own bibliomancy with a dictionary in the comments.

Over at You Don’t Say, John McIntyre points out that just because a word isn’t in the dictionary doesn’t mean it isn’t a word:

But the point is not whether a dictionary has conferred legitimacy on either word; the point is whether the word is comprehensible and appropriate in context.

You and I can make up words. It’s easy. For example, you can attach the prefix anti- to just about any noun in English to create a word that will be immediately understood — even though it’s not in the dictionary. It will be a word.

The full post on the issue is well worth the read.

UPDATE: The Editrix did something fun in the comments below, so now I’m making a game of it here.

From Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fisher, on the poor condition of American troops in November 1776:

A British officer who found some of them along the road observed contemptuously, “No nation ever saw such a set of tatterdemalions.” (page 125)

I’d never seen that word before, but I instantly pictured a group of the most ragged, sorry soldiers ever to march on a cold, rainy night (which it was at the time the British officer made his comment). Of course, these tatterdemalions whipped the British soon after.

The OED’s definition of a tatterdemalion:  “A person in tattered clothing; a ragged or beggarly fellow; a ragamuffin.” Other spellings: tatterdemallion, (tatter-, totter-de-mallion, -timallion); tatterdemalion, (7 tatter-, totter-demalian, -dimalian, -demalean, 8 -demelon). The etymology: “From tatter or more probably tattered, with a factitious element suggesting an ethnic or descriptive derivative. The earlier pronunciation rhymes with battalion, Italian, stallion, as shown by the frequent doubling of l.”

I created the image with all the words at the top of my page with Wordle. I just plugged in my Web site address and it made a cluster out of everything on the page, with the most-used words getting bigger billing. I guess the chlorinated chicken thing stood out.

It’s a lot faster to load if you just cut-and-paste some text in rather than using a Web site.

Thanks to Nathan at Polybloggimous for suggesting that I use Wordle to make the header. I had played with Wordle before, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me to use it to make an image for the site. I’m pretty pleased with the result.

I just put the blog on a domain that I own, so the new web address is http://talkwordy.com. Links to the old address should redirect here.

I get a Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day e-mailed to me (it’s a daily entry from Garner’s Modern American Usage). It always has some quote about writing or language at the end. Today’s was:

Quotation of the Day: “The purity of language is under unrelenting attack from every side — from professors as well as from politicians, from newspapermen as well as from advertising men, from men of the cloth as well as from men of the sword, and not least from those indulgent compilers of modern dictionaries who propound the suicidal thesis that all usages are equal and all are correct.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Politics and the American Language,” 43 Am. Scholar 553, 556-57 (Autumn 1974).

“Purity of the language”? English has never been pure, which is part of what makes it such a great, rich tongue. It’s also what gives it all its idiosyncrasies. I know I was going on about skunked terms a few weeks ago, but there’s a difference between seeking clarity and calling for holding a hard line against any new usage. My point wasn’t that one usage is right and the other is wrong, but that if a word has two competing meanings, you have to be careful that using the term is not confusing.

My wife and I were talking about this right after I made that post, and she thought it was silly to say “You can’t use the word decimate” to mean devastate because there are some people will read what you wrote and say, “Harumph. Decimate means to kill every 10th man in a Roman legion for mutiny or other transgressions. But here it’s just being used to mean destruction. Harumph.” She said it doesn’t make sense to retire a word that most people use one way; that doing that is catering to a small group of people who get upset but really understand what you are writing anyway.

She convinced me, as far as words like decimate go (that is, ones that have gained widespread acceptance). I still think that a word like enormity, which means “great wickedness” but is now used to mean “wicked big” (OK, fine, really big) shouldn’t be used in the second way. Sure, it sounds like enormous, but when talk about the “enormity of the state fair” you are really saying something you don’t mean. Decimate at least is in the same general area of destroying or killing things.

A story in the New York Times’ Week in Review section yesterday made me go to the dictionary twice (poor me).  I used the Times’ Web site feature that lets you double-click on a word to get a definition from the American Heritage online dictionary via Answers.com (an excellent feature), but then I discovered free Oxford English Dictionary, so I’m using that as my reference.

The words, in bold:

Behind abstruse legal argument, Justice Eady may have been reluctant to reward Mr. Mosley too generously for what he said in his ruling was “reckless” behavior.

and

He is obtrusively rich, with homes in Paris, Monaco and London.

The adjective abstruse, according to the OED, has two meanings. The first, “concealed, hidden, secret” is listed as obsolete. The second, current usage means “remote from apprehension or conception; difficult, recondite.”

Obtrusively is the adverb form of the adjective obtrusive, which, when applied to a person, means “excessively or annoyingly self-assertive, ostentatious, overbearing, or intrusive.” It comes from the verb obtrude, which means “to proffer forcibly, unduly, or without invitation” and “to become noticeable in an unwelcome or intrusive way; to intrude; to impose oneself; to project out from, protrude.”

OK, now I knew what the words mean. But they look similar. So, digging into the OED’s etymology, I found that the words all have the same Latin root word, the verb trudere, which means “to thrust.” In Latin, the abs- prefix means away (abstrudere=thrust away). The ob- prefix means ” towards, against, in the way of, in front of, in view of” (obtrudere=to thrust toward or against). There’s also intrude (intrudere=to thrust in).

Makes sense. You thrust something away to hide it; you thrust something toward someone to show it off.

I wonder if the Times’ writer intentionally used the two related words in the story. But I’m glad he had me dig in the dictionary. I like it when an article or book does that.

If you’ve read this far, you might be as big a nerd as me. Congratulations.

My mom’s a librarian, and she keeps telling me how city library Web sites give library patrons free access online versions of things that usually cost a ton of money, such as academic journals and reference books. At the Louisville Free Public Library at least, these free things include the Oxford English Dictionary.

From www.hookedonoed.com.

Holy crap! The OED is one of the coolest dictionaries (yes, yes, I know I’m a nerd), but I’ve never had much of a chance to look at it. That’s because it costs $895 for the 20-volume set, or $295 for a CD or online subscription. 20 volumes, like an encyclopedia.  21,728 pages. 291,500 entries. And I can’t afford it!

Fortunately, I don’t have to.

Besides the huge number of entries, the OED offers etymology and quotations showing how the word has been used through the centuries. It’s a big fat piece of word-nerd awesomeness.

Thanks mom.

Coming next, a post that makes entirely too much use of the OED.

I recently found a really cool Web site called Visuwords. You type in a word, and it gives you a cluster of related words that you can move around. It also has definitions for the original word and the related words. It’s a dictionary/thesaurus you can play with. Me like.

Here’s the entry for the word “word.”

It’s a lot like a site I referenced on Friday, VisualThesaurus.com, but has three advantages:

1. Visuwords doesn’t take a bunch of time to load in a separate screen, like Visual Thesaurus does.
2. You can play with Visuwords, both in dragging the entries around the screen hovering over words to get definitions. The dragging around is useless (but fun), but the definitions alone make Visuwords the better site.
3. Visuwords is free. Visual Thesaurus is not. Nuff said.

Now go play.