Monthly Archives: December 2008

OK, so it’s been more than a holiday break. Between NaNoWriMo, pre-Christmas stuff and that thing called life, I haven’t been keeping up with Talk Wordy to Me. I’m going to take the rest of the year off, and come back January 1 in full force. Promise. No, really. My wife will kick me in the rear if I don’t.

I came across an interesting word in a New York Times article about an exhibit in New York called  “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens”:

Yet, the show argues, the assumption that women lived in a state of purdah, completely removed from public life, is contradicted by the depictions of them in art.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, purdah means:

1. a. A curtain or screen, used mainly in India to keep women separate from men or strangers. b. The Hindu or Muslim system of sex segregation, practiced especially by keeping women in seclusion.
2. Social seclusion: “Never have artists been more separate: their inordinate fame, wealth, drug use have driven them into luxurious purdah”" (D. Keith Mano).

The etymology: Urdu pardah, veil, from Persian, from Middle Persian pardak, from Old Persian *paridaka-, from pari-dā-, to place over : pari, around, over + dā- , to place.

Note: First sentence updated to address comment below.

John McIntyre reviews the book Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea over at You Don’t Say. The review is entertaining; the book sounds like it is as well.

I found an etymology quiz online yesterday. They give you 10 random questions on word origins with multiple-choice answers. It’s freaking hard. Give it a try and let us know how you did in the comments.

• My first try: 6 out of 10
• Second try: 6 out of 10
• Third try: OK, I should get back to work.

Funniest false answer:

• Where do we get the word testimony?
• From testicle; the ancient Greeks would swear not on a Bible, but holding their crotch and swearing on their testicles.

Funny, but true:

• From where did we borrow the word pencil?
• The Latin diminutive of penis, for  “tail, brush.”

Yes I am aware the two that I found funny are on a middle-school level of humor. I’m OK with that.

Most interesting true answer:

• What is the proper definition for the word soteriology?
• Study of the salvation of the eternal soul.

Also interesting:

• What did palooka originally mean?
• An inferior or average boxer.

In his “On Langauge” coulmn on Sunday, William Safire defined two kinds of metaphor that could be confused:

Metonymy … identifies a person or thing by something closely associated with it — like “the brass” for high military officers, “the crown” for royalty and “the suits” for executives, usually male, and other stiffs in traditional business garb. “Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche,” I wrote in a display of trope-a-dope, “which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole” like “wheels” for automobiles and “head” for cattle.

His full column this week is about synecdoche, the correct definition of headwind and a few funny plays on words.

For the first time in three years, Merriam-Webster Online’s Word of the Year (bailout) is rooted in the news rather than pop culture. In 2007, it was w00t, a word that expresses video-gamer joy. (W00t’s two o’s are represented by zeroes, which I typed in but look pretty much like o’s in the blog’s font, apparently.)  In 2006 it was truthiness, Stephen Colbert’s word for his own version of the truth. Previous Words of the Year include integrity (2005), blog (2004), and democracy (2003).

The Word of the Year is kind of a gimmick, but I thought w00t and truthiness were kind of out-there picks. Of course, debating the merits of the word is part of the fun.

M-W doesn’t  make it clear how it picks the Word of the Year, though it implies that the intensity of people searching for it on MerriamWebster.com has something to do with it:

Bailout, defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition as “a rescue from financial distress,” received the highest intensity of lookups on Merriam-Webster Online over the shortest period of time.

Here’s the top 10 list for this year, which included several from the presidential election and the economic crisis:

1. bailout
2. vet
3. socialism
4. maverick
5. bipartisan
6. trepidation
7. precipice
8. rogue
9. misogyny
10. turmoil

What do you think the Word of the Year should be? Nominate any of the above, or your suggestions, in the comments.

Thanks to the Editrix for bringing the Word of the Year to my attention.

So, I haven’t posted much in the past month (10 posts in November, by my count). Sorry. One of those posts wasn’t even a post. It was me saying I wouldn’t post for a week because of a project I was working on.

Well, that project is done. I was participating in NaNoWriMo, which challenges you to write a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30. I did it, barely, hitting 50,162 words sometime around 3:30 a.m. Sunday morning. What I wrote is a big mess, not anything like a finished work. But I did it, which is the whole point of NaNo. Not to write something good. Just to write. I wanted to know if I could do that. I can. Sweet.

Anyway, writing up to 3,000 words a day (to make up for days when I wrote nothing) really didn’t leave me any time for the blog. But I’m done, so I’m back. Expect new Talk Wordy goodness starting tomorrow.