Monthly Archives: December 2009

Whatever you celebrate, or if you celebrate nothing at all, I want to wish you all love, joy, hope, and happiness at the end of what’s been a pretty awful year.

Thanks to everyone who finds Talk Wordy to Me interesting enough to stop by. It really makes me happy that this strange little site gets any attention at all.

I’m taking a long weekend for Christmas. See you all on Monday.

When writing for Talk Wordy to Me, I almost exclusively use dictionaries that I can find online; it’s too time-consuming to type something from a print volume unless I can’t find it anywhere else.

I was happy to see somewhere the other day (sorry to whoever pointed it out, I can’t remember to give you credit), that YourDictionary.com was being powered by Webster’s New World College Dictionary. This is the dictionary most newspapers use — I think largely because it’s what the Associated Press Stylebook refers to for further information. It’s a good dictionary, and it’s a familiar one to me since I work at a newspaper.

It’s also nice to have another source to look at while I’m writing here — the more information, the better. Here’s a glance at the tools I use here on a day-to-day basis:

• My favorite online dictionary for clear entries and good etymologies is the American Heritage Dictionary, available via Answers.com.
• For really detailed entries and etymologies, and for looking up obscure stuff, nothing beats the Oxford English Dictionary. I’m sincerely glad I have free access to it online through the Louisville Free Public Library. I couldn’t afford the hundreds of dollars a year for an online subscription, or the more than a thousand dollars that the multivolume print edition costs.
• Merriam-Webster Online doesn’t figure into my posts as much, simply because I usually find better, more complete, or more interesting information in the other sources. But it sometimes has something the others don’t.
• On the other hand, while I haven’t used it much, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage is a fantastic source for long entries on questions of usage. When I have needed it, it’s been great, and it’s available (and searchable) on Google Books.
• Though it’s not available online, Garner’s Modern American Usage is another great source of levelheaded usage guidance. I subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, which sends the book one entry at a time via e-mail in alphabetical order. I am slowly building up an online archive of the book, which is useful as long as what I’m searching for has been covered.

Of all of these, I own print copies of the fourth edition of Webster’s New World and the second edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage. I love flipping through reference books, and I keep my New World nearby when I am reading. I’d like to own print versions of everything else I’ve mentioned, especially M-W’s Dictionary of English Usage and the Fourth Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, which is huge, illustrated, and gorgeous. I’d also like the new edition of Garner’s, for which I was a critical reader before it was published.

So many books, so little time (and money).

Here’s the second of two requests for etymology I got at work last month: scofflaw. (The first was yesterday.)

As the OED puts it, a scofflaw is “One who treats the law with contempt, especially a person who avoids various kinds of not easily enforceable laws.”

It’s obviously a combination of scoff and law. But where does scoff, which means “to speak derisively, mock, jeer,” come from?

The OED says scoff’s origins are as a noun, meaning:

• 1a. (Now rare or obsolete) Contemptuous ridicule; expression of scorn; contumelious language, mockery. Phrase, to make scoff.
• 1b. A derisive jest, an expression of mockery.
• 1c. (obsolete) A mere jest.
• 2. An object of contempt or scorn; a mark for derision or scoffing.

The OED says it comes from the “Middle English scof, skof, of obscure origin.” The American Heritage Dictionary says it is from the “Middle English scoffen, from scof, meaning mockery, probably of Scandinavian origin, akin to the Danish skof, meaning jest, teasing.” Webster’s New World says it is from the “Middle English scof, probably from Scandinavian, akin to the Old English scop, meaning singer, and the Old High German skof, meaning poem, ridicule.”

The OED says a scop was an “Old English poet or minstrel.” Scop and sceop is equivalent to the “Old High German scoph meaning poetry, fiction and sport, jest, derision.” There’s also the “Old Norse skop, meaning railing, mocking.” The OED offers as possibly related the “early modern Danish skuf, skof, meaning jest, mockery; skuffe meaning to jest, mock.”

I had a couple of requests for etymologies at work last month, so I’m going to do one today and one tomorrow.

Today is troglodyte, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as:

• 1a. A member of a fabulous or prehistoric race of people that lived in caves, dens, or holes.
• 1b. A person considered to be reclusive, reactionary, out of date, or brutish.
• 2a. An anthropoid ape, such as a gorilla or chimpanzee.
• 2b. An animal that lives underground, as an ant or a worm.

Troglodyte came up at work in the sense of 1b.

Here’s the AHD etymology: “From the Latin Trōglodytae, a people said to be cave dwellers, from the Greek Trōglodutai, alteration (influenced by trōglē, meaning hole , and -dutai, meaning those who enter) of Trōgodutai.”

Webster’s New World gives a similar etymology, though some of the Latin and Greek words are slightly different: “From the Latin troglodyta, from the  Greek trōglodytēs, meaning one who creeps into holes, cave dweller, from trōglē, meaning a hole, cave … and -dyein, meaning to creep in, enter.”

I like that phrasing, “one who creeps into holes.”

From the lead of a New York Times article last month, headlined: “A Dream Home Undone by Divorce.”

Welcome to home interrupted, Leslie Williams said, opening the door to what appeared to be just the opposite: a bright TriBeCa loft with near-lapidary finishes.

As an adjective, lapidary means:

American Heritage Dictionary:

• 1. Of or relating to precious stones or the art of working with them.
• 2a. Engraved in stone.
• 2b. Marked by conciseness, precision, or refinement of expression: lapidary prose.
• 2c. Sharply or finely delineated: a face with lapidary features.

Merriam-Webster Online:

• 1. Having the elegance and precision associated with inscriptions on monumental stone <a stanza that has a lapidary dignity>.
• 2a. Sculptured in or engraved on stone.
• 2b. Of, relating to, or suggestive of precious stones or the art of cutting them.

Although most of the definitions seem to center on the idea of cutting, it seems lapidary is being used here in the sense of the first AHD definition, to evoke the idea of polished gems.

Lapidary is also a noun, which the AHD defines as:

• 1. One who cuts, polishes, or engraves gems.
• 2. A dealer in precious or semiprecious stones.

The AHD etymology: Middle English lapidarie, from Old French lapidaire, from Latin lapidārius, from lapis, lapid-, stone

I’m experimenting with a new Twitter project: Road Wordier. (You can follow here.) It consists solely of tiny fiction stories of 140 characters of less, mostly that I’ve thought up while driving. I tend toward horror/ fantasy/sci-fi in my reading and writing, so that’s mostly what you’ll find there.

On the same page that Michael Pollan talks about cornhole in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he used another interesting word in discussing corn’s uses in colonial America:

The leaves and stalks made good silage for livestock.

Silage is “Fodder prepared by storing and fermenting green forage plants in a silo,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary. It is an alteration of ensilage, which has the same meaning, according to the OED. That comes from ensile, which is the act of putting the  greens into the silo for fermentation. Ensile is an adaptation of the French word ensiler, which is itself an adaptation of the Spanish ensilar, a combination of en- and silo. Silo has the same meaning in Spanish and English and comes from the Latin sirus, which is an adaptation of the Greek siros, which meant “a pit to keep corn in.”