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Post by marysgurl on Oct 22, 2005 9:26:06 GMT -5
We begin today by asking you to reflect on the words aureole, halo, and nimbus. Do those three terms evoke depictions of saints or do they make you think about meteorology? Both references work. When aureole entered Middle English, it referred to a “heavenly crown worn by saints.” In Roman Catholicism, aureole names a special type of heavenly award; in the art world, aureole refers to the radiant light around the head of a sacred person. And in astronomy, an aureole names “the luminous area surrounding the sun or other bright light when seen through thin cloud or mist.” Nimbus is just as entrenched in the heavens as aureole. To meteorologists, nimbus names a raincloud or cumulus; in religious art, nimbus is the term for the circle, disk, rectangle, triangle, or rayed structure that appears about the head of a drawn or sculptured divinity, saint, or sovereign. Finally, there’s halo. The scientific halo refers broadly to “a circle of light appearing to surround the sun or moon and resulting from the refraction or reflection of light by ice particles in the atmosphere”; halo has a still more precise scientific meaning too. Outside the observatory, halo can name “something resembling a halo, as a nimbus”; it also developed an extended secular sense referring to “the aura of glory, veneration, or sentiment surrounding an idealized person or thing.”
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Post by marysgurl on Oct 22, 2005 9:30:01 GMT -5
Mary says I have horns holding up my halo....hehe....
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Post by quettalee on Oct 22, 2005 9:31:51 GMT -5
and the bigger the halo... the bigger the horns!!!
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Post by marysgurl on Oct 22, 2005 9:42:12 GMT -5
you so funny, baby....
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Post by marysgurl on Oct 31, 2005 8:54:05 GMT -5
The Word of the Day for October 31 is: lamia • \LAY-mee-uh\ • noun : a female demon : vampire Example sentence: In his latest horror flick, a seductive lamia revengefully preys upon the young men of a suburban town, who, it turns out, were responsible for her brutal death. Did you know? According to Greek mythology, Lamia was a queen of Libya who was beloved by Zeus. When Hera, Zeus's wife, robbed her of her children from this union, Lamia killed every child she could get into her power. Stories were also told of a fiend named Lamia who, in the form of a beautiful woman, seduced young men in order to devour them and who also sucked the blood of children. Such nightmarish legends uncannily compelled poet John Keats, and many other writers before and after him, to write their own tales of Lamia, which still haunt and terrify those souls who dare read them.
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Post by marysgurl on Oct 31, 2005 8:56:47 GMT -5
Topic: Frightening words This Halloween we take a look at a few frightening words, some of whose imprint on our lexicon is—at least these days—best described as ghostly. Appropriately, we begin with ghost, which has had a number of meanings over the centuries. Ghost has been applied to everything from "the spirit of man as distinguished from the body," to "person," to "corpse." Although all those senses are now either obsolete or archaic, there is still plenty of life left in ghost. For instance, these days, a red blood cell that has lost its hemoglobin is referred to as a ghost. The path from missing hemoglobins to all-too-present ghosts (with a nod toward any spectral goblins) is not direct, but it does permit a glimpse of other ghost-derivatives. The Middle English gast that is a linguistic ancestor of ghost was once a verb meaning "to scare (someone or something)"; it also developed into the noun gastness, naming "fright" or "dread," and the adjective ghastful, meaning "full of fear; frightened." None of those words survive in modern day use, but before gast faded from sight, it worked its way into the adjectives aghast, meaning "struck with terror, amazement, or horror," and ghastly, denoting "terrifyingly horrible to the senses."
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Post by marysgurl on Nov 3, 2005 8:50:57 GMT -5
Topic: Brang Recent discussions about Neil Diamond—you know, the singer who gave us the joyful "Sweet Caroline"—led us to look up the word brang. That's because Diamond the songwriter included the word brang in his classic "Play Me." That song's initial refrain, "You are the sun/I am the moon/You are the words/I am the tune/Play me," is followed by this stanza: Song she sang to me Song she brang to me Words that rang in me Rhyme that sprang from me Warmed the night. Ignoring the issue of the preciousness in Diamond's lyrics (and setting aside the inquiries about just what sort of rhyme has four consecutive lines ending with the word me—the many-faceted songsmith does rely on internal rhyme), we instead defend our decision to refer to brang as a word. We assure you, we're using word in its sense naming "a speech sound that symbolizes and communicates a meaning"; we are not endorsing its usage. Nonetheless, brang does appear in the big Unabridged Dictionary. It is defined as the past tense of bring, and is annotated nonstandard, meaning "not conforming in pronunciation, grammatical construction, idiom, or choice of word to the usage generally characteristic of educated native speakers of the language." So how do we explain Diamond's use of that term? Our guess is he was simply playing with language . . . so let's chalk it up to poetic license.
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Post by marysgurl on Nov 4, 2005 7:37:48 GMT -5
The Word of the Day for November 4 is:
ab ovo • \ab-OH-voh\ • adverb : from the beginning
Example sentence: "Would you live your life differently if you could start again ab ovo?" Rachel asked.
Did you know? "Ab ovo usque ad mala." That phrase translates as "from the egg to the apples," and it was penned by the Roman poet Horace. He was alluding to the Roman tradition of starting a meal with eggs and finishing it with apples. Horace also applied "ab ovo" in an account of the Trojan War that begins with the mythical egg of Leda from which Helen (whose beauty sparked the war) was born. In both cases, Horace used "ab ovo" to allude to a literal egg while figuratively suggesting the meaning "from the beginning." It was this figurative meaning that found its way into English in the 16th century, when Sir Philip Sidney wrote: "If [the dramatic poets] wil represent an history, they must not (as Horace saith) beginne Ab ouo: but they must come to the principall poynt of that one action."
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Post by marysgurl on Nov 7, 2005 6:55:48 GMT -5
Topic: Albert Camus and absurd
French author, philosopher, and Nobel Prize winner for Literature Albert Camus was born on this date in 1913. Camus is credited as the founder of absurdism, the philosophy based on the belief that the universe is irrational and meaningless and that the search for order brings the individual into conflict with the universe. So if we believe, with Camus, that life is meaningless, then are we condemned to unhappiness? Not necessarily. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus asserts, "The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy."
To fully appreciate the philosophical absurdity of these lines, let's look first at the word absurd, and then at the tale of the mythological Sisyphus.
The adjective absurd, meaning "ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous" didn't travel too far from its Latin ancestor meaning "incongruous; harsh-sounding." Indeed, the punishment meted out by the Greek gods to the legendary Sisyphus does sound harsh. For his sins, that king of Corinth was condemned to an eternity of hard labor in Hades. His ceaseless toil? Pushing a large boulder up a hill, although the boulder will inevitably roll back down as it nears the top.
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Post by marysgurl on Nov 10, 2005 7:14:16 GMT -5
To honor our friend across the great waters.....
Topic: Bull and defecate
Today we mark the birth, in 1483, of Martin Luther, the monk whose nailing of 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenburg precipitated the German Reformation. We're steering clear of the religious aspects of Luther's life and instead looking at a few unusual terms associated with him: defecate and bull. Back in Luther's day, nailing one's arguments to a church door was a way to initiate a scholarly debate. Luther's theses—his propositions that he was advancing and offering to defend by argument—instead led to a papal bull of excommunication. The term bull comes from bulla, the name of the round, usually lead seal appended to the official document.
Luther, at least initially, maintained his criticisms were simply an effort to defecate the Church. Defecate—from the de- meaning "remove" and the faex meaning "dregs"—once meant "freed from dregs or impurities." It was used especially in reference to spiritual matters. Although its adjectival sense is now obsolete, defecate does survive as a transitive verb with the sense "to free (something) from impurity or corruption."
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Post by marysgurl on Nov 11, 2005 6:25:03 GMT -5
We begin today with a question. Can you name the word which functions as an adjective meaning: artful, clever, pat, apt, and pleasant. And also:
miserable, terrible, and considerable. Here's a hint: this word also has an adjectival sense meaning "pleasing by delicacy or grace" and one meaning "appearing or sounding pleasant or nice but lacking strength, force, manliness, purpose, or intensity." Need a bit more help? This term functions as an adverb meaning "moderately." When pluralized, it works as a noun naming lingerie. Finally, when it functions as a verb—which is its most recent functional shift, dating back only a century—our mystery term is often paired with up, and used to mean "to make pretty."
The term is pretty, of course, and we thank the listener who thought to write in to ask how pretty came to mean "attractive" after initially meaning very. She pretty much has things backwards, however.
Pretty, from the Old English tricky, originally—that is, way back when English was just forming into a language of its own—described something marked by or calling for skillful dexterity or artful care and ingenuity. It took a few hundred years—until the days of late Middle English—before pretty came to describe someone's appearance.
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Post by marysgurl on Nov 12, 2005 19:49:17 GMT -5
Topic: The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755
Over the past twelve months, the world has experienced terrible devastation from tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. We're marking these awful events with a look at a natural disaster from long ago: the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Two hundred fifty years ago,November 1st, on the morning of the Catholic holy day known as All Saints' Day, fissures ripped apart the center of that Portuguese port city. Minutes after the earth stopped quaking, an enormous tsunami swamped the city. The areas of Lisbon that weren't flooded caught fire. In all, an estimated 100,000 died. The aftereffects of the deadly quake extended beyond the physical. Voltaire—who described the disaster as "a cruel piece of natural philosophy"—was influenced by it in his writing of Candide. The destruction inspired Immanuel Kant first to muse, "What a game of chance human life is," and then to devote some time to working on a scientific explanation for the tremors (as opposed to attributing the loss of life to a wrathful God). His efforts led later seismologists to credit the philosopher with establishing the beginnings of seismology.
Surprisingly enough, although we commonly refer to such calamities as an act of God, that phrase naming "an extraordinary interruption by a natural cause of the usual course of events that experience, prescience, or care cannot reasonably foresee or prevent" did not appear in print until 1783, twenty-eight years after the Lisbon disaster.
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Post by marysgurl on Nov 15, 2005 20:18:10 GMT -5
Topic: America Recycles Day
Today is America Recycles Day, and we're doing our part. How? By passing along a few words that folks might consider reviving. Today's terms aren't in the trash heap yet, but they are dusty. According to Stephen Chrisomalis, the fellow who rounded them up, all of today's words can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary but have yet to appear on the Internet. Chrisomalis collected them out of a desire to share knowledge, but we're taking things one step further and suggesting re-use. Why not bring back stiricide for example? That delightful term from 1656 refers to "the falling of icicles from a house." Admittedly, if you live in a warm climate, stiricide may not do much for you. Everyone appreciates knowing there's a tragematopolist in the neighborhood. Tragematopolist, another 17th-century term, names "a confectioner, or seller of sweets."
More interested in socially relevant terms? Why not revive the adjective mariturient, meaning "eager to marry"? Or the term which follows both logically and temporally, tecnolatry? Mariturient turned up in the mid-18th century, tecnolatry, naming "worship or idolatry of children," at the turn of the 20th century.
We close with a lofty term from the 19th century: the verb sophronize, meaning "to imbue with moral principles or self-control."
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Post by marysgurl on Nov 22, 2005 9:12:44 GMT -5
Topic: Words from Darwin
Back on this date in 1859—or perhaps it was two days later, on November 24th; records conflict—English naturalist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Better known as The Origin of Species, Darwin's book was an immediate hit. It was also immediately controversial. One hundred forty-six years later, the theory of evolution continues to capture the attention of the public. Today we sidestep some of that controversy by selecting a few words that honor Charles Darwin. We begin by noting the naturalist Darwin is remembered in the Darwin tulip and the Darwin barberry and that some birds that had been observed by the young Darwin are popularly referred to as Darwin's finches. One body part bears his name too: the slight projection occasionally present on the outside edge of the human ear is called Darwin's tubercle. Some scientists theorize this nodule may represent the pointed part of the ear of quadrupeds.
We close with a bit of philosophical musing from that great thinker: "Doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life as one can, in any likelihood, pursue."
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Post by gams on Nov 23, 2005 23:16:06 GMT -5
Looking up the spelling of a word the other day in one of my dictionaries, I came across this:
Fat’ti ma’schii, parol’le fe’mine: (abbreviated and altered from Italian.) Literally; deeds masculine, words feminine; i.e. men act, women talk. The motto of Maryland.
Hhmph, I thought. Kind of a sexist phrase, no? It implies that while men are off doing manly things; taking action, getting stuff done, women are sitting around doing nothing but chatting; probably gossiping over coffee or a glass of wine. Or ‘you want something done – get a man to do it; you want to talk about getting something done, call a woman and she’ll talk off your ear.
But then I thought…hhmmm, maybe it’s not such a bad phrase at all. There should be more talk; more discussion, more negotiating before being so willing to grab the sword, the musket, rifle, the smart-bomb, or cruise missile or whatever weapon of choice seems to be preferred during a particular period in history. Unfortunately during certain times, it seems that talk is considered cheap, and action – no matter the cost – is preferred.
Still…an odd phrase to have as a state motto. So….the two minute Internet drill…
It seems I wasn’t the only one who thought the phrase sexist. In 1993, State Archivist, Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, presented a translation in response to charges that the motto as transcribed in law was discriminatory.
The motto has been used on Maryland’s seal since the 1800’s and the translation has varied over the years.
"Deeds are men, words are women" (Lord Calvert's day – it is the Calvert family whose family arms appear on Maryland’s seal, 1622) "A woman for words and a man for deeds" (Maryland Manual, 1905) "Womanly (Courteous), words and manly deeds" (Maryland Manual, 1905)
Strictly, "Deeds are males’, words, females’" (Maryland Manual, 1939) "Deeds are manly, words are womanly" (Unnamed State Archivist, 1969)
"Manly deeds, womanly words" (State Legislature, 1975)
"Strong deeds, gentle words" (Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, 1993)
Though "Strong deeds, gentle words" has been adopted as today’s translation, the legal translation remains 'Manly deeds, womanly words'.
Just one of those things that I thought was weirdly mildly interesting.
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Post by marysgurl on Nov 29, 2005 10:26:26 GMT -5
gams! Topic: C.S. Lewis, apologist, and wardrobe Today we mark the 1898 birth of Clive Staples Lewis. Known to his friends as Jack, today's birthday honoree is remembered by generations of children and theologians as C.S. Lewis. Children know C.S. Lewis as the author of The Narnia Chronicles, the tale of four children whose entry into a magic wardrobe leads them into the land of Narnia. Historians know Lewis as the twentieth century's most famous convert to Christianity, and as a leading apologist. Today we pay tribute to Lewis with a look at two terms whose meanings we learned because of him: wardrobe and apologist. The term wardrobe entered English in the 14th century. Its Old North French ancestor was created by combining the verb meaning "to guard" with the noun meaning "robe." Wardrobe, of course, refers to a room or closet where clothes are kept. As for the noun apologist: don't be sorry if you didn't know that word has its origin in the Greek verb meaning "to speak in defense." The apologetics associated with C.S. Lewis refer to the systematic defense and exposition of the Christian faith that he addressed primarily to non-Christians. I cannot wait for this movie!!
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Post by gams on Nov 29, 2005 22:34:32 GMT -5
Ooooo, me neither. Loved the book as a kid, and just reread it last week in preparation for the movie. It's been thirty years or so since I last read it, and though written for a child, I found myself totally engrossed in it, reading as an adult....yes, I actually am one of those.
I only hope the movie doesn't stray too far from C.S. Lewis' classic.
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Post by marysgurl on Dec 6, 2005 9:29:33 GMT -5
Topic: Words from 1865
More than six months after the Civil War ended, and nearly a year after its introduction, the 13th amendment abolishing slavery was ratified. Today we mark the 1865 anniversary with a look at some terms whose presence in our lexicon became established in print that same year. Surprising as it may seem, the term Johnny Reb—naming a Confederate soldier—didn't appear in print until 1865. Less surprising (at least to us), 1865 was the birth year of the dramatic breaking point, the upbeat nifty, and the encouraging refocus and normalize.
We're not sure we want to speculate about why impractical and unrealistic made their print debuts that year, but we're ready to welcome—with open arms—the enthusiastic and how.
Any other words whose birth that year might give word watchers or history buffs something to think about? Try these. 1865 was the year businesspeople, graft, moralistic, and penny ante appeared, and it was also the year of the all clear.
Can't quite figure out how all these terms interconnect? You're not alone. And yes, interconnect is another coinage from that year
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Post by marysgurl on Dec 7, 2005 10:40:34 GMT -5
The Word of the Day for December 7 is: Shangri-la • \shang-grih-LAH\ • noun *1 : a remote beautiful imaginary place where life approaches perfection : utopia 2 : a remote usually idyllic hideaway Example sentence: From the air, the city rising out of the mist looked like a Shangri-la, but once on the ground we were besieged by the realities of life in the teeming third-world capital. Did you know? In James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon, Shangri-La was the name of a fictional land of peace and eternal youth in the mountains of Tibet. Hilton invented both the place and the name, but over the years people generalized the name and applied it to several real or imaginary locations. In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced that a secret World War II bombing mission had taken off from "Shangri-la" (later revealed to be the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet). That same year, FDR also used Shangri-la as the name for the new presidential retreat in rural Maryland—a spot now better known as Camp David.
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Post by marysgurl on Dec 9, 2005 8:32:28 GMT -5
Topic: Words from John Milton
John Milton was born on this date in 1608. Milton wrote Paradise Lost, one of the greatest poems in the English language. Paradise Lost tells the tale, in epic verse, of Adam and Eve's exit from Eden. Although John Milton was a deeply religious man, the portrait he painted of Satan—who preferred ruling in hell to serving in heaven—is considered to be deeply sympathetic. There's plenty we could say about Milton's contributions to our lexicon. For starters, his phrase Paradise Lost has become a byword for any lost or ruined Utopia or place of bliss, felicity, or delight destroyed by human greed or foolishness. John Milton is credited with the first recorded use of pandemonium (which takes its name from "the high capital/Of Satan and his peers"), plutonian (meaning "related to the underworld; infernal"), and archfiend (another name for "Satan").
But instead we'll pass along one of our favorite quotes from that most religious of men: "A man may be a heretic in the truth," wrote John Milton, "and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy."
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