I don't think I can adequately describe how awesome I think this is:
Science Fiction Citations for OED
Need to know the provenance of the word http://www.movabletype.org/
http://www.movabletype.org/ansible? (Well, as it happens, I already thought I knew the provenance, but at the same time, it's nice to have it confirmed, since I rely on it in a short story--it's an expensive technology in that world, but it exists.) Here you go.
This will make writing steampunk adventures so much easier...
(I remember when OED issued the call for this research. And then it dropped completely out of my mind...)
Am I wrong in making up a sexual symbolism for all the horns a-blowing in Child Ballad #4, Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight? I only wonder, not because I don't think sexual subtext is a possibility (oh-ho, it certainly is) but if the particular slang that's caught my eye had any meaning back in the day.
I must needs find a slang dictionary, and soon. Preferably one with etymology and word origins. More than just my 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue--which does mention that "old hat" means a woman's private parts, but doesn't mention why ("both are frequently felt"). I also think I need a modern slang to old slang dictionary. I bet there isn't one. I bet there's a market for it, though. Hm.
Also, is "shambolic" a real word, or did that come from Shaun of the Dead or something?
Too much wordplay going on in my head right now... the good news is, I dragged the laptop to work, and I managed to write all through lunch and break. The bad news is, none of it was on anything at all related to my self-imposed deadlines.
In a fit of cleaning this evening, I uncovered my Old English flashcards. I went for a tour.
I particularly love the words that seemed made for poetry. "Lamp" was leohtfæt (light vat). "Farmer" was ierþling (earthling). I suppose I love them because they make sense and are formed out of basic words we still use. It's like cracking a code that you were raised to know intuitively--at least, if you're a native speaker of English. I don't get the same thrill from Latinate words at all.
Now, I've spent a half an hour composing the next paragraph of this entry, which was pretty much a bunch of half-linguistically-literate speculation on why it is that I would like Anglo-Saxon rooted words over Latin-rooted ones. I also spent some time perusing Wordcraft by Stephen Pollington (and noticing that he doesn't translate farmer into ierþing at all, but rather gebur). Since I believe I had a story to rewrite, I'm going to get back to that. I'll debate the cultural relevance of the roots of my native tongue another day.
I'll leave you with a link:
Old English Bird Names.
You never know when it might come in handy.
Microsoft Word does not like this sentence:
"Kestrel touched the King's arm, hoping to wake him, but he lay motionless, eyes wide and staring."
And it's a bad sentence, because my pronouns are quite muddled. But what does Word object to? My use of "lay."
Just to make sure I'm not crazy (aboutthisonething), I typed below that:
"He lay. He lay still. He lay motionless. He laid motionless. He laid. He laid down. He laid down the pen."
Just to prove that it could, it caught only the errors this time. And left me scratching my head.
Now I'm so confused that I have a giant case of jamais vu (like when you say your name over and over again and it no longer seems like a word that comes from human speech) and I have to go get my copy of Elements of Style.
I hate you, Microsoft.
July battle did not go so well.
I did not know:
feuilleton
plumply (in the vein they meant it, as "forthrightly")
conquian
balneology
Golconda
bootless (in the vein they meant it, as "useless, unprofitable")
peregrine (again, the vein, as "having a tendancy to wander" instead of small falcon) (and yet, I know perigrinations)
amphigory
minatory
conventicle (yeah, and Lou knew this one)
litotes
vespertine (if only they'd chosen crepuscular)
(sniff) That's terrible. I don't have the heart to tell you the ones I did know.
I spent about twenty minutes at Write Club agonizing over word choice in The Bitter Road, specifically for Lord Dogwood's title. He was the Lord Chancellor when I wrote the first draft.
With this editing pass, it was very much time to get more careful in word choice. Everyone in the Mountain Kingdom has solid names: either relating to objects, or well-known concepts. Animals: Kestrel, Tiger, Merlin. (Birds outweigh mammals, I just realized.) Plants: Thistle, Rue, Ivy (and then there's the Lady of Apples, who doesn't seem to have a first name, in part because I can't find any good heirloom apple varieties that are obviously apples. Russet, maybe--that's the best I've got.) Metals and stones, though those are reserved for magic workers: Silver, Copper, etc. And, well. The King--which is his job, and he gets the name, because there's only one King at a time. Justice, who's parents, I think, may have been a bit rebellious, has the most abstract name, but it's a possible name in my world, and fits him well. Everything he does, after all, is motivated by his concept of justice. His, and his alone.
There is, in fact, only one smeerp in the book. One made-up word. (There are a few person-names which are not literal, but they are River Marchers on a diplomatic mission to the court of the Mountain King, and they're there for contrast and also as plot points.) The smeerp (and technically, it's not...) is Tair (which is just a slip of the tongue away from "Sir" and yes, they are essentially knights... knights with strange motivations and stranger loyalties). The Tair are Tair. Brook even points it out, once...
"You walk a dangerous line," Iain said. "The Tair are the keepers of these mountains, and the guardians of the ways here."
"Yes, you guard against the spread of history," Brook said. "What does the word Tair even mean?"
Kestrel said, "I don't understand your question. Tair is just Tair."
Brook shook her head. "No. It's not a Mountain Kingdom word. All our titles and names mean something. They have another use. We call our ruler the King, and we know what that means. We have a bird called the kingfisher, we have a plant called king's crown. We use it in stories: the Mountain eagle is the king of birds, the salmon is the king of fish. So, I ask you: what's a Tair?"
"Let's not distract ourselves from this task," Tair Iain said.
One of my first readers got irritated with the Tair at this point for shutting Brook's question down, but hey. There were circumstances. And secrets.
So, anyway. Lord Chancellor Dogwood. I felt that Chancellor was awfully French. I'm trying to find nice, Anglo-Saxon-rooted words for anything that's not conceptually solid (Justice, again, the exception, since I'm sure that's French--but even so, I think most people have conceptions of justice that feel pretty concrete to them, whether it's a mental image of a gavel or a court-room or just the memory of the first time they wailed to their parents: "That's not fair!"). Anglo-Saxon because I have this illusion that such words feel more solid, more primal. They tend to be shorter words with harder sounds; less Latinate all around.
Chancellor was out.
I dithered. Out loud. Thankfully, Write Club was kind. And suggested steward, which I poo-pooed until Lou threatened to get at dictionary. So, I went to look, and yeah. Ste from stig (the dictionary claimed) meaning house or hall in OE, and ward meaning guardian. A word with Anglo-Saxon origins, fitting thusly my criteria.
And tonight I've pulled out my OE books, and Barney's Word-Hoard has a lovely paragraph with all the OE words deriving from the Indo-European root *sta-. It has a lot to do with "stay" and "stand," actually, and places where one stands in battle as well as to do military service. And hey. A King's court is a great place to stand to do military service, and who's in charge of the court? The steward.
At one point Eric said, "This is an occasion where Tolkein works for you, because folks know the Steward of Gondor." When he first said it, I didn't want Tolkein to be working for me; I wanted to stand on my own. I'd already had to unname a character the White Witch because I felt it was too Tolkein-esque. But later, I realized Tolkein is the Imperial Jedi Master of Old English linguistics, and if steward was his choice, then, by the rules I set out above, it should be mine as well.
And that went on way, way longer than it should have.
"Taboos are responsible for the loss of some words. Words for death adn dying, for example, are often replaced by euphemisms, which themselves become tainted by their meanings and are in turn replaced by other words or euphemisms. OE [Old English] had an extremely commen verb, gewitan, meaning "to go away." By late OE, it had become a common euphemism for "to die." The ultimate loss of gewitan from the language is probably the result of its unpleasant associations with death."
--The Biography of the English Language by C.M. Millward, p. 126
That's a whole story in and of itself. The death of a word caused by the word meaning "death."
May Battle
Oooh... I'm so late in posting this!
Didn't know:
Garrison finish - a finish in which the winner comes from behind
verbicide - deliberate distortion of the sense of a word
inspissate - to make thick
flyblown - impure, corrupt, seedy-- or infested with eggs of a blowfly
Did know:
ascetic, hackle, quixotic, decorous, Panglossian, clement, boondoggle, recalcitrant, flummox, melange, cognizable, facile, small beer, petulant, Milquetoast, beguile, lachrymose, salient, aplomb, mollycoddle, equanimity, demean, neophyte, Dunkirk, tantamount, confection, hoise.
What I find interesting is that I can't bring myself to throw any of these little slips of paper away. They have word histories on the backs. I always say, "I'm going to need that some day..."
Silly.
"The term language family is sometimes criticized as a dangerous metaphor, suggesting as it does a biological analogy. This criticism has some justification; languages are not discrete entities, like kittens, born at one specific time and dying at another. They are not separate creatures from their "parents"; rather, they are their parents. Spanish is not something entirely separate from Latin; it is one of the thigns Latin has become over a period of two thousand years."
from A Biography of the English Language by C.M. Millward (p.45)
Anthropologically speaking, family-tree analogies are similarly detrimental to discussions of species and speciation. Like Latin and Spanish, so are Neanderthals and we. (I believe, but I'm also a student of the great Wolpoff.)
April's Battle
Didn't know:
vaporware - a new computer-related product that widely known but unavailable
wallah - a person identified by a specified line of work or service
pukka - genuine or authentic
Easy month, with a 12-day run from the 3rd to the 14th.
I knew expedite, commodius, gossamer, taciturn, seder, daedal, Hosbson's choice, lambent, bathetic, sylvan, artless, palaver, contumely, tenacious, mettle, clairvoyant, putative, vitiate, egregious, dissemble, scarify, baptism of fire, impromptu, jabberwocky, funambulism, and aggress.
In attempting to find an Old English poem on the web (I was looking for something I could translate quickly and throw into my novel at an important point (thus alleviating me the task of making up an actual poem, but getting around all the narstiness of copyright by translating it myself))--
I came across this:
Incipit gestis Rudolphi rangifer tarandus
It's a perfect send-up of OE poetry. And, the best part is, you can say the first line aloud, and a speaker of Modern English would probably understand you.
March's Battle
Didn't know:
pachydermatous - callous, insensitive
jackleg - characterized by unscrupulousness, dishonesty or lack of professional standards
alembic - something that refines or transmutes as if by distillation
ear candy - musical equivalent of eye candy (DUH)
colubrine - "like a snake"
palmy - marked by prosperity, flourishing
Six again.
Knew: serendipity, flout, phantasm, troglodyte, cachet, ineluctable, bastion, chapter and verse, glom, debonair, bona fides, syncretic, hare, lucrative, fulsome, cyberpunk, veritable, lodestone, execrable, rankle, oenophile, capricious, modicum, dollar diplomacy, nadir.
A good 17-day run, the 7th to the 23rd, phantasm to execrable.
How to talk like a Michigander.
Naturally, I find something that celebrates my accent just when I decided that I need to rub it out.
(The terminology section is the true gem: make sure to read the definitions of "the big lake" and "the cottage.")
I have these memories of being asked to say "oil" in the 4th grade. "Oyl!" the kids all laughed, mimicking me. Of course, I felt like I had the high road: oil clearly begins with an o, not the a of "awhl" that my Southern classmates used.
But in the 6th grade, I stood in the front of the class to point out the parts of a plant. "Petal, stem, root," I said.
A firestorm of laughter. "The what?"
"The root," I said. Pronounced like "rut."
Turns out, they say the oo's in root like the oo's in boo in the South.
I don't mind the vowel hijinx. At least, not the o's. I can live with saying rut instead of root and ruff instead of roof.
But the next time I hear my voice coming out of my nose instead of my mouth, I may just bash my head against the wall. It's gaht to stahp.
February's Battle
Didn't know:
cacography - bad spelling or handwriting
bloviate- to speak or write verbosely or windily
indefeasible - not capable of being annulled, voided or undone
raddled - broken-down, worn
adjuvant - auxiliary; OR assisting in the prevention, amelioration or cure of disease
myrmidon - loyal follower
Improved over last month. Of course, it's a shorter month.
I should have known cacography (I knew kakistocracy, after all). I sort of knew raddled, adjuvant and indefeasible, but I was slightly off in my definition; and as for myrmidon, file that under "words I used to know."
Words that did not kick me in the gut: utile, probity, minuscule, verbose, gibe, paragon, non sequitur, alacrity, stymie, homage, trepidation, enigmatic, utopia, Babbitt, propinquity, distaff, jurisprudence, laconic, ennui, white elephant, denegation, hoary, and aphorism.
My best run was merely 9-words, from gibe to Utopia, beginning on the 7th.
January's Battle
I didn't know:
polymath - a person of encyclopedic learning
handsel - a gift made as a token of good wishes or luck
thrasonical - bragging, boastful
omphalos - a central point
footless - stupid or inept
nostrum - panacea
uxorial - of or relating to a wife
luftmensch - an impractical, contemplative person having no definite business or income
I should have known polymath from the Greek roots, omphalos from all the damn art history I've taken, nostrum (once I saw the definition, I remembered it) and uxorial (but I got it confused with uxorious).
I did know:
watershed, forfend, lissome, chin-wag, kakistocracy (at least my Greek doesn't always fail me), akimbo (thank you, Kathleen Woodiweiss), crucible, Rosetta stone, welkin (thank you, Jane Eyre), bunkum, lexical, conundrum (thank you, Lewis Carroll), gauntlet, antediluvian, paladin, importune (thanks, Mrs. Miller, tenth-grade English teacher), mnemonic, hark back, bon vivant, pedantic, callow, voracious, and dreadnought.
My best run was Jan. 11-20th--crucible to importune. A good ten-word run.