A.D. vs. B.C.

So in my studies today I noticed that Muslims have a calendar system whereby the designate years as "A.H." (from the Latin "anno Hegirae", or "Year of Hijra".)

So that sent me poking around, and I'm wondering, can anyone explain to me why we have "B.C." based on the English "Before Christ", but we have "A.D." based on the Latin "Anno Domini" or "Year of the Lord"?

I mean that's screwed up. They should both be Latin, or both be English.

Maybe we should stick with the more politically correct "B.C.E." and "C.E." At least they're both English, which, for the time being, is the most spoken language on earth (with 1.5 billion +) (although by no means the most spoken *first language* on earth, which as it turns out, is Mandarin, with nearly 900 million native speakers) (which is why after I get a good start on Arabic, one of my goals before I die is to learn Mandarin) (ha--good luck with that) (Hell, if Richard Wurmbrand can learn 9 or 14 languages, I don't know why I can't learn 4.)

Word of the day: labile

Today I learned

Labile:

Easily changing, unstable. If your asthma is labile, it means that you can go quickly and unpredictably from being perfectly fine to barely ...


Unstable; literally, characterized by a tendency to slip.


Readily undergoing change or breakdown. The term labile is often used to describe compounds (such as carbon or nitrogen) that are available to easily move through soils.

Now to use in a sentence. Here's a politically incorrect attempt: According to traditional gender stereotypes, women, on average, are more labile than men.

Word of the day:

"Sequelae": Conditions which result from an event. Further definitions

Try using this in a sentence today. Perhaps in a comment here.

"red-meat declarations" and "Misteaks happen"

Reporter Michael Luo of the New York Times seems to have coined the phrase "red-meat declaration" in an article about the Religious Right on October 21. He used it again today in his article about Mitt Romney, whose recent speech about his Mormon faith and the interplay of faith and politics was, Luo claims, "peppered with red-meat declarations"

A google search for "red-meat declarations" returns seven hits, all from these two articles by Luo. A search for the singular "red-meat declaration" returns zilch.

It will be interesting to see if the phrase catches on. I suppose a google search tomorrow, for instance, will return this post. I like the phrase. It works for me. I intuitively know exactly what kind of declaration he's talking about.

In an associated note, a recent billboard from a major auto insurance company (clearly the advertising didn't work, since I can't remember which one) near my house had a photo of busy interstate traffic and across the photo was the slogan, in really big letters, "Misteaks happen". They meant to refer, I think, to some program they have where you can get "forgiven" for one accident, and not have your rates go up, and to do so in a funny way by misspelling "mistakes". But it took me a little while to figure that out, because the combination of the image of traffic, the idea of mistakes/accidents, and the embedded word "steaks" left me instantly with the mental picture of a big accident and lots of dead human meat strewn over the interstate--human steaks, as it were. Quite offputting, but I'm guessing this wasn't their intention, so also a little humorous. Maybe I'm just wierd, and other people didn't get that impression. But the billboard *did* come down quite quickly--it's not there anymore.

okay, wait, I think I'm giving people too much credit. A quick google blog search returns results in which some people *still* haven't even figured out that it's mispelled on purpose. Alas.

meta and it's antonym

So today I was writing and suddenly came to a dead stop looking for a word that means the opposite of "meta"

I found some interesting tidbits. The first was that I couldn't find any decent opposite anywhere. at all. and I have some sources that work for most everything.

Secondly is that ... the literature (and I'm using that term in the most absurdly loose sense) doesn't seem to mean, by "meta", what *I* mean by "meta". Only one entry in the long list generated when you tell Google (you know what's *yotta* funny? Blogger says "google" is mispelled if it's not capitalized) "Define: meta" even touches on what I mean--and even that one doesn't quite capture it.

So here's a question. What do you mean by the prefix "meta"?

And what's it's opposite?

Aha--wikipedia gets it. It's actually fairly unusual to see wikipedia and google going down such different tracks.

When I think of "meta", I think of arabian nights. and of hofstadter, who actually just came out with a new one this year which is more autobiographical, and apparently has quite a tragic and deeply moving story within, called I am a Strange Loop .

I don't know vs. I know.

My friend Russell, who spent several years in France, told me a great story the other night. While he was learning French, one day he asked a friend "What that word you keep saying 'Jepas'"? (as in "Shay PAH"). After something like half an hour, they finally figured out it was "Je ne sais pas", French for "I don't know". But it all got kind of boiled down to "Jepas". And of course we do the same thing with lots of phrases. "I don't know", for instance, gets boiled down to this strange three syllable word which is all vowel, and is practically impossible to spell, but might look something like "uhnuh". This is intriguing, because if you think about it, the opposite declaration, "I know!", is always said quite clearly. Maybe we humans feel kind of negative about not knowing, so we boil having to admit it down to the shortest, mumblyest form possible.

Or "Have you eaten yet?" become "Jeat?"

Got any further examples?

words

why does "cleave" mean the opposite of itself? Why does "flammable" mean exactly the same thing as "inflammable". And why are the redundancies "extra virgin" and "100% pure" used to describe olive oil and sunflower oil respectivley? Hmmmmmm...

help--what is a "nonce"?

I learned a new word today, but I can't seem to get a sense of the meaning, which makes the amateur philologist in here crazy.

OED gives: 1.a. for the nonce. a. For the particular purpose; on purpose; expressly. Freq. with infinitive or clause expressing the object or purpose. In quot. 1949: for the purpose of teasing or joking; for its own sake. Now Eng. regional (south.) and Sc.

and

1.c. For the particular occasion; for the time being, temporarily; for once.

So a google "define: nonce" gives the above and also: A randomly chosen value, different from previous choices, inserted in a message to protect against replays

The only definition I found which does make sesne is a secondary definition in OED:

(british criminal slang) nonce: A sexual deviant; a person convicted of a sexual offence, esp. child abuse

Ah here's a fun column from william safire in the new york times (which, by the way, you'll probably have to register for a free account in order to view) in which he says: "Today’s linguistic space odyssey shows how mainstream readers can tangle with the weaving Web. A last word: Don’t knock yourself out looking for the origin of e-maelstrom, “a storm of electronic communications.” It was minted today, right here, and if it does not die in the nonce, a dispute will arise over capitalization."

Ha--okay, I get that.

Any of you use this word? And how?

our next president

had damned well better be able to say "nuclear".

Try opening about 5 iterations of this page at once. And brace your ears.

I was wrong!

so I went through the list of 100 words everyone "should" know, and checked to see whether my sense of the words which I wasn't sure of was really the *right* sense. And I found nine more that I didn't actually know properly. so there were really 14 I didn't know. so there. but I learned a bunch of kewl new words.

Ziggurat was not what I thought it was.

I'm not gonna tell you. go look it up yourself. ('kay, you prolly already know anyway).

The new nine I didn't know were diffident, circumlocution, enervate, lugubrious, oxidize, pecuniary, precipitous, unctuous, yeoman.

On a couple of these I had almost the opposite idea in my head--for instance, on enervate, and on diffident.

Expurgate and bowdlerize are quite similar--sometimes defined as synonymous, depending on how you use them.

"Feckless" is fun because it talks about feck, and implies "feckful", which means "efficient, vigorous, powerful". As in "Oh, darling, you're so feckful!" or something.

Following is my pathetic attempt to use these 14 words which I didn't know in a couple paragraphs. It was kind of fun.

The queen's faithful yeomen decided not to circumlocute. He felt too lugubrious and enervated having learned that all three of his quadruplet brothers had died in Iraq. He sensed his own precipitous death, and felt keenly the quotidian nature of his pecuniary chores. No, he would come out and say it--"I love you. Marry me!" He must be neither diffident nor jejune nor unctuous. He must not use merely a moiety of his feck, he must use all of it!

He must also remove the oxidation from his shoe buckle, which it had developed during his vacation while studying the ziggurats in Mesopotamia during his vacation.

(This wee story has been bowdlerized in case any young 'uns happen to read it)

100 words you "ought to" know =)

BOSTON, MA — The editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know."The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."

Okay, brutal honesty here. I have a *sense* of the meaning of, and can pronounce, and could probably use in a sentence, all of these except for: bowdlerize, jejune, moiety, quotidian, and ziggurat. Although I think I might also have a sense of ziggurat--is it something that has sort of taken on an overwhelming momentum and bowls down everything that would oppose it? Thing is, I'm not sure how to pronounce ziggurat. I shall have to research and post tomorrow on the meaning and pronunciation of these 5 I don't know. How many do you know?

(see what comes of 25 years of insatiable book lust? You end up knowing lots of kewl words. =)

Here's the list

abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious

(read more ...)

belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
ephiphany
equinox
euro
evanescent
expurgate
facetious
fatuous
feckless
fiduciary
filibuster
gamete
gauche
gerrymander
hegemony
hemoglobin
homogeneous
hubris
hypotenuse
impeach
incognito
incontrovertible
inculcate
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
jejune
kinetic
kowtow
laissez faire
lexicon
loquacious
lugubrious
metamorphosis
mitosis
moiety
nanotechnology
nihilism
nomenclature
nonsectarian
notarize
obsequious
oligarchy
omnipotent
orthography
oxidize
parabola
paradigm
parameter
pecuniary
photosynthesis
plagiarize
plasma
polymer
precipitous
quasar
quotidian
recapitulate
reciprocal
reparation
respiration
sanguine
soliloquy
subjugate
suffragist
supercilious
tautology
taxonomy
tectonic
tempestuous
thermodynamics
totalitarian
unctuous
usurp
vacuous
vehement
vortex
winnow
wrought
xenophobe
yeoman
ziggurat