One of the things I love about this forum is learning new words. So I'm going to start saying thank you whenever one of you give me a new titbit, a new concept, a linguistic sweetie!
My first thanks of this thread is to Brianp for 'actuarial'!
I owe an old one to Matt for the other meaning of materialist and countless thanks in between to a whole host of you. I just want to see how many rack up over time here.
Oh - and thanks to Pebble for 'a priori'.
Dr B pointed me to an article on Immortality. It mentions...
Epiphenomenonalism - the idea that the mind is a separate yet dependant by-product of the brain. (Try saying it when you haven't had a drink!)
And
cryptomnesia - the idea that the mind is a vast and muddled storehouse of information derived over time from newspapers, books, lectures, TV, radio, etc...which might explain those who claim to have had a past life.
An obscure lexicon joke:
A literate drug dealer's telephone answering service "... for marihuana press the octothorpe key"
(Answers on a postcard)
What a load of bloody hash!
I deeply love Google!
Impressed - I will have to be even more cryptic next time. Floppit, you are certainly no foppotee.Originally Posted by Floppit
The first dictionary
King LeirThis is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star!
Kind of fitting round 'ere! Of course it's only a hunch that fopotee has any real relationship to foppery.
You would probably enjoy the books 'Weird and wonderful words' and 'More weird and wonderful words'.
I do have a question for you all though. I heard this word in a meeting, it was a manager-type person speaking and I assumed it was just one of those made-up words that managers think make them sound clever. The word is 'anonymised'. I don't think this is a real word, am I right? I'd like to be right, as it gave me a good laugh during a depressing meeting. But I don't mind being wrong either as if I am wrong it means I too have a new word to use.
Well it's in the Collins Online as a verb:
and in lots of other online dictionaries, but it's not in my trusty Concise Oxford which, being a book, takes precedence.anonymize , anonymise
vb tr to carry out or organize in such a way as to preserve anonymity
anonymized AIDS screening
The Urban Dictionary has thisKing Leir
Kind of fitting round 'ere! Of course it's only a hunch that fopotee has any real relationship to foppery.
BTW don't go browsing around the Urban Dictionary unless you are VERY broad minded!1. foppotee
Idiotic person. Simpleton.
It was used in the 1600's but somehow died off.
What an pitiful foppotee he was, always oblivious to our jeers!
stupid idiot dumb simple foppotte
I got the definition but it had a sort of Shakespearean feel to it so I set off to look - the Shakespeare quote seemed so... so damn skeptical it made me laugh! I tried to find if the words were related for sure but got nowhere. That's happened to me before, I've often wondered if 'camp' (as in tented escapade for fun) came from 'campaign' (war tented escapade) ever since I saw some 'campaign furniture' on the Antiques Roadshow, it seemed tantalising to just believe the two to be related but I never found anyone writing that they had a link and coincidence was possible.
Do you think it's reasonable to decide they are related, camp and campaign, foppotee and foppery?
One of my favourite ever new words was epistemology - not that was one hell of a tasty word, a whole new playground.
It isn't in the 1973 Shorter OED either ( I refuse to use anything more modern on the grounds that it almost certainly txtspk or something quite as unutterably bloody). Mind you, I don't object to anonymize itself but to the fact that those who use it can't make up their minds whether it's the bod or the writing that has been anonymized.
By Jove, I feel better for that!
Sad to say it is a word I have used many times. It is not uncommon to say that clinical data are anonymised. It simply means that the identity of patients of volunteers on trial has been protected.
But should it be anonymize (Lord Muck) or anonymise (Mr. Lappin)?
I offer a pair of favourite useful words, both referring to the lining of canal and river banks with boards of timber or steel to prevent them from collapsing: 'campshedding' and 'campshotting' (they appear to be interchangeable, both deriving from Dutch I believe). I use them to test dictionaries!
Another one I rather like is "frap" as in "frapping your halyards"; which means securing the ropes used to pull sails up a mast, or flags up a flagpole, so that they don't keep beating against the mast in a wind. So when you walk past sailing boats and hear this characteristic rattling of wires against masts, you can say "Aha! They haven't frapped their halyards!" But don't spell it as "frapp" as (I have just discovered on checking) it has a rather rude meaning...
I thought 'frap' meant to electrocute, as in 'The dog bit the wire and got frapped'. I like the sailing meaning better, sort of makes it sound different.
*I need to remember campshed for scrabble, it has an s in the middle and uses a c!
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