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More Idioms Other Than English: Nahuatl
I dug up some old photocopies about expressions and saying in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. These are from the Codex Florentino"Servants are sent" - this refers to a story about the king who spotted two women bathing. He sent two messengers to find out who the women were, but all the messengers did was hang around watching them bathe. He ( Read more... ) -
Idioms Other Than English
From Lonely Planet's Say What?"To have bats in the belfry" = French "To have a spider on the ceiling", Croatian "Crows have drunk his brain ( Read more... ) -
A few words that've been lying around
bole - tree trunk (askoxford.com).
cantillation - chanting.
cataplasm - poultice (1913 Webster's).
circumforanean - "going about; walking or wandering from house to house" (1828 Webster's).
claustral - of or like a cloister ( Merriam-Webster Online).
enceinte - pregnant ( Merriam-Webster Online).
gremial - of the lap or breast; a bosom friend (1913 ( Read more... ) -
Two unrelated snippets
In nuclear physics, the cross section is the size of the nucleus you're trying to hit with a particle, and the barn is the unit of measurement for the cross section! (The outhouse and the shed are both tiny fractions of a barn.) Check it out in The Language of the Nucleus.
The thorn is the "y" in "ye", as in "Ye Olde Shoppe" - it's actually a "th -
Greennotebook's Tags
I've been tagging entries here with the words defined therein, which means the list of all tags is a rough, miniature dictionary. I haven't tagged every word (eg I've omitted technical terms) and I still need to add tags for words defined in the comments. -
From the little notebook in my backpack
corybantic - wild, frenzied, like the dancing of the Korubantes, the priests of Cybele.
disjunctive - unconnected.
aspersive - defamatory (Webster's 1913)
ochreous - containing or resembling ochre (dictionary.com)
bolster - a long, firm pillow.
catlap - "Usually weak tea or milk; something fit only for cats to drink" (Cat-ch Phrases)
caucus - "a ( Read more... ) -
Wurdz
abject - in general use this means degrading, completely without dignity; in psychology, it means a state of horror caused when meaning, order, and the boundary between self and other breaks down, such as when we see a corpse and it reminds us of our own mortality, or when we encounter an atrocity. (This is my stab at a definition based on various ( Read more... ) -
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I came across the word "inobvious", Googled it, and found it all over. But onelook.com finds it in precisely no dictionaries. omg word creation in progress! -
Some more loanwords
arriviste - "a person who has recently gained social or financial status or is ambitious to do so" (French)
au courant - "up to date and well-informed" (French)
catafalque - " a decorated wooden framework to support a coffin". (Italian)
Erse - Scots or Irish Gaelic (Scots Gaelic)
gasconading - boasting (M-W) (French)
habitué - resident of, or ( Read more... ) -
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A few terms I've encountered while marking up in HTML the journals of Lachlan Macquarie (soldier, traveller, and sixth Governor of NSW).
blue-skins - "the Offspring of European Fathers, by Moor or Gentoo women".
cuddy - "The public or captain’s cabin of an Indiaman or other passenger ship." (The Hobson Jobson Dictionary of Anglo-Indian Terms)
dead ( Read more... )