Categories: linguistics, reading
Date: 09 April 2010 21:36:06
A happier topic to move on to then politics and vote-grabbing.
And a nice happy day today for I am headed off for a picnic with friends up in the very beautiful Hawkesbury River region north of Sydney. The Hawkesbury River flows west out to the sea, but has tributaries which start south of Sydney, go out to border Sydney at its west [and where the Blue Mountains begin], before running east[*] along Sydney's north to empty out into the sea
Need to update my goodreads list; I have finished two books on my 'currently reading' list and have started another. One of my delights currently is Ammon Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, for which thanks to Deb on the Run for her review which alerted me to it [still need to hunt down The Professor and the Madman among many others...].
I tried limiting myself to one word a day but have failed as I found each chapter so engrossing. And I sneaked ahead to "P" to check for one of my favourite words, petrichor [the pleasant loamy [another new word for me] smell of rain on the ground, especially after a long, dry spell], and was delighted to find it: surely a sign Mr Shea is a most wondrous person and someone to be listened to as he delights in petrichor as I do. ;)
Each letter is in a separate chapter, where Ammon delightfully describes either his love of reading and of dictionaries, the history of dictionaries, his immense collection of dictionaries scattered round the house, his visits to the library where he pores over the volumes, and much more, and then where he gives a selection of favourite words he encountered beginning with that letter. I'll share a few of them as I go through; for now, I'll give one word from A, B and C that particularly caught my attention [hard to choose only one] together with Ammon's explanation. Oh, who am I kidding?!?; take 2 and even that is a struggle. And as you can see Ammon's explanations are as delightful as the words.
Acnestis [noun] On an animal, the point of the back that lies between the shoulders and the lower back, which cannot be reached to be scratched.
I am very glad I found this word early in my reading of the OED -- the fact that there existed a word for this thing which previously I had been sure lacked a name was such a delight to me that suddenly the whole idea of reading the dictionary seemed utterly reasonable.
Apricity [noun] The warmth of the sun in winter.
A strange and lovely word. The OED does not give any citation for its use except for Henry Cockeram's 1623 English Dictionarie. Not to be confused with apricate (to bask in the sun), although both come from the Latin apricus, meaning exposed to the sun.
Balter [verb] To dance clumsily.
It's nice to find a word I can use to explain why I've always hated to dance. I'm a balterer.
[Ian: I may not hate to dance, but when I do dance I balter. :) ]
Bedinner [verb] To treat to dinner.
So many verbs that begin with this prefix appear to entail the act of throwing or projecting something unpleasant upon someone. For instance, bespawl is to splatter with saliva, bescumber is to splatter with dung, and bevomit...you can figure that out on your own. It's pleasing to discover that bedinner, in contrast, does not denote a food fight.
Cellarhood [noun] The state of being a cellar.
Along with tableity (the condition of being a table) and paneity (the state of being bread), cellarhood is a wonderful example of the spectacular ways English has of describing things no one ever thinks it necessary to describe.
Coenaculous [adjective] Supper-eating, or as the OED phrases it, "Supper-loving".
Every once in a great while, a definition provided by the OED is startingly conversational, as if someone at Oxford had declared they would have "casual-definition Friday," and the result was that the editors let their hair down and came up with definitions like "supper-loving."
[*] as Jan commented, my original "west" would've made it a much larger river than it already is -- around 3,000+ kilometres longer! :D Thanks Jan.