Odd words

[pdurrant]

I'm fond of "antepenultimate", which I first came across in "Maderia, M'Dear" by Michael Flanders.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Defenestrate: throwing someone out of a window [...]

I wish I could remember when I first came across this one, it wasn't Eddings. ... Maybe a John Irving novel. I do remember being fascinated that such a word could exist.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I'm fond of "antepenultimate", which I first came across in "Maderia, M'Dear" by Michael Flanders.

Love it. I see "tope" appears in that same poem. And neither exist in my spell-checker.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by gmw

Love it. I see "tope" appears in that same poem. And neither exist in my spell-checker.

A poem, but also a song! Music by Donald Swann.

From Flanders and Swann's US tour:



(with a little bit of censorship from US TV!)

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Ha ha. Uh, yeah.

I always thought remunerate was a weird word. Sure grammar wonks get it right but ordinary mortals just want to say renumerate.

And to get it is to be remunerated.

[gmw]

"Theres" possibly doesn't deserve to be here, nor did it seem worth raising a new thread, but I just hit a couple of peculiarities with this uncommon (to me) word.

My email spell checker didn't highlight "theres" when I thought it should ... until I thought about it a bit longer. Despite having thought about it, and always enthusiastic about distractions, I studied it further. Every other spell checker I've tried highlights the word.

From the OED comes this example: "In the Space-field lie innumerable other theres that never have been here."

But the OED does not offer it as an alternative to the much more common "there's" (contraction of of "there is"). Curiously, however, dictionary.com does, at least through the examples that it offers.

So I wondered if maybe the use of "theres" instead of "there's" was an Americanism ... but Merriam-Webster does not show it.

So my question remains: Are there "theres" over there?

[Katsunami]

I think it's a made-up word, to mean 'something out there of which we do not know what it is.'

Thus, "theres", as in "multiple unknown things that are not here, where I am", but going by your last sentence I think you've already surmised that

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by gmw

"Theres" possibly doesn't deserve to be here, nor did it seem worth raising a new thread, but I just hit a couple of peculiarities with this uncommon (to me) word.

My email spell checker didn't highlight "theres" when I thought it should ... until I thought about it a bit longer. Despite having thought about it, and always enthusiastic about distractions, I studied it further. Every other spell checker I've tried highlights the word.

From the OED comes this example: "In the Space-field lie innumerable other theres that never have been here."

But the OED does not offer it as an alternative to the much more common "there's" (contraction of of "there is"). Curiously, however, dictionary.com does, at least through the examples that it offers.

So I wondered if maybe the use of "theres" instead of "there's" was an Americanism ... but Merriam-Webster does not show it.

Not an Americanism - just a very rare plural, but perfectly valid. Hardly surprising that spell-check dictionaries don't contain it.

"Theres" can never, ever be a substitute for "there's". The two usages are grammatically distinct.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Not an Americanism - just a very rare plural, but perfectly valid. Hardly surprising that spell-check dictionaries don't contain it.

"Theres" can never, ever be a substitute for "there's". The two usages are grammatically distinct.

It's actually better that spell-check dictionaries do not contain it, letting them pick up on what is usually a typo (as it was in my case).

So the examples offered by dictionary.com in the link I supplied (all of which are printed as "theres" but mean "there is") must either be errors in the original source that dictionary.com has not validated, or maybe dictionary.com's script contains a bug that is stripping out the apostrophes.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by gmw

It's actually better that spell-check dictionaries do not contain it, letting them pick up on what is usually a typo (as it was in my case).

So the examples offered by dictionary.com in the link I supplied (all of which are printed as "theres" but mean "there is") must either be errors in the original source that dictionary.com has not validated, or maybe dictionary.com's script contains a bug that is stripping out the apostrophes.

Yes, I agree completely with both of these points.

[pdurrant]

Another fun word: ablutioner. From The Mikado by G&S.

"The Mikado's Lord High Executioner
Was rhymed with a new word: ablutioner.
When Gilbert thus wrote
This lexical mote,
Some called him a language dilutioner."
— EdRush

[HarryT]

Reminds me of Commander Henry Honychurch Gorringe, the American Naval Officer who supervised the transfer of the Egyptian obelisk wrongly called "Cleopatra's Needle" (it has absolutely nothing to do with Cleopatra - it was erected by Thutmosis III some 1400 years before she was born) from Alexandria to New York's Central Park. He was immortalised in rhyme by the humourist Arthur Guiterman:

In Sparkill buried lies that man of mark
Who brought the Obelisk to Central Park,
Redoubtable Commander H.H. Gorringe,
Whose name supplies the long-sought rhyme for "orange."

[gmw]

Not sure I'm convinced about "ablutioner", but it did lead me to abluvion.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by gmw

Not sure I'm convinced about "ablutioner", but it did lead me to abluvion.

Umm... "ablution"?

[gmw]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Umm... "ablution"?

I understand the supposed root, but can't find it as an accepted derivation in my OED or elsewhere. So Gilbert may have coined the word, but it doesn't seem to have gone beyond that. ... I'm not really trying to be picky, just making the observation.

ETA: What Gilbert really needed was someone to try and sue him for using it. It worked to get supercalifragilistic into the OED along with quotations from the court case.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by gmw

I understand the supposed root, but can't find it as an accepted derivation in my OED or elsewhere. So Gilbert may have coined the word, but it doesn't seem to have gone beyond that. ... I'm not really trying to be picky, just making the observation.

One of the nice things about English, though, is that you can add endings to practically any word, and the listener will understand the word even if nobody's ever used it before. The "-er" ending in this case meaning "a person who carries out the action". Eg the word "computer" is recorded from 1640 in the sense of "a person who performs calculations".