Alaskan Range: A Word
...Dictionary-makers hate that sort of thing; that's why they're hesitant to add new, faddish words. So it's not overly surprising that a Kingston University researcher recently discovered that Oxford University Press, publishers of the OED, have a hidden vault containing the words they chose not to include in their massive, twenty-volume dictionary. Perhaps I can understand leaving out "polkadodge (the dance that occurs when two people attempt to pass each other but move in the same direction)," "dringle (the watermark left on wood caused by a glass of liquid)," or even "optotoxical (a look that could kill, normally from a parent or spouse)."...
Wordsman and librarian Greg Hill considers the tools of his trade.
How important is a mere word? George Bernard wrote that "Words are only postage stamps delivering objects for you to unwrap," and that's true enough. But some words are more than simple delivery devices for ideas, especially when the term has evolved greatly over time in the meaning it conveys. For example, a friend recently emailed me a one-liner joke the operative word of which works on several levels: "The bartender saw a couple of guys too drunk to drive; he called a parataxis."
The American Heritage Dictionary says "parataxis" is "the placing together of sentences, clauses, or phrases without a conjunctive word or words, as 'Hurry up, it's getting late.'" So besides being a pun on "pair of taxis," the joke has no connector, like "but," "and," or, for that matter, "like," and is an example of "parataxis." Linguists enjoy jokes like this, since they're the ones who began using parataxis around 1840, taking it from the Greek "parataxis," which meant "arranging in order for battle."
That seems a stretch, but some words cover a lot of ground. "Tabby," according to Etymology Online, stems from "Attabiy, a neighborhood of Baghdad where "a rich, watered silk (originally striped) was first made." By the 1300s the French adopted it as "tabis," and in 1638 the English began describing "striped silk taffeta" as "tabby." Striped-coat cats were called "tabby cats" as early as 1695 and simply "tabbies" in 1774. Calling cats "tabbies" was first attested to in 1826 and "may be influenced by the feminine proper name Tabby, a pet form of Tabitha, which was used in the late 18th century as slang for 'difficult old woman.'"
Don't confuse it with the building material made with oyster shells, lime, ash, and water that's also known as tabby. The www.GeorgiaEncyclopedia.org article titled "Tabby" says its origin is, ahem, muddy, since some historians say it originated in Africa, and other claim Spain, where "tapia" means "mud wall," "and similar words appear in both Portuguese and Gullah," the dialect spoken in remote coastal Georgia.
Such confusion doesn't exist with "so." Retired UAF geology professor Don Triplehorn, a bookman with few equals, recently passed along an article from Seed Magazine titled "So: the Anatomy of a Scientific Staple." I know to pay special notice to leads from Don, who has also led popular Great Book and science book discussion groups at the public library for several decades, and I wasn't disappointed.
Written by Michael Erard, the article points out that " 'so' is key to a basic unit of scientific talk: the explanation." When scientists use "so," it's not an intensifier ("so expensive"), nor an anti-parataxis conjunction joining phrases. "This is the 'so' that introduces a sentence, as in 'So as we can see, modified Newtonian dynamics cannot account for the rotation.' " "This 'so,' " Erard continues, "is key to a basic unit of scientific talk: the explanation. What follows 'so' is another idea, insight, or fact, not because it's merely next in a series, but because it's consecutively consequent."
The word "siphon" is causing some lexicographers, including those at the Oxford English Dictionary, to revise their dictionaries since their definitions of "siphon" that term incorrectly state that siphons work because of atmospheric pressure, rather than gravity. An Australian professor noticed the error, the first ever found in the OED, and stated "An extensive check of online and offline dictionaries did not reveal a single dictionary that correctly referred to gravity being the operative force in a siphon."
Dictionary-makers hate that sort of thing; that's why they're hesitant to add new, faddish words. So it's not overly surprising that a Kingston University researcher recently discovered that Oxford University Press, publishers of the OED, have a hidden vault containing the words they chose not to include in their massive, twenty-volume dictionary. Perhaps I can understand leaving out "polkadodge (the dance that occurs when two people attempt to pass each other but move in the same direction)," "dringle (the watermark left on wood caused by a glass of liquid)," or even "optotoxical (a look that could kill, normally from a parent or spouse)."
But certainly there's a place in the language for "xenolexica (a grave confusion when faced with unusual words)." For as Shakespeare put it, "Words without thoughts never to heaven go."
