Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

The words of the day, today, come from a favorite book of mine, Gulliver’s Travels:

Lilliputian \lil-lee-PUH-shun\, adj. Extremely small; tiny; diminutive.

Lilliput (and the lesser known Blefuscu) are, according to Mr. Swift, two South Indian Ocean islands inhabited by tiny people who are “not six inches high”. Brobdingnag, on the other hand, was an island entirely peopled with giants. And that brings us to the other Ryan Byrd word of the day:

Brobdingnagian \brob-ding-NAG-ee-uhn\, adj: Of extraordinary size; gigantic; enormous.

• Casualty– a person who is killed, or injured, in a war or disaster.
• Momentarily– For a moment or an instant. (Not IN a moment.)
• Daily Savings Time– The official term is “daylight saving time,” not “savings time.”
• LCD Display– “LCD” stands for “liquid crystal display,” so it is redundant to write “LCD display.” Use “LCD screen” instead.
• Please RSVP– R.S.V.P. stands for the French phrase Répondez s’il vous plaît (“reply, please”), so it doesn’t need an added “please.” However, since few people seem to know its literal meaning, it’s probably best to simply use “Please reply.”
• UFO– “UFO” stands for “Unidentified Flying Object,”so if you’re sure that silvery disk is an alien spacecraft, there’s no point in calling it a “UFO.”
• You can’t have your cake and eat it too– The original version of this saying is “You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” meaning that if you eat your cake you won’t have it any more. (It’s confusing because we use the expression “have some cake” to mean “eat some cake.”)

Some taken from: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors

Where did the word “shorts” come from? The French word for an “outer garment for the lower part of the body, having individual leg portions that reach typically to the ankle” is pantalon, which comes from the Italian “pantalone,” after San Pantalone, or Saint Pantaleon (died A.D. 303), Roman physician and martyr. The English circa 1580-90 took the French word and coined pantaloons. That’s a long word to say, so in the 19th century (1830-40), Americans shortened the word to just pants^*. Then, with increased global warming and decreased modesty, the amount of cloth in trousers was reduced to the knee and above, thus giving us “short pants,” which was used until we tired of two words for a single garment and cut it down to the modern shorts.

Says Dictionary.com, “the abbreviation of pantaloons to pants met with some resistance at first; it was considered vulgar and, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “a word not made for gentlemen, but ‘gents.’” First found in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, pants has replaced the “gentleman’s word” in English and has lost all obvious connection to Saint Pantaleon.”

* Pants is considered by many to be an inherently funny word.

Silly Riddle of the Day:

Think of words ending in -gry. ‘Angry’ and ‘hungry’ are two of them. What is the third word in the English language? You use it every day, and if you were reading carefully, I’ve just told you what it is.

(First one who posts the answer gets a gold star.)

MORE WORD FUN:

• Maybe you know that there are four words with no rhymes: silver, orange, purple and month. BUT silver and orange have HALF RHYMES! Lozenge with orange and salver with silver.
• “Bookkeeper”/”bookkeeping” are the only words with three consecutive repeated letters, unless you include hyphenated words, then you have “sweet-toothed” too.
• After primary, secondary, we have tertiary, quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary and denary. Jumping to 12th we have duodenary and let’s not forget 20th, vigenary.
• Though the letter ‘e’ appears more often in words than any other, there are more words beginning with the letter ’s’.
• I’ve claimed that the longest one-syllable English word is screeched, at nine letters, but there are other 9 letter words with one-syllable as well: scratched, scrounged, scrunched, stretched, straights and strengths.
• Vacuum and continuum are two words that have two u’s in a row.
• “Ough” can be pronounced in at least nine different ways: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”
• ‘Skepticisms’ is supposed to be the longest word that is typed using alternate hands, try it and see!
• The abbreviation for pound, “lb.,” comes from the astrological sign Libra (symbolized by scales.)

Here are two more of my famous word fun and word trivia posts.

src: my brain, google, http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwords/contranym?view=uk, http://www.jayp.net/trivia/lang01.htm

The last word fact entry received a positive response, so I was encouraged to post again on the same topic.

• The word perk (as in, “your job has lots of perks”) is actually a shortened version of the word perquisite.
• Berserk, meaning violently or destructively frenzied, comes from Norse warriors who fought with frenzied rage in battle, possibly induced by eating hallucinogenic mushrooms. Such warriors wore hides of bears, which explains the probable origin of berserkr as a compound of *bera, “bear,” and serkr, “shirt, coat.”
• Mesmerize is named after Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), Austrian physician who developed a theory of animal magnetism and a mysterious body fluid which allows one person to hypnotize another.
• The term counterproductive has nothing to do with rating fast-food employee efficiency
• Irregardless is a word, albeit nonstandard. Nine out of ten smart people will think you’re stupid if you use it however. Impress them instead by using “irrespective”.
• The word carpet has little to do with either cars or pets.
• Tranquility is often considered the most beautiful word in the English language. Runners up include lullaby, gossamer, gracious, mother, sycamore and lovely. The ugliest words? Cacophony, crunch, flatulent, gripe, phlegmatic, plutocrat, treachery, fructify, kumquat, crepuscular, and gargoyle.

Sources: dictionary.com, thefreedictionary.com, google, my brain

Any Spanish speakers out there? Any word buffs? Let see if we can discover the etymology of a word together. First we’ll do a warm up: “Companion.” It’s Latin based. cum + panis = with + bread (see dictionary.com), or “one with whom you would eat bread.” A companion is someone you share meals with. That’s kind of cool because it makes a lot of sense. Now here’s today’s word: Sincere. Let’s try our hand at this one:

Sincere. That also looks Latin: sine + cera = without + wax. The story goes that the Romans would use wax to hide imperfections and roughness on statues, columns and pottery. A really good Roman craftsman, on the other hand, would advertise that his creations were Sine Cera, or without wax. The Latin was adopted by the Spanish and English stole it from the Spaniards. And you can read all about it in Dan Brown’s first thriller, Digital Fortress, which I read last night.

What a great lesson! Aren’t words awesome? I feel smarter.

Except… The whole “Sine Cera” thing is completely WRONG. The OED states “There is no probability in the old explanation from sine cera ‘without wax’”. Wikipedia says, ‘”sincere” actually derives from the Latin sincerus meaning “clean, pure, sound.” According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the Latin word “sincerus” is derived from the Indo-European roots “sem” and “ker,” generating an underlying meaning “of one growth,” hence “pure, clean.”‘ Dictionary.com confirms this.

That’s the problem with the truth. It ain’t nearly as sexy. Sorry to disappoint you. Sorry that Dan Brown is full of manure. That’s just life, amigos.