Who knew?

[old man emu]

6 hours ago, pmccarthy said:

Umbra was Latin for shade. Isn't language wonderful.

It's well nigh impossible to take umbrage at that suggestion.

 

"Umbrage": Early 15c., "shadow, darkness, shade," from Old French ombrage "shade, shadow". The English word had many figurative uses in 17c.; the one remaining, "suspicion that one has been slighted," is recorded by 1610s; hence phrase to take umbrage at, attested from 1670s. 

[willedoo]

Take the English word no, same in Latin, Spanish and Italian. All up there's well over forty languages where the word for no starts with the n sound. N for negative.

[old man emu]

9 hours ago, willedoo said:

there's well over forty languages where the word for no starts with the n sound.

If you trace the roots of those languages, are they all Indo-European? Indo-European languages are the most widely spoken languages: 44% of the world population, or 2.5 billion people, speak a language in the Indo-European family. Over 96% of the earth's inhabitants or 5.5 billion people speak a language in the top 10 language families, meaning that the languages in the remaining 84 groups are spoken by only 4% of the world population!

[facthunter]

I think LATIN is very clever wherever that originated from. OME will know. Over to U sir.. My brother can converse in it ( to monks etc) Nev

[willedoo]

4 hours ago, old man emu said:

If you trace the roots of those languages, are they all Indo-European?

Most of them are; there's only the odd African one amongst them.

[octave]

Here is a fascinating word (to me at least) that I first came across a few years ago.   The other day in conversation with a friend I was reminded of the meaning of this term but I could not remember the actual word.  a search on google refreshed my memory.   

 

The word is "Mountseazel" said to be named after named after Lillian Virginia Mountweazel.

 

Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972) Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.[iii]

 

Sounds improbable?  

 

Also consider the word "esquivalience"

 

 

For a more thorough explanation: The incredible story of Lillian Virginia Mountweazel and dictionary tomfoolery

 

 

[onetrack]

Hands up who knew, that the little depression in the centre of your top lip, directly below your nose, is called the Philtrum?

[pmccarthy]

An internal shaft in a mine is called a winze, because it is used for ventilation and let’s the winds blow through.

[old man emu]

2 hours ago, octave said:

Also consider the word "esquivalience"

I was reaching for my Official Grammar Police baton to smite you a blow for a misspelling. I thought that you were using a word to denote that two substances had equal valence - " the degree of combining power of an element as shown by the number of atomic weights of a monovalent element (such as hydrogen) with which the atomic weight of the element will combine or for which it can be substituted or with which it can be compared". The word for that would be equivalence - "the condition of being equal or equivalent in value".

 

That stepping into the world of Chemistry brought to mind an intriguing  1947 doctorial dissertation from Columbia University. The work was entitled " The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". Further research lead to the publishing of the paper,  "The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline" in 1953.

 

It's worthwhile to read the background article on the topic of Thiotimoline here: https://gizmodo.com/the-fake-chemical-compound-isaac-asimov-invented-to-pun-5887014

[octave]

A word gets into the dictionary when enough people use it and agree on its meaning  How a Word Gets Into the Dictionary.  The word esquivalience did briefly find its way into the dictionary by accident but has since been removed. The creator of the word  Christine Lindberg admits to using the word often.  Perhaps we could start a movement to get the word recognized by common usage.   I for one and sick of those esquivalient politicians.

[Jerry_Atrick]

11 hours ago, old man emu said:

was reaching for my Official Grammar Police baton to smite you a blow for a misspelling

I guess yuo hvae given up on me... or yuo no they are typos 

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

I guess yuo hvae given up on me... or yuo no they are typos 

Mea culpa, me culpa, mea maxima culpa. 'Twas my fault, Your Worship. I initially misapplied the sequence of letters to a sequence previously included in my lexicon.

[pmccarthy]

It exacerbates me when I witness a petulant fool brandishing bombastic cultisms as banal corollaries whose ephemeral purpose is to obscure the rickety collections of his despotic lexicology.

 

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, pmccarthy said:

It exacerbates me when I witness a petulant fool brandishing bombastic cultisms as banal corollaries whose ephemeral purpose is to obscure the rickety collections of his despotic lexicology.

 

After an utternace like that, all I can say is, "PMcC for Prime Minister!"

[facthunter]

I'll take your word for that but "Nobody Understands Me" is not what I want to hear from you.  Nev

[onetrack]

Peter, I can't believe you described Donald Trump precisely, in one slick excoriating sentence!

[red750]

Who knows how the microwave was invented?

[facthunter]

Probably someone  stood near a radar antenna to get warmed up.  Nev

[onetrack]

Without googling, I believe it was a scientist who was experimenting with microwave generation for another purpose, and who had a bar of chocolate in his coat pocket.

He found the chocolate bar had melted inexplicably, and upon further consideration, came to the conclusion the microwave radiation had melted it.

[red750]

Very good Onetrack.

 

[red750]

OK. Here's another one.   What is a tipple?

[gareth lacey]

a small drink of alcohol

 

[old man emu]

One answer is device-ive

[red750]

That's what I saw it referred to.

it is a contraction of the proper name Tipulidae, or crane fly. Further investigation shows that this is a nickname given in some areas. It happened to pop up on FB. Looks like a long legged mosquito but they feed on the roots, root hairs, crown, and sometimes the leaves of crops, not blood.

 

[old man emu]

You can also tipple when making hay.