February 09, 2009

• Interesting
• This is excellent. Not the sort of thing you'd enjoy if you're a snollygoster.
• No yelve required here! A post to be perused with traboccant lubency.
• I won't be quibbleistic about it - but may I quaritate mothy as to where you found this rather delightful site? Perhaps in your hemerine trawling of the web?
• *quaeritate
• Their use of the red squiggly underlines makes it look like everything's misspelled.
• Well, I learned that "mingent" means "discharging urine. Searching the interwebs for any examples of its use, I discovered Ming River Enterprises have, on the face of things, made an unfortunate choice for a domain name.
• Looks like far too many of the words offered are obscure quasi-medical terms that never were used very commonly. Attempting to use pretty much any of these words in everyday speech will undoubtedly result in raised eyebrows... Apart from the obfuscation, any such uses will be highly contrived. There's a reason they're not heard often. Most folks these days have a pretty limited vocabulary, and it's been a while since erudition was considered cool. Cute idea, but on the odynometer scale ranks high enough that I'm sure it won't catch on. Okay, there, I used my word.
• "mingent", eh - so mingers..?
• ZOMG "long play" ("n. Vinyl phonograph records that play at 33-1/3 revolutions per") is apparently an endangered word. *looks at vast LP collection, suddenly feels old* *cries*
• Kinnakeet, I don't think most people would be sevidical about your vocabulary. Just perplexed.
• As far as I'm concerned, people who take pride in using obscure words in a vain effort to impress their peers - well! These idiots are nothing but apogenous bathetic caballine danderous excerebrose fabiformous guttling halalkhoric immorigerous jumentous kakidrosistic lacertilian microcephalic nasute oligophrenial pococurante quacksalvering rambunctious swavering thersitical unsad vomitory warby xanthopsiac yirning Zoiluses.
• Zoili, surely?
• Oh sure, quid, that's easy for YOU to say.
• Zoili, surely? Zoilus was Greek - you abacinated bovaristic cacafogoing deblaterating egede facinorous gavaging haptodysphoric incohate jactationing kyphotic lachrymating mesoprosopic nithering onanistic papuliferous quaestuarial recondite stercoraceous tenebrific unguinous verrucose wherriting xenophobic yerking zoophyte! (ps - did I spy you walking about in Oxford on Monday night? Or your doppelganger?) (pps - when is our next drink up aka meet up?)
• Oh sure, quid, that's easy for YOU to say That's only because - unlike yourself, kinnakeet - I am not an abactinal batterfanging coprolalial deglubated egregious factitious gnathonic homunculine incrispated jaluciferous kakistocratic labrose misologic nosopoetic odious porriginous quisquilian rhonchisonant shonky thoan uxorious ventripotent wambling xanthocroiatic yaffling zelotypiatic!
• Zoiloi, then! (ps. I was in Oxford Friday but not Monday. Must have been my evil twin.) (pps. Name the day, o quidmeister. Music? Art? Booze? All of the above plus a jacuzzi full of lime jello?)
• (perhaps not this weekend but the next? Let us sound a regional klaxon to concentrate the appropriate throng)
• *turns on the WARM BEER SERVED HERE sign*
• tracicle, eh? Nothing but an abliguritional battological captious dasypygal eldritch fastuous geophageous hircine infundibular jejune kalopsiatic lacinulate mephitic noctivagous obambulating porcine quidnunc rebarbative sciolismic tomentose undinismic vermian wlatsome xerasiatic yeaning zebrule, in my opinion.
• PORCINE!!?
• OK, maybe "porcine" is going a bit too far - you acephalic beshrewing carnaptious delumbated eructating feminivorous gravigrade hygromal ithyphallic juvenile keloidal laloplegiac moschiferous napiform oleaginous polypodded quibbling rodomontading saponaceous turpitidinous ultracrepidarian vagarious warty xylocephalous ypsiliform zooperist.
• The Makers Who can remember back to the first poets, The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? No one has remembered that far back Or now considers, among the artifacts And bones and cantilevered inference The past is made of, those first and greatest poets, So lofty and disdainful of renown They left us not a name to know them by. They were the ones that in whatever tongue Worded the world, that were the first to say Star, water, stone, that said the visible And made it bring invisibles to view In wind and time and change, and in the mind Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers Of the city into the astonished sky. They were the first great listeners, attuned To interval, relationship, and scale, The first to say above, beneath, beyond, Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine, Who having uttered vanished from the world Leaving no memory but the marvelous Magical elements, the breathing shapes And stops of breath we build our Babels of. --Howard Nemerov
• The Grammar Lesson A noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does. An adjective is what describes the noun. In "The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz" of and with are prepositions. The's an article, a can's a noun, a noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does. A can can roll - or not. What isn't was or might be, might meaning not yet known. "Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz" is present tense. While words like our and us are pronouns - i.e. it is moldy, they are icky brown. A noun's a thing; a verb's the thing it does. Is is a helping verb. It helps because filled isn't a full verb. Can's what our owns in "Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz." See? There's almost nothing to it. Just memorize these rules...or write them down! A noun's a thing, a verb's the thing it does. The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz. --Steve Kowit
• Ah yes, one of my favorite poems about words As posted by BH in 2 out of 5 popular threads This one, too: Writing Letters to My Mother Colette Inez I sat inside a thin gray envelope of air which seeped into my nerves, directing my hand to write a stilted prose: how late I am in sending condolences on the passing of your sister, Jeanne, or the cool of spring is followed by an excess of summer heat. Looking up abide in the Thesaurus, I stared at the “a” and “e”, book ends to the word, and the “b” and “d”, twin sisters, one pregnant, the other, an invalid in a wheelchair. The central “i” kept the meaning intact. Abide, endure, wait, reside, continue, tolerate, bear with. To bear a child, to endure bearing it, to let it reside in the womb, to wait for it to come to term, to continue a time on earth, tolerant of loss. An excess of summer heat when I was born. She could not abide it. I endure. What was the word to describe her only sister strapped to a wheelchair in a ward? What words must I pluck from a box of nouns to suggest my mother’s weltanschauung when she packed me off to the nuns? Pain. Anger. Regret. What are their referents? There were days I pictured her as a spectral ship that carried me, her cargo, across the border from Paris to Brussels, from autumn to summer, and to term. Now she is dry docked in the country of her birth, having voyaged through worlds of separate notions and concerns from my beckoning messages. I’ve changed my starts and paragraphs, faltered and paused. How to capture a sentence? What flourish to give it, how to end on a roll, a firm note? Verbal cul de sacs. I’ve dug them with my words to her. Sometimes, my pen hovered over the page like a dragonfly looking for a place to land. This blue marsh of language, this fen, that pure plateau at the head of the page, the little strips between words and paragraphs stretching out in parallel lines, or grid lines on a map. My letters must have sighed between her forefinger and thumb. Did she flinch at the curving scrawl that called up the past she longed to dismiss like an unruly class at the end of the day? Composing the first draft of an answer, she turned to the psalms, lifted her eyes to hills of white clouds — heard God, her referent, calling her home.
• Just encountered this recently, but it seems to be one of my favorites already: The Poetics of Desire Throw away your papers tonight put aside your pen let your fingers write on my body, an empty page a word, a sentence, write a poem if your syntax hurts my skin if I sigh, if I moan just tighten your embrace if your fingers stammer dip them in darkness and start again fill up my margins suffocate me with your grammar proofread the madness you have created erase with your lips any mistakes your fingers make read to me what you have written see the pages of my life come alive in your fingers tonight. --Rina Singh