SRIJAN 2002-2003(1st Edition)

♦ DIVVY/Language
Logoleptic Verbiv@rism Of Wordaholic LeXiG@MailidG Lytgliaphi1eid!
What is common between the words plica, vug, ogee, redd and mecca? Well, they all have letters in reverse
alphabetical order! Just like this, there are more interesting words out there waiting for you. And no!
We haven't cooked up all this philological stuff - look up into your dictionary and you will be baffled!
When John Keats wrote 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
its loveliness increases, it will never' (Endymion, Book 1), he
meant many odd things that can constitute things of beauty.
Obviously it depends, well, on one's own interests. For a
logophile (Gr logos word + philos loving), enjoying the magic
and music, the sounds and stories of words is something so
enthralling and that is precisely (you would have surmised by
now) what we will be dealing with here.
And puhleez! This is not another hurly-burly exposition which
gives you ten tenets for increasing your vocabulary! The aim is to
introduce you to some unspoken facts about English words
without knowing which your 'wordy' life can not be so exciting.
"There Is No Butter In Butterfly": Misleading Words
Ever misspell a word in your school report that cost you a
grade? Ever make a typo in an office memo for which you paid a
heavy price? D6n't be disheartened if you think you may never
master the whimsies of the English language. Take comfort in the
fact that there's no universal god of orthography who once
decreed, "And ye shall spell potato as p-o-t-a-t-o." Indeed, there
are many words which have been formed precisely through this
process, that is to say, erroneously since once they were
misspelled (interestingly, correctly spelled words have been
lost!). Take niddering (a coward; the word comes from
ME/Medieval English nothing which was once a correctly
spelled word), helpmeet (a helpmate esp. wife; comes from the
phrase "an help meet for him" (i.e. a help suitable for him); it was
incorrectly written as "an help-meet for him" and erroneously
interpreted as "a helper for him") and derring-do (daring acts,
from ME dorryng do (daring to do) misprinted as derrynge do
and interpreted as a noun form).
But then, there are words which directly appear quite
misleading. For instance, the Canary Islands got their name from
dogs (and not the bird Canary!), a light-year is a unit of distance
(not time), and a triolet is a poem of, well, eight lines. These are
red-herring words that appear to mislead us in the beginning but
if we look deeper everything becomes obvious. Triolets are so
called because the key line in the poem appears thrice. Find-out
what makes 'attic salt' (graceful wit), prick-song (written song)
and histrionic (related to acting) so different in meaning
compared to what can be perceived from their spellings.
Also, mostly variants of more common words, some words
may appear to be misspellings of everyday words. They will add
to your verbal arsenal, especially if you are playing a game like
Scrabble, or may come in handy if your keyboard happens to
have a broken key! Take passible (susceptible to sensation),
monestrous (related to mammals which experience one estrus),
assoil (pardon), eagre (high tidal wave), calendar (a clothmachine),
quean (disreputable woman), dragoon (a trooper) and
navvy (laborer). So check out what meaning do hight, angary,
stile, cingular, specie, alarum and wether carry?
Equally confusing are the words formed by the process
known as back-formation. A back-formation is a word created by
removing rather than adding an element, e.g. the verb "to edit"
has been formed from the noun "editor" (unlike, for example, the
usual way nouns are created, e.g., 'lover' from the verb 'love').
Back-formations are often denounced when they first appear, but
many times they fill a real need. Consider emote (back-formation
from (b.-f.f.) emotion), sass (b.-f.f. sassy), aesthete (b.-f. f.
aesthetic), dentulous (b.-f.f. edentulous) and esthesia (b.-f.f.
anesthesia).
"Is There A Vowel-less Word?": Rare And Ridiculous Words
There are words which have very unusual arrangement of letters.
Take verisimilitude (a word with alternating consonants and
vowels), DIOXIDE (a word which reads same upside down),
indistinguishability (a word with six 'i's; also, indivisibility), yob
(rowdy youth; a word coined by spelling a word backwards; also
mho), syzygy (shortest word with three 'y's), gyp (the only word
made up entirely of letters with descenders; a descender letter has
protusions to lower row of writing like g, y, q, p, as against b, d,
h, etc.), spendthrift (the longest word whose normal and phonetic
spellings are same; phonetically it is SPEND-thrift), brougham
(the most silent letters in a row; pronounced as 'broom'), logology
(If you assign a value of 1 to the letter a, 2 to b, and continue up
to 26 for z, logology averages 13.5, the perfect midpoint of the
alphabet) and kine (plural of cow; a word having no letter similar
to its singular, cow); they all have something unique to notice!
Coming to the last word kine, we have some more words
which have irregular plurals as numen (pl. numina), opus
(opera/opuses), virtuoso (virtuosi), occiput (occipita), trousseau
(trousseaux), chrysalis (chrysalides), os (awra, ossa and ossar
depending on the meaning), lemma (lemmata) and cherub
(cherubim).
If we forget to mention words in which all vowels occur
once and only once, then this section may appear incomplete. It
is not difficult to find them out but the fact remains that they are
not in abundance although we neglect their beauty when we come
across them everyday. Most of them are suffixed with 'ious' and
'ion', start with a vowel itself, are plural forms or proper nouns
like abstemious, ossuaries, arterious, facetious, annelidous,
armigerous, epuration, inquorate, uncomplimentary, education,
euphoria, cauliflower, Uvarovite, Mozambique, Euphorbia and
Praseodymium. 'Perfect and pure' examples in this category are
somewhat hard to find. My list includes subcontinental, duoliteral
and permutation. Can you find more?
A tougher challenge may be to find words which 'have no
vowel in their spellings (no acronyms please!). One may quote
three-letter words which often end with 'y' as in fly, why, pry and
cry. But what about gyp (fraud), cwm (natural amphitheatre),
syzygy (pair of opposites; the word is also a great wrist exercise
if written in cursive!) and crwth (a violin). But then people forget
that as per modern English grammar, 'w' and 'y' are semi-vowels.
Most of the vowels-less words are of Welsh origin wherein, these
two letters are actually vowels (Here, note that one Welsh
consonant with no English equivalent is 'LL' as in Lloyd and
Llewellyn!).
Continuing our word game, here's an exercise for you, can
(sRuitti)
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
(2oo2-o3)