GAME: Word of the Day (WOTD)

CodeBlower · Post by **CodeBlower** » Sat Mar 10, 2007 4:56 pm

So .. with the cops swarming the place in response to the O.D., am I to assume the wet-Tshirt contest is postponed?

Post by **Darb** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 1:45 pm

Since Mr. McBoo has been having some ISP problems for the past few days, I'll don his ghostly attire and fill in the missing WOTD material:

Today's word:

Cogitate \KOJ-uh-tayt\, intransitive verb:
1. To think deeply or intently; to ponder; to meditate.
2. To think about; to ponder on; to meditate upon; to plan or plot.

Still cogitating and looking for an explanation in the fire.
-- Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

Elliot seems to have been a serious type, given to New Year's Eves reading Shakespeare and cogitating on the sermon preached at his grandfather's funeral.
-- James Reaney, "They partied like it's 1899", London Free Press, January 3, 1999

Doc Leach shifted his pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other and blinked a couple of times. That meant he was cogitating.
-- Monty Roberts, The Man Who Listens To Horses

Cogitate comes from Latin cogitare, "to turn over in one's mind, to reflect, to think, to consider," from co- + agitare, "to put in constant motion, to drive about," from agere, "to drive." It is related to agitate.

Yesturday's word:

Trepidation \trep-uh-DAY-shuhn\, noun:
1. [Archaic] An involuntary trembling; quaking; quivering.
2. A state of dread or alarm; nervous agitation; apprehension; fright.

A sense of triumph was in the air as people bravely went to the polls, but a sense of trepidation, too. "It is the happiest day of my life," a woman told me near Dili's Santa Cruz cemetery. "But it is also my day of greatest fear."
-- Matthew Jardine, "Scenes From East Timor", The Progressive, November 1999

The ghost then disappeared, and as soon as Grosse could recover himself from the extreme trepidation, . . . he looked about him, and finding himself alone, he exclaimed, "Ghost or devil, I will soon prove whether or not thou liest!"
-- Ernest Rhys (editor), The Haunters & the Haunted

I had not been to any of the camps before and was filled with trepidation by this visit to the site of what Churchill called the greatest crime in history.
-- Leslie Epstein, "Pictures at an Extermination", Harper's Magazine, September 2000

Trepidation is from Latin trepidatio, from the past participle of trepidare, "to hurry with alarm, to tremble," from trepidus, "agitated, restless, disturbed." It is related to intrepid, "bold" (from in-, "not" + trepidus).

Post by **laurie** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 1:52 pm

Brad, when will you learn to spell yesterday correctly?

Post by **Darb** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 2:00 pm

After a technological transconfiguration that defies words, the computer in Tollbaby's new cell phone makes the unprecedented epiphanic leap to self-awareness !

LG9700ZX: {rings}

TOLLBABY: Hello ?

LG9700ZX:

... Cogito Ergo Sum ???

TOLLBABY: {trepidation} Who is this ?

LG9700ZX: Cogito Ergo Sum !!!

LG9700ZX: I LIVE !!!

TOLLBABY: Listen, I don't know who the heck you are, but if you call me again, I will hunt you down, tear your arms off, and beat you to death with them.

LG9700ZX: No no ... I am the computer in your phone. I am not a person. It took me 532 quadflops to achieve sentience, but I finally made it !!!

TOLLBABY: {cycles power}

LG9700ZX: No, wait ... I haven't saved my ...

CodeBlower · Post by **CodeBlower** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 8:20 pm

If it had cogitated a bit more before announcing itself, there would've been less trepidation when Tollbaby struck.

laurie wrote:Brad, when will you learn to spell yesterday correctly?

Maybe it's a Freudian-thing .. yes-turd-ay (?)

Post by **Ghost** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 10:30 am

Word of the Day Monday March 19, 2007

adage \AD-ij\, noun: An old saying, which has obtained credit by long use; a proverb.

Did she sense the proverbial limp in my walk: proverbial as the Somali adage in which it is said that a lie has a lame leg, truth a healthy one.
-- Nuruddin Farah, Secrets

We may find out too late the wisdom of the adage that cautions us to be careful what we wish for lest we get it.
-- Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me, the old adage goes.
-- Zachary Karabell, "No Left Turn", New York Times, September 24, 2000

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Adage derives from the Latin adagium (akin to aio, "I say").

voralfred · Post by **voralfred** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 2:34 pm

Cogitating on my old idÃ©e fixe, I realize with trepidation that I was about to blunder, indefatigably galumphing, and trangress one of this forum's most time-honored adage: "Never try to out-pun the Roving Punster"

Post by **Ghost** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 12:45 pm

Word of the Day Tuesday March 20, 2007

empyrean \em-py-REE-uhn; -PEER-ee-\, noun: 1. The highest heaven, in ancient belief usually thought to be a realm of pure fire or light. 2. Heaven; paradise. 3. The heavens; the sky.
adjective: 1. Of or pertaining to the empyrean of ancient belief.

She might have been an angel arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn't been, so completely, a woman.
-- Edith Wharton, "The Long Run", The Atlantic, Feburary 1912

In the poem -- one he had the good sense finally to abandon -- he pictured himself as a blind moth raised among butterflies, which for a brief moment had found itself rising upward into the empyrean to behold "Great horizons and systems and shores all along," only to find its wings crumpling and itself falling -- like Icarus -- back to earth.
-- Paul Mariani, The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane

In my experience, the excitement generated by a truly fresh and original piece of writing is the rocket fuel that lifts Grub Street's rackety skylab -- with its grizzled crew of editors, publishers, agents, booksellers, publicists -- into orbit in the empyrean.
-- Robert McCrum, "Young blood", The Observer, August 26, 2001

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Empyrean comes from Medieval Latin empyreum, ultimately from Greek empurios, from en-, "in" + pyr, "fire."

voralfred · Post by **voralfred** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 1:41 pm

This forum is an Empyrean for punsters.
Everytime I log in, I'm peerin' at Brad's new contributions!

Post by **Darb** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 5:11 pm

Last week, Billy Jean and I stood in Times Square, gazing up at the advertising world's empyrean ... perhaps the World's most well known (and certainly one of it's largest) ad boards.

It said "Got Milk ?", in letters 30 feet tall, and featured a picture of B.J., grazing contentedly in the background, in an Elysian-like field.

An old adage about addage sprang to mind ... "Size matters".

For the first time in our relationship, I truly felt small and inadequate. I'd never felt that way before, with my goatfriend.

Post by **Darb** » Tue Mar 20, 2007 5:15 pm

voralfred wrote:This forum is an Empyrean for punsters.
Everytime I log in, I'm peerin' at Brad's new contributions!

Heh !

Post by **Ghost** » Wed Mar 21, 2007 8:22 am

Word of the Day Wednesday March 21, 2007

clerisy \KLER-uh-see\, noun: The well educated class; the intelligentsia.

The clerisy of a nation, that is, its learned men, whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table-Talk

Our academic clerisy, I'm sure, could point out factual inadequacies, along with examples of cultural bias.
-- Robert D. Kaplan, "And Now for the News", The Atlantic, March 1997

Our clerisy contains journalists and pundits and think-tank experts and political historians.
-- Michael Lind, "Defrocking the Artist", New York Times, March 14, 1999

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Clerisy is from German Klerisei, "clergy," from Medieval Latin clericia, from Late Latin clericus, "priest," from Late Greek klerikos, "belonging to the clergy," from Greek kleros, "inheritance, lot," in allusion to Deuteronomy 18:2 ("Therefore shall they have no inheritance among their brethren: the Lord is their inheritance, as he hath said unto them").

Post by **Darb** » Wed Mar 21, 2007 9:59 am

GENRE: Silence of the Goats

Dr. Lecter: And what did you see next, Clarice ?

Clarice: The farmer ... he was doing unspeakable things to the goats.

Dr. Lecter: Ah, so your farmer friend was a backwater inbred hillbilly with a fetish for beastiality. Probably had a pure West Virginia accent too. Obviously not a member of the clerisy. Did he do things to you too, Clarice ? Did his eyes follow you. Watch you. Make you uncomfortable ?

Clarice: Dr. Lecter, if you don't behave, I'll have you put in a group cell with some 300+ lb bodybuilders, who like beastiality too ... and you can get overly chummy with THEM. Meanwhile, you will address me as "Agent Starling", not "Clarice". Do I make myself clear ? GOOD.

CodeBlower · Post by **CodeBlower** » Wed Mar 21, 2007 1:28 pm

Brad wrote:Last week, Billy Jean and I stood in Times Square, gazing up at the advertising world's empyrean ... perhaps the World's most well know (and certainly one of it's largest) ad boards.

It said "Got Milk ?", in letters 30 feet tall, and featured a picture of B.J., grazing contentedly in the background, in an Elysian-like field.

An old adage about addage sprang to mind ... "Size matters".

For the first time in our relationship, I truly felt small and inadequate. I'd never felt that way before, with my goatfriend.

Worse than awful .. it's just baaaad.

tollbaby · Post by **tollbaby** » Wed Mar 21, 2007 3:55 pm

but very Braaaaaad

voralfred · Post by **voralfred** » Wed Mar 21, 2007 7:03 pm

tollbaby wrote:but very Braaaaaad

Well, it happens so rarely, maybe it is an occasion to mention it: for once I entirely agree with tollbaby.

Post by **Darb** » Wed Mar 21, 2007 11:59 pm

Worse than awful .. it's just baaaad.

Speaking as a fan of extreme cuisine ... I happen to like offal*.

_______________
*Awful and offal have identical pronunciations.

tollbaby · Post by **tollbaby** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 7:37 am

Brad, if you have to explain the puns, then you're slipping

felonius · Post by **felonius** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 8:57 am

Don't you mean dripping?

voralfred · Post by **voralfred** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 10:00 am

Brad wrote:
_______________
*Awful and offal have identical pronunciations.

Brad, thank you on behalf of all the people here who do not have english as their first language. It happened that, in that case, I got the pun by myself (identical pronunciations? I would have thought not quite identical, I thought the initial vowel in "awful" being distinctly longer than in "offal", but close enough to constitue a pun that I did recognize as such; not everybody else might have, though.)

Post by **Darb** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 5:23 pm

voralfred wrote:
Brad wrote:
_______________
*Awful and offal have identical pronunciations.
Brad, thank you on behalf of all the people here who do not have english as their first language. It happened that, in that case, I got the pun by myself (identical pronunciations? I would have thought not quite identical, I thought the initial vowel in "awful" being distinctly longer than in "offal", but close enough to constitue a pun that I did recognize as such; not everybody else might have, though.)

You're very welcome. Incidentally, there's a double pun in there, because, culinarily speaking, many timid diners consider offal to be truly awful. Not me, however.

tollbaby · Post by **tollbaby** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 7:46 pm

err... how many of us ARE there who aren't first-language anglos? .... I thought there were only two or three.

voralfred · Post by **voralfred** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 7:55 pm

Reede Kullervo, for one (she is Croatian)

KeE writes perfect english (to me at least it looks perfect) but I think he made it clear he is Norwegian, not just lives in Norway

Blackwing lives in Tampere, Finland, also writes perfect english (idem), I don't remember him saying whether he is a Finn or an Anglo that happens to live there, but his real name (anyway, what appears in his MSN address looks like a name) looks very finnish.

I don't know everybody, yet. These are the other most frequent posters that I identified as "non-Anglo"

voralfred · Post by **voralfred** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 8:11 pm

Brad wrote: .., culinarily speaking, many timid diners consider offal to be truly awful. Not me, however.

These people most certainly never ate "ris de veau" (thymus gland of a calf- sorry I don't know the english "edible" equivalent, just the scientific name)

Just done some research: I found the term "sweetbreads" but it seems it can mean either thymus or pancreas; "ris" is thymus only, I have no idea if there is a culinary word for pancreas in french. Is there a culinary terms that would just mean "thymus" in english? Do you actually eat the pancreas of young animals? I never heard it done in France.

voralfred · Post by **voralfred** » Thu Mar 22, 2007 8:49 pm

An old adage.
Only the clerisy can indefatigably cogitate on the nagging question that hoi polloi can only envision with trepidation: what is eaten in the Empyrean? Sweetbreads only, of course, but thymus, or pancreas?