Lent?

Even at my more advanced age and years (and years) in the church I didn't have an answer to the question:

Where does the word "Lent" come from? What is it's meaning?

Well, I knew that in some languages like Spanish and other Romance languages, the name of the season simply comes from the word for forty out of Latin:

quadragesima

Some languages use a word or phrase that refer to "fasting," a common element of the season. In other Christian holy seasons and days, our English is sometimes impacted by pagan history, i.e. Easter which comes from a fertility Goddess:

Ēastre, the name of a goddess associated with spring.

Well, it seems that when sermons started being given in the vernacular (i.e. Reformation and after), they had to come up with a word for the season other than simply calling it "Forty Days" the literal Latin translation. Never ones to spend a lot of time on theological depth, they simply turned to the vernacular world.

How then can we name this season? Why make it difficult, let's simply take the word for spring, which was, in German, Lenz, and lente in Dutch. Not to put too much extra baggage on those words, they simply meant "long" because in spring the days get longer. Common German today, of course, has other words for spring, but lenz is a poetic word for spring.

That's a long answer to a short question, but I am always intrigued by the way language develops and grows. It is often very simple, down-to-earth and readily explainable- once you do the digging.

So, Happy Spring, as this is the first Sunday of Lent.

Continuing On

This is from a Wikipedia "disambiguation" page.

To Be Continued may refer to:
To Be Continued (Elton John album), 1990
To Be Continued (Terje Rypdal album), 1981
...To Be Continued, a 1970 album by Isaac Hayes
To be Continued... (The Temptations album), 1986
to be continued, a film plot device, see cliffhanger

It could also be a way of filling space on a post when you have not had a chance to think of anything new to say.

Is this a cliffhanger? Back to Wikipedia:

Cliffhanger is a plot device as an ending of a fictional work.

Cliffhanger(s) or Cliff Hanger(s) may also refer to:
Cliffhanger (roller coaster), an roller coaster at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park.
Cliffhanger (ride), an amusement park ride
Cliffhanger (comics), an imprint (brand name) of the comic book publisher Wildstorm
Cliffhanger (film), a 1993 action film starring Sylvester Stallone and John Lithgow
Cliffhanger (video game) a video game based on the 1993 film
Cliffhangers (TV series), an American television series
Cliff Hanger (Between the Lions), a recurring character on the children's television series Between the Lions
Cliff Hanger (comic strip), two separate 1983 comic strips
Cliff Hanger (video game), a laserdisc video game based on the manga and anime series Lupin III
"Cliff Hangers" (The Price Is Right), a segment game from the game show The Price Is Right

Ah, but there's more. What IS disambiguation?

• Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving the conflicts that arise when a single term is ambiguous—when it refers to more than one topic covered by Wikipedia articles. For example, the word "Mercury" can refer to an element, a planet, a Roman god, and many other things. There are three important aspects to disambiguation:
• Naming articles in such a way that each has a unique title. For example, three of the articles dealing with topics ordinarily called "Mercury" are titled Mercury (element), Mercury (planet) and Mercury (mythology).
• Making the links for ambiguous terms point to the correct article title. For example, an editor of an astronomy article may have created a link to [[Mercury]], and this should be corrected to point to Mercury (planet).
• Ensuring that a reader who searches for a topic using a particular term can get to the information on that topic quickly and easily, whichever of the possible topics it might be. For example, the page Mercury is a disambiguation page—a non-article page which lists the various meanings of "Mercury" and links to the articles which cover them. (As discussed below, however, ambiguous terms do not always require a disambiguation page.)

Did I just waste all this time and valuable Internet space for this?

THAT is not ambiguous.

No Rhyme (or Reason)

I found an interesting list somewhere last month. It was the five words that have no rhyming words in English:

• depth
• month
• orange
• silver
• purple

Whoa, I thought, I never realized that such common words can't be rhymed. I was sure that purple would rhyme with maple surple.

Or perhaps depth and month were rhymes.

But I discovered, much to my literary and poetic dismay that rhyme, true rhyme must be more than ..th deep.

Then I went Googling around the Internet and in the depths of Wikipedia I found

a list of English words without rhymes, called refractory rhymes—that is, a list of words in the English language which rhyme with no other English word. The word "rhyme" here is used in the strict sense, called a perfect rhyme, that the words are pronounced the same from the vowel of the main stressed syllable onwards.

Lo and behold there were more

• angel
• angry
• foible
• obliged
• polka
• sandwich
• wolf
• zigzag

Then to my majestic surprise I find an obscure rhyme for purple:

rhymes with curple (the hindquarters of a horse or donkey) and hirple (to walk with a limp)

and for silver:

rhymes with chilver, a female lamb.

Finally I got into Dr. Seuss land when I discovered a rhyme for month:

rhymes with en-plus-oneth (n + 1)th, a mathematical term; also hundred-and-oneth (= hundred-and-first)

I am glad English is a living language. I can hardly wait for someone to come up with a new, but very real word that will rhyme with sandwich or, even better, foible. Think how much easier it would be to write poetry or a good rhyming song.

Sorry- No Translation

Listverse has had a couple posts over the past several years of words that are very difficult to translate from their native tongue.

Here are a couple of my favorites as described at Listverse....

Hygge is something we all want all the time – but seldom have. It is a Danish word meaning a “complete absence of anything annoying, irritating or emotionally overwhelming, and the presence of and pleasure from comforting, gentle and soothing things”. It is especially associated with Christmas time, grilling Danish sausage on long summer evenings and sitting around lit candles on a rainy night.

Uitwaaien: Literally, this Dutch word means to walk in the wind, but in the more figurative (and commonly used) sense, it means to take a brief break in the country side to clear one’s head. It is amazing that one word needs so many in English to make the same sense.

English Isn't This Colorful

Back in the dark ages of the 60s I was a student of German. One of the craziest things about German that made it both fun and frustrating was its ability to build long compound words to describe many different things. Well, I heard and read in the news earlier this week that the publishers of the Langenscheidt dictionaries so indispensable to so many of us took a poll to find the #1 "youth word" of the year. It is Gammelfleischparty or "spoiled meat party."

The word gammelfleisch itself made it big in the past year when people found out that meat packers had been regularly supplying some restaurants with past-due products - spoiled meat. So, in the smarminess of young people everywhere, they began to use gammelfleischparty as their way of describing a gathering of people over 30. (Just when we thought it was safe to trust people over under 30.)

If you are interested the two runner-up words were:

Bildschirmbraeune or "screen tan" — referring to the complexion of someone who spends too much time at a computer.

And unterhopft, meaning "underhopped," or in need of a beer.

Use These Today

Another item I found in the news magazine compendium The Week has to do with new old words. A British dictionary publisher has challenged the public to use some two dozen archaic words. If they do, the dictionary will keep them when they print their next edition. So, here are four of them:

Calignosity, niddering, fusby, and olid

Admittedly these have not been a part of my vocabulary- or many other people's either. They all cause my spell checker to underline. Three of them feel like their definitions.

Calignosity is darkness
Niddering is cowardly
Fusby is squat and
Olid is foul-smelling.

So the niddering, fusby, old fool gave off a sense of calignosity, not to mention clothes that were downright olid.

Let's see where else I might be able to use them today. After all, use a word enough times and it will be yours.

By Definition

One of my not-so-guilty-pleasures is a site called The List Universe. They often have intriguing and interesting lists of Top 10 this or Top 25 that which make for fun reading. One this past week really pushed the old brain cells into new territory with a list of Another 25 Words Your Don't Know. I have to admit I didn't know 23 of them. For some reason I know that a mullion is

a vertical dividing piece between window lights or panels.

and that glossolalia (often used to describe the charismatic/pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues) is defined as

gibberish; babble.

Here are a few that tickled my fancy:

24. Yerd - To beat with a stick.

23. Dendrofilous - Loving trees enough to live in them.

22. Wamfle - To walk around with flapping clothes.

9. Fample - To feed a child.

8. Coprolalomaniac - Someone who compulsively uses foul language.

And my favorite:

2. Wallydrag - A completely useless person.

Don't miss the comments. They're fun, too.