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Countries RSS Feeds602-1: Feedback, notes and comments - Dandiprat Peter Weinrich remarked, following last week’s Weird Word article, “Do I assume you are not a great listener to twentieth-century classical music? Understandable in light of all your other labours, but surely the most frequent use of the word is in Malcolm Arnold’s comedy overture Beckus the Dandipratt.” Thanks to all the other classical music fans who also mentioned the piece. David Duncan elaborated, “To Arnold a dandipratt meant something like an urchin. He got the idea while on holiday in Cornwall when a small boy made friends with him on the beach. As you might expect, the music is brilliantly orchestrated, tuneful and cheeky.”...Feed Source: www.worldwidewords.org 602-2: Weird Words: Gossypiboma - A surgical sponge left within a patient after an operation.
Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary from cover to cover and wrote about it in his book Reading the OED, commented on this word in a piece on the OUPBlog. He had been told about it by a surgeon, who called it “a memento that we surgeons sometimes accidentally leave behind to commemorate our presence in some poor patient’s abdomen.”
It’s rather worrying that the condition happens often enough that surgeons have found it necessary to create a word for it (it’s fairly common in specialist articles and books). It’s even more worrying that two further terms exist to describe cotton or synthetic fibre gauze left in error in a patient: textiloma and cottonoid.
In both subject and appearance, gossypiboma surely fits anybody’s definition of a weird word. Its strange look comes from its being an ... 602-3: Recently noted - Boffinated Reader Jim Delton asked about this word, which he had seen used in a couple of places online but for which he couldn’t find a definition. It was new to me, too, but examples suggest it derives from boffin, in the sense of a person with knowledge or a skill considered to be complex, arcane, and difficult; this is a World War Two British term for a research scientist, of unknown origin. Boffinated seems to be a disparaging reference to matters variously considered swottishly or boringly academic. One reference is to “Harry Potter’s boffinated sidekick Hermione”. In The End of Innocence: Photographs from the Decades That Defined Pop, dated 1997, there’s a reference to musicians who “wore long white coats like boffinated B-movie scientists”. The earliest reference I can find is from way back in 1969, in Kathleen Nott’s book A Soul in the Quad: The Use of Language in P... 602-4: Questions and Answers: Indexes versus indices -
[Q] From Bert Forage, Australia; related questions came from Mark Smith and David Parks: “I wish you wouldn’t spell the plural of index as indexes in your side banner! We’re being dragged screaming into the American version of English.”
[A] Index is one of those oddball words with two different plurals in English. Since it’s from Latin, English copied the Latin one at first, making indices. As with a lot of other Latin plurals, the standard English way of marking the plural, using -s or -es has progressively been taking over. Generally speaking, we now prefer crematoriums to the Latin crematoria, miasmas to miasmata, forums to fora, and referendums... 602-5: Sic! - • Following up my piece on lukewarm in the last issue, John Causer sent through a copy of the menu at the Hotel Sirmione, which is at the southern end of Lake Garda, not far from Verona. One dish was “Foie gras terrine with porto wine served on a salad bouquet with pukewarm sweet bread”. He says it was excellent.
• Jim McLoughlin forwarded a wedding announcement from the Houston Chronicle of 24 August 2008: “Amber was escorted by her father wearing a strapless silk wedding gown designed by Marianne Lanting carrying a tropical floral bouquet.” Quick question: which of the three of them was holding the flowers?... 602-6: Copyright and contact details - World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2008. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites or blogs requires prior permission, for which you should contact the editor.
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