Archive for the ‘words’ tag

Bloogy-brained

Wednesday 15th June, 2005 @ 8.56pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

My brain is bloogy.

Yes, I did just make it up, but I’m a morphologist, so I’m allowed :p

posted in Life(style), Morphology | Tags: words | No Comments »

Coinageness

Thursday 2nd June, 2005 @ 10.22pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

I just coined a new word - at least Google comes up with no hits for it and asks me if I meant dysmemorrh[o]ea, which I didn’t. My new word is dysmemorial, which I claim to be because my memory doesn’t work at all well. The OED Online (2nd edition) doesn’t have it in; the nearest word it comes up with is dysmenorrhagia, which precedes the entry for dysmemorrhoea and means the same thing. Do I get a prize?

Mind, the OED also says that the prefix dys- is usually followed by a word of Greek origin, to stay in keeping with the origin of the prefix, so I will now recoin my word as dysmnemonic and search for that on Google. No, it asks did I mean usemnemonic, a computer function name by the looks of it.

The last time I thought I’d coined a new word, I discovered it already existed (by doing a Google search, of course). That word was dysnumeric, which I also claim to be.

posted in Language and Linguistics | Tags: words | 1 Comment »

Serbo-Croatian

Monday 23rd May, 2005 @ 10.51pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

Serbo-Croatian dalek, ‘far and distant thing’ (source: Wikipedia)

posted in Language and Linguistics | Tags: words | No Comments »

Prenominal Adjectival Goddess!

Friday 20th May, 2005 @ 5.41pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

What do you mean, who? It’s me!

posted in Language and Linguistics, MA | Tags: words | 2 Comments »

No title

Wednesday 27th April, 2005 @ 2.11am BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

CatBear says:

maybe it was a release of pent-up depravity

posted in Life(style) | Tags: words | 1 Comment »

Naming conventions

Sunday 17th April, 2005 @ 8.55pm BST Europe/London by Pandammonium

There are lots of examples of patronymic names, but none that I can find from a casual glance through Google’s search results of matronymic ones. If you know of an example, please let me know. Ta.

Incidentally, my dictionary tells the reader in the entry patronymic to compare matronymic, but fails to have such an entry! It goes from matron to matron of honour to matt. Should I tell someone?

[Update (2 minutes later): I just looked up the synonym of matronymic, which is metronymic, and is in my dictionary. I double-checked the reference under patronymic, and it definitely tells you to look up matronymic. Weird.]

posted in Language and Linguistics | Tags: words | 3 Comments »