Comments on: Monthly Gleanings: January 2012

By: Marc Leavitt

Marc Leavitt — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:13:19 +0000

I came across the adjective “cunctative” in Shelby Foote’s madddeningly-detailed history of the Civil War for the very first time in my entire life, and learned that it was synonomous with “dilatory.” I was far from cunctative in adding it to my list of words I want to know, but often will have to look up at least a dozen times.

By: Alice

Alice — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:40:55 +0000

@Douglas Fear
Yes, we caught the typo just after it went live and have since corrected it. Thanks!

By: Douglas Fear

Douglas Fear — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:43:31 +0000

Re ModGer klotzen: this does not mean ‘puke, vomit’. The verb you are thinking of is ‘kotzen’. ‘Klotzen’ is a low-register word ‘to work hard (at something, often concrete physical labour is meant)’. I assume a typo got into the works here.
Re critter: Don’t forget German ‘Kröte’, often used to refer to creeping animals, in particular toads & frogs. The plural, Kröten, is a word for ‘money’. Of course, there may be no connection between this and ‘critter’, and even if there should be, the German word might well have been borrowed from Scandinavian as well (although Low German tended to influence Scandinavian rather than vice versa).
Re would: surely the fact that the old subjunctive and the simple past have become morphologically identical in English is the reason. The examples of would quoted are, to a great extent, subjunctive. They are thus perfectly in order.
Re favourite plural: thanks for showing this up for the silly thing it is! This inability to say ‘his or hers’ is truly laughable.
In general: Thanks!

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:47:17 +0000

Well, I’m glad you shot down my pet etymological theory, which I can now forget about, so convincingly.

As for semantics, there is offensive and there is offensive. In the U.K., the C-word has evidently become a synonym for fool, and is applied to men and women alike. To forthrightly call someone a fool is always going to offend the victim, whether justified or not (indeed, Someone said that someone who did so was in danger of hellfire, Matt. 5:22). But seemingly the use of the word does not inherently offend the public in the way it does in North America, where it is a crude but potent insult as applied to women (a hundred times worse than being compared to any other taboo body part), and it is hardly thinkable to apply it to men at all.

By: Roland Schuhmann

Roland Schuhmann — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:32:10 +0000

The assumption that äkä is a loanword from Germanic can already be found in J. Koivulehto, Germanisch-finnische Lehnbeziehungen I, in: NM 72 (1971) – so it was not that clear for me …