Endlings, muddled languages, and a volcano goddess’ hair |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK THE ENDLING IS NIGH A surprisingly touching word ended the week as the most popular on HH: an endling is the last surviving individual of a species. And by means of an example, attached to that word was an infamous photograph of Benjamin the thylacine—who died, the last of his kind, in Hobart Zoo, Tasmania, in 1936. The word endling was coined as recently as 1996, in an letter published in the scientific journal Nature that sought to find a word for precisely this phenomenon. Terminarch, ender and relict were also put forward (though strictly speaking a relict is a sole surviving population, not an individual), but it was endling that caught on: a display of a thylacine skin in the National Museum of Australia in 2001 popularized the word and brought it to broader attention, and it has remained in albeit occasional use ever since. As for the thylacine, it is perhaps better known as the Tasmanian tiger (and should not be confused with the Tasmanian devil, which is an entirely different creature). Once native to Australia and New Guinea, the thylacine was the largest known carnivorous marsupial; as a marsupial, the name thylacine derives from a Greek word, thylakos, meaning “pouch” or “sack”. The last wild individual was shot by a farmer in 1930, and with the death of Benjamin in 1936 the species vanished from the face of the earth. (Apparently...) Elsewhere this week we found out that: - blind, unquestioning credulousness or gullibility can be called ultrafidianism
- there’s a reason why the words poodle and puddle are so similar
- the original seabed was an actual sea bed, before it came to mean seabed. So to speak.
- willingly ignoring things that are obvious or right in front of you is ostrichism
- sleds are shoes that are falling apart but are so comfortable you can still wear them
- and if you’re still working while everyone else has gone to lunch, you’re a noon-tender.
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POPULAR THIS WEEK HAIR RAISING A curious geological phenomenon known as Pele’s hair cropped up on HH this week.
Also known as witches’ hair, Pele’s hair is formed when tiny individual droplets of molten volcanic glass are ejected from the earth by volcanic eruptions and are picked up by the wind, which blows and stretches them into astonishingly slender, hair-like strands. These strands can then accumulate in clumps blown together in piles on the ground, or else can become moulded around railings and signposts while they’re still hot. Needless to say, the Pele in question here isn’t the Brazilian footballer. He’s good, but he’s not that good. Nor, despite the connection to volcanoes, does this have anything to do with Mount Pelée, the volcano that obliterated much of the Caribbean island of Martinique in a gigantic eruption in 1902. Instead this Pele is Tutu Pele, or “Madame Pele”—the goddess of volcanoes, lightning and violence in Hawaiian mythology. The local tales associated with Pele are as diverse as they are numerous, but most versions of her story credit Pele with creating the Hawaiian islands themselves from molten rock hauled from the centre of the Earth as she fled from her elder sister, the water goddess Namakaokahai. The sisters’ constant bickering is said to be responsible for Hawaii’s swelling seas and active volcanic landscape, as Namakaokahai cools and erodes Pele’s fire and rocks. |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK LE MOT JUSTE On Wednesday, HH tweeted that dropping foreign words into everyday conversation so as to appear sophisticated is a process called cacozelia—and it ended the week among the most popular facts. Cacozelia is an example of a rhetorical vice—a turn of phrase or other linguistic phenomenon recognized in the work of untalented or inexperienced speakers and writers, and so best avoided in all good prose or oratory. Although the definition we gave on Twitter is the more usual, sometimes cacozelia is used more loosely to refer to any stylistically affected or overwrought language. The use of clashing languages in quick succession (“dismissing the hoi polloi is de rigueur these days”) or the unintentional misuse of foreign words or expressions (“mange tout, Rodney, mange tout!”), meanwhile, is called soraismus. The word cacozelia itself literally means “poor imitation”, likely in the sense that someone guilty of it isn’t exactly succeeding in imitating a learned or fluent speaker. The “caco–” of cacozelia is the same Greek root as in words like cacophony and cacosomnia, while the “–zelia” is an etymological cousin of zealousy, and derives from a Greek root, zelos, meaning “emulation” or “eager rivalry”. Put those two roots together, and voilà—le mot juste. |
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT... EUROPHORIA 26 Septmber is European Day of Languages, an initiative organized by the Council of Europe to promote multilingualism and language learning across the continent. To mark the occasion, HH brought together 15 suitably plurilingual facts from the Twitter archives—from edible Italian carpet slippers to ideas that only seem feasible when you’re drunk. You can check out the full list here. |
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ANAGRAMS No. 7 Four more tricky anagrams to finish things off this week: the letters of each of these words can be rearranged to spell another dictionary word. What are they? SUNHAT SUNRISE SUNLIGHT SUNBURNED [Answer to last week’s puzzle: TRAGEDY, DOVETAIL, DISPARATE, PLATITUDES] |
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