Lemurs, musical language and phantom nations |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK CONSPIRACY THEORY The fact that a group of lemurs is called a conspiracy ended the week as the post popular fact on HH—although as Hal Duncan astutely pointed out on Twitter, going by the photograph that accompanied our tweet perhaps a more appropriate term might be a Voltron of lemurs. Last week’s HH newsletter addressed the origins of fairly throwaway group terms like these, so there’s no need to go into that again now (except to say that calling a group of lemurs a conspiracy is probably towards the more flippant end of an already fairly flippant scale—though nevertheless has the backing of the Zoological Society of London.) As for the origins of the word lemur itself however, that’s something altogether different. They might be cute, lemurs take their name from one of Ancient Rome’s creepiest bits of folklore: stalking, skeletal wraiths called the lemures. In Roman tradition, the lemures (that’s “LEM-yuh-reez”, rhyming with please) were believed to be the ghosts of all those who had not been afforded proper burial rites, or else had died leaving unfinished business behind them. Ultimately, they were the ghosts of everyone from sailors lost at sea and those who had died in accidents whose bodies could not be recovered, to murder victims, executed criminals, victims of suicides, and all other unquiet souls. These ghosts would, it was believed, rise at night and walk the streets of Rome, haunting their former homes and neighbourhoods in a vain attempt to put right the wrongs that they had left unresolved. From there, skip forward a few millennia: in 1754, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus entered a record of a creature he called the Lemur tardigradus (literally “slow-moving lemur”) into the exhibition catalogue of the Museum of King Adolf Frederick of Sweden. Four years later, he compounded his use of the term lemur by adding it into the 10th edition of his landmark guide to animal classification, Systema Naturae, alongside two more species he named Lemur catta (the “cat lemur”) and Lemur volans (the “flying lemur”). Explaining his choice of names for these creatures, Linnaeus explained, “I call them lemurs because they go around mainly by night, in a certain way similar to humans, and roam with a slow pace.” Despite their cuteness, Linnaeus clearly saw something otherworldly in the lemurs’ nocturnal habits and surprisingly humanlike faces and gaits. How conspiratorial he thought they were, we’ll never know. Elsewhere this week we found out that: |
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...although we don’t recommend playing that because it sounds like something even Arnold Schoenberg would turn his nose up at. The seven musical notes from A–G can be used to spell around 100 English words, including the likes of face, cafe, decaf, badge, faded, defaced and effaced, acceded and deceded, baggage, feedbag and gagged. The fact that the musical note B is designated H in some notational systems would more than double this total, and add the likes of hedge, beach, chafed and chaffed, egghead, beheaded and headache to the list. The 10-letter word deadheaded would also step forward and steal the record from cabbaged. (Shameless plug #452: there’s more on this in the HH fact book, Word Drops.) It had to be pointed out that cabbaged is the longest dictionary word on this list, as other 8-letter musical words (or longer, for that matter) are certainly possible but not universally acknowledged. Of these also-rans, debagged—the past tense of debag, British slang for “to take one’s trousers off”—is probably the plausible, while the likes of debadged, bedeafed, baggaged, becabbaged and cabbage-bed are all perfectly feasible words that stumble on not having been widely accepted onto the pages of our dictionaries. But as HH pointed on out Twitter, the sooner people who look like they’ve overindulged start to be described as feedbag-faced, that cabbaged record will be ours. One question remains, though: what on earth does cabbaged mean? Well, this cabbage isn’t the same cabbage that you’ll find in your coleslaw. As a verb, cabbage means “to steal” or “to pilfer”, but as Merriam-Webster point out that meaning has nothing to do with thieves stealing vegetables from unguarded farmyards. Derived from an old French word, cabas, meaning “stealing” or “theft”, in English cabbage became a slang word for the off-cuttings of tailored garments, which clothesmakers would be permitted to keep for their own use as a side benefit of their job. Perhaps because some less reputable tailors and cutters had a habit of trimming off more fabric than was actually required, the word cabbage steadily earned an association with somewhat shady dealings. And ultimately, our musical cabbaged is another word for “stolen”, “purloined”, or “embezzled”. |
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NEW ON THE BLOG GHOST WORLD Appropriately enough, the word phantomnation popped up on the HH feed on Halloween, defined as “a vast assembly of ghosts”. But perhaps even more appropriately, the word phantomnation itself is a “ghost” word. The term ghost word was coined by the etymologist and philologist Walter Skeat in 1886 to refer to what he colourfully described as, “words which have no real existence ... being mere coinages due to the blunders of printers or scribes, or to the perfervid imaginations of ignorant or blundering editors.” Put another way, ghost words are words coined entirely by mistake. The most famous example of a ghost word is dord, a word that made a questionable appearance in the 1934 edition of Webster’s Dictionary when an index card for the letter “D or d” was misfiled as a word in its own right.The card had merely been intended to explain that the uppercase letter D or lowercase d can be used as an abbreviation of the word density in certain scientific contexts, but instead “D or d” was interpreted as a single word, dord, and given “density” as its definition. Just like that, a ghost word was born. The error that gave rise to the word phantomnation isn’t quite as glaring as that that gave us dord, but it nevertheless led to the word finding its way into several major dictionaries despite its origins in an editor’s unwitting mistake. The editor in question was Oxford scholar and classicist Richard Paul Jodrell, who published an exhaustive Philology of the English Language in 1820. In compiling his dictionary, Jodrell lifted several choice quotations from Alexander Pope’s 1726 translation of Homer’s Odyssey. But when it came to a line in Pope’s edition that spoke of “the phantome-nations of the dead”, Jodrell omitted the hyphen (as he was wont to do with hyphenated words) and unwittingly misinterpreted Pope’s phrase. Ultimately the single word phantomnation was added to Jodrell’s glossary and erroneously defined as “a multitude of spectres”. Despite the oversight, from there the word was picked up by subsequent editors and lexicographers who added phantomnation to their dictionaries: in 1864, it even found its way into the unabridged edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, which not only defined the word as an “appearance as of a phantom” but credited its invention to Alexander Pope himself. But by the turn of the century Jodrell’s error had been discovered: when phantomnation made its debut in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1982, it was rightly tagged as a “misinterpretation” that “probably arose from Jodrell’s recording the expression in Pope as a solid [i.e. an unhyphenated word] in accordance with his characteristic method of writing compounds.” By then, however, the damage had been done, and perhaps the ghostliest ghost word in the dictionary had already found its place in the language. |
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT... TRICK OR TREAT 2017 As it was Halloween this week, that could only mean one thing: the HH Trick or Treat game was back with a vengeance... In case you missed them over on Twitter, there are two brand new Missing Letters games available to play on the HH website now. One—the Treat—is a straightforward enough challenge, along the lines of the other Missing Letters games we’ve posted before. The other—the Trick—follows the same rules, but offers up a much more fiendish challenge... Take on the 3 minute timers here—and good luck! |
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ANAGRAMS No. 12 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? OPCODE OPTIMES OPALESCE OPUSCULAR Last week’s solution: DOODLER, BACKWARD, DEPOSITOR, DRAWLINGLY |
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