Seeking early medical words in the Old English dictionary known as the Epinal glossary, I was not surprised to find that one of the dozen examples I unearthed was onomatopoeic: iesca (yesk or yex, a sob, a hiccup, or the hiccups). Perhaps I should have been surprised that there weren’t more; after all, some early […]
Category: Jeff Aronson’s Words
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The first medical word
In an earlier blog I noted the impossibility of knowing which words came first, language having evolved thousands of years before written records, although claims have been made for the longevity of words such as I, we, and thou; this and that; who and what. One can, however, discover the earliest known recorded words in […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Ars magna
In 1545 Girolamo Cardano, an Italian physician, mathematician, and philosopher, published a book, Ars magna, or the Rules of Algebra (picture), which included the solutions to cubic and quartic equations, for which Cardano is perhaps best known today. Rearranging the letters of “ars magna” yields “anagrams”, another 16th century phenomenon, in English at least—the first […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Backronyms
A backronym is not an acronym written backwards but one that is formed retrospectively. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives two definitions: 1. An acronym formed from a phrase whose initial letters spell out a particular word or words, chosen to enhance memorability. 2. A contrived explanation of an existing word’s origin, positing it as […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Get shorty
Abbreviation of a word or phrase to a letter or two is the most extreme form of breakage that it can undergo. The process has variants: initialisms, contractions, and acronyms. An initialism is a single letter standing for a whole word, or a string of such letters. B, for instance, stands for bachelor, baron, and […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word … Backslang
Back-formation , forming words by shortening other words, should not be confused with backslang, the formation of words, not by breaking them up, but simply by reversing them. A yob is a [backward] unruly boy. Naff, as in “naff off”, may be from fanny, the back or front version, but could just be a variant […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Back breaking
Words typically develop from a root of some sort, and derivatives are formed from a primary word by changing or adding something. You can do this in many ways. You can form adjectives, for example, from other words by adding prefixes or suffixes, such as un– and dis–, or –ed, –ful, –ive, –less,–y, –ic, –al, […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking worst
There are other ways of breaking words besides the ones we have so far dealt with: metanalysis, aphaeresis, aphesis, and apocope. Take, for example, ellipsis (Greek ἔλλειψις), which means coming short. The explanation is coming shortly. It starts with some deceptively simple geometry, originally studied by Greek mathematicians, such as Menaichmos, Euclid, and Archimedes, but really […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking worse
There is a bewildering number of ways to break a word. In metanalysis you reinterpret the form of a word, creating a new one. An umpire, for example, was originally a noumpere, from the old French word nonper, peerless, although one batsman suggested, when I gave him out, that it was from non père, fatherless […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking bad
Metanalysis is when you break a word badly. It’s defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the reinterpretation of the form of a word, resulting in the creation of a new word; esp. the changing of the boundaries between words or morphological units.” Pea and cherry fit the first part of this definition; they were […]