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Countries RSS Feeds613-1: Feedback, notes and comments - Book review Apologies to early readers of last week’s newsletter. I made two mistakes in coding the links that enable readers to buy the book from Amazon — codes should be four alphanumeric characters, but I made them five, then forgot to test them. My thanks to alert subscribers who told me about the problem. It needed 15 minutes of hurried reworking of the online translation routine, but the codes have since worked....Feed Source: www.worldwidewords.org 613-2: Turns of Phrase: Black swan - A black swan event is related to the butterfly effect. The latter was coined by the American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1973 as a way to illustrate the chaotic nature of weather and the huge difficulties of modelling it on computers. A tiny change in the initial conditions can often lead to dramatically different outcomes. His example was of a butterfly that fluttered its wings in Brazil, setting off a tornado in Texas. (SF fans will know that Ray Bradbury anticipated the idea in his 1952 story A Sound of Thunder; a time traveller to the age of the dinosaurs accidentally kills a butterfly and learns when he returns to the present day that history has changed in a small but vital way. But Bradbury didn’t use the term.)
Black swan came into the language in 2008 because of the book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former market trader. He argued that the stock market is a... 613-3: Weird Words: Chatoyant - Having a changeable, varying lustre or colour.
No two dictionaries seem to entirely agree on the current meaning of the word. Some mention only the bright lustre of a gem that’s caused by reflections from within the stone, because the word now most frequently appears in discussions by gemologists; other dictionaries include the sheen of a bird’s plumage or the changing colours and texture of a material such as silk.
All agree, however, that the source of the concept is the gleam of a cat’s eyes in the dark. The direct source is the eighteenth-century French verb chatoyer, to shine like a cat’s eyes (based on chat, French for cat). Its French connections remain so strong that it is still sometimes said as though it were a French word (/ʃætwæjɑ̃/, roughly “cha-twai-yan”).
Many examples in English literature refer to shining eyes, as in ... 613-4: Vote for World Wide Words - Some of you may be jaded following recent electoral excitements in the USA, New Zealand and elsewhere. But your further and continuing help is required. Despite everyone’s endeavours, World Wide Words is dropping back in the contest for the 2008–09 Choice Awards. This is the competition organised by L-Soft, creators of the LISTSERV mailing list software on which the World Wide Words newsletter is distributed. Do please vote and keep on voting!... 613-5: Recently noted - Ephebicide George Monbiot created this word in an article, Lest we forget, in the Guardian on 11 November: "There are plenty of words to describe the horrors of the 1939–45 war. But there were none, as far as I could discover, that captured the character of the first world war. So I constructed one from the Greek word ephebos, a young man of fighting age. Ephebicide is the wanton mass slaughter of the young by the old." The root appears in a few English words, including ephebe, the Greek word filtered through Latin, which means a young man aged between 18 and 20 who undertook military service. Ephebiatrics is a rare medical term for the branch of medicine that deals with the study of adolescence and the diseases of young adults; an ephebophile is a homosexual adult sexually attracted to adolescents. Though George Monbiot created it afresh, there is one previous example of ephebicide on recor... 613-6: Questions and Answers: Widow’s peak -
[Q] From Ton Hayward, The Netherlands: “I read a sentence in a book and can’t figure the last part out: “Her dark hair was drawn back in a simple chignon that accentuated the elegance of her widow’s peak.” I cannot find an explanation of what widow’s peak means. I hope you can explain.”
[A] Widow’s peak is a well-known English term for a V-shaped protrusion of hair at the forehead.
There has been a widespread superstition — I’ve found it recorded in Britain, Ireland and North America, and it was probably at one time a common belief throughout the English-speaking world — that a woman with this shape of forehead hair is destined to outlive her husband.
Some writers argue ... 613-7: Sic! - • “I submit this example to the Department of Funny Mistranslations,” Claude Baudoin wrote. “Salad with believed ham. It was an English subtitle on the menu at a brasserie in Paris I dined at last month. It comes from the fact that cru is the adjective meaning raw (in this case, it refers to air-cured ham) and also the past participle of croire, to believe. I would like my ham to really be there but I’ll believe it when I see it.”
• John Leonard continues the theme of unfortunate translations: “My friend’s son is in northern China on business. The other morning his breakfast buffet offered fungus burning rape. We guess it was wood-ear mushrooms sautéed in canola (rapeseed) oil. Jay said he was afraid to even lift the lid.”... 613-8: Copyright and contact details - World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2008. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites or blogs requires prior permission, for which you should contact the editor.
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