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| | | Subject: connecting the dotes
Posted Jun 28, 2006 by Edward the Bonobo - Gone.
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12443
  | | My wife was interviewing job applicants yesterday. She's an employee of the state, and whenever they select candidates for interview, they draw up a 'short liet'...ie what anyone else would call a 'short list.'
It appears to be a term used only in Scottish government/legal circles. Googling it, I can only find one English-language example in the right context (it happens to be top of the search list...er...liet) - although it does appear to mean something in Dutch.
They also do this other thing that amuses me. The interview panel meets beforehand and agrees a single set of questions to put to everyone. That's not what happens in the real world!
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| | | Subject: connecting the dotes
Posted Jun 29, 2006 by ~ jwf ~
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12454
| | >> ....anyone else ever wondered if it's the origin of "dotty" for "slightly mad". <<
Yes. That was a thought I had after reading the first couple of replies that didn't see such a great leap from dote to dotage.
Thanks all! I can see now that equating affection to 'being mad' (or words to that effect)is quite common. There are indeed several phrases and figures of speech that reflect the mildly neurotic nature of love.
Upon reflection I realise the problem isn't one of cultural ammendment in regard to attitudes toward madness and senility but rather my own subjective values and the degree of madness one attributes to doting and dotage.
In the first place I don't have much use for kids and always scorned those who doted on them. But seeing it more objectively, doting is just a mildly neurotic obsession just as dotage was once just mildly neurotic distraction. At least it was before the advent of all these new dementias.
~jwf~
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| | | Subject: Late Post
Posted Jul 8, 2006 by Researcher 188007
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12455
| | I may not be around much anymore, but I couldn't just desert Brit Eng. So here are some replies from way back...
 Funnily enough, the 'h' in 'posthumous' was erroneously added on analogy with 'humus'. It comes from the Latin 'postumus', the irregular superlative of 'post'.
Trait - might have been a bit hasty there  'Pretentious' is an easy  to chuck at people. A better argument is that there's already 'tray', so why have two words pronounced the same if you can avoid it?
Me, in a 2-minute posting: >It occurs to me that trebuchet [TREbyooshet], a fine Anglo-Norman word, and sans [sanz] - *not* written in italics - are examples of refrenchified pronunciation.<
TC: >Sans, however, (when not italicised, as Jack says), when pronounced sanz, is surely an anglicisation rather than "refrenchification". <
That wasn't very clear of me. [Sanz] is the authentic English pronunciation of this word in English. Both those words, and many others, were borrowed into English back when Anglo-French was the prestige language in many parts of Britain. That is, as Recumbentman said, they have a long pedigree of being pronounced that way. One could argue that the determined mispronuniciation of French words is the most visible remant of this otherwise dead language.
Another example of this is cinque, as in Cinque Ports (lived in one, went to school in another), which should sound the same as 'sink', but is pronounced 'sank' by many people.
Maintainability. Surely, like all words with an -ity suffix, it's pronounced maintainaBIlity? Though where the secondary stress is I'm not so sure.
That's all for now 
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| | | Subject: Late Post
Posted Jul 9, 2006 by Recumbentman
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12459
| | Canny . . . can't think of the French connection there (poor France, just watched them losing after dominating the match). Eejit I always took for an oldfashioned pronunciation of "idiot" as used in Ireland, but the feminine French "idiote" is a very convincing candidate for the origin of it.
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| | | Subject: Late Post
Posted Jul 11, 2006 by Edward the Bonobo - Gone.
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12460
| | Another Franco-Scotism...
You can buy 'butcher's pies' - pre-cooked steak pies. These are sold in large, rectangular/oval foil trays (or sometimes even ceramic, with a deposit). They are also known as 'ashet pies'. An ashet is a serving dish. cf 'assiette'.
Then there's 'gushet', the triangular spit of land where a road forks. From the french 'guichet', now a ticket office, originally a tollbooth. (And it also refers to a variety of genital piercing. Google if you don't believe me! )
Onto Germano-English (having been reminded by the deposit on ashets): When I worked in Canada, student-aged, they used the word 'Pfand' for the deposit payed at a bar, repayable on return of an empty glass. This seems to be understood in several countries...but not in the UK.
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