h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't know if this makes things any clearer, but alert comes from the Italian phrase "all'erta!" meaning "to the look-out tower!" (erta actually means high, but was used on its own as shorthand for "torre erta").

Ictoan, are you talking about onomatopes? If so, glisten isn't one, as glistening makes no sound.

A likely story. (This is a good example of punctuation affecting meaning - if I'd put an exclamation mark there....)
Ictoan - for reasons you won't have unearthed yet, some of the regular posters to this thread are "intermates"
God, what an intellectual snob I am, but it so happens that all the languages I know do derive their word for orange from Sanskrit - even if the languages themselves do not derive from Sanskrit because the word was brought into the local language from the European colonial tongue.
I cannot, however, remember what the Chinese for orange is, but I do know that the Mandarin for mandarin is mandarin

in the sense of orange, that is

Is Mycroft taking the pith?

Mycroft, do onomatopoeic words only sound like a sound (eg buzz or hiss)? I thought it meant words that sound like the thing they describe, not just sound like the sound of the thing they describe.

*scratches head and tries to think of one and fails for the moment*

Probably the worst sentence in history but hopefully you understand what I mean

They only sound like the sound of the thing they describe.

Squelch.

No, Tefkat, Mycroft is not taking the pith. Does no-one take GCSE Mediaeval Italian any more?

Kelli, for a word to sound like the thing it describes, the thing it describes must make a sound.

Mew, or miaow even.

Mycroft, yup, I meant <cut & paste> onomatopes.

So is there a word for words like glisten? Cos it does sound quite glisteny when you say it. Well it does in my head, ok?

WS, hmm, think I remember the bit about intermates. I've been doing the backlog from post 1 up to now tho' so it all gets a bit jumbled!
OK, I'll be a pearl. Pobably only in the irritating sense though!

If you had a fake tan in sanskrit would it be a naranga tan ?
Or would that only be for other great apes?

Well I'll be a monkey's uncle ..again. No wait that was and I was the nephew ..oh lordy it was all so long ago.
*ponders backlog and the meaning and protocols there-of*
Hmmm...

As for glisten and other words that associate sense by sound (without necessarily fitting Mycroft's strict and correct definition of onomatopoeia) my favourite is spiral.
Go on, say it out loud with your eyes closed. Now do you 'see' a spiral.
Helix, vortex, screw - just not the same is it.
Maybe we need a word for words that glisten and spiral.

Leave onomatopoeia alone! The word you need is phanopoeia.

Tefkat,

"St. Luke's Little Summer" a title from yesteryear. St. Luke's day 18th Oct.

In "Peanuts" Lucy (Fussbudget) van Pelt opined that the Indian Summer was a conspiracy by native Americans to lull settlers into a false sense of security so they would become stranded by the subsequent, sudden onset of winter, and perish.

Is that any help?

Oh.

Lucy's not far mistaken: the regular autumnal period of calm, dry weather which Native Americans took advantage of for harvesting was viewed by settlers as being as deceptive as the locals. Whether or not it was originally used as a pejorative term, it's definitely an Americanism and describes a real phenomenon similar to but far more reliable than Britain's equivalent old wives' summer.

No doubt early settlers were bitter about sudden and surprising onsets of bitter-cold that often caught them unprepared. But the notion that this was a hostile plot by native North Americans was pure projection - remember these Europeans come from a time when poisoning was a common social lever, and they expected the same sorts of treachery from everyone including the painfully honest forest folk.
In truth, the Indian summer, just like the old wives summer, refers to a time of year when those who are closer to nature are free and more able and adaptable to enjoy the bright but cooling days. They enjoy the colours and the strains of Kurt Weil's September Song while more culture bound (anal) types are busily conditioning themselves for the winter's coming snowbound immobility by working indoors pickling and jamming and smoking meats and fishes.
Mad dogs and Englishmen may go out in the nude-day sun but only injuns and old women have sense enough to preambulate in the lingering autumn when the protestant work ethic screams 'the crops are in, the world is dead, get indoors and start knitting'.
(The world's few surviving bears will note that I have refused to inform you all of the real reason injuns preambulate in autumn.)

jwf

Thanks guys
(Plaguesville, please forgive me if you're a guyess )

This is just because I haven't posted for a while. So I don't have to click through 5 red dots trying to find where I read up to last.

Where's Nikki?

She doesn't seem to have been around anywhere lately TC.

Tefkat,

I have pondered the soubriquet but done nothing about it. I caught a bit of a TV progamme about prehistoric extinctions. V. clever.

Flattering to learn that my contributions could be seen as sex-ambivalent or neuter.

Well I have been told I have a fatal smile
Plaguesville dear, I've learnt not to make assumptions about gender, specially here, where all you can hear is the inner voice.

Don't the Brits still call them Halcyon days - or is that only old Brits (eg)