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

"to" or "for", New Englanders, (east of the Hudson River and south of the Saint Lawrence) are perhaps a little likelier to say 'to' than 'for', while in Dixie, (east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio river) they're some what more likely to say 'for' than 'to'.

In either case, or anywhere else in the English speaking USA, so long as the terms are uninflected, either is acceptable.

If the word 'for' is strongly inflected, its an admonition that the oil isn't to be usedfor any other purpose.




What kind of oil?

Thanks Pit. What I've been calling quartersawn is closer to riftsawn, as the smaller pieces near the edge of quartersawn log will have grain that is far from vertical in the plank. But for musical instruments, both back and belly will be made from wood cut a different way again, as I said, like slices of a very tall cake. You then split your slice into two thinner slices and glue the thick ends of the wedges together, giving you book-matched grain with the thickness to gouge out the arching.

Hello again.
Here are 3 lovely new (ie previously unknown to me) words: balisaur, bonander, danchi.
How are you going to find out what they mean? Not by looking up the OED, anyway. The latest scandal is that Robert Burchfield deleted these and many other words of foreign origin while he was editor.

"How are you going to find out what they mean?"

Google? http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/26/former-oed-editor-deleted-words

By the way, it's 'boviander'.

danchi sounds as though it came from India. (Haven't looked at Elf's link yet.)

Oh dear. I was wrong. Japanese. Oh well.

I bet we sau - sorry, saw - one of those balisaurs at the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Maybe even of the vampire variety.

Oh boo! That was a rhetorical question.
I hoped we could find other foreign words that are no longer in English, or at least discuss the heinous crimes of Robert Burchfield

The problem with using foreign words in English is putting plurals on them. For example, the Irish word feis, pronounced "fesh", is a festival devoted to discussion, music and dancing. It's also used for meetings of political parties, which I think would be called conventions in the UK. It's quite a common word.

But when you have a feis and another one, what do you call it. The Irish plural is feiseanna, pronounced "feshunnuh", but that seems stupid in English. "Feshes" is probably what an Irish person would say, but I've no idea how you would spell it.

"words that are no longer in English"

Happily, no one can remove words from language - they don't live in dictionaries.

Do they live in lexicondos?


~jwf~

(Insert appropriate smiley)Hmm, what words do you regularly use, or even what words do you know, that are not in dictionaries? Especially not in the OED?
Because I have travelled in many non-English speaking countries, I have picked up many useful foreign words. Alas they are mostly gone from me forever, because almost nobody I know shared the same experiences and it is rude to say the least to use words your audience doen't know, or boring to keep translating. I'm still looking for a synonym for 'mpashle', though.
Gnomon, when I think of all the lists of non-regular plurals I learnt in primary school that are still cluttering my brain, I regret that they all seem to have become regular. Who now speaks of croci?

Mathematicians sit on their ba doing sa (or as they call it solving the conundra of pendula and the like).

Borrowed words:

flokken (for muesli oatflakes),

tapas (but that must be in the dictionary),

gubu (actually that's an acronym for 'grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented', a phrase used by an Irish prime minister some decades ago to describe the finding of a murder suspect, later convicted, hiding out in the home of the attorney-general).

No more borrowed words for Wand'rin star?

Just googled balisaur, bonander, danchi. Oo-er, not trying that in a hurry (imagining a balisaur performing bonander in a danchi).

Looked up balisaur in OED and indeed there it isn't.

Eye wanders to nearby word: balin.

Typical Tolkien! He takes a name from an ambiguous word in the dictionary.

Balin: "An unknown plant, supposed to have wonderful medicinal virtues.

1546 T. Langley tr. P. Vergil Abridgem. Notable Worke i. xvii. 30 a, Slain by the virtue of an herbe called Balin.
1609 T. Heywood Troia Britanica iv. xi, Hauing th' herbe Balin in his wounds infusd, Restores his life."

-- so apparently it is a medicine that can be used either as poison or restorative. Well, so is digitalis, I suppose.

Derived from the Latin balis, in turn derived from the Greek βάλλις, meaning "plant with wonderful medicinal properties, Xanth. 16."

As I pointed out in 2005 F104566?thread=575099 most of the dwarf names in The Hobbit were out of an Icelandic edda.

Balin was one that wasn't, but Tolkien in my opinion probably made it up to rhyme with Dwalin, rather than using the name of an obscure plant.

I expect Tolkien knew well the implications of the words he used.

The first time I came across Tolkien was in college in (yes!) the sixties. A group of students were reading it aloud in their flat. They came to the description of the ring: 'It was hot when I first took it, hot as a glede, and my hand was scorched, so that I doubt if ever again I shall be free of the pain of it'.

Someone said 'bet he didn't just make that up' and looked up 'glede' in the dictionary: A live coal, an ember.

Living between cultures, as I do, I find it hard sometimes to disentangle words, to know if they are English or not. In my head at least. I scrutinise them before I utter them, though.

Can I throw something into the discussion on another tack?

Sometimes people say "off his own bat" and sometimes you hear "off his own back". Which is correct? I used to think it was "bat" and was a cricketing term. But "back" sort of makes sense, too.

I've always heard it as "bat".

OED says (after defining 'bat' as the cricketer's weapon):

"Hence the phrase, off his own bat, in reference to the score made by a player's own hits; fig. solely by his own exertions, by himself."