They drove me banana's!

Deleted - off-topic.

I don't think we had this sort of teacher when I was at school in the 50s and 60s. I still like proper grammar and punctuation although while I always (unless I am typing carelessly) get the latter correct, I sometimes get confused with grammar, especially grammatical terms. Just today someone (I had to check it wasn't on this board) wondered why the adverb was linguistical and not linguistically as is usual.

My attittude varies. Informal writing, I don't bother unduly provided it's clear what is meant (cf "A wombat eats, roots, and leaves.") but in formal documents (such as council motions) I tend to unleash my Inner Pedant.

Green George wrote:

Priscilla wrote:

Not a word of the day but  the lack of one


This week a teacher in Ireland is in jail for refusing to use the word 'they' with a trans pupil; 'he' and 'she' not being acceptable to the pupil and 'they' not being acceptable to the teacher.

A new word is required for the circumstances, but nothing comes naturally.

Not really.  He's in jail for insisting, despite a court injunction, on attending the school whilst suspended pending disciplinary action over what is (inelegantly) referred to as "misgendering" the pupil. The teacher claims it violates his christian beliefs to use the non-specific pronoun.

It seems to me like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut to put the teacher in prison.  I know "they" as an informal pronoun goes back a long way and there are people who are genuinely intersex albeit such conditions are relatively rare.

Green George wrote:

My attittude varies. Informal writing, I don't bother unduly provided it's clear what is meant (cf "A wombat eats, roots, and leaves.") but in formal documents (such as council motions) I tend to unleash my Inner Pedant.

Was that a deliberate missquote - in which case well-played - however I suspect that many people will still have missed the reference completely. The original term in Lynne Truss' 2003 book, 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation', refers to a panda and not to a wombat. Unlike pandas, wombats are animals that few people are aware of and moreover they actually rarely eat leaves as they are not browsers but rather are ground grazers and rooters. So with wombats - cute though they are - the joke/quote, just doesn't work.  

Besides - and it's very clearly printed inside the back cover of the book - the key joke is:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit.
The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

But now to more important stuff ...

Temperance wrote:

Oh, I do wish I'd known that back in 1976!
I did mutter something at the time about Edward II and that unfortunate business with the comma, but the remark was lost on him. Probably just as well.

Temp ... I'd thought I was quite well read however I've searched online and yet I'm still none the wiser about Edward II and the comma. Please explain: what exactly is this "unfortunate business with the comma"?

It came from a sweatshirt a fellow-worker (Aussie, naturally) used to wear when awaiting the summons to bat.

(edit) LOOOOONG before the book, btw.
(editedit) c. 1980. Before I was married anyway, so pre 81. Worth considering what the verb "to root" means in Strine.

Does it (root) not mean the same in England? It certainly has the meaning in Aotearoa/New Zealand of having sex.

Not in my experience, Caro. If it has a slang meaning, at least locally, it's "fart".

Thus, while putting a wombat as the centre of the joke might well work in Australia - and hence as an Aussie sweatshirt slogan - as the key subject of the book's liguistically jokey title it's a panda that generally works better in Britain and North America.

Nevertheless the noun 'wombat' is itself eminently suitable as an interesting 'word of the day'. Wombat, plus numbat, dingo, koala, wallaby, wobbegong, billabong and boomerang (but not kangaroo as it's from a different language group) are amongst the very few words of the native aboriginal Dharug language to have entered mainstream global usage.

I've only come across 'root' when it doesn't literally mean a plant root in the sense of 'rooting about' for something in the junk or in the weeds or somewhere difficult to search.

Anyway, I've come across a previously unknown (to me) word.

According to the dictionary it's an "irrational or disproportionate fear of chocolate".
xocolatophobia

Not a word I have heard before, LIR. Back to 'root' my NZ Pocket edition of the Oxford Dictionary edited by (as I may have said before) my brother-in-law says (among many other meanings) "NZ and Aust: coarse colloquial "act of sexual intercourse". It also has a NZ/Aust meaning "ruined, exhausted, frustrated" and gives as an example "His schemes were rooted".

Ta ta - meaning 'goodbye'. We used to use this often, but you don't hear it much now, I think. I just remembered it when I read it in Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope written in 1869. Perhaps I still use it without thinking.

I've heard 'ta ta', Caro though as you say it may becoming old-fashioned now.  In my local dialect it sometimes became 'ta ra' or even 't'ra'.  I've heard of 'tatty-bye' but if memory serves me correct the late comedian Ken Dodd (I'm aware he's not to everyone's taste) used to use it in his act sometimes.

NEPENTHE

I do not claim this as my own: I've pinched it from today's "The Times":

Liz Truss may want to take note of the word of the week, which is from Poe’s The Raven and is “nepenthe”, as in “quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe”, in aid of relieving the narrator’s grief. This is the drug, first mentioned by Homer, that takes away the pain and strife of life. Nevermore do you have to remember.

I think we in the UK could all do with a gallon of the stuff, doled out free to every household, courtesy of the new Chancellor, bless him.

I feel at the moment as though I am living in a sort of giant monetary Hadron Collider. I am quite dizzy with it all.


PS MM - re commas and poor old Edward II. The nasty, homophobic Bishop of Winchester (Bishops of Winchester always seem to be villains), Adam Orleton, Latin scholar and "royal administrator" (that title covers a multitude of sins), did for the wretched Edward by omitting a comma, knowing full well one could be easily added:

Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est.

Add a comma after "timere" and the sense changes! Someone added a comma apparently and the rest is history.

Some historians think Christopher Marlowe made this up, but Orleton was a nasty piece of work and was gunning for the King. The red-hot poker was an extremely distressing detail in Marlowe's play - hence my observation: "Never say commas aren't important. Try telling that to Edward II."

A similar fateful comma was the one that did for the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement, who after his conviction and death sentence for treason commented, "I am being hanged by a comma". 

Casement's offence had been to try and get Irish prisoners of war in Germany transported to Ireland and there join the 1916 Irish uprising (in this he largely failed as very few of the POWs were prepared to desert their colours) and to arrange a shipment of German arms to Ireland (again this ultimately failed when the ship was intercepted by the Royal Navy). Casement was landed in Ireland from a German submarine three days before the planned uprising, however he was unable to travel further due to a bout of malaria (a legacy of his time in the Belgian Congo) and was almost immediately discovered, arrested and then quickly transferred to Brixton Prison in England. Accordingly he took no active part in the Easter Rising itself. He was subsequently tried at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) in London under the 1351 Treason Act of Edward III. Casement’s defence lawyer attempted to argue that no offence had been committed because his actions had been performed in Germany while the Treason Act, so it was claimed, applied only to activities carried out within the King’s realms, ie on English (or arguably British) soil. The issue turned on whether or not a key provision in the Act was modified by a comma and so two of the judges were dispatched to the Record Office to inspect the 1351 original of the Act, hand-written on vellum in medieval French,

"... si home leve de guerre contre n're dit Seign^r le Roi en son Roialme, ou soit aherdant as enemys n're Seign^r le Roi en le Roialme donant a eux eid ou confort en son Roialme ou aillours, [...] doit estre ajugge treson."

Unfortunately for Casement they decided that a faint comma could be made out after the final "Roialme", therefore in translation as written in the law books of the 20th century and now with the critical comma included, the sentence read,

 “... if a Man do levy War against our Lord the King in his Realm, or be adherent to the King’s Enemies in his Realm, giving to them Aid and Comfort in the Realm, or elsewhere, [...] it must be judged Treason."

This interpretation crucially widened the sense so that "in the realm, or elsewhere" now included anywhere the actions were performed and not just where the "King's enemies" might be. Found guilty - almost inevitably, in an English court with an English jury, the Irish rebellion having now been ruthlessly put down and whilst the country was still engaged in a bitter war with Germany - Roger Casement was hanged at Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916.

Edward III's Treason Act is still on the statute books albeit now greatly amended. It was last used to prosecute William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) in 1945 for his collaboration with Germany in World War II, presumably relying on the same interpretation of the Act as had been applied in prosecuting Casement. As recently as 2014 it was suggested that it could be used to prosecute British nationals who have travelled to Iraq and Syria and pledged their allegiance to Isis or other extremist groups, again with the precendent that the Act applies equally to actions committed by Britons abroad having been set by Casement's trial.

When I was working as a temporary secretary in one booking where we had to type legal documents from dictation we were told to leave commas out altogether unless expressly told otherwise because it could change the meaning.

Caro wrote:

Ta ta - meaning 'goodbye'.

'Ta' on its own is used for 'thankyou' and 'thanks'. Child speech and language therapists are currently promoting the use of 'ta ta' for 'thankyou' with regard to infants with delayed development in their talking. The phenomenon of delayed speech has apparently become quite widespread for babies born during the Covid-19 pandemic with its social distancing and lockdowns etc.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives no etymology for either 'ta' (thank you) or 'ta-ta' (goodbye) but simply suggests that they are both derived from infantile or nursery expressions that subsequently became colloquially used in adult speech. The OED’s first citation for the use of 'ta' in writing is from a birthday letter written in 1772 by an Englishwoman, Mary Delany, to her year-old niece (who would appear to have greatly advanced beyond 'ta' and 'ta-ta' if she fully understood the message even if it was read out to her):
"My dearest little child, this is your birthday, and I wish you joy of its return; perhaps if you knew what a world you are enter’d into, so abounding with evil you would not say ‘Ta’ to me for my congratulation."

For the expression 'ta-ta' meaning goodbye, the OED gives the first recorded citation as a letter written in 1823 by Sara Hutchinson, who was a friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, again recording the speech of an infant:
"Baby I believe has not learnt any new words since Mrs M. wrote last, but she has the old ones very perfect - ‘Gone’ - ‘Ta-ta’ - ‘Bye bye.’ "

And from later in the Victorian era there's this example in Sir Francis Cowley Burnand’s novel 'Strapmore!' (1878):
"Ta-ta, little one très cher! Bye-bye."

The common expression 'Ta-ta for now', in the sense of 'bye, see you later', seems to have evolved in the 20th century and in the contracted form 'TTFN' certainly seems to have been deliberated created by the writers of the hugely popular BBC wartime radio show 'ITMA', itself an acronym (with or without dots) standing for the catchphrase, "It’s That Man Again", the man in question being the comedian Tommy Handley in the central role. The jokes in ITMA often made a play on acronyms and initialisations which were of course common in the wartime/military setting: RN, RAF, TNT, MTB, RADAR, naffy (from NAFFI), waffs (from WAAF), wrens (from WRNS), ack-ack, flak etc. The OED's first citation for the initialization 'TTFN' (ta-ta for now) in writing is from a 1948 book about the show, 'ITMA, 1939-1948', written by its producer Frank Worsley. In writing about the beloved Cockney Charlady, Mrs. Mopp (played by Dorothy Summers) he says that among her famous sayings were,
"... the letters 'T.T.F.N.' - a contraction of 'Ta-ta for now' with which she made her exit."

Green George wrote:

ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP8f2MHuXow

The words of the chorus are:

Put on your tat-ta little girlie, do what I want you to
Far from the busy hurly burly, I've got lots to say to you
My head's completely twirly whirly, my girl I want you to be
So put on your tat-ta, your pretty little tat-ta
And come out a tat-ta with me.

In that sense I seem to remember that a tat-ta (various spellings) was a type of ladies' bonnet or fancy hat which one wore to go out "a tat-ta", ie strolling with one's beau. Perhaps - and I'm guessing here - it derived its name from the sense of "bye, just going out for a while".

Yes, the phrase "going ta tas" was used in my youth to mean "going for a walk" - usually taking a child or children for a daily constitutional.

Or pet dogs ... I'm fairly sure that in the 1970s I recall that our dog-obsessed and slightly dotty neighbour on one side of the house every evening loudly announcing "tatas!" to her unruly pack of canines, whereby she basically meant in the very best Barbara Woodhouse vocal tradition: "Walkies!". (The neighbours on the other side were quiet cat-lovers from which we only ever heard the occasional and rather anxious, "Mitzi?!", while we ourselves had a couple of usually silent and undemonstrative rabbits, plus an almost perpetually somnolent tortoise).

There's also 'ta-ra' (again meaning goodbye) which I have always assumed was simply a NW English variant of 'ta-ta'. From memory it was frequently used by the Liverpool-born singer and TV presenter Cilla Black, often somewhat as a catchphrase in the form "ta-ra chuck". Here 'chuck' (and in the North of England it's usually pronounced rather more like 'chook') is usually taken to be a variant of chick or chicken, meanwhile 'hen' is still a common and respectful term of endearment for women generally throughout Northern England. In Northumbrian/Geordie a common and completely unpejorative term for any woman is 'hinny', which I'm fairly sure has exactly the same chicken, chick-hen, mother-hen or henny origin (note also that this is completely unrelated to the more general meaning of the word 'hinny' meaning the sterile offspring of a male horse and a female donkey). I've seen attempts to trace the particular Liverpudlian, or at least North-Western, 'ta-ra', to the Irish expression 'tabhair aire' (pronounced something like 'tawr arra') and meaning 'take care', but I'm not convinced. Nordmann, as a gaelic speaker, might well have been able to throw some light on this, but he now seems to have permanently gone "tat-tas".

New to me word zaffer meaning (according to dictionary.com) 

“a cobalt oxide–silica mixture used to produce a blue color,”

According to thesaurus.com it has more than one possible explanation for its origin:-

"Zaffer, from French safre or Italian zaffera, may come from Arabic ’aṣfar, “yellow,” which resembles but is not related to saffron and sulfur. Alternatively, zaffer may come from Latin sapphīra, “sapphire,” via Ancient Greek sáppheiros, “lapis lazuli,” from a Semitic source akin to Hebrew sappīr, “sapphire.” One intriguing proposal is that sappīr and its close Semitic relatives come from Sanskrit śanipuriya, “dear to Saturn,” equivalent to Śani, the planet Saturn, plus priyá-, “dear.” Zaffer was first recorded in English circa 1660."

In an attempt to increase my vocabulary for quite some time now I've been having a daily word emailed to me from Dictionary.com.  That's the theory but in practice I often forget the new (to me) words I am sent.  Today's word means "either of two triggerfishes of Indo-Pacific coral reefs"...and the word is:-
[size=54]humuhumunukunukuapuaa[/size]

Here's a link to Wikimisleadyer's article about the said triggerfish (triggerfishes?). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reef_triggerfish

I'd never heard of the word "agape" to mean a non-sexual type of love - or if I had I'd completely forgotten doing so.  I was listening to something being read by  a robot voice where some wording like "jaw agape" was read as "jaw agapay".  I mentioned this and someone observed that "agapay" was the correct pronunciation.  I was maybe a little at fault for not making it clear that I was speaking of 'agape' as in the adjectival sense, meaning mouth wide open but I genuinely didn't know (or else as I say had forgotten) that there is a noun "agape" which has three syllables.

New to me word ferhoodle meaning to confuse or mix up. The dictionary says it comes from Pennsylvania Dutch "WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF FERHOODLE?
Ferhoodle is adapted from verhuddle, “to tangle, confuse,” in Pennsylvania Dutch, a dialect of German. This means that verhuddle is closely related to German verhudeln, “to bungle, make a mess of,” in which the ver- element is related to the for- in English forgive and forget. Ferhoodle was first recorded in English in the mid-1950s.

EXAMPLE OF FERHOODLE USED IN A SENTENCE

The alternating days of searing heat and chilling cold ferhoodled everyone’s gardening plans."

I know the word agape, though out of context I probably wouldn't know what it meant. But I certainly have never heard the word 'ferhoodle'; it seems to me an example of a word that sounds like what it means. I had forgotten what that word was but now see it is onomatopoeia.

But it's not really onomatopoeic is it? What sound does a ferhoodle make, or is generated when one ferhoodles something?

Nevertheless your post made me think. In English onomatopoeic words typically describe the noise of an event or action; like crash, bang, plop, ping, sizzle, whizz, whirr ... or they describe the sound made by an object, machine or animal; such as screech, oink, miaow, neigh, roar, hiss, toot, clink, chirp or rat-a-tat-tat. But apart from occasional use in childish speech - moo-cow, baa-lamb, tweety-bird - I cannot think of many animal nouns that appear to derive from the distinctive sound they make. There's cuckoo, chiffchaff, cockerel and hoopoe, although that last is surely direct from the Latin, upupa or ancient Greek ἔποψ (épops) both clearly imitative of its distinctive cry, but being a native to the Mediterranean the bird remained largely unknown in Britain except through classical literature.

I expected there to be more animal names with onomatopoeic origins but frankly I can't think of many, although very likely more exist in other languages, such as the Greek κοκοράκι, pronounced kokoraki, which mimics the bird's loud call rather better than the English cockerel; or the Chinese for cat, 貓 which is pronounced māo and so very similar to the English miaow. I wonder why there aren't more onomatopoeic animal names in English?

Jackdaw? pom-pom gun?

Agree about this one - much closer than the English one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nRlAPtoM0g

Donald Swann did actually speak Greek: during WW2 he served with a Quaker Ambulance Unit in Greece and then after the war he read Russian and Modern Greek at Oxford University.

It is interesting that - as indeed he points out - in the song the cockerel (το κοκοράκι) doesn't actually cry out his onomatopoeic name but rather goes "κικιρικικί" (kikirikiki) which, while still onomatopoeic, doesn't quite represent the strident morning clarion-call that most people associate with a cockerel. In fact French cockerels (called simply coqs in their own country) often make a better stab at shouting their name in Greek as they are usually reckoned to say "cocorico". They also sometimes say "coccodi-coccoda" as in the French folksong 'Mon coq est mort' ("mon coq est mort, il ne dira plus coccodi-coccoda ...", ie. my cockerel is dead, he will no longer say coccodi-coccoda).



All this just goes to show that animals seem to speak in a local dialect - or is it just that we humans choose to 'hear' them in our own particular dialect? Thus while in Britain a dog goes woof or bow-wow, a cow goes moo and a pig goes oink; in France un chien dit ouaf, une vache fait meuh, et un chochon dit groin-groin; meanwhile in Germany der Hund bellt wau-wau, die Kuh geht muh, und ein Schwein geht grunz-grunz. And incidentally a German cockerel (ein Hahn) also seems to give its morning wake-up call in passable Greek as it's usually reckoned to go kikeriki.

It's all rather different from the sounds 'Down on Jollity Farm':

In Spanish a rooster says qui-qui-ri-qui-ri though the bird is of course un gallo. MM may know that being not too far (I think) from the French-Spanish border.

Subcontinental birds often have a local name based on sound etc.....with some excitement I once pointed my first sighting of a Greater Curlew on a rocky reef. What, I asked my village fishing friends did they call it? 'Ah,' he bestirred himself, "Atchar karna,'...... a 'Good meal' and so saying,  he went into his hut to get a gun. And there was a sort of road runner too, I asked about - and that was called in translation, a daft bird, so not much point in asking locally, really.

Probably old and dated even but for the first time I heard the phrase, 'brain fade' used  about a sloppy move during a cricket commentary. I thought it neat and will coin it - daily - as my life hiccoughs along these days. Modern language can be quite expressive.

I have known brain fade for a while. It seems to mean a sort of forgetfulness. My husband is always complaining that I have forgotten what he told me quite recently. I think it is just because I have so many things to think about.

A new word to me "instagrammable" - meaning something which is deemed worthy of inclusion in the instagram account of someone who is active on that social media platform. I thought it was slang but upon checking I see it is included in the Cambridge Dictionary.  https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/instagrammable