Neontology - The study of presently alive or recently extinct organisms.

The word 'neontology' appeared in a rag-week magazine recently (of all places) and, not immediately finding it in a dictionary, I assumed it had been invented as a spoof speciality. But it occurred to me to try OneLook today and it quoted The Biological Sciences Dictionary; the only source, in fact, that it gave.

I suppose it is the antonym of palaeontology and I am surprised not to have met it before.

Edit: I have since found the word in The Concise Oxford - so not so obscure after all!

hah! thanks, David, I shall add that to my armoury of obscure insult terminology... :)

New to me, dixbie. As is the term "rag-week magazine." I know ICLIU, but that's no fun. What does it mean?

Rag week is a fund raising event for local charities by university students. A traditional part of it is selling the rag week magazine, which is usually full of the most politically incorrect jokes the organisers think they can get away with.

Bingley

full of the most politically incorrect jokes the organisers think they can get away with.

When I edited such a Rag Mag, I included a ditty which was a personal favourite at the time:

A mathematician named Hall
Had a hexahedronical ball:
The square of its weight
Times his pecker plus eight
Was four fifths of five eighths of fuck-all!

The college principal called me in to his grand office, and we had an earnest and wide-ranging discussion which covered, amongst other topics, responsibility, appropriateness of language, the relationship of language and fascism, and the ascent of 20c. mankind.... Since he was resolute in his antagonism to having the good ancient word fuck printed on college authority, and I was equally resolute (in a manner he found clearly, er, surprising!) that the alternative was to scrap the whole production and explain why in my scheduled radio broadcast the next day, we needed a practical compromise. It ended up with the absurdly funny debate about exactly how many letters would be removed from the word and replaced by asterisks. I beat him down to one. I still like the bluntness of the word and remember the silly limerick to this day even though I have forgotten much of greater value... tsk! Oh, well, at least Age Concern got their £2,000

So, what you're saying is that you didn't want to be thought of as feckless?

I'm not sure which is worse: Feckless, Aimless or Pointless ~ cold comfort, all!

>Feckless, Aimless, Pointless.


While my p[ost, of course, was cross-threading, and related to your erse neighbours.

*the farm crouched like a beast about to spring. . .
I found the audio tape of BBC's radio production Cold Comfort Farm and loved it.