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"A doctor examining one of his more crapulent patients said to him,
'Your body is a temple and your congregation is too large.'"
Dale Turner; Guarding Our Health Lets Us Better Serve in Role God
Intended; The Seattle Times; Apr 26, 2003.
Maybe it's just me, but I think the writer may have meant corpulent rather than crapulent here. IMO, corpulent better fits the meaning of the statement.
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Dear NK: the word "crapulent" was chosen by the journalist, not the doctor. The "more" with it sounds as though the doctor had many "crapulent" patients. A more common word could have been more effective and understood by more readers.
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In French, a crapulent person (une crapule) is a vile, low-down, dirty character. The name is usually given to those who have done the vilest of things - tortured a child, violent rape of a little girl, that type of thing.
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Still seems to me that the sentence, "Your body is a temple and the congregation too large," better describes a corpulent rather than crapulent patient. Just my take on it. 
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The girdle is your temple and the congregation is too large?
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"Wallowing" is what one does in ones own "crapulence". I've heard this a number of times from different sources. It fits nicely and is forever attached.
However isn't "crapulous" more specific to vomiting of food / drink?
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The unfortunate who can properly be described as crapulent is one suffering the effects of imbibing too freely or eating to excess. If such overindulgence is chronic, he can be called crapulous, but, in the confusing ways of our language, that term is also sometimes used as a synonym of crapulent. Crapulent comes from Late Latin crapulentus, based on L. crapula (drunkenness), which was an import from Greece. Crapulous is from LL crapulosus. None of these words has anything to do with the vulgar word that forms the first syllable of each [e.a.] and has an altogether distinct etymology: Middle English crappe, from Dutch krappe (chaff--the husks thrown away in threshing--whence the word came to mean "worthless stuff, refuse"). - Norman W. Schur
-joe d. bunke
This week's theme: words that aren't what they appear to be.
p.s. - I believe one can be crapulent (hung-over) without throwing up!
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This morning I'm living proof of your theorem ...
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I agree with NancyK. A body can be crapulent but this condition isn't necessary visible from the outside. Whereas corpulence is.
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I had associated crapulence with drinking, but thought that perhaps the eating connection was there and it is. Take a look at AHD:
"1. Sickness caused by excessive eating or drinking. 2. Excessive indulgence; intemperance."
OK. The patient is at the doctor's--and the patient is sick. Sick from excessive eating? Or drinking? Well, whatever. Excessive eating would figuratively form too large of a congregation in this man's temple.
So, I must beg to differ with AnnaS and NancyK. I think crapulence works in the passage, although corpulence would have also worked.
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I do see your point, WW, but I think if you look at the entire quote
"A doctor examining one of his more crapulent patients said to him,
'Your body is a temple and your congregation is too large.'"
the idea of size enters into it. If crapulent means suffering from excessive eating or drinking, I find the use of the comparative "more" somewhat strange. And if you substitue "sicker" for more crapulent, the second part (large congregation) doesn't really fit. In the totality of the statement, at least the way I'm reading it, corpulent still would have been the better choice.
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nancyk, I thought the exact same thing when I got crapulent in the mail. Am with you and AnnaS on this..it certainly feels like corpulent in that sentence
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"Crapulent" reminded me of yet another Simpson influence on our culture: "craptacular" has entered the language in certain circles.
And Nancy, I had the same reaction you did, in thinking that crapulent and corpulent had been confused.
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Well, I still think crapulent works. Think of food as congregating in the belly. It's not the sickness itself that is congregating--it's the cause of the symptoms that's congregating.
Yes, it is the size of the congregation that's the point, but not necessarily the size of the body. It's the amount of food and drink congregated in the body that have brought about the condition that brings the doctor and patient together. [And it's not the house that Jack built.]
Again: "A doctor examining one of his more crapulent patients [i.e., a patient given to excessive eating and drinking] said to him, 'Your body is a temple [i.e., subtext: treat your body as a place of reverence] and your congregation is too large [i.e., subtext: your eating and drinking matter that enters your body is too large of an amount or too large of a congregation for this temple, your body].
With 'crapulence' the emphasis is on the amount of food/drink that enters the temple; the congregation itself is too large of an amount.
With 'corpulence,' as you pointed out, it's the size of the body itself that is too large and not necessarily the contents of the body/temple.
I think both terms do work, but if the crapulent is the one in the original text, I would not see it as an error.
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Considering that we don't know what the person being described looked like, we're really arguing whether the temple/congregation statement is appropriate or not. Then, perhaps it was a typo and runamok spellchecker problem with the reporter having entered 'cropulent' or 'carpulent'
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>carpulent
you been smokin' dope with the Hell's Tunas Faldo?!
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tsuwm: Ha! In reply to:
Considering that we don't know what the person being described looked like, we're really arguing whether the temple/congregation statement is appropriate or not.
Oh, so true, Faldage! However, it's fun arguing in the out-of-context abstract, ain't it?
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(From AWADMail #110:)
From: Mark Stenglein (mark@stenglein.net)
Subject: A.Word.A.Day--crapulent
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/crapulent.html
Crapulent is one of my favorite words. Recently, after a giant holiday meal, my family and I were discussing our crapulence when the conversation turned to other words that end in -ulent. We came up with this sentence:
This succulent and opulent food and poculent wine is leading to crapulence, corpulence and flatulence.
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Gotta watch that flatulence around kids. They seem to find it to be the most amusing of all kinds of humor.
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..and then it mutates, somehow, into guy humor.
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Dear WW: I can remember at skinnydip pond seeing two
big kids hold flatulent fatso, and hold lighted match near
the orifice. A bluish and yellow flame went both ways,
fatso screamed, and all the little kids thought it hilarious.
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Gotta watch that flatulence around kids. They seem to find it to be the most amusing of all kinds of humor.
..and then it mutates, somehow, into guy humor.
(not much of a stretch there)
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not much of a stretch
Hey! You're just jealous because we're more in touch with our inner child.
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And what might the penalty be for autopedophily?
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..and then it mutates, somehow, into guy humor.
Ungulents. <eg>
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Taking this excess of gas back to Proto-Indo-European, philologists reconstruct two roots for 'fart': *perd- 'to fart loudly' (*prdi-s whence OE feortan and Welsh rhech 'fart') and *pezd- 'to pass wind softly' whence Greek bdeo, Latin pedo 'to fart', podex 'butt, behind', pedis 'louse'. The Latin podex also gives the German words der Podex and der Popo 'butt'.
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We see this same r<>z,s correspondence in the Latin 1st/2nd declension genitive plural endings -arum/orum which was from an earlier -asum/osum, as well as in the French chaise form chaire. But I wonder, I've heard of IE satem and centum languages and Celtic P and Q languages. Are there IE perd- and pezd- languages?
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Are there IE perd- and pezd- languages?
Faldage-- I know what you mean. I thought of Latin rhotacization, the -Vsum/-Vzum/-Vrum of the genitive plural. Also you see this in honos, honor. As for the -r-/-z- alternation, I had to take a look at the handbooks on this one. Brugmann reconstructed a series of fricatives s, z, S, and Z (as well as þ, and ð) for PIE, but most IEists today only have -s- (~ -z- as an allophone).
The weird thing about chaire ~ chaise is that the 'r' in kathedra yielded an 's', the opposite of the Latin direction.
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