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any ideas about this one? my sister ran across it in the Library where she works, perhaps on this book: The Charge of the Expormidable Moose by Claude Gauvreau. which I found here: http://www.utpjournals.com/jour.ihtml?lp=utq/utq671.htmlmight be a new one for the list, tsuwm? 
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well, a friend passed some information on to me which led me to this Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Gauvreau"he wrote what many consider to be his masterpiece, La charge de l'orignal épormyable," now, can anyone find a translation of épormyable? Bel?
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okay, a couple of footnotes from this page: http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/TRIC/bin/get4.cgi?directory=vol19_1/ruprecht/&filename=ruprecht.html+(my emphasis added) 10 Automatiste theatre is represented mainly by Claude Gauvreau, who wrote numerous works for the theatre. His play La Charge de l'orignal épormyable (The Charge of the Horrinormous Moose--my translation) was staged for the first time in 1970 by the group Zéro. It was cancelled during the third performance because one of the actors refused to continue before such a small audience. Crête was the only performer in that production who had a theatre background. The contact with Gauvreau had a profound influence on Crête, who came to understand that theatre was a creative process that could somehow alter the lives of the participants. 11 C. Gauvreau's earlier works, Les Entrailles and Faisceau d'épingles de verre, among others, are written in his "langue exploréenne." Influenced by the abstract painting process of Borduas and his fellow "automatistes," Gauvreau created a parallel form of abstraction for the written text: groups of vowels and consonants that had no relation to the semantic or syntactic structures of French were conceived as written symbols that captured the intense feelings and sounds of spantaneous impulses produced in highly charged emotional settings. See the discussion in Ray Ellenwood (195-201) interestinger and interestinger...
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"Expormidable" simply means something that used to be pormidable but isn't any more.
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Yup, your explanation makes the most sense F.Steve. Épormyable is definitely not a word, but, as I understand it, that what was M. Gauvreau was all about. It just didn't take. I'd have to read the play to know what he meant the word to mean. If I have to hazard a guess, I'd say "Ép" he would have taken from épeurant (scary) or épouvantable (abominable or scary) and "ormy" from formidable (mighty, formidable or impressive).
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yeah, Bel, that seems to fit the Horrinormous idea. as for expormidable, Father Steve aside, the (f)ormidable part is easy to see, but exp-? maybe hormidable would have been better, or macabormidable, or something...
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best not to put *too much analysis into the translation of a made-up word. (cf. zzxjoanw :)
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Aye perhaps in this case tsuwm, but did not Lewis Carroll make up a slew of words in Alice in Wonderland that are now part of our everyday vocabulary and translatable. Figures I can't think of an example right now but I'm sure those with better "spur of the moment" memories will know the words I speak of. Speaking of which...I know there is long-term memory and short-term memory but is there a term for that type of memory retrieval?
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how is it different from long-term memory?
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It's the type of memory retrieval I'm wondering about. For example, I can't for the life of me remember what the words Lewis Carroll invented in Alice in Wonderland but I do remember that he invented several.
I have no doubt that I'll be sitting here, hours from now, doing something completely different, and the words will pop right into my mind.
So the retrieval of the information will have taken a long time.
But, I am also sure that when some people read my initial post, the will have a spur of the moment recollection of the invented words. The retrieval will be immediate, instead of delayed.
So, what I'm wondering is, is there a specific term for those two type of memory retrieval?
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ah. I'll try to remember that.
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here's a Jabberwocky of 'em: http://www.math.luc.edu/~vande/jabglossary.html[our own slithy toves may be offended you couldn't recall any of these..]
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It's not in the OED. I ain' sayin' no more'n that.
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I dunno, Bel - I think of it as "immediate memory" and "fetching from the archives". Little elves sit at the desk in my brain, and they're pretty good about coming up with the stuff I ask them for. Sometimes they have to run up to the attic to get the answer, though...
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But dontcha hate it when they can't find the key?  It's the "coming up with the answer an hour later" that annoys me. If I know it, why didn't I know it when I needed it.
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worrying about coming up with the answer blocks the pathways to the answer...
performance anxiety.
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Well, you may be right in some circumstances eta, a neurologist told me recently that stress hinders memory, and that people under extreme stress can even break connections to some memories permanently.
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And that sometimes would be a good thing.
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How about at 3 o'clock in the morning? The *worst* is when the answer wakes me up and then I can't get back to sleep. 
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Absolutely. A few weeks ago a bunch of us were trying to remember who recorded the 80s song, "True". We thought for hours (with no Internet handy to consult) and never did think of it. Last weekend the same gang was together again, and someone asked if anyone had figured out who sang "that song". At first I couldn't remember what the song had been, but as soon as someone said "True", I said, "Oh, that was Spandau Ballet." I hadn't thought of it for a second in the intervening time, but because I wasn't searching for it, the answer popped up with no problem.
Oh, and Bel, "chortle" and "galumph" are probably the most well-known examples of the "Jabberwords".
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Ah, so I am not alone. Elves in the attic, bats in the belfry.
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