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umm, the wwftd that I got was "hesitude"...
did you ever doubt it?
formerly known as etaoin...
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Quote:
Am I hungover? I come back after a drinking bout in the woods to see that tsuwm's Worthless Word for the Day is "hastitude".
Somehow this seems unseemly, or at worse, a violation of the Hogwash(c) copyright laws.
Do you all think that tsuwm is running out of "Worthless Words"?
I don't know about "hungover"; but as eta points out, you did misread the word.
as to running out of "worthless words", it's not going to happen as long as writers such as Eco are around; e.g.,
"It was in [Nuovissimo Melzi (It. encyclopedic dictionary)]
that I had encountered terms that tasted like magic words:
avolate, baccivorous, benzoin, cacodoxy, cerastes, cribble,
dogmatics, glaver, grangerism, inadequation, lordkin, mulct,
pasigraphy, postern, pulicious, sparble, speight, vespillo..."
- Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame... (trans./2005)
there's a couple of theme weeks' worth right there.
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Wouldn't Eco have seen the Italian equivalents of these words in the Italian dictionary? Do these words actually exist or are they simply nonce-words he's made up to translate the Italian words?
Bingley
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Quote:
Wouldn't Eco have seen the Italian equivalents of these words in the Italian dictionary? Do these words actually exist or are they simply nonce-words he's made up to translate the Italian words?
Uh, Bingley, changing the subject back to the subject, may I change my vote from "K" to...
"P" - The period between the delta sleep stage and REM sleep, during which the second and third stages of sleep occur in reverse order.?
Think about it. It gives ummphf to the "lude".
I now vote "P! 
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Wouldn't Eco have seen the Italian equivalents of these words in the Italian dictionary? Do these words actually exist or are they simply nonce-words he's made up to translate the Italian words?
Bingley, changing the subject back to Milo's hungover(?) digression, the translator of this tome is one Geoffrey Brock; and I'm sure I don't know how he went about translating that list of "hard" (but actual) words. here he talks about the difficulties of translating Eco.
edit: there is a link to Mr. Brock's own website at the above link, and I've written to him asking this question.
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Quote:
Wouldn't Eco have seen the Italian equivalents of these words in the Italian dictionary? Do these words actually exist or are they simply nonce-words he's made up to translate the Italian words?
I recgonize five or six of those words right off the bat, so I doubt they are all (or maybe any) nonce-words.
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well, quite an interesting (and quick) response..
MF: Can you give me some insight into how you came up with this list of English hard words?
GB: Sure... In this case the literal meaning of the Italian words was beside the point -- what mattered was only that the words be obscure and sound mysterious or "magical." So I picked words that looked vaguely similar (pseudo-cognates, I called them to myself) from the 1913 Webster's Unabridged (which seemed a decent analogue for the Melzi). It's one of several passages in the book where I as the translator got to have a bit of fun. (With Eco's oversight and approval, of course.)
best,
Geoff
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Ahhhh....Ha!
The man comes out from behind the curtain.
I like Eco. He, like me, thinks that the World is much to literal.
Good show, tsuwm.
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Quote:
well, quite an interesting (and quick) response..
MF: Can you give me some insight into how you came up with this list of English hard words?
GB: Sure... In this case the literal meaning of the Italian words was beside the point -- what mattered was only that the words be obscure and sound mysterious or "magical." So I picked words that looked vaguely similar (pseudo-cognates, I called them to myself) from the 1913 Webster's Unabridged (which seemed a decent analogue for the Melzi). It's one of several passages in the book where I as the translator got to have a bit of fun. (With Eco's oversight and approval, of course.)
best,
Geoff
WOW. Well done Geoff (and tswum, of course). As a translator trainer, I love it when someone can cogently and succintly justify a good translation decision, which this certainly is... 
Umberto Eco is well-known for his painstaking interest in the work of his translators, with whom he corresponds as necessary and collaborates with if possible.
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tsuwm, what a wonderful list of words; it's so cool that you wrote to him and he wrote back--thank you!
Now--what would Umberto be in English? Herbert?
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