"I'd like to buy a vowel." Most of us in the `civilized' world are familiar with this oft-heard sentence in a popular TV game show. For those who are not, it is a Hangman-like game where contestants identify words in several categories by guessing their letters. Correctly guessing a consonant helps in winning a prize, while one has to pay to guess a vowel. Imagine playing this game and getting words having all five vowels? That wouldn't be very exciting where you have to squander all your cash in buying the vowels. To make it more tolerable, we've selected this week words that have all the vowels once, but only once. And the vowels can be in any order. To see the words with all the vowels, once and only once, AND in order, see the archives for Oct 1997: http://wordsmith.org/awad/themes.html.
I was looking in the AWAD archives, hoping for inspiration for starting a new thread. I came upon the following by sheer coincidence. I apologize for the extreme length, but we can't link to any single entry, and it can be tedious to find one among the entire list. I think there is a lot here that people will find worth commenting on. ==========================================================
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 1994 00:03:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: A.Word.A.Day--jalousie X-Bonus: Multitasking allows screwing up several things at once.
jal.ou.sie \'jal-*-se_-\ n : a blind, window, or door with adjustable horizontal slats or louvers for control of light and air
-- notice anything special about the word? it has all the vowels in its spelling. and only once. - anu
I didn't intend to send a followup on today's mailing but looking at the volume and enthusiasm of replies, I couldn't keep without sharing them with you.
Many suggested the words facetious, abstemious and arsenious all of which have all the vowels occuring only once and in order. Among those who sent in one or more of these words are: Linguaphiles Martha (albion.edu), Pete Cottrels (umd.edu), Zach (att.com), Marc Picard (concordia.ca), Brian Battles (arrl.org), Mortnsue (aol.com), Garthe Nelson (ucsb.edu), C. Sudhama (mot.com), Evan Robinson (mit.edu), Ullas Gargi (psu.edu), Guy Jacobs (ukans.edu), David Powers (flinders.edu.au) Miriam Shlesinger (biu.ac.il, Israel) and Manojkumar Saranathan (washington.edu). In addition, Saranathan came up with this word with all the vowels in reverse order: duoliteral.
Linguaphile Tim Lee from datapath.co.uk recalled a vacation he took years ago in California, where he saw the giant red-woods, the sequoia trees. He points out that "Not only does 'sequoia' have all the vowels and only once, it also has only two consonants."
Now, how about a crash course in French? Linguaphile Jean Wilmotte hailing from ucl.ac.be ("be" is the country code for Belgium) wrote to inform that jalousie has a second meaning in French -- jealousy. It had me thinking what jealousy had to do with venetian blinds. But I didn't have to wait for long. Manfred Borzechowski of alcatel.de (de = Germany) piped in with the etymology. Here is a peek at the historical roots of the word:
Such blinds served in old Arabic ages to protect from being seen when having an intimate relationship, so that nobody else would become jealous.
Frits Stuurman from ruu.nl (nl = Netherlands, which incidentally, is written as Nederland in Netherlands/Nederland/Holland) was reminded of James Joyce's Ulysses where "there is also something about aeiou = a.e. [initials of one of Joyce's friends, I seem to remember] I owe you;"
Bruce Nevin of lightstream.com greped (grep is computerese for search) in /usr/dict/words and sent a list of 54 words with all the vowels. Did I say all the vowels? A couple of linguaphiles expressed doubt whether I was forgetting `y' when I said the word `jalousie' has all the vowels in it. Garthe of ucsb.edu had probably already thought of it. He wrote: "the most remarkable word of this kind that I've found is `facetious' which not only has all the vowels exactly once but also in alphabetical order. It can even accommodate the `sometimes y' clause with the addition of `ly' to form `facetiously', still in alphabetical order."
On a cool, cloudy morning on the shore of Lake Erie... Anu
discussion recently about exactly where it is from which Anu reigns so gloriously.
(Heaving a great West-of-Irelad sigh) Yes, 'twas I. I tried extrapolating The Glorious One's home station location from the article in Smithsonian. Given Anu's note about being on shores of Lake Erie .... seems I was wrong! (Pouring ashes over head emoticon) Sooooo -- I give! Wow
If my memory is correct, it used to be fatal. When the fetus is tiny, and arterial pressures relatively low, there is a communication between the aorta and the pulmonary artery, called the ductus arteriosus.(I think) Ordinarily it involutes before birth. but if it persists the higher pressure in aorta forces blood through it into pulmonary artery which has lower pressure. My brother's only son died of it because heart surgery to correct it had not been developed at that time. So it was fetal, but could often be fatal fifty years ago. Alex, or Doc_Comfort, correct me if I am wrong.
Anybody interested, just type "patent ductus arteriosus" in Yahoo! search box, and up comes a dandy illustration and information about this.
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