Thanks, Wordwind! I never knew the musical connotation of crwth! This is from The Folkies' Dictionary on OneLook:
crwth (Welsh, pron. "crooth") also known as "crowd", this is a Welsh bowed lyre used by the bards. Three or four strings in its rectangular frame was common. Illustrations from the 11th century show it, and it's probably much older than that. With the decline of the bardic tradition, it was largely gone by the 19th century. It's all up to the period players now.
And I promise not to post on this thread again today!! Honest!!
My gray matter also tells me that the crwth became to be known as the "crowd." So, your post doesn't surprise me in the least. It simply and amply confirms.
Best regards, WordWither (which rhymes with zither)
well, once again it turns out that the crowd, which is indeed the English version of crwth, is an entirely different word from that which we are accustomed to -- some who have bandied crwth around (including the OSPD) probably never bothered to look up crowd.
An ancient Celtic musical instrument of the viol class, now obsolete, having in early times three strings, but in its later form six, four of which were played with a bow and two by twitching with the fingers; an early form of the fiddle.
Grove Dict. Mus. Crwth or Crowd, as far as we know the oldest stringed instrument played with the bow... Bingley heard it played at Carnarvon as late as 1801; but it is now entirely out of use.
Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood (1954) He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn.
At last: a post, titled regarding paramecia, that actually refers to paramecia.
So we say a paramecium is asexual, not gender-free. Well, Duh! It's neuter. Paramecium. Hello?
Actually, by understanding is that paramecia can reproduce either asexually (by division) or "sexually", by fusion of the genetic matter of two separate individuals. Furthermore, the choice is not random. A colony of paramecia, left undisturbed, will reproduce by fission, by an individual dividing into two. But if a separate colony -- a separate population -- is introduced, then the mode switches over to fusion, and consistently, the fusing pairing-paramecium will be from opposite colonies; an individual will not fuse with a member of its own colony. In other words, the species appears to express a reproductive preference in favor of genetic diversity.
who had the temerity to publish a collection of short stories under the title "Caviar, by Sturgeon". I'm not sure I've yet forgiven him for that. Or maybe it was his publisher who should take the heat/get the credit?
Faldage, yours a very interesting point, and it comes down to defining precisely what is meant by "sexual" (as opposed to asexual) reproduction.
Concept-spinning here, and without any LIU, I would think the key point is that the DNA from two distinct individuals is combined, so that the offspring has DNA which each parent (individually) lacked, and thus brings together a new and potentially valuable combination of DNA. With asexual reproduction, the offspring would generally be a clone of its parent (except for mutations), thus minimizing the diversity from which natural selection (using that phrase in the biological sense) could select.
and yes, dr. bill, there are forms of asexual reproduction in which the offspring cell has only part, but not all, of the DNA of the parent cell, and hence is not a clone thereof. One example would be meiosis, the production of haploid cells from a diploid parent-cell.
That is, I would thing that the test of whether reproduction is "sexual" would be whether genetic material so as to product a new combination -- regardless of how that new-combination cell then proceeds.
But I will say that bartleby provides no clear answer, as far as I can tell.
I'd think the test cannot be whether the genetic material combines (and/or the offspring develops) at a place inside or a place outside the body of a parent. For by that test, fish would be deemed asexual:
THE FISH ... The chastest of the vertebrates, He never even sees his mates, but when they've finished, he appears And O.K.'s all their bright ideas. --- Ogden Nash
BTW, on the site on which I found this poem, it was immediately followed by Nashs poetic ode to the hippopotamus. Which see. btw #2: "O.K." is verbatim in the original.
Interesting point on the fish, Keiva, although there are fish in which one or the other of the parents carries the fertilized eggs. As I said before, the biological intricacies are beyond me. Not to mention the universe being full of a great number of things.
[Bright Blazing Red]BTW, on the site on which I found this poem, it was immediately followed by Nashs poetic ode to the hippopotamus. Which see. btw #2: "O.K." is verbatim in the original.[/Bright Blazing Red]
You were just seeing whether I could stay away, weren't you? Now admit it!!
I think, by the way, that your arguments for sexual reproduction of paramecia make perfectly good sense, mixing of varieties of DNA into the paramecia goulash, and all that.
Best regards, DubDub Who really cannot resist a hippo.
But you sounded so terrifically clinical in your hypothesizing! Listen to yourself:
Concept-spinning here, and without any LIU, I would think the key point is that the DNA from two distinct individuals is combined, so that the offspring has DNA which each parent (individually) lacked, and thus brings together a new and potentially valuable combination of DNA. With asexual reproduction, the offspring would generally be a clone of its parent (except for mutations), thus minimizing the diversity from which natural selection (using that phrase in the biological sense) could select.
Now that's just darned great stuff there! Just use the same voice when clinically describing the mating habits of the hippopotamus! The cold, direct, clinical eye and no nonsense. See? After all, the hippo's just a gigantic, more complex version of the paramecium, hmmmmm?
OOPS! Didn't read the complete thread before posting this. So southerners aren't as anomalous as I thought... [Can anybody edit a post or can we only edit our own?]
from wwh: And while we're at it, I have never except in jest heard "aunt" pronounced like the appellation of a member of the family Formicidae.
So you haven't spent much time in central Oklahoma, eh? I grew up pronouncing aunt as ant. Upon arriving in the blessed north, a new friend politely pointed out the correct pronunciation (then there was root, which I was rhyming with put - egads), but now it grates a bit to hear the southern version.
Anybody else have southern exposure? I'm curious about whether this is truly a case of southern weirdness [no offense to anybody who loves it] or just a regional anomaly.
Dear diborg: I spent a couple days visiting my son in Airbase near Enid, OK when he was in AF there. I didn't have any contact with local people. I'm not good at recognizing regional accents anyway. I have no idea how Southerners and Westerners detect my origin so quickly. Most of them however, make gross hilarious efforts to mimic it.
I grew up in Chicago. My mother was a Wisconsin farm girl, my father a northern urban born in Scotland who spent most of his youth in New York or Chicago. I never heard it spoken with that horrid aw or ah sound except in jest or pretension.
And you were the one writing recently about how children learn English! It's all environment, not pretension, unless, of course, the environment is ridden with pretension, always a possibility.
Off a bit, I still can't understand why my father's sisters were always ants to me and my mother's, aunts. Both families came from southern Virginia, and there ain't much that's pretentious here.
And off a bit more, my daughter insists upon pronouncing either "EYE-thur." She picked that up years ago in middle school and it plumb (plum? still don't know) goes against my grain.
Faldage says, I grew up in Chicago. My mother was a Wisconsin farm girl ... I never heard it ["aunt"] spoken with that horrid aw or ah sound ..." and, "Eyethur is about all I hear anymore. In my yoot it always sounded pretentious."
Faldage, I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and still live there and my wife is a Wisconsin farm girl. The pronunciations we hear here are ant and eether.
To local ears, awnt, ahnt and eyether still sound pretentious or foreign.
I have always said eyether, but say ant. However, I find I have unusual pronunciations for a Buffalonian (one born and raised in the Buffalo, NY area).
How does everyone say roof?
And I have a hard time pronouncing, (of all things), apple! I have this way of saying ahpple, and can't get myself to say it with the harder A sound.
Just wonderin' what in Sam's Hill "agony aunts" are? Is this something esoteric or just still another huge gap in my education?
Pronunciation: AGGG-uh-knee ants, unless you're using it in a poem and you want it to rhyme with taunts, haunts, daunts, etc. (Although wouldn't it be fun to write a poem in which you're thinking that agony aunts is agony ants, and you want the reader to read tants, hants, and dants. Now there's a creative nudge!)
Angel, good to see you again. I say "rooooooof," but lots of people here in Virginia say "ruff"; I think they's all pups, however.
http://www.formica-europe.com/main_com.htm: Formica was invented in Cincinnati in 1913 by two young men, Herbert Faber and Daniel O'Connor. It was intended to serve as an electrical insulator and was created as a replacement for Mica, which was used for that purpose at the time. Hence the name 'for mica'.
"Agony Aunt" is chiefly a Brit expression, so I guess we can surmise how it's *supposed to be pronounced.
For further/previous discussion of regional pronunciations of "aunt", see another thread Wordwind started that also sort of warped off into insect kinship here recently in Q&A on Lifetime Pronunciation Addi(c[sic])tions.
... which is a pun of sorts, given what's transpired (or transgressed) in this thread while I've been ignoring it.
Imagine this Latin conversation, held between, say, Marcus and Brutus by a food stall in the forum on March 15, 44BC
"Marcus, estne haec?" "Salve Brutus. Formica est." "O me miseram! Barf! Chunder! Quo lamnia mea est?"
Brutus fumbles around frantically while retching uncontrollably, finds knife stuck in waistband of breechclout and then stabs Caesar multiple times. Caesar, who was innocently eating fried lampreys and thinking about which gladiator he was going to bet on at the arena that afternoon stumbles to his knees and dies, not uttering "Et tu, Brute!", but "Et tu, Lamprey!" He was going for his third when Brutus, who couldn't find a cat, in the heat of the moment chose to, ah, kick Caesar. Which wasn't felisitous at all, at least from Caesar's point of view.
And what was the root cause of the one of the most famous murders of all time? This:
Formica -ae f The act of paramecia mating both sexually and asexually on a table top of dubious quality.
Lifetime Pronuncation Additions was really what I intended the thread topic to be, although addictions are interesting, too. I started the thread because I'd been wondering about those words that we learn one pronuncation for in our youth, but, by the time you've lived to be as old as I, are overtaken by incorrect pronunciations and, finally, found to be acceptable by those boards of lexicographers. So, these are the pronunciation additions to the dictionary to which I was referring.
Sheesh! You done gone and zapped me on Cole Porter yesterday, and you're back "sic"'n the spelling dogs on me today! I am learning to feel the power of the ASP, indeed!
That, my dear WW, was not intended as a presumptious spelling correction but rather as a sort of internal wordplay, which apparently fell flat on its face. Not the first time, nor will it be the last.
" Brutus, who couldn't find a cat, in the heat of the moment chose to, ah, kick Caesar. Which wasn't felisitous at all, at least from Caesar's point of view."
Dear CK: If this is a pun, I don't get it. With, or without the apparent typo.
Disclaimer: Wordsmith.org is not responsible for views expressed on this site.
Use of this forum is at your own risk and liability - you agree to
hold Wordsmith.org and its associates harmless as a condition of using it.
This is from The Folkies' Dictionary on OneLook:
