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I happened to mention in an IM somebody called Firdaus. My correspondent asked how it was pronounced, using dowse as an example for the second syllable. I said it was more like douse. Now, to me, dowse means to search for water with a Y-shaped stick and is pronounced with a z sound, while douse means to extinguish with water and is pronounced with an s sound. My correspond seemed to think both spellings were used for either concept but the pronunciations were associated with each concept as I had said. I went over to xrefer http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=592818&secid=.-&hh=1 to see what they had to say, only to find that they agreed that the spellings do fluctuate and they added another dowse into the mix, meaning to doff (a cap) or strike (a sail). Granted my nautical vocabulary is not very great and cap-doffing is not all that common these days, but even so I have never heard of this other word. Comments on spelling, pronunciation, and this third word from AWADers from around the world please. Bingley
Bingley
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I looked them up, and was surprised to see that Atomica listed them as alternate spellings of each other. And I've sure never heard of dousing your cap, meaning taking it off.
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I had never heard of the third meaning that you wrote about, Bingley, and have always pronounced it (wrongly, as I now find) as DOW-S, in both of the other contexts. But here's what my M-W says on the subject of douse:
DOUSE or DOWSE: (DOW-S)
1. to plunge into water or the like
2. to splash or throw water or other liquid on
3. to extingusish
4.(informal) to remove; doff
5.(Naut):
a) to lower or take in a sail or a mast
b) to slacken a line suddenly
c) to stow quickly
6.(Brit) a stroke or a blow
DOWSE (DOW-Z)
to search for underground supplies of water, metal by the use of a divining rod
And Bingley, you brought up a most beautiful word, Firdaus (FIR-DHAWS). The AW has to be dragged out to give it an 'OH' lilt. It is a Persian word which loosely tranlates into empyrean or paradise. (??Paradise and Firdaus appear to share a common root). It is used to acknowledge the gift of something so unique that God could only have crafted it when he had nothing else on his mind; thereby implying that, God made it at his leisure. It's also a somewhat common name for girls in Persia and northern parts of India.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Here in Indonesia it's a male name and the ordinary word for paradise. Yes, Firdaus and paradise are both from the same Persian root. The AHD has this to say ( http://www.bartleby.com/61/74/P0057400.html):
The history of paradise is an extreme example of amelioration, the process by which a word comes to refer to something better than what it used to refer to. The old Iranian language Avestan had a noun pairidaza-, “a wall enclosing a garden or orchard,” which is composed of pairi–, “around,” and daza– “wall.” The adverb and preposition pairi is related to the equivalent Greek form peri, as in perimeter. Daza– comes from the Indo-European root *dheigh–, “to mold, form, shape.” Zoroastrian religion encouraged maintaining arbors, orchards, and gardens, and even the kings of austere Sparta were edified by seeing the Great King of Persia planting and maintaining his own trees in his own garden. Xenophon, a Greek mercenary soldier who spent some time in the Persian army and later wrote histories, recorded the pairidaza- surrounding the orchard as paradeisos, using it not to refer to the wall itself but to the huge parks that Persian nobles loved to build and hunt in. This Greek word was used in the Septuagint translation of Genesis to refer to the Garden of Eden, whence Old English eventually borrowed it around 1200. Bingley
Bingley
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To cross-thread momentarily, "dowsing for water" is also a pathetic fallacy. Many years ago
a columnist for the Boston Herald told a a friend of his who had located water on Bermuda
but pointing a dowsing rod at a map of Bermuda.
Pathetic that anybody could believe that. Or dowsing in any form.
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