I'm looking for a word that isn't commonly used. It is a noun that describes something that has always been a certain way, an old way of doing things that everyone does but they don't know why they do it that way anymore. Is there such a word?
Welcome clucky! Try entering "traditional" at
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/#lookup
A. would call it 'convention'. [Did specify noun.]
There may be a word for it, but there are many such somethings.
Even a commonly used word for it seems to be hard to find.
Well,habit,routine,the daily grind... It appears to be quite hard to find the fitting word from a vague or incomplete definition.
A paradigm? Not so uncommonly used in business settings, but it might work.
I believe I have found the word you are looking for...
mumpsimus noun ( pl. -muses) a traditional custom or notion adhered to although shown to be unreasonable. • a person who obstinately adheres to such a custom or notion. ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: erroneously for Latin sumpsimus in quod in ore sumpsimus ‘which we have taken into the mouth’ (Eucharist), in a story of an illiterate priest who, when corrected, replied “I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus.”
I love this. Either m- or s- coulda been a Hogwash word.
"...a illiterate priest who, when corrected, replied 'I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus."Thanks, Hydra, what a delightfully appropriate response.
I will use the word "mumpsimus" in conversation all day, hoping, just hoping, that some Episcopalian New Age Priestess will give me the chance to say...
Sorry, dear, I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus.
Are there any words tsuwm doesn't know? Could be like that game, Stump the Band—try to recall from memory a word he can't. Not a very exciting game, but a game all the same.
well, I have let a few words go through a round of hogwash..
-joe (obscure, abstruse and recondite) friday
Hello Clucky--There is a great quote somewhere in my files comparing CONVENTION with TRADITION. I can't lay my hands on it right now, but here is a good one from Eliot that talks about the same issue:
If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition,’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of wider significance. It cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves in the first place, the historical sense...and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
—T. S. Eliot
Magpie, Clucky--are you two related? ;-) Welcome, anyway, to the both of you!
...a game all the same. Hello, Hydra--it has been good to see you back, these recent days. I guess you could try, if you want, but I tried it onct, and he pounced on it in under two minutes.
Ma.
Never said it couldn't be in another language. You have to guess which language I'm thinking of.