etymologic - the toughest word game on the web

-joe (that's their claim) friday

edit - My Score: You Gotta Go Study

8 out of 10 (Good!) One of my wrong answers was ignorance of one sort (I'd never even heard of the word) and one was ignorance of another sort (I slept through that class in school). One of my right answers is a commonly held belief that has no basis in the record. I gambled that the writers of the quiz believed it to be true.

note that the ten(10) questions are a random selection.

-joe (random?) friday

Ha! I got ten out of ten my first set!
After a breather I'll try another set.

I have a system*.

* My system: After the stupid program posted that my first answer was WRONG I decided to see if I could get all ten WRONG and I did.
This is much harder than trying to get all ten RIGHT because the stupid programmers are trying to be tricky.

I'm just freakin' stoopid.

You're right. I tried your system and only got nine out of ten.

"Good!" on a second try.

-joe (I'm so pleased) friday

well, I got a "Good" this time, as well, tsu, but does "honcho" really come from the Japanese?

Damn the luck! I was so mad when my first answer was RIGHT that I changed my system to one where my ten answers would have to be exactly half RIGHT and half WRONG. I was worried until the final question which was about Atlas but I guessed correctly and aced the test with a perfect score of five RIGHT and five WRONG.

I'm not bragging; I'm just saying... this game ain't no hill for an Alabama high stepper!

Etymology: Japanese hancho squad leader, from han squad + cho head, chief [W3]

-joe (word honcho) friday

from here it looks as though, with that system, you're always going to have to worry about the final question -- even when everything is going smoothly. that's a lot of pressure...

My system utilised hindsight!
If I got an incorrect answer, I went back and modified it until it was correct. Perfect 10, hooray.

So far they've been pretty much definitely wrong on their etymology of "bistro" and maybe wrong on "hassle." Although, I suppose that giving a definitive answer to a question that the experts are uncertain about could be classified as wrong just on GPs.

8 of 10..

yeah, thanks. weird. just never knew that, and thought it was around before that. I usually think about it more like the Mexican desperado...

hancho squad leader, from han squad + cho head, chief So when we say head honcho, it's like saying PIN number or au jus sauce (hi, TEd and Branshea!). Thanks, tsu, I also had a vague idea it was Spanish; prolly due to all those old Westerns.

yeah! what's up with that? how did a Japanese word get appropriated in westerns?

Hi, Sweet Thing. :-) My guess would be that the spelling got changed. I think han in Japanese must be pronounced to rhyme with don (more or less).

honcho dates from the Korean War; not one of the OED citations relates to Western movies:

1947 J. BERTRAM Shadow of War VII. i. 212 But here comes the hancho. This boat must be finished to-night. 1955 Amer. Speech XXX. 118 Honcho. 1. n. A man in charge. (This is a Japanese word translated roughly as ‘Chief officer’, brought back from Japan by fliers stationed there during the occupation and during the Korean fighting...) 2. v. To direct a detail or operation. 1964 Sat. Rev. (U.S.) 10 Oct. 82/2 Jack Bullock, who honchoes the Curaçao casino. 1967 N.Y. Times 4 June IV. 1 Mr. Komer expects to be able to name these 45 key provincial honchos, and he hopes to place civilians in at least a quarter of the posts. 1972 C. WESTON Poor, poor Ophelia (1973) xiii. 77 It's out of our territory, but I'll call Pete Springer. He's honcho in that division. 1973 New Yorker 30 July 24/1, I was the first employee who was not one of the honchos.

-joe (Pancho) friday

/hug

yup, but maybe I'm just thinking poncho/honcho?.... or are Jackie and I just silly, and not remembering this correctly? aren't all the bad guys in those Westerns honchos?

or maybe you were a Jack Slade fan..

well, there you go!

7/10 (good) - I did better on the definitions than the origins.

My virgin post here....

"the toughest word game on the web" ??
I don't think so!
I got 8 of 10. Was fun - I'll go back for more randomness.

Welcome DixieRose. It is fairly easy. You get questions ramdomly so you can take it again. I've taken it about three or four times and have found one of their answers is flat out wrong and one is questionable at best.

Yes, welcome, DixieRose, I am widely known as DixieDoodleDandy and I fear that the Faldage is misleading you if you can be mislead.

In fact none of the test answers can safely be said to be "flat out wrong" and all of the "correct" answers are questionable at best.

Such is the nature of etymology where prime word origins are found most often only in the minds of word researchers.

But don't tell Faldage...he likes things neat.

Me too.

Okay, I'm stoopid, too! Etymology isn't my strongest suit, anyway. But I do know that the letter "h" isn't really "native" to Spanish. It's almost always silent, unless it's part of a proper name or something along those lines.
Their definition of "naranja" as "dripping jewels" sounded weird to me. I checked it and found:

• Naranja, like most words for “orange” in European languages, originated from the Sanskrit nagaruka or naranga which was subsequently transmitted via Arabic naranjah and Persian narenj. Agria and amarga both derive from amara, the Latin word for “bitter”.

Then I found this one, which I really like:

• Orange (Eng.); Orange (Fr.); Naranja (Sp.); Arancia (It.)
Interestingly, none of these terms come from the Latin word for orange, citrus aurentium; instead, they all come from the ancient Sanskrit naga ranga, which literally means "fatal indigestion for elephants." In certain traditions the orange, not the apple, is the fruit responsible for original sin. There was an ancient Malay fable--which made its way into the Sanskrit tongue around the Seventh or Eighth Centuries B.C.--that links the orange to the sin of gluttony and has an elephant as the culprit. Apparently, one day an elephant was passing through the forest, when he found a tree unknown to him in a clearing, bowed downward by its weight of beautiful, tempting oranges; as a result, the elephant ate so many that he burst. Many years later a man stumbled upon the scene and noticed the fossilized remains of the elephant with many orange trees growing from what had been its stomach. The man then exclaimed, "Amazing! What a naga ranga (fatal indigestion for elephants)!"

I hope I don't get in trouble for the long post... :0)

...or perhaps misled?

Interesting word 'misled' - when I saw it written I used to think it was pronounced 'Migh-zuld' (as in miserly).

a naranja

an aranja

an orange

But try to buy Marmalade in Seville. Marmalad(e?) in Spanish means jam or jelly. If you ask for orange jam (marmalade do naranjas) you just get that "be nice to the poor stupid tourist" smile that says you're not making sense. Apparently the bitter Seville orange my mom made marmalade from is not una naranja at all but has a completely different name and preserve they make from it also has a different name from marmalade. I guess it is not just English that gets itself in a twist.

Pook! We are twin souls, LOL! Here are some others that stumped me, some well into my adulthood:

rendezvous: I read "ren-dez-vus" in my mind, and knew it had a synonym, "ron-day-voo", but I never put them together until I heard someone read aloud what I saw written... yikes!

miniseries: Okay, misled by the lack of a hypen, I read this as "min-IZ-er-ees". Don't ask!!! What was I thinking?!?!

emeritus: Lacking, again, the sound/symbol connection taken for granted with more common words, I saw this as "em-er-ITE-us", I suppose going from "dermatitis", or something similar.

I guess I have a weird combination of visual/audio thinking. :0)

Jam is "mermelada" in Spanish. What we call "marmalade" (which, by the way, can be any fruit jam, but we have narrowed it in the US) would be "mermelada de naranja". I haven't been to Sevilla, but possibly it simply isn't commercialized. As Americans, we practically demand that anything we ever try and like be commercialized and offered for sale down the street! In most of the rest of the world, many many foods are prepared in homes, and no one would dream of buying them, even if they could. Perhaps this is the case with the "mermelada Sevillana", made only at home and not sold anywhere. Just a theory... :0)

Actually many older Tasmanians seems to pronounce emeritus the way you do.

A friend of mine used to pronounce 'awry' as OR-ee.

Pook- I thought there were two girl's names, Penelopey and Penelope to rhyme with cantalope. Not to mention those two diseases noomonia and puhmonia.
Maybe min-IZ-er-ees was an editorial thought associated with misery?

Twosleeepy - thanks I was too lazy to look up the correct word mermelada. The stuff made with Seville oranges is certainly available in Seville stores but its name includes neither of the words mermelada nor naranja which made asking for it difficult. The fruit which are too bitter to eat as fruit are not considered oranges but have a different term just as we have for tangerines or kumquats.

Then there is the oft mispronounced 'adversaries', which should be said AD-v'ss-rees but many people say it ad-VERS-a-rees.

oy. AD-ver-sare-ees

I allus thought that marmalade was made from a citrus fruit and there had to be bits of rind in the final product.

Lemme go look it up:

AHD says "especially citrus fruits."

Edit: Thanks, eta. Shoulda oughta proofed

gotta a nextra ] in there, Fald.

I always thought it had to be orange, but such is not the case. As you wrote, "especially", not "always", which is indicative of usage, not actual meaning.

Try this one: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/marmalade This indicates that the origin of the word had to with quinces, not a citrus fruit! The quince connection appears in all the sources I checked, including your Bartleby's. :0)

You guys are drifting towards one of my pet peeves: pronunciation. Where I live, people talk about getting a "per-MIT", when the proper pronunciation is "PER-mit". There are many such noun/verb pairs that get slaughtered/confused constantly. In general, the noun is accented on the first syllable, the verb not, as in:
RE-search vs. re-SEARCH
RE-cord vs. re-CORD
AL-ly vs. al-LY
Dislcaimers: This doesn't always work; I don't know the formal rules; just something I noticed; I'm sure someone else can come up with many more than I! :0)

Is 'proper pronunciation' pretentious preposterous poppycock? Some would say so. Whether it is or not, it's certainly dependent entirely on how many people say it for how long. And it's regional and dialectic.



Not in Antipodean or British English. One of my pet peeves is the Americanisation of Australian which includes placing the stress on the first syllable. In general we don't stress the first syllable of a two syllable noun but the second. In Aussiespeak we used to talk about deFENCE and offENCE (nouns). Now throuhg American Basketballese it has become DEfence and OFFence. We also tend mostly to stress the second syllable of verbs. We used to say deFEND (verb) but now it is becoming yankeefied to DEfend.

However, there is no consistency and the rule you mention probably has so many exceptions as to be meaningless, even in American English. I haven't heard anyone, btw, Australian or American, say per-MIT for the noun, only for the verb. But it's all just a matter of usage over time. There is no inherently correct way. Language is very democratic - the majority rules eventually. English is dynamic not static, and dialectical not universal in pronunciation (or pronounciation as some people 'incorrectly' say it!).

You guys with pet peeves, what do you feed them? I've looked in the pet food section of supermarkets, and even in pet specialty stores, such as PetSmart and no peeve food, neither dry nor wet. No peeve treats. No peeve chew toys (I gather from the way y'all talk about them that peeves like gnawing on things). Nothing. So what's the story here? And do you let them run free or do you keep them in cages? Again, it seems like if you let them run free, what with their propensity for chewing on things, that your furniture would end up in tatters.

Sign me,

Confused

Thanks, Faldage.

Geez, Pook, in your world there are no rules at all, I guess! What is the point of any of this discussion if it's all relative? And I have never in my life heard anyone say "DE-fend", ever. As for "'proper pronunciation' pretentious preposterous poppycock", that's the best alliterative string I've seen in a long time!

LOL, Faldage! Mine live under my bed and whisper to me at night...

Check this out, I found it on another site, and it's great:

Olny srmat poelpe can raed tihs. I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! :0)

Read this.

Why, thank you! Note I said "some people" - I wouldn't necessarily say it myself, I just said it because it popped into my head and was nice alliteration that I thought y'all word freaks might enjoy.


I dint say that, but I just think that this particular passionately promoted pronunciation paradigm (there I go again, can't help myself!) is not really so cut and dried or consistent enough to be called a rule.

I guess on a wider level what I'm saying is that grammar is primarily descriptive, rather than prescriptive. I'm not saying it's not prescriptive at all, it IS, but only for a certain period of time and in limited geographical areas. In essence, grammatical "rules" are merely descriptions of the way that the majority of speakers use the language at any given time.

Yes, interesting. Thanks for that Faldage. I didn't read it before making my last post, but (insofar as I understand it after speed-reading it once) I think I agree with most of what he says there. I think that's what I was trying to say. I certainly agree that the "two extreme ones are both utterly insane." (ie extreme descriptivism v. extreme prescriptivism)

He mentioned split infinitives as one of those hoary old chestnuts people like to argue over. I used to be one of those who insisted that "one ought to never split infinitives" but have since been convinced by the Pookwife (who is an editor and indexer and has done courses in English usage) of the silliness of that extreme position. I think there are some instances where it is still grammatically undesirable to split an infinitive, but there are others where splitting it conveys better the meaning that you want to get across. The real question is not "have I split an infinitive" but "have I communicated the real meaning (and or emphasis) of what I want to say."

And I have never in my life heard anyone say "DE-fend" Hoo boy, you must not have heard many Southerners ('scuse me, Pook and Olly--shoulda said U.S. Southerners!) talk, then.

The real question is not "have I split an infinitive" but "have I communicated the real meaning (and or emphasis) of what I want to say."
Mm. As someone (sorry I've forgotten who) pointed out not too long ago, it also depends on the circumstances: are you talking or writing, and is it formal or informal?

Jackie, you're not going to hopelessly claim that you'd never (ever) split an infinitive in formal writing?!

-joe (the price of gas is likely to more than double) friday

Even some Government style guides no longer insist on never splitting infinitives and suggest that it may be desirable to do so in some instances, so even formal writing (what is that exactly anyway?) is not sacrosanct from the practice.

Nah; I just meant more general things, such as being less likely to use contractions, and I'd be terse while being as clear as possible; which is not always the case here by any stretch.