From online article "Nighttime lights linked to depression"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40242387/ns/health-mental_health

"In people, loss of enjoyment is known as anhedonia and is a major symptom of depression."

From http://www.etymonline.com/, the 3 parts of "anhedonia" are Greek.
an- without
hedone pleasure
-ia to form an abstract feminine gender noun

They have the actual word at that site, but it doesn't break out the -ia.

Anyway, the article is intriguing, even if applying the results to humans seems a little premature.

And our planet seen from space at night is well lit.
Curious thoughts result.

Uh why is the 'ia' bit added on the end?
Does that mean only those of the female persuasion can get it?

I think the gender applies to the Greek grammar, not the English grammar. I don't think we have grammatical genders for English nouns.

I reckon "-ia" is common usage among sesquipedalians.
glossolalia (speaking in tongues)
anosmia (loss of sense of smell)
aphasia (loss of ability to speak)
coprophagia (eating feces)
dipsomania (alcoholism)
Utopia (nowhere)

We do have a few I think?
-or on some words indicates masculine gender and -ress indicates feminine. And I think he/she/it are gendered personal pronouns...although not sure if that is on or off topic!

I'm a little fuzzy on genders. I agree there are gendered pronouns in English. Not so sure with nouns. I've always inferred that the actual gender of the object isn't always indicative of the grammatical gender.

For example, the Latin word "hasta" (spear) is feminine, instead of neuter. The German word "Madchen" (maiden) is neuter, instead of feminine.

The German word Mädchen ("girl") is treated grammatically as neuter because it was constructed as the diminutive of Magd (maidservant; archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix -chen conventionally places nouns in the "neuter" noun. But that I know is definately off topic!
I am also not so good with the english gendered words...we seem to have changed them all to neuter or gotten rid of the altogether.

-or on some words indicates masculine gender and -ress indicates feminine.

The English suffixes for agentive nouns , -or and -ess come, via French, from Latin. They replaced the native (Old) English suffixes, the feminine of which was -ster (as in the names Baxter '(woman) baker' and Brewster '(woman) brewer'.

The abstract noun suffix -[i]ia (from both Greek and Latin) is more like our -ness or -hood. The agentive noun suffixes mentioned as not really an example of gender in English. Except in the pronominal system, English has lost gender marked by inflection or class. In many languages related to English, such as Russian, German, Latin, and Greek, grammatical gender is still very much a living part of the grammar. All nouns and adjectives have gender, etc.

I've always inferred that the actual gender of the object isn't always indicative of the grammatical gender.

This is true, and I've mentioned it here and elsewhere. Gender was originally a grammatical term that became a sort of euphemism for biological sex. There are some languages, famously of the bantu family in Africa, that have upwards of 13 genders (though today they tend to be called noun classes because of the word gender's newer meanings).

the Latin word "hasta" (spear) is feminine, instead of neuter.

Yes, but it is good to remember that not all nouns that end in -a in Latin are of the feminine grammatical gender. Latin agricola 'farmer', nauta 'sailor', and poeta are all grammatically masculine. And, not all nouns which end in -us are masculine: e.g., corpus, corpora, 'body' and opus, opera, are neuter and manus 'hand' and foetus 'fetus' are feminine. This leads to some funny attempts (by folks with little Latin and less Greek) to replicate plurals in English with words borrowed from Latin, e.g., *opii as the plural of opus, virii as the plural of virus, etc. The last mentioned is particularly funny as virus 'poison' seems to have been a non-count noun in Latin and had no plural form.

Also the ever brilliant 'octopi' rather than the correct 'octopuses'. So would you say then that we have no gendered grammer or just neuter grammer if gendered at all?

Currently, octopuses is the most common form in both the US and the UK; *octopodes is rare, and octopi is often objectionable.
-wiki

Also the ever brilliant 'octopi' rather than the correct 'octopuses'.

Or the facetious, though "correct" in Greek octopodes.

So would you say then that we have no gendered grammer or just neuter grammer if gendered at all?

I would say that English does not have grammatical gender for nouns and adjectives, but some seem to think it has remnants of gender in its pronominal system. One of the big things about grammatical gender in language systems is that gender usually gets marked in more than one word. For example, in Latin, puer Romanus 'Roman boy' and pouella Graeca 'Greek girl', the adjectives agree in gender, number, and case with the nouns the qualify.

and octopi is often objectionable.

My favorite, annoying learned plural is apparatus for apparatus. In Latin, the -us of the plural form is with a long u. Apparati is right out.

The additional i is particularly irritating to some. It's as though the singulars were opius and virius.

Personal favourite pet hate is when sheep gains an incorrect -s when pluralised and fish an -es.

(When -es is added to words ending in s when -' is the correct addition I tend to get ever so slightly mad)

when sheep gains an incorrect -s when pluralised and fish an -es.

Actually, fish is the plural of fish when speaking of a single species of fish, but when multiple species are involved fishes is the "correct" plural. In Jacobean English fishes is perfectly OK. It appears numerous times in the King James version of the Bible, including the story about the fishes and loaves.

I've never heard sheeps, but I don't doubt that somebody might try to make sheep plural.

We loves Sheepses, yessss we do!

Sheep is only plural. The singular is shoop.

And the plural of book is beech. I hate it when people say books

Two of my favourite rare plurals are
egg > eyren/eggys
shoe > shoon
but unfortunately whenever they are used you tend to get a look of total incomprehension.


I always believed shoop to be a humourous back-etymology of sheep following the likes of feet/foot and geese/goose and not the actual singular of sheep which I always thought was both singular and plural. (I may be wrong though)

Sometimes what you always believed is true.

Isn't beech the origin of the word rather than its plural? Writing material was often strips of beech because it kept the colour well and could be made quite thin. In my OED it has books as the plural or bookes (from Old English booke)

In OE the nominative singular was bōc and the nominative plural was bēċ. MnE book and beech are indeed related but they split off from each other before English was English if AHD4 is to be believed.

We loves Sheepses Ok--should I say TMI, or is this some brand of something I've never heard of?

or is this some brand of something I've never heard of?

He's riffing on the speech patterns of the character Gollum in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

Great books (or beech if you prefer)

'what has it got in its pocketses?'

You're looking at it from an OZ versus Kiwi banter POV.

Z, I'd never heard riff used that way, cool.

Handel put it a little more grammatically in his We Like Sheep from The Messiah.

We Like Sheep

... and LOLcatz like cheezburgaz ... oh, and Bach's organ works ...

Oh how a comma changes the meaning!

We like sheep...
or
We, like sheep, ...

Only too true,
but what is it that we, like sheep do/have in common/like?

All we, like sheep, have gone astray

Terrific new site for me. Thanks.

Not quite related, but: by accident today I came across a video of a flash mob singing the Hallelujah Chorus at a food court somewhere. One woman started it, then by ones and twos others stood on their chairs and joined in; and at the end they all just sat back down at their tables. Utterly cool, esp. since they could really sing.

I saw that as well, really nice.
It was done in Brussels, Belgium, last year, and both are on
You Tube somewhere.

You might notice in the bible translations that I linked to, none of the translations that use the wording "all we like sheep", none of them use a comma between we and sheep.

Here is what you saw on TV"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE


And when I said Brussels, I meant Antwerp:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k&feature=related

from the Sound of Music.

Oh, thank you for posting that! I'm not sure I could have found it again. The first time I watched it I had tears streaming down my face. I can almost never hear or sing that without crying.

Had to go to a Cathedral Advent service last night and what turned up in the reading?

All we like sheep, have gone astray

I was very much amused by the coincidence especially as in the sermon it occurred another two times

Thanks Luke...they are brilliant.
Talk about taking art to the audience!

And Bexter.....bet you looked a little sheepish sitting there, smiling.

Love these things. "... senseless acts of beauty" and all that. I think I saw that first one previously, but it was from a cell phone taken from above. Very crappy view. This one is much better. I know I've seen the second one previously, as well.

The first one was just on TV last week or so, and
the one in Belgium, last year maybe. I love those
senseless acts of beauty, as you call them, so very much
as well.

Ah! The one I watched previously was the same song, different event.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_RHnQ-jgU&

Yes, I saw that one too, somewhere; TV probably.
Sure wish I could experience one first hand. I know
it would be so spontaneously enjoyable.

The first one I saw on TV was in a square some place....I think in USA....I'll have to go find it, now.

T-mobile have done a bunch of these as adverts - they've filmed them and people's reactions and then turned them into adverts for their phones (video and camera stuff I think)......

yes...I saw them, in my search (which I have stopped now..cause I didn't find what I was looking for)

Just go to the sites listed before and look down the
right side, there are many "flash mob" examples.
Don't watch too many advertisements so I would not
know whether they are used such.

We have been bombarded with such adverts by T-mobile...there are lots; people singing in tube stations, dancing in squares, singing (including public) in large open spaces with giant tv screens. They became so popular that they posted the dates and venues of the next one to be filmed so that eager fans could take part or be there live...I assume they are all over youtube...