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I have many of these recorded, but not in any one place. here's three that I can get my fingers on:
lurgulary - Mrs. B. defines this as "the act of poisoning water (old English law)"
agnuopia - Charles Elster has "a salacious and submissive stare, the notorious come-hither look" (lamb-eye??)
megalonisus - Mrs. B again, "a tendency to exaggerate"
(probably a nonce-word, from megalo- very large + nisus, endeavor)
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so Ww, now that we know that Mrs. B. had a tendency to exaggerate, and Elster has admitted to two errors; would you use either of these two as a single source?
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gnuopia - ... (lamb-eye??)
We do have the old-fashioned expression, "making sheeps' eyes".
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Dear tsuwm: it is really disappointing to be unable to learn anything more about "lurgulary". I can ermember reading many times about putting salt or dead bodies into wells to deny their use by the enemy, but never saw a word to describe the practice. And "poison" is quite possibly not the best word. In the era described, I can't think of any poison available at the time that ould have been effective when so diluted.Too bad Mrs. B didn't give a bit more information. Maddening to to be able to guess the roots of the word. It rhymes with "burglary" I wonder if it is from same period.
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For a bit of fold etymology:
burglar - 1541, shortened from burgulator, from Anglo-L. burglator (13c.), from O.Fr. burgeor "burglar," from M.L. burgator "burglar," from burgare "to break open, commit burglary," from L. burgus "fortress, castle," a Gmc. loan-word akin to borough. The intrusive -l- is probably from infl. of L. latro "thief," originally "hired servant." Burgle (1872) is a hideous back-formation.
By analogy, could a French word for "water" be substituted
for "burg" ? "l'eau gu lary"?
Reminds me of manikin pis "Ne bouvez jamais d'eau".
(Un chat mort se trouve dans votre puits."
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Sorry to hear about your bad cold, tsuwm. Good chicken soup, as someone suggested on another thread, and plenty of rest will help more than anything.
Single source--Mrs. B? Well, not really, since she would count as at least two sources in every case. She ostensibly took some of her very rare words from one source and then she published her lexicon, so that would make two sources.
We've had some oddball words here on AWAD that have sometimes confounded us in trying to track them down. On those occasions, you have often saved us with the OED, but perhaps these words have been in other dictionaries, too--just not in the ones included on Onelook, for instance.
I do wonder about your comment that Mrs. B sometimes exaggerates. I would guess that she at least was honest in what she included in that she included words that appeared in at least one lexicon, even those of lexicographers who may have been less than rigorous in application of their own sources. But Mrs. B's job wasn't to present a book of bona fide, standard entries; instead, it was to present a book of entries--even 'preposterous' ones--that had appeared in at least one lexicon. What an interesting hobby she had there!
However, it's a real pity that she--or they--didn't footnote some of the more obscure references.
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so she's just a middle-man--however you look at it, I still have only one source... and I don't even know what it is! as to "exaggeration", it was just a jape on the word "megalonisus" and the zzx word.
-ron o.
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Yes, tsuwm. As I interpret Mrs. B's contribution to word hounds, she is exactly as you put it: a middle man. In fact, I would enjoy being such a middle man if I had the time that doesn't appear to be forthcoming in this lifetime. Maybe in the next. Ferrophiliac is my onliest entry so far. Oh, by the way, the now-deceased editor of the Random House Word Menu was Stephen Glazier. I've mentioned him to you before, but will go ahead and type out his name here since I have his book by my side now. He, like Mrs. B., didn't footnote his entries--even his more obscure entries like ferrophiliac.
What I'd like to know is how she went about compiling her lists. Even in the age of computers, what she did wasn't an easy feat--especially given the fact that a certain percentage of her words [wouldn't we like to knoww!] were fabricated ones that so happened to appear in these 'dictionaries' she'd investigated.
The zzx word is really hilarious to me, all things considered now.
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