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Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2002
Posts: 1,526 |
I love words and I also love reading.
I began at an early age by thumbing through dictionaries, magazines, and encyclopedias. Unfortunately, I have a really horrible memory, so very little stuck. Later, as my reading habits widened, my functional vocabulary expanded immensely. In particular, I note that a lot of those SAT/GRE words are found in classical literature, if in few other places.
Words are a minor interest. I'm a lot more interested in meaning and how it occurs.
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Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2005
Posts: 3,290 |
Let's see. Hard to say. My grandmother spoke an Italian dialect at home with her sons, but a weird kind of Italian inter-dialectal lingua franca with other Italians in her home town who all came from different dialect areas of Italy. During high school, I spent a lot of time in the library, which had a beautiful old OED bound into volumes from fascicles. Reading the etymologies therein made me wonder about all the other languages that English was related to. The first book I ordered from a publisher was Braune's Gotische Grammatik. They didn't carry it in any local book stores. (Actually at the time there was only one in our town, the owner of which was kind enough to show me Books in Print and how to order books using it.) Before graduation from high school, I also started to use the libraries at some local colleges to read linguistics books. Pei, Whatmough, Bloomfield, Sapir, Jespersen, Brugmann, et al. What started out with words soon morphed into a genuine interest in how languages differed from one another or historically from different versions of themselves. By the time I got to university, I majored in linguistcs.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,891
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
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Please don't misread the comment about the subject having been brought up before Mechan. If a topic has been discussed before, the person who posted the topic might not get a lot of responses, and feel hurt. Letting them know it has been discussed explains this lack of response.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue the discussion. Faldage's sentiment is right, there always seems to be new angles, and new voices to add to the pot.
I am the worst at finding old threads, but sometimes, folks find the old threads and add a link to that thread in their post. That is easier to deal with than bringing the old thread back up. Some of the old threads were very long and some folks’ internet access is very slow, so a long thread takes forever to load and then all they get for their wait is a couple of new comments added to the pile. A new thread with a link to the old thread is much easier to load.
You don’t have to post the link though. Like I said, I’m the worst at finding old topics so there’s no way I’d expect anybody else to.
So, no worries Mechan. post away with any topic you like.
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Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 43
newbie
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OP
newbie
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Aww thanks. 
[insert signature here]
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Joined: Sep 2005
Posts: 203
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Sep 2005
Posts: 203 |
I like words, just not long ones (I'm hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobic).
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Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 43
newbie
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OP
newbie
Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 43 |
Hehe. 
[insert signature here]
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