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Joined: May 2002
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"...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.


Last edited by themilum; 05/01/07 11:21 AM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Originally Posted By: AnnaStrophic
I love this. Either m- or s- coulda been a Hogwash word.


or not

-joe (really obscure) friday

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addict
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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.

Last edited by Hydra; 05/02/07 01:58 PM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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well, I have let a few words go through a round of hogwash..

-joe (obscure, abstruse and recondite) friday

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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

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Carpal Tunnel
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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.

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journeyman
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Ma.

Never said it couldn't be in another language. You have to guess which language I'm thinking of.


I exist! I am a pedant! I have a foreboding signature!
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