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stranger
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Is it just me or did anyone else think upon first reading poetaster that it seems like a combination of poet and disaster? My sobriety is slightly compromised, but I thought that would be fitting, obviously. Just wondering...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Haha. Yes, very good. Welcome! My association with the word was poet and aster; a poet who can rhyme a bit about a flower or two, but no more than that.
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Carpal Tunnel
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did anyone else think upon first reading poetaster that it seems like a combination of poet and disaster?
No, but then I've studied Latin. The pejorative suffix -aster occurs in a number of Latin words: e.g., claudaster 'slightly lame', oleaster 'wild olive', philosophaster 'bad philosopher', pueraster 'stout lad'. OTOH, disaster is a combination of the pejorative prefix dis- and the noun aster 'star'. It means literally 'bad star' in Latin. A more common misanalysis of the word would be poe taster, whatever that might mean.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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poe taster = sampling a bad poet
-joe (my original anal-ysis) friday
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poe taster = sampling a bad poet
-joe (my original anal-ysis) friday similar to my reading. :¬ )
formerly known as etaoin...
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----please, draw me a sheep----
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claudaster
Has claudaster something to do with Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus; 1 August 10 BC – 13 October 54. With his name? Claudius was afflicted with a limp, but this can be sheer coincidence of course.
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It's my understanding that Claudius was a nickname that he got because he was lame. The Latin for 'lame' is claudus.
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so the whole Claudian clan (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero) got saddled with a nom de guerre, as it were?
(there's no mention of this in the wiki article..)
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Shades of cannibalism for me, too.
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