Well, last Sunday while being the lector at the service I mispronounced ‘synod’. It’s Sih-nd, not Sigh Nod. Oh well.
It’s been a while since I mispronounced anything in front of an audience.
The last time I was really astonished at the pronunciation of a word was Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, while attending a graduate English lecture by someone famous (Donna Haraway?) that was completely over my head. I’d have been in my twenties.
Nem MAH sin nay
I was reading an article in The Economist when I came across capex. I thought I had seen it before but they provided no explanation.
I turned to my business wife and she told me it was cap ex, capital expense. Business slang turned into a word.
We then argued whether it was an acronym or a portmanteau. Any takers?
Mind blown x 2
Portmanteau.
a word blending the sounds and combining the meanings of two others, for example motel (from ‘motor’ and ‘hotel’)
It’s also a contraction. So a contracted portmanteau - could one call it a handbag?
From Grammerly:
To form a portmanteau, usually [the first segment of one word is attached to the final segment of another word. Some portmanteau words are blended in other ways, like combining the initial segments of both words.
(Bolding mine)
Lol!!
Going right back to the OP, the word tang is also used as a word for the part of a knife or sword that extends into the handle. Looking at some Neolithic knives in a museum on Orkney a couple of days ago, I noticed that some of the flint blades had tangs that were inserted into handles. The only person I’ve heard say the word is my wife, who is deeply into archaeology.
Good ones. How’s about micturate, condign, and valetudinarian and cloaca?
Also, I’ve never used nor heard used a psychiatrist referred to as an alienist.
I’ve heard the first and last but not the middle two.
Ironically, I think I can also add “shibboleth” to the list.
I’ve certainly read of “condign punishment” in Victorian novels or some such (or maybe some stuffy judge’s sentencing remarks)
Also Tangs are a brightly colored reef fish.
I use tang as a word pretty commonly. Referring to the way something tastes. Tangs are also a part of the manufacture of rasps and other types of blades, not just swords. I also use the word in this sense. I think of it as a common word.
inchoate and incoherent mean two different things even though they look like they ought to mean the same thing. Inchoate means something not yet formed. Incoherent, in present usage, refers to garbled speech.
Incoherent also applies to light sources which are not synchronised, i.e. non-lasered or non-coherent.
And then there’s the boom tang and mast tang, sailboat hardware.
that seems kind of specialized. I bet I could come up with twenty words that mean something very specialized in fields I’m familiar with. Different thread …
I just realized there’s been no post for ‘synecdoche’. Sounds similar to a city in New York. Never would have known that just from seeing the word written.
Whenever I saw someone wearing a CHOATE tee shirt, my fingers would itch to run up to them and Sharpie IN in front of it.
Stump compound: FedEx, WaPo, TriBeCa, politruk, etc.
Yes, condign punishment was used to display no measure of doubt or ambiguity. It’s more or less synonymous with “just”.
I’m familiar with the turn of phrase regarding dangerous periods in human history referred to parlous times, as in “we live in parlous times” used in a novel, essay or letter during, for instance, the French Revolution or the American (or any other, or that matter) Civil War. However, never have I encountered the word parlous by itself in a conversation, nor have I even used in a movie or TV show; nor even, so far as I can recall, a classroom. It’s probably a word still understood by bookish and well educated people, likely over the age of fifty, though much younger than that, I doubt it.