zompist bboard

Ive actually used it in Scrabble before, and I might have even won because of it once (way too long ago for me to remember).

Outside of that, I've only seen 'za (always with the apostrophe) in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic books, which I used to read during the early 1990s. Apparently, there were two simultaneous TMNT comic series, one published by Archie Comics and the other by Mirage Studios. I had noticed the different art styles, but since Archie Comics itself often changed art styles from one issue to the next I assumed it was just that. But, if it matters, I think the Archie ones were more "soft" and videogame-like, and avoided dangerous situations and used more slang expressions, and I think that is where I read 'za.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

I've only heard za in Dream Daddy.

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I can only say that while I know the word, to me it's purely literary and I'd be astonished if anyone used it in a non-literary context.

A friend of mine in Köln told me that Abtrett is still current in Kölsch.

What about the euphemism Abe?

I never heard that, although I live next to Cologne. But that doesn't mean much - I don't speak Kölsch, I only drink it.


Never heard of it.

I remember seeing Abort in the bunker (OK, technically not a bunker but whatever) we visited in Berlin but that's not in use at all in German today, isn't it?

If it was a bunker from WWII or from the 50s, that doesn't surprise me. I wouldn't expect the word in a contemporary building, except perhaps in a retro style / folklore themed place or used ironically in an alternative / hipster place.

How would you pronounce it? Confusingly, Duden seems to suggest the segmentation A·bort is more common than Ab·ort.

Yep, that's true, and it's also how I would pronounce it, with stress on the second syllable.

Russian:
мошна moshná "purse"
кравчий krávchiy "cup-bearer"

ossia - passage of music, usually only a few bars long, presented as an alternative to the music written in the body of the score.
Ossias are usually used where the limitations of the instrument (eg Beethoven, who lived in a time when pianos were getting bigger, wrote ossias for performers who still had older pianos without some of the higher notes he used; or, when a piece written for one instrument provides alternative passages for those who want to play it on a different instrument) or of the ensemble (eg when a piece for a large orchestra, or including a rare instrument, may have to be played by a smaller orchestra, or without that special instrument), or of the performer (eg music written for young performers who haven't yet mastered the instrument, or who may have smaller hands, or music written for professionals but published for amateur domestic players) may preclude playing the notes as intended. Ossias may also in some styles of music be provided that are more complicated than the original, suggesting additional embellishments for more accomplished performers; I've also seen them in books for children of baroque music, offering suggestions for the ornamentation and variation that performers of the era were expected to improvise according to prevailing conventions. Apparently they're also used in scholarly reconstructions of music, to provide an alternative version found in a different manuscript, or a different interpretation of hard-to-read original notation.

I've always known what these were, but I've only recently learnt what they were called.

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

paduka

മുട്ടാൾ [mʊˈʈaːɭ] or മുട്ടാളൻ [mʊˈʈaːɭɛn] 'stubborn, perverse, or evil man'
മെതിയടി [mɛˈd̪ijəɖi] 'paduka'

Dodecahedron. Thank god for autocomplete, because I only knew it in Swedish, where it's dodekaeder.

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AKA a twelve-sided die. My favorite.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

dodekaedr in Polish. One of the few words I would pronounce with an antepenultimate stress (-de-) rather than a penultimate one (-ka-). (Even though diachronically it makes more sense the other way around.)

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The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

Deodand - a thing that has caused the death of a person, and that is therefore to be forfeited to God (or to the earthly authorities, who donate the thing or its value to a religious cause). Deodands were abolished in English law in 1846, in order to protect the railway companies.

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Blog: http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

My coworkers were quite amused when they learned the words hindrance and impediment.

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The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

Not guns ? I'm guessing justifiable homicide was n exception or all guns would be single use implements. Gunz'a are a big probelm in USA and some want to sue the gun companies when somebody dies by accident after being shot. But I've never heard of blaming the gun itself for the killing.

Very interesting , thank you, nd i want to take that now onto Teppala. All man-made objs belong to one of the gods&so do natural objs. That is who gets it. Unlike earth, the property really is confiscated and not just sum of money.
Often the perpetrator will sue the god to get their props bavk, which in practice is the same as any other court I case.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

Deodand is mostly a mediaeval thing, as I understand it. By the time firearms became widely held, and when they were legal (they were periodically restricted in various ways), deodand wasn't an automatic process, but a legal recourse that could be sought if needed. In case of gun homicides (which I think have always been rare here)*, prosecution would be for murder or manslaughter, and deodand wouldn't normally have been worth seeking. However, in the case of something like a railway accident, where neither malice nor necessarily any specific negligence by any specific individual could be proven, deodand was seen as potentially a way to get compensation, or at least vengeance, from the railway company without having to meet an unmeetable standard of criminal proof. Deodand was ended at the same time that formal compensation schemes were begun.

[and i'm not actually sure that deodand can apply to actual weapons, where the 'guilt' lies with the user]

It may seem a strange superstition, but it's actually a very clever idea. In its pure form (the item is actually confiscated), it fulfills several useful functions at once:
- it acts as a quality inspection law to aid health and safety. This seems to be behind the English rule that deodand applied to stationary objects only if the deceased was an adult. So, if a child falls off a cart, that's their fault for being an idiot, but if a sensible adult falls off a cart and dies, that might indicate something unsafe about the cart. So, deodand can get dangerous vehicles, buildings, machines, animals, etc, out of circulation.

- the threat of deodand acts to encourage property owners to institute their own health and safety procedures. If your cart might be confiscated if your carter falls off it and dies, not only do you try to make sure your cart isn't dangerous, but you also make sure the carter knows what they're doing on it.

- it can punish the wilfully neglectful without the need to prove guilt. Older legal systems were much more hesitant about ideas like "negligence" and the like, generally requiring specific, active guilt to be proven, which often wasn't possible. Deodand - attacking the item rather than the owner, in theory - is a way to get around that restriction. If your horse runs through town loose and kills someone, it may be hard to prove that you specifically did something 'wrong' - but if the government takes your horse anyway, you loose out, creating a deterrant: so that not only do you try not to do anythign provably 'wrong', you actually take steps to prevent accidents.




*currently death by gun is approximately 5,000% more likely in the US than in the UK.

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

I learned the Ojibwe word maaminonendam, which means "s/he thinks about,considers, realizes, notices something", according to the Ojibwe People's Dictionary. Yeah, they have really long words in Ojibwe. It is a polysynthetic language, after all. I learned it partly through participating in the "nifty way to increase your fluency" thread and partly by repeating it to myself as I went to sleep. (I think I remember things better that way.)

Tankero - crappy English with a heavy Finnish accent. Just to clarify, the event described in that WP article is just a joke, not something that actually happened.

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തടം [t̪əˈɖəm] 'size, area, garden bad, hole/basin around tree, platform built around the foot of a tree, slope, body part, lair'
തൂക്ക് [ˈt̪uːkɯ] 'abrupt slope'
മധുരിപു [məˈd̪ʱuɾibu] = ജനാർദ്ദനസ്വാമി [d͡ʒɛˈnaːrd̪ɛnəsʋaːmi] = Vishnu (apparently, Adi Shankara claims that janārdana in Sanskrit literally means 'one who inflicts suffering on evil men')
രിപു [ɾiˈbu] 'enemy'
ആരാദ്ധ്യൻ [aːˈɾaːd̪ʱjɛn] 'male fit to be worshiped'

Heulsuse crybaby

I learned that word from a C S Forester short story called "To Be Given To God". Evidently written shortly after WWII, it is about the mental processes of a Nazi on trial at Nuremberg for running an extermination camp. He can't see why he is going to be executed when he was only obeying orders. He is allowed law books and fixates on this archaic term of English law as the explanation: he caused death so he's going to be "Given to God" (the root of the word "deodand") just for that. He thinks of himself as a martyr to an obsolete English law. The last line is something about how anything is preferable to allowing in the thought that he was being punished justly.

I've never heard the word before or since, until this thread.