Pinellas County Real Estate DirectoryYou are here » Pinellas County Real Estate » Links Directory » Computers » World Wide Web (0)
World Wide Web RSS Feeds602-1: Feedback, notes and comments - Dandiprat Peter Weinrich remarked, following last week’s Weird Word article, “Do I assume you are not a great listener to twentieth-century classical music? Understandable in light of all your other labours, but surely the most frequent use of the word is in Malcolm Arnold’s comedy overture Beckus the Dandipratt.” Thanks to all the other classical music fans who also mentioned the piece. David Duncan elaborated, “To Arnold a dandipratt meant something like an urchin. He got the idea while on holiday in Cornwall when a small boy made friends with him on the beach. As you might expect, the music is brilliantly orchestrated, tuneful and cheeky.”...Feed Source: www.worldwidewords.org 602-2: Weird Words: Gossypiboma - A surgical sponge left within a patient after an operation.
Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary from cover to cover and wrote about it in his book Reading the OED, commented on this word in a piece on the OUPBlog. He had been told about it by a surgeon, who called it “a memento that we surgeons sometimes accidentally leave behind to commemorate our presence in some poor patient’s abdomen.”
It’s rather worrying that the condition happens often enough that surgeons have found it necessary to create a word for it (it’s fairly common in specialist articles and books). It’s even more worrying that two further terms exist to describe cotton or synthetic fibre gauze left in error in a patient: textiloma and cottonoid.
In both subject and appearance, gossypiboma surely fits anybody’s definition of a weird word. Its strange look comes from its being an ... 602-3: Recently noted - Boffinated Reader Jim Delton asked about this word, which he had seen used in a couple of places online but for which he couldn’t find a definition. It was new to me, too, but examples suggest it derives from boffin, in the sense of a person with knowledge or a skill considered to be complex, arcane, and difficult; this is a World War Two British term for a research scientist, of unknown origin. Boffinated seems to be a disparaging reference to matters variously considered swottishly or boringly academic. One reference is to “Harry Potter’s boffinated sidekick Hermione”. In The End of Innocence: Photographs from the Decades That Defined Pop, dated 1997, there’s a reference to musicians who “wore long white coats like boffinated B-movie scientists”. The earliest reference I can find is from way back in 1969, in Kathleen Nott’s book A Soul in the Quad: The Use of Language in P... 602-4: Questions and Answers: Indexes versus indices -
[Q] From Bert Forage, Australia; related questions came from Mark Smith and David Parks: “I wish you wouldn’t spell the plural of index as indexes in your side banner! We’re being dragged screaming into the American version of English.”
[A] Index is one of those oddball words with two different plurals in English. Since it’s from Latin, English copied the Latin one at first, making indices. As with a lot of other Latin plurals, the standard English way of marking the plural, using -s or -es has progressively been taking over. Generally speaking, we now prefer crematoriums to the Latin crematoria, miasmas to miasmata, forums to fora, and referendums... 602-5: Sic! - • Following up my piece on lukewarm in the last issue, John Causer sent through a copy of the menu at the Hotel Sirmione, which is at the southern end of Lake Garda, not far from Verona. One dish was “Foie gras terrine with porto wine served on a salad bouquet with pukewarm sweet bread”. He says it was excellent.
• Jim McLoughlin forwarded a wedding announcement from the Houston Chronicle of 24 August 2008: “Amber was escorted by her father wearing a strapless silk wedding gown designed by Marianne Lanting carrying a tropical floral bouquet.” Quick question: which of the three of them was holding the flowers?... 602-6: Copyright and contact details - World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2008. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites or blogs requires prior permission, for which you should contact the editor.
Comments on anything in this newsletter are more than welcome. To send them in, please visit the feedback page on our Web site.
If you have enjoyed this newsletter and would like to contribute to its costs and those of the linked Web site, please visit our support page.... Pulling the Processes Together - Pepperweed's free version of its Process Model ties 21 processes together, from ITIL to portfolio management to security.... LSI Goes Full Steam Ahead with 6 Gig SAS - Anticipating blistering 6 Gb/s SAS adoption, LSI gets to work on gear for faster, high performance enterprise storage systems.... Your Best Netbook Deal - Windows XP and a 120GB hard disk give Acer's 2.3-pound compact an edge over Linux lightweights when it comes to adding software (though there's a Linux version too). The Atom-powered ultraportable also boasts a sunny 8.9-inch screen, a close-to-full-sized keyboard, and a price below even the 7-inch Eee PC that started the netbook craze: $349.... 'Kilen Woods:' MindTouch's Killer App? - The company's wiki-based platform delivers new workflow capabilities, adapters, and usability improvements targeted at the enterprise. ... Will Nokia's Unlocked Phones Open Wallets? - Turning its back on tying phones to carriers, the mobile giant looks to woo new buyers--even though the approach means higher prices.... Review: Sputnik 720 Wi-Fi Hotspot Gateway - This pricey, high-performance hotspot gateway is customizable and easy to deploy.... EMC Takes Unified Storage Down a Notch - The storage giant's fast-selling Celerra unified storage moves further down market with the new NX4.... Acrobat.com Simplifies Collaboration Tools - Buzzword is now the cornerstone of Acrobat.com, Adobe's new online suite of tools (now in beta), and it just might change the way you collaborate on documents.... Open Source: CRE Loaded 6.31 Released...for A Price - To the open source commerce industry, the most startling change in this e-commerce program will be its new pricing scheme: the Standard Edition is no longer free.... Free: A Year of Open Source CRM - Concursive offers companies up to 100 seats of its on-demand, open source CRM suite for one year. And it really is free.... Free World Dialup No Longer Free - Arguing that VoIP needs to be kept separate from the PSTN in order to reach its potential, FWD is launching a new Web siteand a $30 annual membership fee. ... EVGA Adapter Lets You Adopt More Monitors - If an expansive display is what youre after, this external adapter from EVGA offers a quick and easy way to add more screen real estate to your system.... Box.net's Upgrades a Hit With Businesses - The company's enterprise version offers the same storage and collaboration features as the consumer version, but with group management and reporting tools.... BlackBerry Struts Stuff in the Far North - Bars galore for AT&T BlackBerry Pearl traversing Alaska.... Epson Rolls Out Printers for the Smallest SMBs - Companies with fewer than five employees may be small in number, but that doesnt mean they don't need big print power. Epson aims to fill the void with four new inkjets. ... Pinellas County Real Estate - Pinellas County real estate investment opportunities and your resource for real estate rental homes on Florida's west coast and Tampa. Your headquarter for all your real estate investment needs. Foreclosure prevention program, real estate investor programs, rent to own programs.... Copyright © 2008, Pinellas County Real Estate. All Rights Reserved. |