Barackyogenesis

Slate has a series of Obamisms that is about as good a lexiconographical study of our next president's neologisms as you will find anywhere on the internet. The widget here is quite a thing to behold. And this may be the best one yet -- combining cosmology, linguistic humor, and Change We Can Believe In™:

Barackyogenesis (buh-RAK-ee-oh-JEN-uh-sis) n. An attempt to explain why there were more Barackyons than anti-Barackyons in the Democratic Party, a condition necessary for the formation of heavier election matters.

Example: There must be some initial perturbation to explain the Barackyogenesis problem. Many political scientists have suggested that an imbalanced density of subatomic particles known as "charm quarks" in the candidates led to the dominance of Barackyons over anti-Barackyons.

Further Adventures in Eponymity

I have serious doubts that 'eponymity' is a real word. 'Eponym' is, as are 'eponymous' and '-ist' and so forth. And since 'anonymity' is a word and 'eponym-' is of the same category, it follows that the quality of being eponymous ought to be describable as 'eponymity.' That fact doesn't cause many people to use it of course, but somehow, google searches for eponymity currently turn up my post of a few months ago (among some other things). Oddly, the top result is for a similar thing, a pointer toward this article about naming-afterness in science.

Robert Bunsen, whose name we associate with the burner, was a 19th-century German chemist of some renown. He worked on explosive organic arsenic compounds--leading to the loss of one eye--and, later, on gases from volcanoes, geysers and blast furnaces. With Kirchoff he contributed to our understanding of the meaning of spectra lines. (He also gained note for not bathing--one woman of polite society remarked that Bunsen was so charming that she would like to kiss him, but she would have to wash him first.) Bunsen invented many bits of laboratory apparatus: the spectroscope, the carbon-pole battery, an ice calorimeter and vapor calorimeter, the thermopile, and the filter pump--but not, as one might imagine, the gas burner that bears his name. Rather, the "Bunsen" burner was developed by Bunsen's laboratory assistant, Peter Desdega. Desdega himself likely borrowed from earlier designs by Aim� Argand and Michael Faraday. So why does Bunsen get the implicit credit? --And why do we know so little about Desdega that we cannot add much to his story?

Link.

Vernacularisms 1

As I explained in this post, I compiled a gigantic list of wonderful but obscure words in high school. Here are a few:

Succedaneum- n. A substitute, resorted to when the real thing is not available
Pigsney- n. (A.S.) A term of endearment used when addressing a girl
Varlet- n. A low, menial scundrel
Zori- n.pl. Flip-flops
Ephetic- a. Habitually suspending judgement, or given to skepticism (n. Ephecticism)

Vernacularisms

In a high school English class we had a midterm where we were told one of the long essay questions in advance and allowed to bring a sheet of notes into the exam with us. Being the typical literature-class-disrespecter and smart-alack that I am was, I decided that I didn't need to outline my exam. How complicated could an exam essay possibly be to require a whole page of notes? I figured that I could put that sheet to much better use.

I don't recall all the details, but I think I must have had English after my other tests, and with this ridiculous note page edict, I was casting about for ways to spend my study time productively. On some whim I picked up my dad's old dictionary and started leafing through it absentmindedly. Of course! I could put anything on this page -- how about a bunch of rare and unusual words? I mean, it is English, it doesn't matter which kind of words I use as long as they make sense. They want pointless verbiage? I'll give it to them! On what basis would my English teacher penalize me for using strange but correct English words?!

So I spent a day or two building up a giant document that cataloged everything weird that I found in the dictionary, then I selected the 50 or so with relatively common meanings that could conceivably be used in regular writing, (if one was inclined toward being pretentious and misunderstood), to put in my "notes." And of course, when the test rolled around I crammed about 20 in there with no shame whatsoever. When I handed it in I even asked the teacher "if he had a dictionary nearby." Such was my adolescent hubris.

If this was an 'excellent' story instead of a 'mildly amusing' story, I would have failed the test*. I actually did well. It helped that my teacher was the type of guy who would get a kick out it. He said that it took him about 20 minutes to grade my several page essay because he had to stop every sentence or so to look something up. That'll show him for trying to teach me.

Though he doesn't realize it, he managed to get me back 5 years later. But that is a tale for another day.

[*If it was a Tim O'Brien story I definitely would have failed, even if I didn't, because that makes it 'more true.']