When I went to college, I took a linguistics class because my advisor thought I might like it. He knew I was a lover of words. He also knew that if I randomly won a truckload of cash, I'd buy my own set of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary). Turns out, I loved the Intro to Linguistics course, and then I loved all of the other courses I took for the minor.
Both for fun and for class presentations, I read The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary and The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. I loved them both. I would suggest that anyone who loves the making of dictionaries, especially the OED, read these. These two books fueled my love of words. They also push us think about how we choose which words are important to us, how some words were burnt to a crisp in a stove, and how other people choose what is important to us without even our knowledge.
Words come and go, and for some odd reason, the death of a word is sad to me, but they die all the time. In my own way, I'll resurrect a few.
Words come and go, and for some odd reason, the death of a word is sad to me, but they die all the time. In my own way, I'll resurrect a few.
So, today is Wednesday Word Museum. And today's word of the day is cachinnatory.
Cachinnatory relates to loud or immoderate laughter. What a strange word, yeah? It might seem as though this word describes explosive, serendipitious laughter, but it does not. This word orignated in the early nineteenth century, and back then, it was not cool to burst out laughing, especially if you were a gentleman.
In the early nineteenth century, cachinnatory would have been used to describe raucous youth, a rowdy bunch of drunkards, a distateful, carousing group. It would have been uncivilized to act in such a way, especially in public.
Henry Harford, in his three-volume book Fan: A Story of a Young Girls' Life, published in 1892, details his heroine visiting London Zoo: "The laughing jackasses laughed their loudest, almost frightening her with their weird cachinnatory chorus."
Why don't you want to be a part of a cachinnatory group? Because you'll be compared to jackasses. Understood.
Cachinnatory relates to loud or immoderate laughter. What a strange word, yeah? It might seem as though this word describes explosive, serendipitious laughter, but it does not. This word orignated in the early nineteenth century, and back then, it was not cool to burst out laughing, especially if you were a gentleman.
In the early nineteenth century, cachinnatory would have been used to describe raucous youth, a rowdy bunch of drunkards, a distateful, carousing group. It would have been uncivilized to act in such a way, especially in public.
Henry Harford, in his three-volume book Fan: A Story of a Young Girls' Life, published in 1892, details his heroine visiting London Zoo: "The laughing jackasses laughed their loudest, almost frightening her with their weird cachinnatory chorus."
Why don't you want to be a part of a cachinnatory group? Because you'll be compared to jackasses. Understood.
No comments:
Post a Comment