"Roundheads and Ramblings"
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Posted on Friday, May 18, 2012 9:30 AM
6. Sanguinolency
Noun – “Addiction to bloodshed” – Could be a useful word for history majors and gamers, as in “Genghis Khan was quite the sanguinolent fellow” or “Do you think spending six hours a day playing Postal 2 actually fosters sanguinolency?” I'm thinking it could also be used to describe the finale of Grey's Anatomy!
7. Jollux
Noun - Slang phrase used in the late 18th century to describe a “fat person” – Although I’m not sure whether this word was used crudely or in more of a lighthearted manner, to me it sounds like a nicer way to refer to someone who is overweight. “Fat” has such a negative connotation in English, but if you say “He’s a bit of a jollux” it doesn’t sound so bad! Or does it?
8. Malagrugrous
Adj. – “Dismal” – This adjective is from Scots and may be derived from an old Irish word that refers to the wrinkling of one’s brow. An 1826 example of its use is “He looketh malagrugorous and world-wearied.” I’m tempted to also make the word into a noun: “Stop being such a malagrug!”
9. Brabble Verb – “To quarrel about trifles; esp. to quarrel noisily, brawl, squabble” – Brabble basically means to argue loudly about something that doesn’t really matter, as in “Why are we still brabbling about who left the dirty spoon on the kitchen table?” You can also use it as a noun: “Stop that ridiculous brabble and do something useful!”
10. Freck
Verb intr. – “To move swiftly or nimbly” – I can think of a lot of ways to use this one, like “I hate it when I’m frecking through the airport and other people are going so slow.”
So let's see . . I've been in a malagrugous mood all week--feeling a bit jollux and brabbling over trifles. So before my mood descends into sanguinolency, I plan to freck out of here and spend the weekend deliciating at a luxury hotel/spa . See y'all on Monday!
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Posted on Thursday, May 17, 2012 3:42 PM
Yesterday I offered you some "big" words. Today, I have some "little" ones. Do you remember homonyms? Those pesky little words that sound exactly alike by are spelled in several different ways and had several different meanings? In grade school I had a teacher who loved them. During quite periods, she taught us to play a game in which we made up sentences containing homonyms but substituted the word "teakettle" for the words themselves. The challenge was for the other students to identify the missing homonym. The sentences sounded like this: "I teakettle would like teakettle eat teakettle pieces of cake."
The game was just childish silliness, but it's not funny when a writer gets wrapped up in her story and types one homonym for another without noticing. Maybe you are writing a sympathetic description of an admirable politician who suffered from great depravation -- or did you really mean to type deprivation? There's not a spell checker in the world who will catch an error like that. And there's no sure way to avoid making the occasional goof. About all you can do is take time to think about the words that cause you trouble. Here's a baker's dozen that may trip you up when you are busily touch-typing.
• Cite (to summon, to quote, to refer to), Site (place, situation), Sight (view) • Council (administrative or advisory group), Counsel (to advise, advice) • Desert (waterless region, to abandon), Dessert (last course of a meal) • Dew (moisture), Do (perform), Due (owed) • Gait (manner of walking, Gate (door) • Grate (iron frame), Great (large, magnificent) • Haul (pull, carry, transport), Hall (passageway, large room) • Here (in this place), Hear (to perceive sound, to sit in judgment) • Idol (image, object of adoration), Idle (not busy), Idyl (poem) • Leak (hole, to drain out of), Leek (vegetable) • Made (created), Maid (domestic servant, unmarried woman) • Meat (animal flesh food), Meet (a gathering, to encounter, to convene) • Morning (before noon), Mourning (grieving, to grieve)
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Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2012 10:06 AM
The following words were once a common part of the English language. Today, if they appear in a dictionary at all, they are marked as obsolete. But just think what opportunities they offer if you want to insult someone without being understood. I really wish I had known some of them when I was writing lots of letters of recommendation for problematic students.
1. Jargogle
Verb trans. – “To confuse, jumble” – First of all this word is just fun to say in its various forms. John Locke used the word in a 1692 publication, writing “I fear, that the jumbling of those good and plausible Words in your Head..might a little jargogle your Thoughts…” I’m planning to use it next time my husband attempts to explain complicated Physics concepts to me for fun: “Seriously, I don’t need you to further jargogle my brain.”
2. Deliciate
Verb intr. – “To take one’s pleasure, enjoy oneself, revel, luxuriate” – Often I feel the word “enjoy” just isn’t enough to describe an experience, and “revel” tends to conjure up images of people dancing and spinning around in circles – at least in my head. “Deliciate” would be a welcome addition to the modern English vocabulary, as in “After dinner, we deliciated in chocolate cream pie.”
3. Corrade
Verb trans. – “To scrape together; to gather together from various sources” – I’m sure this wasn’t the original meaning of the word, but when I read the definition I immediately thought of copy-pasting. Any English teacher can picture what a corraded assignment looks like.
4. Kench
Verb intr. – “To laugh loudly” – This Middle English word sounds like it would do well in describing one of those times when you inadvertently laugh out loud while reading a text message in class and manage to thoroughly embarrass yourself.
5. Ludibrious
Adj. – “Apt to be a subject of jest or mockery” – This word describes a person, thing or situation that is likely to be the butt of jokes. Use it when you want to sound justified in poking fun at someone. “How could I resist? He’s just so ludibrious.”
These items in this list (and others to follow) appeared in a blog entry by Heather Carreiro on November 8, 2010. Words are from Erin McKean’s two-volume series:" Weird and Wonderful Words" and "Totally Weird and Wonderful Words." Definitions have been quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary.
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Posted on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 9:57 AM
What fascinated me in Sunday's Civil War notes was the mention of a fight at Fort Pillow. The remains of the fort are just a few miles up the road from my house, but I was unaware of the actions that took place there in 1862. Here's a summary of what I learned.
At
the start of 1862 the line that separated Union and Confederate territory ran
along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, reaching the Mississippi at Columbus.
However, after the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson by U. S. Grant in
February 1862, the Confederates had to abandon that line in favor of one that
that ran through Tennessee. The western end of that line was located at New
Madrid and Island No. 10. However, even these new positions were dangerously
exposed to Union attack. At the end of February a force of over 20,000 men
under General John Pope marched overland to capture the two strongholds. On 3
March Pope began a siege of New Madrid, on the northern bank of the river. On
13 March the Confederate defenders of the town pulled back to Island No. 10,
abandoning the town.
Pope, with 20,000 troops launched his attack on 7 April. Two gunboats
bombarded the Confederate positions at Watson’s Landing, south of New Madrid,
and west of Island No. 10. Pope’s troops landed soon after. Trapped by greatly
superior forces, the Confederate defenders of Island No. 10 had no choice but
to surrender.
The capture of Island No. 10 was a key moment in opening of the
Mississippi. Only one more position, Fort Pillow, a Confederate fort on the
Tennessee bank of the Mississippi River. remained between the Union fleets and
Memphis. On the same day that Island No. 10 fell, U.S. Grant launched his
counterattack at Shiloh,
forcing General Beauregard to retreat to Corinth and destroying any chances
that Fort Pillow might be held. After
a Union army expedition against the fort was abandoned, the burden of capturing
the position fell to the Western Flotilla, a collection of ironclads and
gunboats.
The Confederate defenders of the Mississippi had constructed their own
fleet of rams. On 10 May, those rams launched a surprise attack on the Union
fleet attacking Fort Pillow. The Union fleet’s response was not well
coordinated. Two of their ironclads were badly damaged by ramming attacks,
before the Confederate fleet retreated into the shelter of Fort Pillow’s guns.
The Confederates soon evacuated Fort Pillow itself. The main Confederate
army had been forced to retreat from Corinth. This left the fort exposed to an
attack from the rear, and so Gen. Beauregard
ordered the garrison to leave, after destroying the fort. During the night of 4
June they carried out that order, before withdrawing towards Memphis. The next
morning the Union fleet occupied the site of the fort.
After the evacuation of Fort Pillow, the next Union target was Memphis.
On 6 June, the Union’s Western Flotilla, reinforced by their own rams, fought
and defeated the Confederate fleet at Memphis, and
captured the city. Fort Pillow remained in use. It returned to prominence later
in the war, when Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest captured the
fort, and massacred dozens of black soldiers (Fort Pillow Massacre, 12 April
1864).
This is a summary of two articles found at
http://www.historyofwar.org/americancivilwar/index.html: Rickard,
J (14 August 2007), Battle of Island No. 10, 7 April 1862 ,
http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_island_10.html Rickard, J (23 February 2007), Battle of Fort Pillow, 10 May 1862 ,
http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_fort_pillow_1862.html
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Posted on Monday, May 14, 2012 11:43 AM
In response to a reader's comment yesterday, here's a summary of how a gentleman could hire a substitute during the Civil War. It is borrowed with permission from "Articles Exploring the Civil War."
When
the Civil War began, there was no shortage of able bodied men who
volunteered for service in both the U.S. Army and the Confederate Army.
Eager to show their patriotism, convinced that their cause would be
victorious in a matter of months at the most, men gathered in cities
and towns throughout America to form volunteer regiments, clamoring to
assist in the war effort.
However, by late 1862 and early 1863, the patriotic fervor that had
characterized the war effort early on was wearing thin in both the
Confederacy and the United States, and finding men to replenish the
armies of both nations was becoming difficult. Those who wanted to serve
were already engaged; those who did not had either refused to serve,
or, having volunteered and found the experience to be much more arduous
than it seemed at first, had deserted or refused to re-enlist. This
necessitated instituting a draft to choose men for service, and, in
both the North and the South, the practice of hiring substitutes to
serve in the place of those who were called and did not want to serve.
Long before the United States began the draft process, the Confederate Congress had allowed men to forgo service in
the Confederate Army if they met certain occupational criteria –
criteria that mostly exempted owners of large plantations or other
enterprises, leading to the phrase “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”
to describe the Confederate war effort. Southern men who did not meet
exemption criteria but whom were otherwise able to fight often hired
substitutes to serve for them. Yet by 1863, exemptions were outlawed in
the Confederacy, where men willing to fight were becoming too scarce
to exempt from service. This practice was just beginning, however, its
travel north.
When the draft laws – known as the Enrollment Act – were first
placed on the books in the United States in 1863, they allowed for two
methods for avoiding the draft – substitution or commutation. A man who
found his name called in the draft lotteries that chose men for
mandatory service could either pay a commutation fee of $300, which
exempted him from service during this draft lottery, but not
necessarily for future draft lotteries, or he could provide a
substitute, which would exempt him from service throughout the duration
of the war.
With the Enrollment Act, the Civil War truly began to be known as a
rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight throughout the entire nation. The
$300 commutation fee was an enormous sum of money for most city
laborers or rural farmers, and the cost of hiring a substitute was even
higher, often reaching $1000 or more.
In small towns where the potential loss of their entire population
of able-bodied men became an imminent possibility, taxes and other
means were raised in order to pay commutation fees, and, as commutation
was outlawed, substitutes. These “bounties,” as the fees were called,
would pay substitutes in lieu of townsmen.
The practice of hiring substitutes for military service took hold
quickly in the North, becoming much more widespread than it had ever
been in the South. For one thing, there was a much larger pool of men to
draw from; immigrants that flowed into the ports of the North, even in
a time of war, provided a large number of the substitutes hired by
those who did not wish to serve. As the duration of the war lengthened,
African-American soldiers, who’d thus far been only nominally accepted
by the U.S. Army as viable soldiers, also became part of the pool of
potential substitutes; many of the recruitment posters from the time
explicitly solicit African-Americans for substitution.
Although the hiring of substitutes seems mercenary, and in many
cases, resulted in the desertion of the substitute, many who went to
war as hired men went because they were unable to enlist through the
regular channels. This included the recent immigrants who were anxious
to fight for their new country, and, importantly, the African-Americans
who found going to war as substitutes the only way to fight for their
freedom. For these men, the war was indeed a “rich man’s war and a poor
man’s fight,” but from the perspective that poor men were more willing
to fight for the possibilities they saw in their country.
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