Words I've learned because of my Kindle

[Leslie]

demimondaine - n. a woman considered to belong to the demimonde.

demimonde - n. (in 19th c. France) the class of woman considered to be of doubtful morality and social standing. From the French, demi-monde, literally 'half-world.'

[The Hooded Claw]

quid⋅nunc
[kwid-nuhngk]
–noun
an inquisitive person; a gossip or busybody.
Origin:
1700–10; from Latin  quid nunc what now?



I'm reading a book from the late 1700s, "The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen", and ran into the above word.  I'd never heard of it before.

[chipotle]

Some British slang from Sophie Kinsella's Remember Me?:

sarky - sarcastic
bolshy - combative, I guess like a Bolshevik?
skint - having little or no money

[redshift1]

Try Foucault's Pendulum for a treatise on obscure words that are not in casual dictionaries.

[BTackitt]

Phlogiston:
n. A substance supposed by 18th century chemists to exist in all combustible bodies, and to be released in combustion.

(while reading Lost World, by Michael Cricton (sp)

[hsuthard]

Excoriate:
–verb (used with object),-at·ed, -at·ing.
1. to denounce or berate severely; flay verbally: He was excoriated for his mistakes.
2. to strip off or remove the skin from: Her palms were excoriated by the hard labor of shoveling.

(from Ellen Fisher's excellent contemporary romance "All I Ever Wanted")

[The Hooded Claw]

I'm re-reading an old favorite, a science fiction novel by A. Bertram Chandler called "The Big Black Mark"  Available here:  http://www.webscription.net/p-692-the-big-black-mark.aspx

The book includes the sentence "All hands, the senior officers especially, were now required to dedigitate."  I don't remember seeing the word at all from previous readings (I've read the book numerous times, the first when I was sixteen years old).  But now I tried looking it up using my Kindle's built-in dictionary.  Nothing.  Trying "digitate" in an online dictionary got me "having digits or fingerlike projections".  What that means when you put a "de" in front of it was beyond me.  I then tried googling "dedigitate", and found it easily in The Urban Dictionary.  I'll decline to put a link here, and definitely not the definition. Don't look it up if you're easily offended (Not that bad, but I doubt it would make it onto television).  I'm surprised old A. Bertram Chandler got that one past the editors, they must have glossed over it as I evidently did several times over the years (My guess is that this is my fourth time reading the book).

[nogdog~6op6ou]

I'm re-reading an old favorite, a science fiction novel by A. Bertram Chandler called "The Big Black Mark"  Available here:  http://www.webscription.net/p-692-the-big-black-mark.aspx

The book includes the sentence "All hands, the senior officers especially, were now required to dedigitate."  I don't remember seeing the word at all from previous readings (I've read the book numerous times, the first when I was sixteen years old).  But now I tried looking it up using my Kindle's built-in dictionary.  Nothing.  Trying "digitate" in an online dictionary got me "having digits or fingerlike projections".  What that means when you put a "de" in front of it was beyond me.  I then tried googling "dedigitate", and found it easily in The Urban Dictionary.  I'll decline to put a link here, and definitely not the definition. Don't look it up if you're easily offended (Not that bad, but I doubt it would make it onto television).  I'm surprised old A. Bertram Chandler got that one past the editors, they must have glossed over it as I evidently did several times over the years (My guess is that this is my fourth time reading the book).

Well, I just had to look it up, and came across this English-to-German translation page, which cracked me up for some reason: http://syn.dict.cc/english-german/Dedigitate.html

[The Hooded Claw]

usufruct

(n.)  the right of enjoying all the advantages derivable from the use of something that belongs to another, as far as is compatible with the substance of the thing not being destroyed or injured.


Read this one in Mesopotamia, by Gwendolyn Leick.  I'd have bet a large amount of money this wasn't a real word, I'd certainly had never encountered it before.

[CaroleC]

usufruct

(n.)  the right of enjoying all the advantages derivable from the use of something that belongs to another, as far as is compatible with the substance of the thing not being destroyed or injured.

I am not a lawyer (so pardon my lack of knowledge) but one often hears a lot about usufruct here in Louisiana. Apparently Louisiana law is based loosely on Napoleonic Code, and I am told this is why usufruct shows up so often in wills here. For example, if a husband dies he will often leave some money, equities, etc to his children, but in usufruct so that his widow can benefit from the dividends/interest while she survives. Until she dies, the children cannot touch the property and the widow cannot spend or destroy the property. However she has the benefit of the income from it. 

A friend of mine is an heir but his inheritance is tied up in usufruct (so for now he has nothing he can spend, though technically it is his.).

[The Hooded Claw]

I am not a lawyer (so pardon my lack of knowledge) but one often hears a lot about usufruct here in Louisiana. Apparently Louisiana law is based loosely on Napoleonic Code, and I am told this is why usufruct shows up so often in wills here. For example, if a husband dies he will often leave some money, equities, etc to his children, but in usufruct so that his widow can benefit from the dividends/interest while she survives. Until she dies, the children cannot touch the property and the widow cannot spend or destroy the property. However she has the benefit of the income from it.  

A friend of mine is an heir but his inheritance is tied up in usufruct (so for now he has nothing he can spend, though technically it is his.).

I've known of people in that situation, though never heard this term applied to it.  The mother of one of my friends was benefiting from the right to live in a house owned by her second husband (my friend's stepfather) for her lifetime.  When she had to be put into a care facility, she lost right to use of the house, and my friend had to move her stuff out and vacate in a ridiculously short period of time.  Now I know what that was called, but I hadn't made that connection to the word.  Thanks!

In the book I'm reading, it is talking about how ancient priests and religious officials sometimes personally benefited from the use of temple lands as a right of their office.

[CaroleC]

I may be wrong (not being a lawyer) but I don't think it is legally called "usufruct" in states other than Louisiana, because they are common law states and not states with laws based on Napoleonic code. I had never heard the term elsewhere but it is often heard here. I think there are some very subtle differences but a lawyer would explain them better than I ever could.

And then, the word probably has more colloquial meanings besides its strict legal meanings.

That makes a lot of sense that the priests would benefit from the land in usufruct.

Edited to add: Aha! Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usufruct

[Nicolas]

Actually, it's as the Wikipedia says, usufruct derives from the latin word "ususfructus" or "usus at fructus". Because France had a legal system loosely based on the Roman heritage (called "reception") and Napoleon particularly had a soft spot for the Roman emperors' legacy, the Code Civil (or Code Napoleon) heavily involved Roman civil law elements. That's why Luisiana's law also has two thousand years old roots.

You'd be amazed how advanced legal system the Romans had and how they managed to infuse law with fundamental principles like ethic (mus, mores), customs (fas) and equilibrium, lawfulness (ius).

[BTackitt]

Someone was looking for this thread, so bumping it.

[CNDudley]

Ah! A thread worth revisiting.

Came across this in Trollope's BARCHESTER series:

eleemosynary: of, relating to, or dependent on charity

[Chad Winters]

empennage (pronounced /ˌɑːmpɨˈnɑːʒ/ or /ˈɛmpɨnɪdʒ/)  (also known as the tail or tail assembly) of most aircraft gives stability to the aircraft, in a similar way to the feathers on an arrow. Most aircraft feature empennage incorporating vertical and horizontal stabilising surfaces which stabilise the flight dynamics of pitch and yaw,as well as housing control surfaces.

[Annalog]

I looked these up recently after finding them in Snuff by Terry Pratchett:

conker
n. (BRIT.) the hard shiny dark brown nut of a horse chestnut tree.
<SPECIAL USAGE> (conkers) [treated as singular] a children'sgame in which each child has a conker on the end of a string and takes turns trying to break another's with it.
<ORIGIN> mid 19th cent (a dialect word denoting a snail shell, with which the game, or a similar form of it, was originally layed): perhaps from CONCH, but associated with (and frequently spelled) CONQUER in the 19th and early 20th centuries: an alternative name was conquerors.

prognathous
adj. (esp. of a person) having a projecting lower jaw or chin.
<ORIGIN> mid 19th cent. from PRO 'before' + Greek gnathos 'jaw' + OUS.

gaff³
n. (BRIT., INFORMAL) a house, apartment, or other building, esp. as being a person's home. <ORIGIN> 1930s: of unknown origin.

[CNDudley]

prognathous
adj. (esp. of a person) having a projecting lower jaw or chin.
<ORIGIN> mid 19th cent. from PRO 'before' + Greek gnathos 'jaw' + OUS.

Ooh! Good one. The opposite of the one I noted in another thread, where Jane Austen called one guy "considerably underhung."

"Underhung" meant "having a receding chin." Waiting for these to show up on an SAT:

prognathous:underhung as...
(A) happy:sad
(B) pugnacious:underdog
(C) punchy:loopy
(D) prognosis:understanding

[Chad Winters]

Jane Austen called one guy "considerably underhung."

ouch.....

[The Hooded Claw]

"Pergola"

An archway in a garden or park consisting of a framework covered with trained climbing or trailing plants.


Read it this evening in "The Chinese Parrot".  I'd never encountered the word before, though gardens aren't a usual reading topic for me.