Warning: The opening paragraph contains references to RSS. If you have no idea what this is, you could do worse than read this simple explanation. If you like the sound of it, you’ll be pleased to know you can follow my updates via RSS as well as Twitter – just click here.
Shameless self-promotion aside, I’m a bit of an RSS fiend, and have many, many feeds I look at every day. Well, about ten regular viewing feeds and another hundred or so that I leave to build up for a week and then delete unread. If I find any interesting word-related stuff, I bookmark it for later research. So here’s a few I have happened upon recently.
Tautonym (from this article on boingboing): From the greek tauto (identical) and nym (name, as regular readers will be aware). Largely associated with scientific naming (taxonomy), where a genus and species may be the same. Examples include Gorilla gorilla – unsurprisingly referring to a gorilla – Rattus rattus (Black Rat), Lynx lynx (see if you can guess) and the somewhat bizarre Myospalax myospalax – which I’m sure we all know to be the Siberian Zokor. It can also refer to any word or name in which the two composite parts are the same: Lulu, tomtom, tutu or bonbon. The most famous example of a tautonymic noun is probably Wagga Wagga – a town in New South Wales, Australia. The aboriginal people in the area (the Wiradjuri) pluralized their words by repetition, thus wagga (crow) became Wagga Wagga (place of many crows).
Synaesthesia (from this article on the BBC news site): This is a condition affecting around less than 1% of the world’s population. If you have ever thought a word, phrase or text sounded ‘tinny’ or ‘woody’, you may have experienced a mild version of this phenomenon. In the more extreme cases, those affected can ‘taste’ colours, ‘see’ sounds or ‘taste’ shapes or letters of the alphabet. Synaesthesia is a mixing of sensory information, and is an involuntary ability in most. Scientists believe, however, that researching this more thouroughly could pave the way to new methods of perception only previously granted to those using industrial-strength hallucinogenics. A simple test that proves we can all do it was devised by Dr Wolfgang Köhler. He showed people a card containing two coloured shapes (pictured left) and asked a simple question: Which of these shapes is ‘Bouba’, and which is ‘Kiki’? The vast majority of people (some 98%) chose the purple blob to be ‘bouba’ and the spiky orange shape to be ‘kiki’. This ‘crossmodal abstraction’ as it is known, is the reason scientists believe we all have the capability. For a more in-depth discussion on synaesthesia, take a look at this web site.
Finally, one for Madame Joad, rock chick extraordinaire. Given her bent for all things geology, I’m sure this will be funnier for her than it is for most of the world. Next to computing/IT, geology has probably the largest selection of double entendres and cheap gags of any profession. From the science that gets its rocks off with things like ‘cleavage’, ‘fuchsite’, ‘dike’, ‘grabben’ and many more, I give you:
Cummingtonite: Yes, really. I thought it was simply a bad gag at first, but no. The suffix ‘-ite’ (‘descending from’ or ‘connected with’) is applied copiously in geological nomenclature: Calcite, Aluminite, Flourite – the list goes on and on. The name was quite possibly innocently applied after the first discovery of a sample in Cummington, Massachusetts (USA) in 1842. Nowadays, however – depending upon your profession – you either know it as (Fe,Mg)7Si8O22(OH)2, or a pitiful attempt at a chat-up line. If you really want to know more, head over to this web site and go nuts.
