Momma's Word of the Day (check first post every day!)

[momma]

Interesting you should post this today because I was just thinking about how I seem to get deja vu all the time. Another phenomenon I get sometimes is jamais vu, which is the exact opposite, when you know you know something but it seems eerily unfamiliar.

 

I didn't post the whole article about deja vu but it also talked about how this new research into it could help with Alzheimer's as well which is an issue that has effected my family greatly.

 

I have never heard of jamais vu, its amazing all the mysteries of the human mind and the way it works.

[momma]

225.June 12th, 2007ke·no, n.-A game of chance, similar to lotto, that uses balls rather than counters.

 

-Origin: 1814

 

What passes for lotto in many state is actually a version of keno. The term keno comes from French quine, meaning "five winning numbers." Players mark off numbers printed on a keno ticket and the keno caller draws numbers on keno balls from a keno goose in order to determine if there are any winners. Originally the keno goose was a wooden chamber with a long neck wide enough to emit one numbered ball at a time when tipped. Nowadays, the goose is often a chamber with numbered ping-pong balls which are forced up at random through a tube by a blast of air.

 

Keno, a relative of bingo, comes from the gambling halls of New Orleans, which explains the French connection. It is a descendant of lotto, which originated in Italy in the sixteenth century. Originally, keno was intended for a large number of players, each paying the same price for a ticket, usually on a weekly schedule. A diary from 1814 makes the first mention of the game: "I employ'd in washing & mending my messmate playing keeno."

 

In present-day Las Vegas casinos, the game has been modified to some degree. It allows a smaller number of players to gamble a variable amount of money on a ticket in games that may be played several times in an hour. This has also been called racehorse keno because the ticket carried the names of horses rather than numbers in its early history.

 

-Synonyms: lotto, bingo, beano

[momma]

226.June 14th, 2007en·co·mi·um, n.- 1. Warm, glowing praise.

 

2. A formal expression of praise; a tribute.

 

-Greek choral hymn in celebration not of a god but of a man. By derivation the word means a song ‘at the kōmos’, in this context the revel at the end of a banquet, and so suggests a eulogy of the host and guests. The word came to cover eulogies in general; the first poems of a generally eulogistic nature so described were those of Simonides. The epinikion or epinician ode, a triumphal ode for victory in the Games, and the thrēnos, a funeral dirge, are developments of the encomium.

 

-When you like something very much, you don't have to suffice with simply praising it. You can give it an encomium, like the many that the TV series The Sopranos got during its eight-year run:

 

"It was sometimes hard to bear the encomiums — the saga of the New Jersey mob family has been likened to Cheever, Dickens and Shakespeare; scripts were pored over as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls."

 

Link: The Sopranos - Television - New York Times

 

Posted June 12, 2007.

 

-Synonyms: acclaim, acclamation, applause, celebration, commendation, compliment, eulogy, kudos, laudation, panegyric, plaudit, praise

 

-Encomium is also the name of a Led Zeppelin tribute album released in 1995. The album featured covers of some of Led Zeppelin's most famous songs including "Misty Mountain Hop" (4 Non-Blondes), "Hey Hey, What Can I Say?" (Hootie & the Blowfish), and "Dancing Days" (Stone Temple Pilots), among many others (12 tracks in total). Gibbons17 14:01, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

 

-I deserve a encomium for getting a job yesterday. Guess who finally gets to be a big kid history teacher?

[General Septem]

Congratulations on the job. You have my encomium. :beer

 

Since you're already dealing with us big kids, you should be well prepared.

[momma]

Congratulations on the job. You have my encomium. :beer

 

Since you're already dealing with us big kids, you should be well prepared.

 

It is kinda like managing a high school classroom around here sometimes .

[momma]

227.June 15th, 2007man·go, n.- 1a. A tropical Asian evergreen tree (Mangifera indica) cultivated for its edible fruit.

b. The ovoid fruit of this tree, having a smooth rind, sweet juicy flesh, and a flat one-seeded stone. It is eaten ripe or pickled when green.

 

2. Any of various types of pickle, especially a pickled stuffed sweet pepper.

 

-This word originated in India

 

As early as 1582 English speakers were tasting mangos, if only in print. Nicholas Lichefield, translating Lopes de Castanheda's account of The Historie of the Discouerie and Conquest of the East Indias, mentioned Mangas as one of the fruits of India. In 1598 another translation, this one of John Huighen van Linschoten's Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies, informed English readers that "The Mangas is inwardly yellowish, but in cutting it is waterish.... The season when Mangas are ripe is in Lent."

 

It would be several centuries, however, before fresh mangos could be imported to English-speaking countries. Until then, the only way they could travel to England and America was as pickles. Prepared Indian style, a mango is not just an ordinary pickle but an experience. Saroj's Cookbook from present-day India has a recipe for Spicy Mango Pickle that starts with three mangoes chopped into chunks and adds mustard, fenugreek, aniseed, turmeric powder, a half cup of salt, and a half cup of red chili powder, topped off with a cup of oil. According to Saroj, "This pickle will not go bad for over a year even at room temperature."

 

Because mangos were first known to Americans in this pickled form, mango was sometimes used to mean any pickled fruit, even if not from the mango tree or from India. An American recipe from 1847 noted in the Dictionary of American Regional English calls for "melon mangoes" to be stuffed with horseradish, cucumbers, green beans, nasturtiums, onions, mustard seed, peppercorns, cloves, and all-spice before being pickled. Muskmelons, cucumbers, and green peppers were all made into "mangoes." Even today green peppers are sometimes called mangoes or mango peppers in the middle of the United States because they used to be pickled that way.

 

Malayalam is one of the major languages of India, and indeed one of the most populous in the world. About thirty-five million people in southwestern India speak Malayalam, a Dravidian language. Malayalam has also given us copra (dried coconut meat, 1584), teak (1698), and jackfruit (1830), which remains less known and less appreciated than the mango.

 

-The Nutritional Value for: mangos, raw -135 35 1 0 207 1 0.1

 

-Top 12 Mango Producers - 2005 measured in hectares

India 1,600,000

China 433,600

Thailand 285,000

Indonesia 273,440

Mexico 173,837

Philippines 160,000

Pakistan 151,500

Nigeria 125,000

Guinea 82,000

Brazil 68,000

Vietnam 53,000

Bangladesh 51,000

World Total 3,870,200

[momma]

228.June 16th, 2007nif·ty, adj. or n.-adj.

 

First-rate; great: a nifty idea.

 

n.

 

A nifty person or thing, especially a clever joke.

 

-Synonyms: divine, fabulous, fantastic, fantastical, glorious, marvelous, sensational, splendid, superb, terrific, wonderful

 

-Origin: 1866

 

Sure, we had been engaged in a great Civil War, but some Americans were managing to have a nifty time in spite of it. One of them was Mark Twain, who used nifty in his depiction of slang used in Virginia City, Nevada, in the early 1860s. "As all the peoples of the earth had representative adventurers in the Silverland," Twain wrote in Roughing It (1872), "and as each adventurer had brought the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination made the slang of Nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in the mines of California in the 'early days.' Slang was the language of Nevada. It was hard to preach a sermon without it, and be understood."

 

Twain continues with the story of Buck Fanshaw's funeral. A fireman, Scotty Briggs, making arrangements for the funeral, says to the puzzled minister, "We are going to get the thing up regardless, you know. He was always nifty himself, and so you bet you his funeral ain't going to be no slouch--solid silver door-plate on his coffin, six plumes on the hearse...."

 

Another writer of the gold- and silver-fevered West, Bret Harte, employs nifty in a poem written in the 1860s, "The Tale of a Pony." He sets his humorous story in far-away Paris, but uses the American slang word to describe his young heroine's "new turn-out," or horse-drawn carriage: "Smart! You bet your life 'twas that! Nifty! (short for magnificat) " Harte's explanation of nifty is not meant to be taken seriously (in fact, the word's origins are unknown), but the word he and Twain presented to the public has found many nifty uses ever since.

[Guest element]

I'm about to order a nifty 8800GTS 320meg. :angel:

[momma]

229.June 17th, 2007an·drog·y·nous, adj.- 1. Biology. Having both female and male characteristics; hermaphroditic.

 

2. Being neither distinguishably masculine nor feminine, as in dress, appearance, or behavior.

 

-Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek words andras (άνδρας) (meaning man) and gyne (γυνή) (meaning woman).

 

-Androgynous traits are those that either have no gender value, or have some aspects generally attributed to the opposite gender. Physiological androgyny (compare intersex), which deals with physical traits, is distinct from behavioral androgyny which deals with personal and social anomalies in gender, and from psychological androgyny, which is a matter of gender identity. A psychologically androgynous person is commonly known as an androgyne, although there is a politicized version known as genderqueer.

 

-To say that a culture or relationship is androgynous is to say that it lacks rigid gender roles and that the people involved display characteristics or partake in activities traditionally associated with the other gender. The term androgynous is often used to refer to a person whose look or build make determining their gender difficult but is generally not used as a synonym for actual intersexuality, transgender or two-spirit people. Occasionally, people who do not actually define themselves as androgynes adapt their physical appearance to look androgynous. This outward androgyny has been used as a fashion statement, and some of the milder forms of it (women wearing men's pants/men wearing skirts, for example) are not perceived as transgendered behavior.

 

-Androgyny in culture

 

-Music

 

* The 1970s rock genre, glam rock, which peaked in 1973, had players, such as David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Alice Cooper (see cover of Easy Action), Suzie Quatro and Queen, who dressed in an androgynous manner.

* The song and subsequent video "Androgyny" by Garbage.

* The Joan Jett song "Androgynous" talks about the concept.

* The song "Androgynous" by The Replacements

 

-Movies and TV

 

* The movie Orlando follows the young nobleman Orlando, who lives through four centuries in Britain and changes . on the way, ending up as an androgynous being.

* In the movie Stargate, the Egyptian god Ra is portrayed as an androgynous figure.

* In the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled The Outcast, The Enterprise helps an androgynous race.

* Saturday Night Live's popular character "Pat", played by Julia Sweeney, was portrayed as an androgynous figure.

* The figure of Satan in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ is presented as genderless. The character was portrayed by a woman, Rosalinda Celentano.

* The movie and the graphic novel 300 both showed the Persian king, Xerxes I as an androgynous figure.

* Both of the characters of Hedwig and Tommy in Hedwig And The Angry Inch were androgynous, although to different extremes.

[momma]

230.June 18th, 2007OK, n., adv., adj., interj., or v.-n.

 

Approval; agreement: Get your supervisor's OK before taking a day off.

 

adj.

 

1. Agreeable; acceptable: Was everything OK with your stay?

 

2. Satisfactory; good: an OK fellow.

 

3. Not excellent and not poor; mediocre: made an OK presentation.

 

4. In proper or satisfactory operational or working order: Is the battery OK?

 

5. Correct: That answer is OK.

 

6. Uninjured; safe: The skier fell but was OK.

 

7. Fairly healthy; well: Thanks to the medicine, the patient was OK.

 

adv.

 

Fine; well enough; adequately: a television that works OK despite its age.

 

interj.

 

Used to express approval or agreement.

 

v.

 

To approve of or agree to; authorize.

 

-Synonyms: allowance, approbation, approval, authorization, consent, endorsement, leave, license, permission, permit.

 

acceptance, acquiescence, agreement, assent, consent, nod, yes.

 

verb

 

allow, approbate, approve, authorize, consent, endorse, let, permit, sanction.

 

adverb

 

absolutely, agreed, all right, assuredly, aye, gladly, indubitably, roger, undoubtedly, unquestionably, willingly, yea, yes.

 

adjective

 

acceptable, adequate, all right, average, common, decent, fair, fairish, goodish, moderate, passable, respectable, satisfactory, sufficient, tolerable.

 

-Antonyms: bad, incorrect, intolerable, unacceptable, unsatisfactory, unsuitable, wrong

 

-This word originated in United States

 

America's greatest contribution to the English language and indeed to languages all over the world is a joke. Or at least that's how it began.

 

In the summer of 1838 newspaper columnists in Boston thought nothing funnier than to reduce a phrase to its initials (with an explanation in parentheses). Allen Walker Read, the premier historian of our most famous expression, found this example in the Boston Morning Post of June 12, 1838: "We understand that J. Eliot Brown, Esq., Secretary of the Boston Young Men's Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Indians, F.A.H. (fell at Hoboken, N.J.) on Saturday last at 4 o'clock, p.m. in a duel W.O.O.O.F.C. (with one of our first citizens.) What measures will be taken by the Society in consequence of this heart rending event, R.T.B.S. (remains to be seen)."

 

To add to the humor, columnists sometimes misspelled the abbreviations. One 1838 example was O.W., meaning "all right," with blatant misspellings of both initial letters. That set the stage for an even more outrageous misspelling in March 1839: O.K., translated as "all correct." The joke was that neither O nor K was correct.

 

O.K. might have died out with O.W., R.T.B.S., and the rest of the laughable abbreviations if "Old Kinderhook," President Martin Van Buren (born in Kinderhook, New York), hadn't running for reelection in 1840. "O.K. clubs" supporting him were established throughout the country. Old Kinderhook lost, but O.K. won a permanent place in American English.

 

Until about 1900, however, O.K. remained obscure. Even Mark Twain apparently never used it. But the twentieth century turned out to be an OK century, perhaps encouraged by scholarly President Woodrow Wilson's use of "okeh" on official documents. (He spelled it "okeh" because he mistakenly thought it came from the Choctaw Indian language.) It was streamlined, too, in this century, increasingly written without the periods that mark it as a mock abbreviation. We now live in an OK world where it is difficult to imagine a conversation or a computer session without frequent use of OK.

 

-There are also many proposed international etymologies of O.K., but they lack supporting written evidence just as the American folk etymologies do.

 

In Greek, O.K. is a correctly-spelled abbreviation for the expression, Ola Kala (Ὅλα Καλά, ΟΚ), which has the same meaning as the American English "okay". It is possible that Greek sailors used Ola Kala in American ports.

 

"Waw-kay" is an exclamation in both Bantu and Wolof dialects: "waw" means yes, and "kay" is an emphatic, so "waw-kay" is an emphatic yes. There is a record of a traveller from England who encountered such usage from a slave in Virginia in the 18th century[8]:

 

Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe;...

 

Although this usage of "kay" significantly predates the initialism fad in Boston, there is no record that connects this particular Bantu word to the use O.K. among non-slave English speakers. However, some other English words such as jive (jev) and banana have uncontested Bantu or Wolof origins.

 

The word of assent in Occitan is òc (from Latin hoc), as opposed to oïl (< Lat. "hoc ille), the ancestor of the modern French oui, from the langue d'oïl of Northern France. However, before the word "okay" appeared in American English, the final consonant in Occitan òc tended to become silent, leading to the two possible pronunciations: [ɔ / ɔk]. In any case, it is very unlikely that this Occitan word is the origin of okay.

 

French fishermen, including those based in New Orleans, might sometimes have used the phrase "au quai", literally "to the quay", to mean that a fishing trip was successful (or went okay) and therefore there were fish to unload at the quay.

 

The term OK is also used by typesetters and people working in publishing. A manuscript that did not need any changes or corrections would be marked O.K. for Ohne Korrektur (German for 'without correction'). Other stories are that it comes from the British English word hoacky (the last load of the harvest), the Finnish word oikein ('that's right' or 'correct'), or the Scottish expression och aye (oh yes).

 

Yet another unsupported speculation is that the word derives from Spanish. English speakers may have directly translated the phrase 'or what' into Spanish, and the Spanish speakers have regarded it as an English dialectal feature. Or Spanish speakers may have used the phrase '¿o qué?' (or what?) in the end of many English sentences, letting English speakers interpret it as a dialectal 'right' and thus replied with an affirmative 'o qué'.

 

There may also be a tie in to Finnish immigrants to the US. The Finnish "oikea" tranlates to accurate, arrant, authentic, correct, due, exact, genuine, germain, just, positive, proper, pure, real, right (meaning also the direction), sound, true, veritable, regular, as in "Se on oikein" (It is correct or OK)

 

In Sesotho, the national language of Lesotho, the phrase "ho lokile," (pronounced "ho low-key-lay") means literally "that/this/it is good." This is an unlikely source for the English okay, but English-speaking students of Sesotho experience an eerie moment when introduced to this very common phrase. (Similarly, the phrase "e-a ntatae" means "yes, sir" - literally, "yes, father." It is pronounced very much like "A-on Daddy"!)

[General Septem]

"Joo wanna play rough? OK! Say 'ello to my lil' friend!"

[DuTcH]

this one is more on my level :tooth:

sorry about not posting as of late been hard at work:sweat:

but I promise to try harder posting if thats OK:angel: