Vocabulary Blog

In a previous post, I showed some word roots that although sound the same, are completely unrelated.

I found another example today with the word venery.  Venery has two definitions, both of different origins.

1. venery - hunting for wild animal
2. venery - the pursuit of sexual pleasure or indulgence

I can imagine an award conversation based around the misinterpretation of this word.

Bob:  Hey John, how was your weekend?
John:  It was great, the wife was out of town, so I had an entire weekend of venery.
Bob:  I didn’t realize anything was in season.  What’d you get?
John:  A blond and a brunette

Sorry if that was lame.

The first definition comes from the Latin word venor, meaning to hunt (think venison).  The second definition comes from the Latin venus or vener-, meaning desire or love (think venereal).

Don’t confuse this with the similar-sounding Latin root venera, from which we get venerable.

There’s a term in language processing call an n-gram, which is a sequence of n words.  A bi-gram , for example, is a sequence of two words.

I’ve been wondering if there are common bi-grams of words in GRE and SAT vocabularies that could make it easier to determine answers to fill-in-the-blank questions.

One example might be the word halcyon.

halcyon - Calm, undisturbed, peaceful, serene.

The phrase halcyon days (also a bi-gram) is used to refer to a period of calmness during the winter.  I thought it’d be interesting to search through texts to see if most uses of halcyon follow that pattern.

Some examples I’ve found

When young, sweet love, with her luring smile,
The mystic charm-light of halcyon hours,

Bird of the sea rocks, of the bursting spray,
O halcyon bird,
That wheelest crying, crying, on thy way;

Weavers, weaving at break of day,
Why do you weave a garment so gay? . . .
Blue as the wing of a halcyon wild,
We weave the robes of a new-born child.

The halcyon days at length draw to a close, and sorrows “in
battalions” compel them to emigrate and bid

“Assign’d am I to be the English scourge–
This night the siege assuredly I’ll raise:
Expect St. Martin’s Summer, halcyon days,
Since I have entered into these wars.”

So total, I found two days, one hours, one wild, and one bird.  My theory unfortunately doesn’t pan out for halcyon, but I’ll keep looking.

Prepare is an interesting word.  It comes from the Latin word pre (before) and the word paro (make ready).  So it literally means to make ready beforehand, which is basically the definition of prepare.  The pre part seems redundant though.  You can’t get ready after the fact, so there’s no postpare.  And there’s no word pare that simply means to get ready during.  There’s also a Latin word preparo, which means the same thing as paro, so even the Romans were just as confused as us.

Next time somebody “preps” for the SATs or GREs, they’re actually missing the most important part–pare.

I’ll also leave you with some other English words that are derived from paro.

pare - when you peel a vegetable, you’re preparing it.

apparatus- an instrument used to prepare something.

Just be careful not to confuse paro words with the root word par, meaning equal, or the Greek prefix para, meaning beside or side-by-side (parody, parable, paradox, etc.)

There’s probably a word for the phenomenon where once you learn a new word you start to notice it everywhere.  I don’t know what that word is, so I’m going to hope that somebody posts it in a comment.

The reason I bring this up is because I was reading an article on Wikipedia today and saw ostensible used, which was the topic of one of my previous posts.

. . . some argue that it employed ideas and methods that were relatively new at the time and, due to the ostensible success of the operation, led to Operation PBSUCCESS becoming the de facto model for the overthrow or destabilization of a defiant government for some time to come . . .

If nothing else comes from this blog, I can at least point to this as a success.

I was watching a show recently in which they used the term per diem.  I honestly hadn’t heard that expression, but even if I hadn’t taken highschool Latin, I could tell that it means “per day”.  I knew what diem meant because of the well-known Latin phrase carpe diem, which means “seize the day”.

I wondered though, did diem ever find itself into English words, or was it merely destined for use in Latin phrases?

I decided to do some research.  My first mistake is that the Latin root is dies.  Diem is the accusative case in the 5th declension.  I perused word lists without any luck, but finally after some seriously googling I found what I was looking for.

nudiustertian - this has to be one of the best words that I’ve never heard.  It means “the day before yesterday”, and comes from a combination of words literally meaning “now is the third day”.  Isn’t that beautiful?  Unfortunately this one will probably never appear on the GRE or SAT.  It isn’t even in Webster’s.  I could only find it in the Oxford dictionary.

meridian - used to mean “midday”, as a combination of medius (mid) and dies (day).

journey - you wouldn’t know by looking at it, but this one came to us from Latin to French to English and literally means “a day’s trip”.

diet - a found an explanation of this one here, although etymologists aren’t positive that they’re related.

dismal - from dies mali, literally “evil days”.

diurnal - I’ll leave you with this one, which might actually appear on the GRE or SAT.  It means “during the day”, or “daily”.

Janet Evanovich is to the New York Times Best Seller list what Cliff Clavin is to Cheers.   If the NYT Best Seller list was a bar, the number-one stool would be perfectly molded to the shape of Evanovich’s buttox.
Wow, that reference made me feel old.

I don’t want to exclude contemporary writers from analysis, even though it is slightly more difficult to obtain the texts for their works.

I took a look at the first ten books of Janet Evanovich’s Plum series (the one where all the titles start with a number).  I made a table comparing the total number of words and the total number of unique words.

Overall she seems fairly consistent. The books are typically around 80,000 words, and have a vocabulary of 6500 words.  However, there is a noticeable drop off in vocabulary between the third and fourth book.  Maybe she lost her thesaurus.

Since I still have some Mark Twain handy, I’ll first compare her books to one of his works.  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is similiar in length and weighs in at 74,000 words, 7600 of which are unique.  That vocabulary isn’t much more than one of Evanovich’s books.

Next I’ll try a British author, like Charles Dickens.  It was difficult to find a book of his of comparable size.  I finally settled upon one of his non-fiction books, Pictures from Italy.  Even at only 75,000 words its vocabulary weighs in at 9100!  Just for fun I’ll look at another British book, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights which packs in a vocabulary of 9500 words.

I don’t like to jump to conclusions with such a small sample size, but it does seem that the British do know the English best.

I performed a similar exercise on the complete poetic works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Given that it’s much smaller than Twain’s complete works, the vocabulary list is noticeably shorter–8,000 compared to Twain’s 45,000–and much easier to work with.

Given Poe’s reputation as the Master of the Macabre, I thought I’d take a look at some of the words he used to see if that title is justified.

Off to a good start . . .

That’s disappointing.

Same here.

OK, so maybe it’s not fair to compare words like dark and light.  Light is an overloaded word.  Websters lists 8 definitions for dark and 15 definitions for light.

It might be more interesting to look at the rate at which Poe used certain words in comparison with other authors.

The word death made up .035% of Poe’s words, compared to .086% for Twain.  Wait, that means that Twain used death at more than twice the rate of Poe.

Let’s try another one.  Poe used blood .012% of the time, compared to .015% for twain.  I’ll just have to reserve judgment until I actually read more of Poe.  It’s not the number of words you use, or even the number of times you use them that matters, it’s how you use them.

While I’m on the subject of Mark Twain, I thought I’d do some simple analysis on his vocabulary.  I grabbed his complete works from the gutenberg project, and started doing a rough analysis of his word use.

I’ll estimate that there are about 45,000 words, although that includes proper nouns, many eye dialects, and words like Personaleinkommensteuerschatzungskommissionsmitgliedsreisekostenrechnungserganzungsrevisionsfund.

Below are the top 10 words by count.

There are over 15,000 words that Twain used only once.  Sorry, but I won’t be listing those here.

There’s nothing too interesting yet, but tomorrow I hope to dig deeper into the data and possibly compare it to other authors.

I was practicing GRE words at http://gre-word-test.com, and I sadly missed a question related to the word ostensible. I’m more familiar with the word ostentatious, but I want to be sure that I can properly distinguish between the two.

ostensible - meant for appearance; apparent
ostentatious - intended to attract notice; showy

They’re both derived from the Latin word meaning to display or exhibit.

I’ll take a break from British writers and look towards the classic American writer Mark Twain for some examples.

Here in The Prince and the Pauper Twain describes the display of a wedding ring as ostentatious.

There sat Elizabeth of York in the midst of an immense white rose, whose petals formed elaborate furbelows around her; by her side was Henry VII., issuing out of a vast red rose, disposed in the same manner: the hands of the royal pair were locked together, and the wedding-ring ostentatiously displayed.

In another writing, Twain uses ostensible to describe a horse believed to be seven, but in fact is fourteen years old.

I believed that this was insubordination, but I was full of uncertainties about everything military, and so I let the thing pass, and went and ordered Smith, the blacksmith’s apprentice, to feed the mule; but he merely gave me a large, cold, sarcastic grin, such as an ostensibly seven-year-old horse gives you when you lift his lip and find he is fourteen, and turned his back on me.

I was inspired by the excerpt from my last entry to add two more words (those British authors sure have a way with words).

onerous - burdensome; difficult; wearing; tiring

perusal - studying something carefully

I do know what perusal means, but I’ll swallow my pride and admit that I used to have it wrong. The context in which I often saw peruse used was something along the lines of “I perused the magazine.”, which I assumed to mean the act of casually skimming through; that’s the way I usually read magazines. Instead it means the exact opposite. Charlotte Bronte had it right.