Quotes & Word
Quotes of the Day for June 10, 2004
http://www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html
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Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic
Cheshire cat.
-- Sir Julian Huxley
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself
in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
-- Albert Einstein
We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well
and we've no manners.
-- George Bernard Shaw, "You Never Can Tell" (1898), act I
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
-- Henry Kissinger
the worthless word for the day is: zzxjoanw
/ziks-JO-an/ a Maori drum [Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary]
The Music-Lovers Encyclopedia by Rupert Hughes (all editions from 1914 to 1956) has this entry: "zzxjoanw (shaw) Maori. 1. Drum. 2. Fife. 3. Conclusion." According to Philip Cohen in Word Ways (Nov. 1976), there are several problems with this entry, notably the fact that it's an impossible Maori word, both in spelling and pronunciation. Cohen suspects that Hughes made up the word as a joke. In his book, Earth, David Brin has a Maori character playing a zzxjoanw. Asked about this, Brin said that he'd gotten the word from Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary. Anne Woodley, who is from New Zealand, agrees that ZZXJOANW is not a Maori word. She writes, "There are no Z, X or J in the Maori language - also the the phonetics aren't right for the Maori, or indeed any Pacific Island language, all of which come from the same family."
[thanx to Jeff Miller http://members.aol.com/gulfhigh2/words18.html]
this week: neologisms, nonsense words and non-words
http://home.mn.rr.com/wwftd