In 2005, archivist George Redmonds discovered something surprising among English birth records of the 14th century: a girl named Diot Coke.
She was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1379. Researchers at Britain’s National Archives believe that her first name is a diminutive of Dionisia and her last name a variation of Cook.
She might have done worse. Popular girls’ names of the time included Godelena, Helwise, Idony, and Avice.
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary gives no pronunciation for YHWH.
treen
adj. made of wood
German astronomer Karl Reinmuth discovered and named more than 400 asteroids. Among them are these eight:
1227 Geranium
1228 Scabiosa
1229 Tilia
1230 Riceia
1231 Auricula
1232 Cortusa
1233 Kobresia
1234 Elyna
Their initials spell G. STRACKE, for Gustav Stracke, a fellow astronomer who had asked that no planet be named after him. In this way Reinmuth could honor his colleague without contradicting his wish.
oblectation
n. delight, pleasure, enjoyment
adlubescence
n. pleasure or delight
deliciate
v. to delight oneself
Ixonia, Wisconsin, was named at random.
Unable to agree on a name for the town, the residents printed the alphabet on slips of paper, and a girl named Mary Piper drew letters successively until a name was formed.
The town was christened Ixonia on Jan. 21, 1846, and it remains the only Ixonia in the United States.
This Latin sentence consists entirely of repeated syllables:
Te tero, Roma, manu nuda, date tela, latete.
“It is you I destroy, Rome, with bare hands, give up weapons, hide yourself.”
See Repeat Performance.
Sergei Prokofiev died on the same day that Joseph Stalin’s death was announced. Moscow was so thronged with mourners that three days passed before the composer’s body could be removed for a funeral service.
(Thanks, Alina.)
mancipate
v. to enslave
“But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.”
So says Casca to Cassius in Julius Caesar, and the expression has been current in our language for 400 years. In 1978, Arnold Rosenberg of the IBM Research Center began to wonder: If we can take that as a general consensus that Greek is harder than English, then perhaps we could seek similar expressions in other languages and so discover the hardest natural language. For example, if Germans say “That seems like Spanish to me” (Das kommt mir spanisch vor), and Finns say “It is totally Hebrew to me” (Se on minulle tāyttā hepreaa), then arguably Spanish is harder than German and Hebrew is harder than Finnish. Rosenberg set about collecting such idioms, and the final picture was surprisingly clear:
“Although we have found numerous hardest languages in our quest, we must acknowledge the special position of Chinese among the hardest languages,” he concluded. “If we were backed into a corner and forced to select a single language that deserved the designation ‘hardest,’ then, in terms of popular consensus, of geographical consensus, and of cultural consensus … Chinese would be the hands-down winner.”
(Arnold L. Rosenberg, “The Hardest Natural Languages,” Lingvisticæ Investigationes, June 1979.)