Pine Siskin
Two exotic words seen “in the wild” today:
Medieval prof today translated Einhard’s “sacrum et salvarum” (referring to Jerusalem) as “sacred and salvific, you might say”. Salvific means “tending toward salvation” or “savey”.
I stayed a bit after class to ask a question about syllable stress, and he whipped out “proparoxytone”, which is a word for words accented on the antepenult. So proparoxytone is itself a proparoxytone. I’d seen that one before years ago, during an ill-fated attempt to teach myself Greek, but had forgot it entirely.
November 5th, 2003 at 6:08 pm
“Salvific” is a word well known to theologians. Lama John uses it a lot to draw parallels between Christ and Buddhanature. I’ve got more on that sometime, if you’re interested.
November 5th, 2003 at 11:47 pm
Yeah, it kind of seems like one of those words Stephen D. might have floating around in his head, eh?
I just looked it up again and found it contrasted with “damnific”. Terrific!
November 6th, 2003 at 1:28 pm
Wow. Damnific is a damn fine word! And not one I’ve ever heard. Does it have an “archaic” or “obsolete” marker?
November 6th, 2003 at 1:54 pm
I’m glad you asked! I didn’t bother looking it up, it was just in one of the quotations for salvific.
It’s labeled obsolete by OED, yes. And it looks like it wasn’t used before Bailey put it in his dictionary:
DAMNIFICK, that bringeth damage or hurt, endamaging.
Johnson and following lexicographers picked it up from Bailey. It’s seen some small amount of usage in the wild, but, it seems to me, only from people so pedantic that they think of a Latinate word and then look it up to see if it’s “legal English”.