I might as well make it official: this blog is in semi-dormant status again. My time is largely consumed by a coding project: specifically, generating a vocabulary list to be used in a spellchecker. I don’t have a lot of time to devote to thought about other things.
Yet they say: Write about what you know. I have largely tried to avoid having my blog[s] turn into a Cheese Sandwich blog, but some morsels of my daily bread contain a bit of brain-nourishment, at least for language nerds like me. So I will try to make some brief posts, reporting interesting tidbits I’ve run across while working on this project.
Consider Latin nouns, for instance. The educated and erudite know that the correct plural ending for nouns ending in -us is -i; you might think, though, that this knowledge is not widely disseminated among the hoi polloi, and that the -es form would be widely used. That’s not always the case; consider, for example, the word incubus. A Google search turns up 1,340,000 hits on incubi, versus only 894 for incubuses and a meager 254 for incubusses. (That’s against a baseline of over 10,000,000 for the singular incubus.) I hypothesize that that’s because the word incubus isn’t all that widely known, hasn’t been incorporated into everyday English, so that the relatively small number of people who do know and use the term are likely to know and use the correct plural.
The hits turned up on the Anglicized plurals reveal some interesting things, too. Although incubuses outranks incubusses, a large proportion of the occurrences of the former come from online dictionaries, automatically generated word lists, etc; basically, “It’s a possible plural form so we’d better include it.” In contrast, almost all the hits on incubusses are from referring contexts; i.e., they’re actually talking about the things. (If, that is, you can refer to a nonexistent entity.) A large number of those use the stock phrase “incubusses and succubusses”, a usage that apparently originally appeared in the Mercurius Britannicus in 1644: “I think Incubusses and Sucubusses are Angells of light to these.” The Mercurius was a Parliamentarian newspaper during the English Civil War, so one might guess that it’s the Royalists who’re being compared unfavorably to these critters. (BTW, I don’t know if the single “c” in sucubusses was in the original or is what lawyer’s call a “scrivener’s error.” For what it’s worth, a Google search on sucubusses gets fewer than 100 hits.)
All that valuable information came from this page here. It’s a page from a mailing list called lit-ideas, self-described as a “discussion list for university professors in the humanities to discuss the impact of technology.” I must say, though, that these guys get into some territory that seems pretty far afield from that description. Here, for example, is the post on the above-referenced page:
In “My Memphis Memories — & Other Animals” — vol. 3, New Series, Seattle,
WA — Geary writes:
>I recall I was in the seminary studying to
>be a priest and would pray — sometimes in
>Latin, sometimes not — all day, every day
>for a wet dream — the only ’sex’ [sic with scare
>quotes, sic] we were allowed, now doncha know.R. Paul says that the passage on chess in PI (by Wittgenstein) is _not_ about tropes — and that ‘This is a king’ is LITERAL. I wonder what trope it is, though, that constitutes Geary’s phrase, ‘wet dream’. Surely a dream itself is not wet — or dry for that matter — nor the dreaming. Is this paronymy or _what_? (cf. Henley, The Wet Dreamers, ‘We are the wet dreamers, although’).
Anyway, the mediaevals in the list may _not_ be interested to know that Geary is here making reference to the well-developed theory (in Aquinas, after St. Augustine, etc) of the incubus and the sucubus. More in the ps.
Whew! Wittgenstein, nocturnal emissions, paronymy, Timothy McVey’s favorite poet, and scholastic theology, all in one brief post. Ich bin sprachlos.
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