yesterday there were two words. i have absolutely no idea where they came from or how or if they are related. they were hirsute and meshuga.
hirsute - adj - covered with stiff short hairs
meshuga - yiddish - crazy
the word of today is sidereal - adj. - of, relating to, or expressed in relation to stars or constellations. i actually know where this one came from. i am reading a book called Pendulum about the life of Leon Foucault who was the first person to empirically show that the earth rotates. he did this using a pendulum, which if you’ve ever been to the Pantheon in Paris, you have seen a replica. anyway, when he got older and couldn’t leave his bed, he invented a device called a siderostat that allowed him to watch the night sky while lying in bed. it’s similar to a heliostat which allows one to look at and study the sun. but i’ve always liked the word sidereal, pronounced sid-air-ee-uhl.
sometimes i get words stuck in my head. imagine an all too familiar song stuck in the head day, which invariably it turns out that you don’t even know the whole song, so it’s simply a part of a song on endless repeat up there, but instead of a melody and/or lyrics it is a word. just one word. repeating over and over. this happens to me on a frighteningly regular basis. last thursday i found myself cutting plywood on the table saw with the word ‘ersatz’ on the loop. two days before that it was ‘hem and haw’. tonight it was ‘multivalent’. sometimes i know what these words mean, sometimes i have no idea. sometimes i can remember where i heard the word or read it, sometimes not. all i generally know is that it’s there and my mind can come up with a plethora of ways of thinking it. so i’ve decided to start posting them with their definitions and other details when this occurs. i’ve also made a separate page called ‘word of the day’ (link in the right column) in which i will compile the lot. so…
1.30.07 - ‘hem and haw’ - (idiomatic) to discuss, deliberate, or contemplate rather than taking action.
2.1.07 - ‘ersatz’ - from german, essentially a replacement for something or other, tends to be generic or inferior to the original thing
2.4.07 - ‘multivalent’ - basically it means that something can be connected in multiple ways. in linguistic use it means ‘has many meanings’ (which having a word that means ‘having many meanings’ is just interesting). in chemistry it is used to speak of the combining capacity of atoms. in genetics it’s ‘having three or more homologous chromosomes during the first division of meiosis’. and in immunology it’s ‘having more than one attachment site for an antibody or antigen’.