[LEAPSECS] metafilter followup of the leap rant

[Rob Seaman]

On Jan 2, 2014, at 1:48 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:


> Ignorance is never good policy.

> 

> Poul-Henning


The irony is strong with this one.

"Day" is a more established concept than duration.  Both are needed to express the inherent complexity of timekeeping in either real or virtual worlds.


> [1] If something can be "new-fangled" then obviously somebody "fangled" it, and that person must by necessity be a "fangler".


By all means coin new usage...this will be aided by recognizing that each word has an actual history similar to what you are coining:

Origin: 
1425–75; late Middle English,  equivalent to newefangel - fond of or taken by what is new ( newe new + -fangel,Old English *fangol  inclined to take, equivalent to fang-,  stem of fōn  to take (cf. fang2 ) + -ol  adj. suffix) + -ed3

This is known as the practice of fangle (see Andrew Pickering).

Rob
--

"The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."  - Ralph Waldo Emerson