new vocab

[fflo]

Always new words.  Do you know "nacelle" and "ferrule"?  Will I forget which is which, having learned them so close to each other?  Will the etymology help, somehow?  Nacelle's is a diminutive of ship, and ferrule's got a diminutive of bracelets combined with iron.

Did I ever tell you about the first (and only) date who was shocked that I'd used a word she didn't know, because she knows all the words?  Of course that was it for her, with me.  I think of her more than I might otherwise because I sometimes am near or on Haggerty Road.  She'd suggested we meet at a place there, and at some point the "Haggerty corridor" came up --- it just struck me that it's a double dactyl.  She'd never heard of dactyls.

Gee, I left this draft sitting, and didn't post it OR the Postcard of the Day, yesterday....

 

Comments

[amw.livejournal.com]

If it helps, you might be able to remember nacelle by watching Star Trek. Those two prongs on the back of the spaceship are called the port and starboard nacelles. I didn't even know it was a real word till just now 😅

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I learned nacelle from building plastic airplane models, where you had to glue the halves of the two engine nacelles together, then glue the engine cowlings to the fronts of the nacelles, and finally glue the nacelles to the wings.

I recall that ferules have holes in them but I'm a little vague on them. I'm also unclear on sintering. Once, one of my co-workers was talking about sintering, and I decided I'd best fess up to my ignorance and ask him what sintering meant. But it turns out that it was just his West Virginian accent, and he was talking about centering.

I remember learning about dactyls along with iambic pentameter in some long-ago English class. But aside from pentameter meaning it had 5 beats, I never really made sense of the terms.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

It's all about the accents within the "feet", or subsections of the line. Pentameter is a line of 5 strong beats, and iambs are 2-beat feet (unaccented followed by accented), so a line of iambic pentameter has 10 syllables altogether.

A dactyl is one of the three-beat feet. Anapest is another. With anapest you can remember where the accent falls by pronouncing the word wrong, and calling it an anaPEST. "Dactyl" only has 2 syllables, though, so I used to say dacTIHdyl to remember where the accent fell. ("Said CONrad o'CONner o'DONnell o'DELL, my VERy young FRIEND who is LEARNing to SPELL" — that's 2 sets of 3 dactyls plus 1 iamb.)

"iamb" is not an iamb but a trochee.

Poetry really meets lyrics in metrical feet, and other elements of prosody. Like the math in the music. When I was very young and I made up lines, I didn't use regular feet, so long as the accents felt natural where they fell. Later I found that that's what poetry people call "sprung rhythm"--- this Victorian guy Hopkins (not Johns, Gerard Manley) wrote that way.

I learned this stuff from Latin class, though, with the Aeneid, which is also sprung rhythm. We had to mark the scansion on it for my in-some-ways not-so-great 2nd Latin teacher. But that stuff about the syllables was good stuff.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

For some reason, talk about poetic syllables just makes my brain fog over and explode. Like differential equations, it's the kind of math that hurts my head.