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Hapax Legomenon Lovers


Pyrotex

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Excellent contribution. I don't know.

 

Say, that a word, rendered phonetically into English as, "bloustel", was discovered in the OT book of Hezekiah in chapter 9 verse 9:

 

"As goes the weasel to his den, Daniel beseeched the king for a bloustel, saying that his kin sought to kill him."

 

Let's say, the ancient Hebrew (or Greek or whatever) word has never been found in any other text. Okay. Bloustel is a hapax. We're not sure what it means. Maybe it means protection? Sanctuary? An assassin? A bodyguard? A slow boat to China? A royal edict making Daniel forgiven of whatever it was he did to piss off his kin? A three-toes sloth?

 

Anyhow, let's further say, that Reverend Poncho starts his new TV show on the Religion channel, and he uses that verse in his first sermon, and for some reason it catches on, and goes viral, and the next thing you know, everyone is saying "bloustel".

 

"Don't get in my face, man, I gotta bloustel."

or, "Don't make me open this can of bloustel on yo ***."

Bloustel appears all over the internet, enters common usage in newspapers and novels, and makes it to the Dictionary in less than two years.

 

Now, is "bloustel" still a hapax?

 

I would say yes. Anyone else?

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...Anyhow, let's further say, that Reverend Poncho starts his new TV show on the Religion channel, and he uses that verse in his first sermon, and for some reason it catches on, and goes viral, and the next thing you know, everyone is saying "bloustel".

 

"Don't get in my face, man, I gotta bloustel."

or, "Don't make me open this can of bloustel on yo ***."

Bloustel appears all over the internet, enters common usage in newspapers and novels, and makes it to the Dictionary in less than two years.

 

Now, is "bloustel" still a hapax?

 

I would say yes. Anyone else?

 

yes of course. otherwise, as soon as any hapax legomenon was mentioned as a hapax legomenon , then it would cease to be a hapax legomenon and so in fact no hapax legomena would exist at all. :shrug: :bouquet: i believe your example describes a nonce word. :P

 

from the wicked pedants mouth (boldenation mine):

 

Hapax legomenon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A hapax legomenon (pronounced /ˈhæpɨks lɨˈɡɒmənɒn/ or /ˈheɪpæks/[1]) (pl. hapax legomena, sometimes abbreviated to hapaxes) is a word which occurs only once in either the written record of a language, the works of an author, or in a single text. While technically incorrect, the term is also sometimes used of a word that occurs in only one of an author's works, even though it occurs more than once in that work. Hapax legomenon is a direct transliteration from the Greek form ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning "[something] said [only] once".

 

The related terms dis legomenon, tris legomenon, and tetrakis legomenon refer respectively to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used.

 

Hapax legomena are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's Law,[2] which states that the frequency of any word in a work or corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words occurring are hapax legomena, and another 10% to 15% are dis legomena.[3] Thus, in the Brown Corpus of American English, about half of the 50,000 words are hapax legomena within that corpus.[4]

 

Note that the term hapax legomenon refers to a word's appearance in a body of text, not to its origins, nor to its prevalence in speech. It thus differs from a nonce word, which may never be recorded, or may find currency and be recorded widely, or may appear several times in the work which coins it, and so on. ...

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This is really ccol Pyro! :confused:

 

I'm still trying to wrap my head around it and differentiate betwixt nonce and hapax.

 

I'm guessing Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a nonce word, no?

 

It is exceedingly difficult to probe my mind/memory to find a legitimate hapax legomenon word or phrase, but that is part of what makes it so cool.

 

Thinking...

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Ok, I think I've groked one.

 

What about "Eaarth". It was coined fairly recently by McKibben to describe the current state of Earth's climate change. To whit...

 

What is "Eaarth"?

 

The meaning behind the title is that we really have created a new planet. Not entirely new. It looks more or less like the one we were born into; the same physical laws operate it. But it’s substantially different. There’s 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere than there was 50 years ago, much less ice at the top of the Earth, et cetera. Calling it "Eaarth," an admittedly weird word, is a way of calling people’s attention to the fact that the changes that have already happened are large enough that if you were visiting our planet in a spaceship, this place would look really different from the outside than it did just decades ago.

 

Salon.com "Eaarth": Earth is over

 

Si o no?

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