As I said in my last post, publishers have sent me several books lately; some will require time to read and absorb, but a couple are so obviously wonderful I can tell you about them right away.
1) Walker & Company’s Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed
2) Hippocrene Books, purveyor of references for some very hard-to-find languages (I have their little phrasebook/dictionaries for Georgian and Chechen next to each other on my shelf), have sent me a copy of their Modern Aramaic Dictionary & Phrasebook
I wonder where the “gorm” in the British usage “gormless”comes from? It certainly doesn’t fit
Burgess’s “human hog”.
Bud
Hippocrene’s dictionaries apalling. Badly typeset, often compiled by people who aren’t trained lexicographers, I respond to the argument “Well, there are no other options in print” by saying that Hippocrene dictionaries are actually worse than nothing.
Poor old Burgess. The Young cover all those meanings by, like, “weird” and “random”.
Interesting to see someone else has had a bad experience with Hippocrene — at one point I abandoned their Farsi dictionary in favor of pantomime, and I’ve avoided them ever since.
In general, I find most Hippocrene products to be pretty useless in terms of content; their dictionaries, for instance, generally have so few entries that they’re not even all that useful for travelers. But I think they do put out some useful publications, and that this varies in accord with whoever compiles them. They’ve recently published a “Basic Arabic Workbook”, by John Mace, for instance, which strikes me as quite useful.
Hippocrene’s dictionaries apalling.
I abandoned their Farsi dictionary in favor of pantomime, and I’ve avoided them ever since.
It’s impossible to generalize about Hippocrene products. As I said in this post, “the quality ranges from excellent to abysmal; caveat emptor.” Sure, they put out some total crap, but doesn’t every publisher? And it’s not like you can turn to another source for many of their languages; sure, you can find better books for Farsi, but not for Chechen or Aramaic. And though I’ll be glad to be corrected by someone who actually knows Aramaic and has had a chance to look it over, this one seems well done.
Don’t be a goop!
If I recall rightly what I was told by someone who should know, the Aramaic book is extremely purist – a lot of the words in it are neologisms for which most speakers would in practice use Arabic or Turkish equivalents.
Ah, that’s good to know.
We had a lot of fun laughing at the (Eastern) Armenian one in my field methods class.
Whatever Burgess “invented” it wasn’t the word gorm.
http://www.ceantar.org/Dicts/MB2/mb21.html
Are you sure it isn’t gaumless?
It actually was gaumless originally, but by the late 19th century non-rhotic confusion had caught up with it. OED:
gormless, a.
[f. gaum, dial. f. GOME notice, understanding + -LESS.]
Wanting sense, or discernment. Hence gormlessness, the quality of being gormless.
c1746 J. COLLIER (Tim Bobbin) Lanc. Dialect Wks. (1862) 55, I steart like o Wilcat, on wur welly gawmless. 1845 E. BRONTË Wuthering Heights xxi, Did I ever look so stupid: so ‘gaumless’ as Joseph calls it? 1861 WAUGH Birtle Carter’s Tale 19 Eh, thae greyt, gawmbless foo! Wheer arto for up theer! 1881 ‘BASIL’ Love the Debt iii, You lazy, idle, gaumless good-for-nowt! 1883 in B. WEBB My Apprenticeship iii. 161 Parliament is such a far-off thing, that [they].. say that it is ‘gormless meddling with it’. 1925 J. AGATE Contemporary Theatre 1924 44 Cordelia is a ‘gumph’ or, as we say in Lancashire, ‘gormless’. 1932 L. GOLDING Magnolia St. II. ii. 304 She just went on pulling the [beer] handle and in a moment.. the floor was swilling. ‘Mother!’ cried little Nellie sharply. ‘You are gormless!’ 1934 A. RANSOME Coot Club xix. 233 Ye’d better. He’ll ferget the salt else, the gormless old lummocks! 1940 Illustr. London News CXCVII. 164/2 He looks at once genial and ‘gormless’. 1951 ‘E. CRISPIN’ Long Divorce viii. 84 Pen’s been running after a gormless little twerp of a foreign school~master. […]
Given the Hibernian “gorm”, is it not conceivable that a soupcon of anti-irish sentiment, and not solely the non-rhotic confusion, conveniently assisted in the transformation?
Only if it’s conceivable that a significant number of English-speakers were aware of an Irish word with a completely irrelevant meaning (‘blue or green’) and decided for some reason to substitute its spelling in this word, which I don’t think it is.
“With its commendation of both Theodore Roosevelt and the Kaiser Wilhelm as having ‘spuzz’,
Chumble spuzz, doubtless.