Posted on 01/08/2015 4:30:55 AM PST by secret garden
In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day".
solecism \SAH-luh-sih-zum\ noun
1. an ungrammatical combination of words in a sentence; also: a minor blunder in speech
2. something deviating from the proper, normal, or accepted order
3. a breach of etiquette or decorum
Example sentences:
As a copyeditor, Jane has the eyes of a hawk; rarely, if ever, does she let a writer's solecism slip past her.
"What [Leonard Lyons] presented in his columns was the essence of the person being reported on, and so even when one comes upon the occasional solecism or inaccuracy, it matters less because the portraits as a whole ring true."
— Martin Rubin, The Washington Times, September 5, 2011
Etymology:
The city of Soloi had a reputation for bad grammar. Located in Cilicia, an ancient coastal nation in Asia Minor, it was populated by Athenian colonists called soloikos (literally "inhabitant of Soloi"). According to historians, the colonists of Soloi allowed their native Athenian Greek to be corrupted and they fell to using words incorrectly. As a result, soloikos gained a new meaning: "speaking incorrectly." The Greeks used that sense as the basis of soloikismos, meaning "an ungrammatical combination of words." That root in turn gave rise to the Latin soloecismus, the direct ancestor of the English word solecism. Nowadays, solecism can refer to social blunders as well as sloppy syntax.
The sentence must, in some way, relate to the news of the day. The Review threads are linked for your edification. ;-)
Practice makes perfect.....post on....
Review Thread One: Word For The Day, Thursday 11/14/02: Raffish
Review Thread Two: Word For The Day, Tuesday 1/14/03: Roister
Review Thread Three: Word For The Day, Tuesday 1/28/03: Obdurate
WFB's attempt to emulate us ; ) No pushing at the door please!
Joe Biden’s solecism with a Congressman’s daughter yesterday was cringeworthy and downright creepy. The inmates are running the asylum.
Alas, is there ANYthing in the news today that is not a solecism? :-(
i still think that there are nine planets in the solecism
If a solecism is a small flat error, a tunacism must be a nice big round one, right?
1 degree here. I put on an extra layer.
A++ for you!
5 here, windchill -8. Hate it. Chooks still in the dog crate in the garage. Waiting as long as I can this morning before letting them out. It’s 35 in the garage.
So essentially, it remains a solecism until Joe Biden announces a running mate, and then it becomes a bicism.
There is a big difference between saying people should try not to offend others and saying people should be killed for it.
It’s the difference between calls for civility and calls for submission.
Depending on how you define the definition of "planet", there could be a dozen planets. The largest "asteroid", Ceres, is big enough that gravitational force have pulled it into a sphere.
Take a pile of rocks big enough to be a world, and think about how much you have to squeeze those rocks to crumple them into a ball.
And then there are the Kuiper Belt Objects.
Scientists estimate that thousands of bodies more than 62 miles (100 km) in diameter travel around the sun within this belt, along with trillions of smaller objects, many of which are short-period comets.
The region also contains several dwarf planets, round worlds too large to be considered asteroids and yet not qualifying as planets because they’re too small, on an odd orbit, and don’t clear out the space around them the way the 8 planets do.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395879/thigh-gap-shaming-not-body-positive-katherine-timpf
So, apparently the UK has someone in the gov’t whose job it is to look at underwear ads.
I like Jefferson’s use of the word solecism:
“A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government.”
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Ritchie, December 25, 1820
As relevant now as ever. Witness Federal judges overturning the definition of marriage. Other Jefferson quotes on judicial tyranny:
Thomas Jefferson on Judicial Tyranny
“Nothing in the Constitution has given them [the federal judges] a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the Executive to decide for them. . . . The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.” (Letter to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804)
“The original error [was in] establishing a judiciary independent of the nation, and which, from the citadel of the law, can turn its guns on those they were meant to defend, and control and fashion their proceedings to its own will.” (Letter to John Wayles Eppes, 1807)
“Our Constitution . . . intending to establish three departments, co-ordinate and independent that they might check and balance one another, it has given—according to this opinion to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of others; and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation. . . . The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.” (Letter to Judge Spencer Roane, Sept. 6, 1819)
“You seem . . . to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so . . . and their power [is] the more dangerous, as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.” (Letter to William Jarvis, Sept. 28, 1820)
“The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet, and they are too well versed in English law to forget the maxim, ‘boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem’ [good judges have ample jurisdiction]. . . . A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government.” (Letter to Thomas Ritchie, Dec. 25, 1820)
“The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.” (Letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821)
“The great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them.” (Letter to Judge Spencer Roane, 1821)
“At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life if secured against all liability to account.” (Letter to A. Coray, October 31, 1823)
“One single object… [will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation.” (Letter to Edward Livingston, March 25, 1825)
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