Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/03/16
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Peter Dzwig wrote: > Concise OED: > > Synecdoche: ...ORIGIN Greek "sunekdhoke" from "sun-" = together + > "ekdekhesthai" = take up. > > Sorry I can't do the stresses ;-) Stress on the last syllable. :-) It's an old word. Cicero used it. For what it's worth: "gate" means "street", which is why there are so many "gates" around without a gate. Loan word from Scandinavian languages. The street names probably go back a while. "gate" still means street in Norwegian "gata" in Swedish and probably "gate" in Danish (I don't know Danish). Words can change once borrowed. The cleverest one I've heard today is: kimobitel (Swahili) ki- is the diminuative prefix. Mobitel was one of the first cellphones. "kimobitel" has been trasformed to mean "a little girl", one so small you could carry her around. Back to work ... Daniel > brad daly wrote: > >> FWIW, that's actually probably neo-greek from the 18th or 19th >> century, when the englightenmenters decided to label everything with >> brand new agglomerations of greek and latin words. >> >> sort of like the way in which we use "gate." we all know what a >> "gate" is; we probably walk through several every day. but as a >> suffix, since the early 1970s, it means "scandal," etc. that word has >> always been around, but it wasn't always part of the construction in >> which it is now used. >> >> i could be wrong, of course. >> >> --brad, english major, lover of words >> > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information