lostNfound
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Mar 20, 2005
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- 13,675
OLD New words. behind the rare & obscure window(well do the rocket clock next week)
I was talking to someone older than jesus' last toenail clipping, (did Jesus have toenails or did he perform miracles on those as well?) and he used the word digladiation. Id never heard it before.
DIGLADIATION
Strife or bickering.
That’s the more recent sense, though not one you’re likely to have come across, digladiation being as archaic as any word that has ever featured in this section. Dr Johnson included it in his Dictionary, together with many another strange creation, illustrating it with this quotation from Joseph Glanvill's The Vanity of Dogmatizing, or Confidence in Opinions of 1665, “Aristotle seems purposely to intend the cherishing of controversial digladiations, by his own affectation of an intricate obscurity”.
Thomas McCrie wrote disparagingly about “scholastic wrangling and digladiation” in his work The Life of Andrew Melville of 1819. It appeared a few times after that, as a ponderous and obscurely humorous literary term, in reference especially to courtroom advocatory sparring, but it seems to have died out completely by the end of the nineteenth century.
The link with strife may suggest a connection with gladiator, and indeed physical aggression was the first meaning—in particular hand-to-hand combat with swords. The word is from Latin gladius, the short sword wielded by the gladiators of classical times. To digladiate, you might say, is to cross swords.
What kind of obscure words have you just learnt recently?
PLEASE SHARE!
And no this isnt a word of the day thread, this is for words that you never hear anywhere, except for old people in roman sandles.
I was talking to someone older than jesus' last toenail clipping, (did Jesus have toenails or did he perform miracles on those as well?) and he used the word digladiation. Id never heard it before.
DIGLADIATION
Strife or bickering.
That’s the more recent sense, though not one you’re likely to have come across, digladiation being as archaic as any word that has ever featured in this section. Dr Johnson included it in his Dictionary, together with many another strange creation, illustrating it with this quotation from Joseph Glanvill's The Vanity of Dogmatizing, or Confidence in Opinions of 1665, “Aristotle seems purposely to intend the cherishing of controversial digladiations, by his own affectation of an intricate obscurity”.
Thomas McCrie wrote disparagingly about “scholastic wrangling and digladiation” in his work The Life of Andrew Melville of 1819. It appeared a few times after that, as a ponderous and obscurely humorous literary term, in reference especially to courtroom advocatory sparring, but it seems to have died out completely by the end of the nineteenth century.
The link with strife may suggest a connection with gladiator, and indeed physical aggression was the first meaning—in particular hand-to-hand combat with swords. The word is from Latin gladius, the short sword wielded by the gladiators of classical times. To digladiate, you might say, is to cross swords.
What kind of obscure words have you just learnt recently?
PLEASE SHARE!
And no this isnt a word of the day thread, this is for words that you never hear anywhere, except for old people in roman sandles.
