Word of the Day
syncope
noun
the contraction of a word by omitting one or more sounds from the middle.
More about syncope
Syncope “the contraction of a word by omitting sounds from the middle” comes from Ancient Greek synkopḗ “a cutting short” and is a compound of the elements syn- “together” and kop- (from kóptein “to cut”). Syn- (becoming sym- before b or p) is the Ancient Greek equivalent of the Latin-origin prefix co- “together” (as in cooperate) and appears in terms such as syndrome (literally “run together”), sympathy (“felt together”), and synthesis (“placed together”). The verb kóptein is related to comma, from Ancient Greek kómma “a piece cut off,” as well as to English hatchet—the latter because of Grimm’s law, which makes Ancient Greek k and Latin c tend to correspond to English h (compare heart and the recent Word of the Day cordiform). Syncope was first recorded in English in the late 14th century.
how is syncope used?
As for elisions in the middle of a word, called syncope, even purists do not hesitate to say bedlam (Bethlehem), bizness (business), can’t, don’t, I’ll, isn’t, … pacifist (pacificist), Wenzday (Wednesday). The syncopation of words ending in ary and ory (litry for literary, militry for military, labratry for laboratory) is an Anglicism which never fails to delight the American ear. Syncope is common in proper names: Bennett (Benedict), Dennis (Dionysius), Jerome (Hieronymus). Syncope between words is illustrated by don’t wantny (don’t want any). Pram (perambulator) illustrates both syncope and apocope.
The word “interesting” is pronounced today with either three or four syllables. [University of Michigan Professor] Anne Curzan explains the four syllable pronunciation, which often annoys the three-syllable camp, is actually the more traditional pronunciation …. “If you look in modern standard dictionaries from the last ten years, they will show multiple pronunciations, three and four syllables,” says Curzan. The process of losing a syllable is not rare in the English language. “The process of going from four to three, that losing of a syllable, is called syncope in linguistics, where an unstressed syllable just gets lost,” she says.
sinsyne
adverb
from that time; since then.
More about sinsyne
Sinsyne “from that time” is unusual in that it is a compound of two doublets, or words sharing a root that came into a language through different pathways, as we learned from the recent Words of the Day firth and quagmire. Much as firth is a doublet of fjord and (quag)mire is a doublet of moss, the sin- and -syne halves of sinsyne both derive from a Middle English term meaning “after”; the difference is that the sin- element is from sithen in one dialect of Middle English, while the -syne element is from sethen in a different dialect, perhaps with influence from Old Norse. Middle English sithen was combined with the adverbial suffix -s (compare always and unawares) to create sithenes “afterwards, because,” which eventually became modern English since. Sinsyne was first recorded in English in the mid-14th century.
how is sinsyne used?
Folk have dee’d [died] sinsyne and been buried, and are forgotten, and bairns been born and … got bairns o’ their ain [own] …. [S]insyne auld estates have changed hands, and there have been wars and rumours of wars on the face of the earth.
The bonnie flowers o’ Paradise, / And a’ [all] that’s bloom’d sinsyne, / …. Ilk [every] blade o’ grass has had as weel [well] / Its ain [own] sweet drap [drop] o’ dew.
foehn
noun
a warm, dry wind descending a mountain, as on the north side of the Alps.
More about foehn
Foehn “a warm, dry wind to the north of the Alps” is a borrowing of German Föhn; the German language often allows for vowels with umlauts (such as ö and ü) to be written instead with a subsequent e (such as oe and ue) under certain circumstances. Föhn ultimately comes from the Latin name Favōnius, which is the personification of the west wind according to Roman mythology, equivalent to Zephyrus (also Zephyros) in Greek mythology, which gives us zephyr. Favōnius may be related to the verb favēre (stem fav-) “to favor,” which is also the source of favorable and favorite. Because the vowel u and the consonant v were both represented in Latin as v, a variant of the stem fav- is fau-, as in faustus “favorable,” which may be the source of the recent Word of the Day Faustian, and perhaps as in Faunus, the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Pan. Foehn was first recorded in English in the early 1860s.
how is foehn used?
For centuries, people in the Alps have attributed health issues, headaches in particular, to the mountain wind known as the Foehn. It is, alpine communities insist, a very special wind, with very special properties …. The issue was recently the subject of an hour-long programme on Swiss radio, during which listeners phoned in to swap symptoms. One woman described feeling low, and having a headache when the Foehn was building up, but then being full of energy when it finally started blowing. A man said he believed the wind was a challenge, in a positive way, because it “shakes us up a bit.”
The foehn has been blowing in the Alps recently, adding insult to a badly injured winter ski season. Snow arrived exceptionally late; in very low-lying resorts nothing fell in December after one of the warmest Novembers on record. Early ski racing fixtures had to be cancelled and, once again, the Alpine winter sports industry is peering out toward a distant horizon, wondering whether this winter is just rotten luck or the harbinger of warm winters to come and a ski industry teetering on the edge of the abyss.