The Devil's Pictionary

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by only_human

Although I've previously mentioned herein the Japanese word tsundoku, today I learned of the Icelandic Jólabókaflóð.

If you parse that into the individual words from which it is assembled, ignore the funky Nordic accents and note that as in most Nordic/Germanic tongues 'J' is pronounced like the English 'Y', you see it's actually spelled pretty close to what it means in English, "Yule book flood."

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Leprechaulony (n) -- Where leprechaun incurables go to die.

[only_human]

sentimental: 100 lunatics

[xilman]

Originally Posted by only_human

sentimental: 100 lunatics

0.01 lunatics surely?

[only_human]

Originally Posted by xilman

0.01 lunatics surely?

I stand corrected. They're kinda like IQ points but are not purely real.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by only_human

sentimental: 100 lunatics

Haha, that is a good one. Welcome back Ross, didn't see you around for a while and your Duo account is dormant for months, even a lazy guy like me overtook you in the XP top

[only_human]

Congratulations on passing my Duo XP. Thanks for the welcome. Nice to be here. I'll do more language stuff after a while. Watch out; your XP achievements might be surpassed.

[only_human]

1/2 A Baby Turkey:

* Silver screen credit apportioned to Warren Beatty or Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar

* Tangential reference to a Sarah Palin botched turkey pardon video

* A lite Thanksgiving meal

* Repurposed wooden leg pig joke mashed up with a turkey service animal on an airplane incident.

* Engine size classification for a hobby R/C powered airplane.

[Nick]

Tobaccinal gardens: outside smoking area

[LaurV]

Now I have a serious question, sparked by the discussion in the parallel thread about the moon and month coming from the same root (yes, they are, no argument about it, in my language "luna", same as in Latin, means both "moon" and "month" and in some other languages also refers to menstrual cycle, and this is what raised the devil's dictionary question).

Why it is called "menstruation" and not "womenstruation"?

[xilman]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Now I have a serious question, sparked by the discussion in the parallel thread about the moon and month coming from the same root (yes, they are, no argument about it, in my language "luna", same as in Latin, means both "moon" and "month" and in some other languages also refers to menstrual cycle, and this is what raised the devil's dictionary question).

Why it is called "menstruation" and not "womenstruation"?

As you're not a native English speaker you can be forgiven for not knowing the answer.

In English the word "mann" was applied to both sexes. The term for an adult human male was "were" or "wer" (compare Latin "vir" and English "virile") and it is still seen in compound words like "werewolf". The word "werman" used to exist but fell out of fashion long ago.

That for an adult female was "wif" (compare modern German "Weib") and it is still used for a married woman and in terms such as "fishwife" and "midwife". Incidentally the latter is the only surviving example in modern English (AFAIK) of the Germanic "mit" which means "with". A "wifman", therefore, is an adult female human. The 'f' was dropped and the first vowel changed over the following centuries.


The true answer to your question, of course, is that it comes from the Latin "menstruus", meaning "monthly".

[LaurV]

There's nothing like a joke killer...

But we appreciate the educational side...
(by the way, you killed me with that podcast, I got totally hooked, I took it from the first one and still crawling through them, one issue is the length, they are just few minutes longer than my daily commuting time, and I always have to re-listen to parts.., like those stairs which are one step and a half, you can't step one by one because the steps are too small, and can't skip two by two because your legs are too short.. and you have to go a single stair with the left foot and two with the right - or viceversa...; but the content is really good!)