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Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Words that look like their Meaning

I have been fascinated by the idea of words that look like their meaning for around a year. Pretty much every time I write one I think about it. I've googled the idea a few times only to come up fruitless. On my last search however I found a blog entry by Carl Morris: http://quixoticquisling.com/2009/05/english-words-which-look-like-their-meaning/ his idea does not exactly match mine but he has started a decent list of words that look like their meaning. Also one of the comments has a decent name: onomableva, coming from the greek words "name" and "to resemble".

If you don't know what i am talking about the best example is the word: bed. Which looks like a classic bed that has tall post on either side.

Carl says that the words must be nouns. Which is a complete lie because the first one I ever noticed was: awkward. I would say awkward is an awkward looking word. Look at the wkw, where else do you see a wkw? And you have the k sitting in the middle of a bunch of short letters like some fifth grader who hit puberty early and is clumsily trying to fit in but everyone around him is a w and he just stands their awkwardly.

The main issue with these words is that you pretty much have to make an argument for each word. You can't just be like "fast is onomableva"* and be done with it in the same way buzz is obviously onomatopoeia. So we would have to create a committee that would vote on each word up for onomableva, and then create a dictionary of these words. It would probably end up as a side quirk to English in the same way there are hundreds of funky math things that nobody knows or cares about. Like Happy Numbers. 7 is a happy number because if you add the squares of it's digits, and repeat the process you will eventually reach 1 where it loops endlessly. What is the point of that? It's cool to math nerds, and thats basically it. Onomableva is an English nerd thing and that is it's purpose.

*fast is onomableva because it is a short word and takes practically no time to say.

examples of onomableva according me and Carl (I am not including the ones that I did not agree with):
awkward - wkw
fast - quick word to say
I - looks like a person standing. especially the lowercase i
bed- looks like a bed
four - has four letters
abbr. - it's an abbreviation for abbreviation
committee - bit of a stretch but, there are typically three people in charge such as the Chair person the     treasurer and the secretary and then there is just members,. C is the chair, stands at the front, O is the treasurer, because coins are round, and I is the secretary because they sit between the other members and write down the goings-on, and "mmttee" are the rest of the faceless crowd that makes up the group.

There would also be an argument for words that look like the opposite of what they mean.
like "abbreviation" it's twelve letters long. That is not abbreviated at all. We can call these words unomableva or nonomableva. or the ironic Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia  meaning fear of long words. Or how about long, that's 4 letters.

If anybody comes up with more onomableva's  please leave them in the comments and we can commence the committee of  onomableva.

4 comments:

  1. Today in Data it came up that IQ test don't measure intellect as much as they measure your ability to remember and understand arcane vocabulary.
    And one guy asked what arcane meant. (in a nice way) "Ha", I thought, because arcane means obscure. So arcane is an arcane word. Bam, Onomableva.

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  2. Please do this for your writing prompt! I'm introducing them this upcoming week!

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  3. How about queue? It's a q followed by a bunch of silent letters standing in line.

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