Re: Okay,

[Wolf Lahti <wduby -at- TECHCENTER -dot- PACCAR -dot- COM>]

K Watkins asks me:

>Where did you come up with "elemenopi"?  The Webster's Collegiate in my
>office is unaware of it, and my OED is at home.  It's a lovely word, but
>I've never seen it before.  I taught a graduate course in the History of the
>English Language for several years, and the best guesses I can come up with
>are - either it's a rare echo of some Greek root I'm not thinking of, or
>it's a joke on such a word and actually nothing more than LMNOP.  Please let
>me know, so I can use it on such of my acquaintance as are likely to
>appreciate it!


Theodore Bernstein in _The Careful Writer_ invented it, saying that he
always wanted to coin a word.  :)  This one serves a useful purpose, being a
nicely concise representation of a class that has no other single-word
descriptor (that I know of anyway). It's particularly effective in that it
sounds like what it means. I use it in conversation and writing, and, though
folks sometimes ask about the word itself, they have an intuitive grasp of
its meaning.


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      "I hate quotations."
           -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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