Hapax Legomenon: a word alone
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:20 pm (Vocabulary)
In the course of reading a delightful book called Lost Japan, I came across the term hapax legomenon. It defines a word that occurs only once, uniquely, within the written record of a given language, or other large body of writing (the Greek term literally means “once said”). While being interesting for their rarity, such words also present an often insoluble puzzle: if that single occurrence does not also include a definition, then later readers may never be able to determine its meaning. Alex Kerr, the author of Lost Japan, cites examples in Japanese of the form “The vessel shone with the color X,” where X is the hapax legomenon. We’ll never know what that color was.
But hapax legomena are not restricted to Japanese. The wikipedia article provides several other examples. I think my favorite is “flother,” a pre-1900 English word for snowflake that appeared once, in an 1275 manuscript (apparently titled “The XI Pains of Hell”, which seems a curious location for a flother). Except that now that I (and wikipedia) have committed it to the written record, perhaps it has mutated into a dis legomenon (“twice said”), or even a tris legomenon. A google search returns over 16,000 hits for “flother,” including many uses of it as a proper name, and a few pages (like this one) pointing out its hapaxity. Google also claims no hits for “hapaxity.” Could I have coined a hapax legomenon myself?
Terran said,
June 2, 2009 at 3:27 am
Nifty! What a cool word. I’ll have to try to keep it in my own lexicon.
“flother,†a pre-1900 English word for snowflake that appeared once, in an 1275 manuscript (apparently titled “The XI Pains of Hellâ€, which seems a curious location for a flother).
Why is that curious? The notion of Hell being uniformly hot appears to be somewhat more modern. Dante certainly portrayed a hell that had plenty of ice and cold in it. (IIRC, Satan stands at the middle of everything in a frozen lake.) And when you think about Hell as a place of torment, cold can be a pretty effective torment too — might as well chuck it all in there.