{"id":415,"date":"2009-05-23T14:20:34","date_gmt":"2009-05-23T21:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=415"},"modified":"2009-05-23T20:55:27","modified_gmt":"2009-05-24T03:55:27","slug":"hapax-legomenon-a-word-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=415","title":{"rendered":"Hapax Legomenon: a word alone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the course of reading a delightful book called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/42676.Lost_Japan\">Lost Japan<\/a>, I came across the term <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hapax_legomenon\">hapax legomenon<\/a>.  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 &#8220;once said&#8221;).  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 &#8220;The vessel shone with the color X,&#8221; where X is the hapax legomenon.  We&#8217;ll never know what that color was.  <\/p>\n<p>But hapax legomena are not restricted to Japanese.  The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hapax_legomenon\">wikipedia article<\/a> provides several other examples.  I think my favorite is &#8220;flother,&#8221; a pre-1900 English word for snowflake that appeared once, in an 1275 manuscript (apparently titled &#8220;The XI Pains of Hell&#8221;, 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 (&#8220;twice said&#8221;), or even a tris legomenon.  A google search returns over 16,000 hits for &#8220;flother,&#8221; 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 &#8220;hapaxity.&#8221;  Could I have coined a hapax legomenon myself?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8220;once said&#8221;). While being interesting for their rarity, such [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=415"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":423,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415\/revisions\/423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}