Diurnal and Nocturnal; Log-Blog #03; Wednesday, September 12, 2007
(blogs, or logs, of Word-Info site activities, daily and nightly)
The "journal" continues into day three.
Although it was my intention to re-do the aesth-, esth- unit of "feeling, sensation" words, it is still incomplete.
I was side tracked by coming across a word in the unit which led me into a ptilo- unit referring to "feather". This led me into a quagmire of hard-to-find words because there were so few dictionaries which had anything about such words.
By the way, the etymological source for the word quagmire came to us from Old English and then Middle English, with the first meaning of "a soft marshy area of land that gives way when walked on"; and then it came to mean, "an awkward, complicated, or dangerous situation from which it is difficult to escape".
My best source for the pitilo- words was Henderson's Dictionary of Biological Terms, 9th edition, revised by Sandra Holmes, 1979; however, even in that resource, I had to go back and forth for at least two hours to get the definitions because the definitions themselves included references to other forms of the same word instead of presenting clear, self-contained explanations.
The list is probably irrelevant to most people because very few of the terms are included in the majority (almost all) of the other dictionaries that I consulted.
After completing this "feather" unit, I found and worked on as many other "feather" groups as I could locate which are shown next.
It took MUCH LONGER to complete most of the "feather" units than I had expected, but here they are, listed and linked:
Related "feather, feather-like; soft down, plumage" word units: penna-; pinni-, pin-; plum-, -plume; pterido-; ptero-; ptilo-.
Since so much time was consumed working on the above units, I will have to include more info about the other things I had in mind in the next log, or blog.