Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
Has anyone yet mentioned my least favorite word
COMORBIDITY
co·mor·bid·i·ty
/ˌkōmôrˈbidədē/
Learn to pronounce
nounMedicine
noun: co-morbidity; plural noun: co-morbidities; noun: comorbidity; plural noun: comorbidities
the simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions in a patient.
"age and comorbidity may be risk factors for poor outcome"
a disease or medical condition that is simultaneously present with another or others in a patient.
"patients with cardiovascular or renal comorbidities"
How about old age and a couple of other things?
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
"Bollux" is a good word. Some variant of it applies to a lot of my posts, actually.
A favorite word, mentioned in the UFO thread, is ‘parsec’. It is a constructed astronomical term from P-arallax, AR-c, SEC-ond.
When the subject came up in the other thread, I got to thinking… First, some background:
This refers to a measurement technique that astronomers use to measure distance of relatively near stars (only works in our local part of our galaxy due to limitations in optical telescopes (and atmospheric conditions)) by viewing their (relative) motion on photographs (plates) on a field of fixed background stars. The Angular change, measured in arc seconds (1/3600th of a degree), indicates how far the star is. The distance to a star (in units of parsecs) is equal to 1 over the change in position of a star’s relative position. The angle has to be measured exactly 6 months from its first position (measured with the field of stars at approximately right angles to the sun’s position). Important Part: This is so the earth is separated by twice its distance from the sun (an Astronomical Unit – AU) when making the measurement. The parsec is 3.26 light years, or 2 x 10^13 miles. So a Parsec distance depends specifically on the Earth to Sun distance.
In the first Star Wars movie, Han Solo is said, "You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?…It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs." That sounds like he’s using a Parsec as a unit of time and not distance. (a third of people use light-year as a unit of time and not distance, but of course you are all too intelligent for that). In the movie SOLO, they attempt to clarify this ‘phrase’ by showing that Han Solo actually took a short-cut (they wanted to show distance since a usual Kessel Run is 18 parsecs), near a black hole, to make it more “quickly” to the end of the Kessel Run; actually I haven’t thought about whether he got there faster or from a relativistic point of view he just got there younger, (the writers never considered relativistic effects of time) but this is not to my point today.
My point is that when someone from a Galaxy Far Far Away uses a term like Parsec, which is based on an Earth to Sun distance, that is using a term that does not have a correct Galactic context!! If an anachronism is something out of time, then this is something out of space; it doesn’t belong in that galaxy! It’s as if Solo ordered a Budweiser in that Bar scene.
Anachronism is a great word.
Is there a word to describe something such as the use of Parsec that is ‘out of space’? It is not in context for that Galaxy. I realize that the writers needed to use a unit of measure for that Han Solo statement, and they wanted to use space lingo, but it just strikes me as a ‘space’ anachronism of sorts.
Larry
DevilHorse
Wonderful post - I was aware of the time/distance goof in a new hope, but I did not realize that parsec was galaxy-specific.
And I believe the word you are looking for is either anatopism or anachorism. The difference in the Ancient Greek root words appears to depend on distinctions that do not map well on to English, but anatopism may be the more common term, if wikipedia is any indication.
Anatopism and Anachorism are excellent words.
Although a slight quibble with the online definitions: "a geographical misplacement; something located in an incongruent position". The word 'geography' comes up in both and seems to also imply exploration and measurements related to the earth. But of course, that is too confining a definition, and the point is understood.
Thanks!
Larry
DevilHorse
I have come to dislike the word strongly, strongly. I'm hoping that one day soon, like a miracle, it will be gone.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust