Fluster

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While “flustered” is within the Hundred Thousand, the singular noun “fluster”, as we have in 02.004, is not.  In addition to its current use, “fluster” has an obsolete use which indicates that the agitated state of mind stems from intoxication.

  • 01.024 Yesterday he had been too flustered to do anything of the kind.
  • 01.033 but they have begun to arrive had flustered him badly.
  • 01.138 and he was so flustered that he answered
  • 02.004 in a fluster.
  • 05.047 he was so flustered by the egg-question.

“fluster, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 1 June 2015.

Carrock

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The Cumbrian word “carrec” = “rock”.  Cumbrian was spoken between 500 and 1000 CE north and a bit east of Wales and is closely related to Welsh.  Elements of the Cumbric language can be found place names and family names, which we know Tolkien loved to study.

Word fans, like any good scholar I use Wikipedia only as a place to get the right keywords for deeper searches (or to answer simple everyday questions like “what is earwax?”).  Today, I am stumped for further sources and must give you what I have until a later day – a day when my Cumbric language and cultural history skills have a boost.  Comments with leads and clues are very welcome, and I will be carefully sifting my Philology class notes.

Here’s what we know:  Carrock Fell is a high ground in the lake district of Britain.  This fell is unusually rocky, geologically distinct from neighboring landmarks, topped by the remains of an Iron Age hill fort, and was climbed by Charles Dickens.

Castle Carrock is a village about five miles away which hosts the Music on the Mar festival and boasts a newly re-opened pub.  The village newsletter is available on the web, and I know what destination vacation has been added to my bucket list!

I have added the tag “British” to this word meaning British-not-English and wish a good morning to the kind folk of Castle Carrock.

  • 07.012 the Carrock I believe he calls it.
  • 07.015 And why is it called the Carrock?’
  • 07.016 He called it the Carrock,
  • 07.016 because carrock is his word for it.
  • 07.016 He calls things like that carrocks,
  • 07.016 and this one is the Carrock
  • 07.023 on the top of the Carrock at night watching the moon
  • 07.089 and of how they had all been brought to the Carrock,
  • 07.117 I followed these as far as the Carrock.
  • 07.117 to get from this bank to the Carrock by the ford,
  • 07.130 that joined the great river miles south of the Carrock.
  • 07.130 North of the Carrock
  • 07.130 for at a place a few days’ ride due north of the Carrock
  • 07.131 for a hundred miles north of the Carrock
  • 07.142 when we landed on the Carrock,’

“Castle Carrock Cumbrian Village.” N.p., n.d. Web.

“Carrock Fell.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 01 June 2015.

Burglar

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I first assumed that “burglar”, which appears 37 times in The Hobbit, had been formed from “burgle”, but I was incorrect.  “Burgle” was back-formed from the older word “burglar”, both of which are outside of the Ten Thousand.  OED, bless them, defines “burgle” thusly:

to steal or rob burglariously.

Well, now we’re happy!  “Burglarious”  and its adverb “burglariously” are outside the Hundred Thousand, attested since the 1700s.  I take pleasure in noting that a word outside the hundred thousand most common words in Project Gutenberg is still not called “rare” by OED.

Is “burglar” funny?  It certainly has a funny sound and is awfully… anti-heroic.

[01.116]  ‘That would be no good,’ said the wizard, ‘not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary). That is why I settled on burglary –

  • 01.095 He looks more like a grocer than a burglar!’
  • 01.097 or your reference to burglars,
  • 01.098 Burglar wants a good job,
  • 01.098 You can say Expert Treasure-hunter instead of Burglar if you like.
  • 01.100 If I say he is a Burglar,
  • 01.100 a Burglar he is,
  • 01.117 That is why I settled on burglary –
  • 01.117 the burglar,
  • 01.117 and selected burglar.
  • 01.141 Aren’t you the burglar?
  • 02.009 “Thorin and Company to Burglar Bilbo greeting!
  • 02.029 “Bother burgling
  • 02.039 “After all we have got a burglar with us,” they said;
  • 02.041 “Now it is the burglar’s turn,” they said,
  • 02.047 a bit of good quick burgling.
  • 02.047 and legendary burglar would
  • 02.048 Of the various burglarious proceedings he had heard of
  • 06.012 without the burglar,
  • 06.013 And here’s the burglar!’
  • 06.014 If they had still doubted that he was really a first-class burglar,
  • 06.054 You’ve left the burglar behind again!’
  • 06.055 I can’t be always carrying burglars on my back,’
  • 09.012 I am like a burglar that can’t get away,
  • 09.012 burgling the same house
  • 09.031 A pretty fine burglar you make,
  • 09.051 and have to stay lurking as a permanent burglar
  • 10.041 and he strongly suspected attempted burglary
  • 11.026 What is our burglar doing for us?
  • 12.017 More like a grocer than a burglar’ indeed!
  • 12.035 What else do you suppose a burglar is to do?’
  • 12.035 You ought to have brought five hundred burglars not one.
  • 12.078 and so do burglars,’
  • 13.017 Mr. Baggins was still officially their expert burglar
  • 13.021 Now I am a burglar indeed!’
  • 13.029 and help our burglar.’
  • 16.039 I may be a burglar –
  • 17.014 burglar!’
  • 17.016 If you don’t like my Burglar,
  • 18.048 I mean even a burglar has his feelings.

“burglarious, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 1 June 2015.

“burgle, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 1 June 2015.

Vocables

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I learned many years ago from Professor Catriona Parsons that Gàidhlig waulking songs, the work songs which keep the rhythm for hand-fulling woolen cloth, are full of “vocables”.  In the first song in the linked video, the group’s words between the solo lines are vocables.

“These are not like fa-la-la,” she said. “They are very ancient sounds and they have meaning, but we have lost the meaning.”

She then taught us very carefully to pronounce these syllables, which usually alternate in the songs with phrases in current lexical use, just as she had heard them growing up on the Isle of Lewis.  I fancied that it did not matter if we knew the meaning, as long as those to whom we sang could understand.

Similarly, what’s up with tra-la-la-lally?  Corey Olsen, The Tolkien Professor, makes this point: ” tra-la-la-lally
here down in the valley!” [03.014] sounds very much like “tra-la-la-lally” is the name of the thing which is happening down in the valley.  These vocables are definitely sound play, only spoken by elves.  Do these sounds make those singers a bit alien?  Do they remind us that they speak other languages natively?  I believe they do.  In honor of the play of sound-on-sound in these vocables, I am giving them the ‘Onomatopoeia” tag.

  • 03.014 O! tra-la-la-lally
  • 03.015 O! tril-lil-lil-lolly
  • 19.002 Come! Tra-la-la-lally!
  • 19.003 O! Tra-la-la-lally
  • 19.004 Fa-la!
  • 19.004 Fa-la-la-lally
  • 19.004 With Tra-la-la-lally
  • 19.004 Tra-la-la-lally

I am separating out the Non-Lexical-Vocables after a bloody morning of trying to find a more suitable word. Haven’t found one yet, might have to ask my fellow scholar Jamie Stinnett.

  • 06.077 Ya hey!
  • 06.078 Ya hey!
  • 06.078 Ya harri-hey!
  • 06.078 Ya hoy!
  • 06.079 And with that Ya Hoy!

Rat-tat

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Not only a word in its own right, it’s imitative and “reduplicative” – which means that “rat-tat-tat-tash” is considered the same word, just lengthened out for more sound effects.

  • 01.047 but a hard rat-tat on the hobbit’s beautiful green door.

“rat-tat, n., int., and adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 1 June 2015.

My goodness

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Believe it or not, sometimes I get a bit focused on doing a thing thoroughly.  I looked at the list after removing The Twenty Thousand – several hundred words.  The Thirty Thousand?  Several hundred words.  I realized I was going to take this right to the end.  The Project Gutenberg word frequency lists are not lemmatized, so I am sanguine about using right up to word 100,000 in my stopwords file.

That word is “Apennine”, by the way.  The last improper English word is “withes”, the plural of “withe”:

a. A band, tie, or shackle consisting of a tough flexible twig or branch, or of several twisted together; such a twig or branch, as of willow or osier, used for binding or tying, and sometimes for plaiting.

We get “Withywindle” from this word and it is etymologically related to “willow”.  Yes, indeed.  Word 99,996 is used in Tolkien’s corpus.

When The Hundred Thousand are eliminated from the text of The Hobbit, ninety words remain. The Project Gutenberg words were not lemmatized, so I first went back and checked for the original forms of the words in the text.  In a handful of cases my headword (like “rune”) is not in The Hundred Thousand, but the form in the text (“runes”) is.  Those words are not among these ninety.

adjoin attercop baa bannock bash bebother beeswax befoul belch benight bewuther boatload bottommost burgle buttertub carrock coalmining cockscomb confusticate crunchable daylong draggle drat firework fizzle flummox fluster foreleg frizzle gammer glede goggle greybeard guardroom haymaking hmmm hobbit homecoming hotfoot jibber kindhearted laburnum lazybone lunchtime manflesh moneybags ninepins nosebag oddment ogres orc parch pinewoods pitter plop plump plunk poach poof porthole quoits rockhewn rockrose roundshield ruddy rune scone scrabble scrumptious shoreland skrike slither slowcoach smithereens snapdragon snivel snuffle spearman summertime thrum tomnoddy undercut underparts upkeep uptake waterlog whizz wobble yammer zig-zag

Words beyond The Hundred Thousand have earned the “100K” tag.

“withe | with, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 30 May 2015.

What do we do from here?

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First, we have already made entries on seventy five words which are not in the 975 Uncommon Words.  We’ll enjoy their entries, and hope that some time in the future I’ll be able to do all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives as Blackwelder did.  Most of these are between 5,000th and 10,000th in the frequency lists, although a few like “eyebrows” are very common words which I could not resist making an entry for.

Second, we will consider the riches before us: the Project Gutenberg frequency lists take us all the way through 100,000 words.  I originally chose to eliminate ten thousand words in order to have a smaller group I could work with in my limited time frame, words which were uncommon enough to be of interest, words which Richard Blackwelder would have loved to notice.

Let’s see what happens when I increase my filter.  Will we reveal the gem-words, the scop’s treasure-hoard, if we remove even more words from the list?  Pack a sandwich, the road beckons!

New Numbers

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Well, this is an adventure, and I’m tickled pink to be on it!

Now that I have more accurately eliminated The Ten Thousand most common words in Project Gutenberg, I’m ready to report to my fellow Word Fans.  I love the fact that our source material is the corpus of older written English – out-of-copyright works which include much of the literature which Tolkien himself knew, like William Morris and Lewis Carroll.  The previous list included current written work, and from looking at the word lists I suspected that newspapers and magazines had a proportion of influence which was not quite what we were looking for.

Of the 96,152 words of The Hobbit, 7212 of them are uncommon!  That’s about 7.5% of the book, including names of things (like “Bilbo”) as well as plain words (like “wobble”).  In English, most writers use uncommon words less than 5% of the time (reports vary from 2.5 to just under 5%).

These 7172 are made of about a thousand individual words plus about 75 names.  I have returned to the beginning of this blog and updated the numbers so that new Word Fans are not led astray be contradicting reports.

Double-checking, Project Gutenberg, and The Ten Thousand

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As I approach the end of the month, I am double-checking details, spelling, formatting.  I checked my stopwords file – the list we have called The Ten Thousand.  In their original format, they’re listed as words which are used at least 20 times per million.  I set up my filter to take the first ten thousand of those words in order of use, and thus was born my stopwords file.  This morning, I checked that not only were there no more than ten thousand words, but that there were indeed at least that many.

Oh, dear.  There were just over five thousand.

In searching for my next resource, I discovered that Project Gutenberg’s corpus is being used to create just such a list!  It’s a work in progress, updating as more work enters the project, and going out to 100,000 words.

Thank you, Project Gutenberg!

I’ve easily created my new stopwords file and let’s see how things turn out, shall we?