word

Egg

lfsaldenbirch , , , ,

It’s not an uncommon word – but we include it because of how Gollum pronounces the plural!  It’s a sound-play word!

  • 05.045 teaching his grandmother to suck – ‘Eggses!’ he hissed.
  • 05.045 Eggses it is!’ Then he asked:

I look forward to the day when I can add all the eggs in the work, not just the uncommonly spelled ones.

2016.03.25 – and that happy day has come!  Eggs seems to be evenly distributed, as closely as such non-robust things can be.

  • 01.057 Put on a few eggs,
  • 01.141 I like six eggs with my ham,
  • 05.002 He thought of himself frying bacon and eggs
  • 08.074 and eggs
  • 15.014 since I came out of the egg,
  • 16.047 he was dreaming of eggs and bacon.

Creepsy

lfsaldenbirch , , ,

Tolkien added a -y to “creep” in parallel construction to “tricksy”.  The “-y” suffix indicates “characterized or full of” and in Old English was spelled “ig”.  “Creepsy” is Tolkien’s own original word constructed from his deep understanding of the roots of our language.  I’m giving it the onomatopoeia tag for adding an ‘s’ to Gollum’s words where there was none.

  • 05.117 and he’ll come creepsy

“-y, suffix1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 14 July 2015.

Bitsy

lfsaldenbirch , , ,

“Bitsy” is an adjective all by itself in the OED. The “-y” suffix indicates “characterized or full of” and in Old English was spelled “ig”. Tolkien uses it uniquely adverbially, replacing “for a bit”, constructed from his deep understanding of the roots of our language. I’m giving it the onomatopoeia tag for adding an ‘s’ to Gollum’s words where there was none.

  • 05.022 and chats with it a bitsy

“-y, suffix1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 14 July 2015.

“bitsy, adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 14 July 2015.

Be

lfsaldenbirch , ,

Trolls and Gollum – messing with the copula since the Third Age.

  • 02.087 We ain’t got no water,
  • 05.018 What iss he,
  • 05.091 Where iss it?
  • 05.091 Where iss it?

Update 2015.09.02: Now, the verb “to be” is very common – the most common verb in English.  For this Concordance, we’re only listing the uncommon uses of it.  I will tag it as “10K” for now.  I may change my mind.

Dare

lfsaldenbirch ,

Today’s tidbit is that the 1937 Hobbit has “durstn’t”  and the 1951 has “dursn’t“. I am not finding any reference at all on the negative contraction, but “durst” is given as the current past form, alongside “dared”.  Google’s Ngram Viewer tells us that both “durstn’t” and “dursn’t” fist appear in their corpus in the early 1800s, at first about equal in frequency but by 1925, “dursn’t” about twice as frequent as “durstn’t”.  “Did not dare” overwhelms these forms by an order of magnitude, and is a much older phrase than these contractions are.  Present forms “dassn’t” and “dare not” are more common than all those others, the latter much more popular of the two.

See more our earlier discussion of Gollum’s speech.

“Dare” is uncommon as are the contractions.

  • 05.124 ‘But we dursn’t go in
  • 05.124 no we dursn’t.

“dare, v.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 18 June 2015.

Firework

lfsaldenbirch , , , ,

“Firework”, singular, is outside of The Hundred Thousand.  OED tells us that in its meaning as “a pyrotechnic display” although the plural “fireworks” only is used now, the singular used to be used.  Most instances in The Hobbit are of “fireworks” except one.  The uninflected form could be the older form for the meaning just cited – or could be the form indicating other, obsolete meanings of “firework” (work done in fire, a furnace, and others).  Of course… Tolkien uses it in paragraph 01.091 adjectivally, to describe the glare of the blue light on Gandalf’s staff.  OED admits of no adjectival uses, except as the first element in some hyphenated word phrases.  The word we know is tweaked so very gently off the rails – we can take nothing for granted, yet we do not know consciously that we have been alerted.  Absolutely elegant.

  • 01.017 such particularly excellent fireworks!
  • 01.018 You seem to remember my fireworks kindly,
  • 01.092 in its firework glare
  • 06.030 (even the hobbit had never forgotten the magic fireworks
  • 07.083 I would have given them more than fireworks!’
  • 14.013 No fireworks you ever imagined equalled the sights that night.

“ˈfire-work | ˈfirework, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 5 June 2015.

Smithereens

lfsaldenbirch , , , , ,

Not Scottish but Irish in origin, I gave it the Scottish tag temporarily as “from within the United Kingdom, but alien”.  It means, of course, “little smithers”, particles or atoms, and has not been observed as a singular in the wild.

  • 12.101 in a jumble of smithereens,

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

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