Re: 2/11/2004: Hoarfrost
 

Mr Undertoad, do excuse for my being pushy, but i do have a request to make of u.

just wondering how many of u Americans have never come across the word "hoarfrost"? a silly question but i want to know the answer. thank u.

My best answer: I don't know! It's certainly not part of the common experience, because most of America doesn't have freezing conditions that often.

I never heard it before so I assume that most people haven't heard it. But I could be wrong!

oddly enough, i have the answer to that question. I know it seems incredible, as the question posed would seem to be unquantifiable, but it just so happens, that it was a question that was included in the y2K US census. I have a copy right here. Let's see.........yup, here it is: question 192: "have you ever heard the word 'hoarfrost'?" official result: 27,932,882.33.

in related news, at that time, 35,908,223 people had never heard the word "asshat". i have to admit that I was one of those people. thank you cellar, i'm a better man because of you!

oh yeah, welcome, noodles. we already have a "mrnoodle".... are you two related?

Re: Re: 2/11/2004: Hoarfrost
 

Some of us Americans have an education and a clue. You will find the level is higher than average here.

I had heard it before. There is a piece of artwork that I had seen as a child called "Hoarfrost" and learned the word then.

Some of us have quite extensive vocabularies, even if we don't use them all the time. "Fuck" is such a versatile word, u know?

i am a university teacher of English-Chinese translation. i posed the question coz some half of the Chinese university students--non-english majors, alas-- know the word hoarfrost. i just wondered why, and to the best of my knowledge, most britishers use the word. i have seen it from time to time in their poetry anthologies, and it is not at all a technical term, but highly poetic. culture shock, isn't it? thank u, undertoad and lumberjim. i do like here. this is my very first time to surf an english BBS. i am not a native speaker of english and i hope i cann make myself understood.

loud and clear, noodles. now. your moniker. a self effacing racial slur?

People learning languages in a university setting often learn words not in common usage in the countries where the language is most commonly spoken. It's in the textbook, so they learn it. The question becomes ... how did such an obscure word end up in the textbook to begin with? Is it to keep other textbook manufacturers from plagarizing? "Hey, you used hoarfrost! That's my obscure word!! I'm suing!!"

Cartography companies add roads that aren't really roads to their maps so they can catch if their competitors are stealing their work.

I'd heard the word, but wasn't certain of the exact definition, other than "some kind of frost."

I'm not that good in english (it's the 4th of 6 languages I learned), but maybe that's why I just knew what it means when I read the word... Maybe I saw it some where during a lesson, can't remember...

Not that its likely to come up but just in case, where does one look when addressing one-third of a person. I'll just wear dark sunglasses till we figure this out.

Oh, and here's a blurb on hoarfrost that tells what it is and how it forms but didn't really answer my other question of where the word came from.

edited to add 2nd paragraph and link. 1st paragraph unchanged.

hanging chad

According to these guys the origin is Old English, Old High German, and Icelandic, and the meaning was something like "brightness of the sky" ... hoar describes the quality of light of the frost.

Thanks Wolf!! What an interesting site. I just read the whole Best Buy receipt checking story, browsed the moon phases and some other neat things.

See, ask a simple question and get extra stuff. Cool.

wolf - fuck yea!
lumberjim - better than a self deffacating racial slur, they're ugly.

Amazingly photo, took me a few minutes to work out what the hell I was looking at. Nicely done.