nervy and homely






  1. Ha! Homely... that makes more sense now. I was traveling through New Zealand, where I stayed with some family friends. They wrote an email to my parents telling them I was very homely. I'm glad to find that it just means they liked my baking!!

  2. Hmm. I'm interested that you say temper means to harden a metal. I've always heard it used as to toughen a metal by removing some of the brittleness, more or less synonymous with annealing and so close in meaning to it's sense of taking the edge off one's comments.

  3. I'm not an expert on metals--but the point that's generally made about temper as a Janus word is that it means to strengthen metal (making it less brittle goes with that) but to weaken comments.

  4. I will use my BS in metallurgy to explain. You temper a metal to soften it but it's part of a longer and more complicated process of Quench and Temper. Quench makes the metal harder but more brittle and then temper gently heats it to soften it and toughen it.

  5. The trendiness of "transparent" in good government and journalistic circles has made this particular Janus more prominent (although not dialect dependent):

    Transparent: open, accessible, hiding nothing.

    Transparent: brazen, flauntingly deceptive, not even going through the hypocritical motions of attempting to hide duplicity.

  6. Re Andrew Tyndall's comment, I always used to be utterly baffled by an ex-boss's use of the word "transparent". He would say that all software needs to be completely transparent to the user. By which he meant that it should be developed to be so completely accessible to the user as to make it seem effortless to understand and operate, i.e., hide all complications from the user. He said the same thing more generally about businesses/products/services. Think Apple's iThings or "everything for $1" stores. To me, this is the exact opposite of what I think of as transparency. To me, transparency means seeing all the innards. Nothing to do with ease of use.

  7. I recall hearing of other "autonymns" such as cleave (to split apart, or Biblically, to cling to) and weather (to wear away, or to survive abuse)

  8. In 1959, the Blues scholar Paul Oliver wrote of Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey (pictured here in a publicity photo, not a candid snap):

    Ma Rainey has been termed ugly. Certainly she had an impish, Puck-like face, but she had endearing features. If she was 'homely' in the American sense she was also 'homely' in the English sense and her material build, her affectionate if perverse regard for young boys, was engaging to her hearers.

  9. her material build

    Sorry! That should, of course be:

    her maternal build

  10. wiki-walked here back from your current entry, thought I should let you know that the link to the Mavens' Word is broken, and after persistent googling, have discovered the only good link for it currently is here. :)

  11. Thanks for that. Duly updated!


The book!

Follow by email

View by topic



AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)