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A Small Victory
Jun. 18th, 2018 07:36 pmAlmost a year ago, I did an episode on my podcast that had nothing to do with the actual theme of said 'cast. Bottom line: my wife's choir director used an archaic word as a complement; she didn't know that word and so asked me, the Obsessive Word Nerd™; and I had to go off on a tear and OWN™ that word.
The word: Perpentious. Technically, no, it's not a word (according to the dictionary); but it's close enough to other words, sharing multiple etymological similarities, that it not only could be a useful word, but probably should be.
The best part? The only Google search results I got were all wrong. For reals. Here's a screen-capture of a Google Books entry in the search:
The Problem with Column Conflation
Essentially, the optical character scanner was set to read the page as a single column, but the book was printed with multiple columns, so the side-by-side pillars of words were read as a single unit. I suspect this happened with two other search results, but I'm not willing to plunk down any cash to see for myself.
Bottom line: When folks (like yourselves!) search Google with the single word "perpentious," the only accurate results that pop up link to the various ways to access that episode of mine.
Which is, again, a small, small victory.
The word: Perpentious. Technically, no, it's not a word (according to the dictionary); but it's close enough to other words, sharing multiple etymological similarities, that it not only could be a useful word, but probably should be.
The best part? The only Google search results I got were all wrong. For reals. Here's a screen-capture of a Google Books entry in the search:
The Problem with Column Conflation
Essentially, the optical character scanner was set to read the page as a single column, but the book was printed with multiple columns, so the side-by-side pillars of words were read as a single unit. I suspect this happened with two other search results, but I'm not willing to plunk down any cash to see for myself.
Bottom line: When folks (like yourselves!) search Google with the single word "perpentious," the only accurate results that pop up link to the various ways to access that episode of mine.
Which is, again, a small, small victory.