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Honorificabilitudinitatibus
Honorificabilitudinitatibus (''honōrificābilitūdinitātibus'', ) is the dative and ablative plural of the medieval Latin word ''honōrificābilitūdinitās'', which can be translated as "the state of being able to achieve honours". It is mentioned by the character Costard in Act V, Scene I of William Shakespeare's ''Love's Labour's Lost''. As it appears only once in Shakespeare's works, it is a hapax legomenon in the Shakespeare canon. At letters, it is the second-longest word in the English language featuring only alternating consonants and vowels. The longest is Honorificicabilitudinitatibus, which has the same meaning. Use in ''Love's Labour's Lost'' The word is spoken by the comic rustic Costard in Act V, Scene 1 of the play. It is used after an absurdly pretentious dialogue between the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes and his friend Sir Nathaniel. The two pedants converse in a mixture of Latin and florid English. When Moth, a witty young servant, enters, Costard says ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Sladek
John Thomas Sladek (December 15, 1937 – March 10, 2000) was an American science fiction author, known for his satirical and surreal novels. Life and work Born in Waverly, Iowa, in 1937, Sladek was in England in the 1960s for the New Wave movement and published his first story in the magazine'' New Worlds''. His first science fiction novel, published in London by Gollancz as '' The Reproductive System'' and in the United States as '' Mechasm'', dealt with a project to build machines that build copies of themselves, a process that gets out of hand and threatens to destroy humanity. In '' The Müller-Fokker Effect'', an attempt to preserve human personality on tape likewise goes awry, giving the author a chance to satirize big business, big religion, superpatriotism, and men's magazines, among other things. ''Roderick'' and ''Roderick at Random'' offer the traditional satirical approach of looking at the world through the eyes of an innocent, in this case a robot. Sladek r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Love's Labour's Lost
''Love's Labour's Lost'' is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Elizabeth I of England, Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to swear off the company of women for three years in order to focus on study and fasting. Their subsequent infatuation with the Princess of France and her ladies makes them forsworn (break their oath). In an untraditional ending for a comedy, the play closes with the death of the Princess's father, and all weddings are delayed for a year. The play draws on themes of masculine love and desire, reckoning and rationalisation, and reality versus fantasy. Though first published in quarto in 1598, the play's title page suggests a revision of an earlier version of the play. There are no obvious sources for the play's plot. The use of apostrophes in the play's title varies in early editions, though it is most ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hapax Legomenon
In corpus linguistics, a ''hapax legomenon'' ( also or ; ''hapax legomena''; sometimes abbreviated to ''hapax'', plural ''hapaxes'') is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. The term is sometimes incorrectly used to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works but more than once in that particular work. ''Hapax legomenon'' is a transliteration of Greek , meaning "being said once". The related terms ''dis legomenon'', ''tris legomenon'', and ''tetrakis legomenon'' respectively (, , ) refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used. ''Hapax legomena'' are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of any word in a corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words are ''hapax legomena'', and another 10% to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Costard
Costard is a comic figure in the play '' Love's Labour's Lost'' by William Shakespeare. A country bumpkin, he is arrested in the first scene for flouting the king's proclamation that all men of the court avoid the company of women for three years. While in custody, the men of the court use him to further their own romantic endeavors. By sending love notes to the wrong women and blurting out secrets (including that of an unplanned pregnancy), Costard makes fools of the royal court. Along with Moth the page and Jaquenetta, a country wench, Costard pokes fun at the upper-class. While mocking a pedantic schoolmaster, Costard uses the word ''honorificabilitudinitatibus'', the longest word by far from any of Shakespeare's works. Costard makes many clever puns, and is used as a tool by Shakespeare to explain new words such as ''remuneration''. He is sometimes considered one of the smartest characters in the play due to his wit and wordplay. Costard's name is an archaic term for ap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flap-dragon
Snap-dragon (also known as Flap-dragon, Snapdragon, or Flapdragon) was a parlour game popular from about the 16th century. It was played during the winter, particularly on Christmas Eve. Brandy was heated and placed in a wide shallow bowl; raisins were placed in the brandy which was then set alight. Typically, lights were extinguished or dimmed to increase the eerie effect of the blue flames playing across the liquor. The game is described in Samuel Johnson's ''A Dictionary of the English Language, Dictionary of the English Language'' (1755) as "a play in which they catch raisins out of burning brandy and, extinguishing them by closing the mouth, eat them." According to an article in Richard Steele's ''Tatler (1709 journal), Tatler'' magazine, "the wantonness of the thing was to see each other look like a demon, as we burnt ourselves, and snatched out the fruit." Snap-dragon was played in England, Canada, and the United States, but there is insufficient evidence of the practice i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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