Wikipedia knows...
... what the OED does not:
"Homology" is the quality of sameness.
"Podology" is the branch of medicine that deals with the feet — a less-familiar alternative to "podiatry."
"Chorology" is the study of the geographical extent or limit of something (for example, crayfish).
"Horology" is the science of measuring time. The "hor-" attached to "-ology" just means "hour."
"Codology" is a specifically Irish sort of hoaxing. The OED quotes James Joyce — "The why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business" — and the Daily Express (1928) — "There is in Ireland a science unknown to us in England called Codology... The English is ‘leg-pulling’... When I received an invitation to breakfast at the Dublin Zoo I thought that I could detect the hand of the chief codologist."
It's the "-ology" ending stuck on "cod," which is a slang term for a hoax or joke. Here's James Joyce again:
You went there when you wanted to do something... And behind the door of one of the closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing:But back to "hodology," which Wikipedia says is "the study of pathways." I click on the Wikipedia links to "Psychology," "Philosophy," "Geology," and "Neuroscience," and the word "hodology" appears on none of the pages. Is this a cod? I don't know. But I love the drawing on the page for neuroscience...
Balbus was building a wall.
Some fellow had drawn it there for a cod. It had a funny face but it was very like a man with a beard.... Perhaps that was why they were there because it was a place where some fellows wrote things for cod....
Drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1899) of neurons in the pigeon cerebellum. It takes me back to one of my favorite subjects, How to Draw Like Paul Klee.
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37 comments:
Is Hodalogy the study of the Today show post-Lauer?
Wasn't there a mouse or rat as subject of the blog for a while?
The etymology of "cod" is a little weird. It means or meant a small bag or pouch (apparently codpiece was derived from it). But how you get from that to a joke or jape or prank is unclear. And the fish makes even less sense.
This blog is one 14-years-and-counting pathway of the Althouse brain... Althodology.
"The etymology of "cod" is a little weird. It means or meant a small bag or pouch (apparently codpiece was derived from it). But how you get from that to a joke or jape or prank is unclear. And the fish makes even less sense."
I picture that Monty Python fish-slapping dance.
And 4. a. in the OED definition is: "The integument enveloping the testicles, the scrotum; improperly in pl. testicles. (Not in polite use.)"
The OED has "cod" (the fish) as a completely separate entry, "cod, n.2," with a different etymology. It purports to know where the bag meaning of "cod" comes from: "Old English cod(d < Old Germanic type *kuddo-z : compare early modern Dutch kodde , ‘coleus, testiculus’ (Kilian), Old Germanic type *kuddon- , the source of the closely related cod n.2(Show Less)"
But as for the fish, it says: "Origin uncertain: the name is known only as English. No notion of connection with Greek γάδος (modern zoological Latin gadus) is tenable. One suggestion is that this is the same word as cod n.1, as if = ‘bag-fish’, from its appearance. Wedgwood suggests identity with obsolete Flemish kodde = kudse club, cudgel (Kilian), comparing the analogy of Italian mazzo beetle, club, mace..also a cod-fish (Florio). But the Flemings are not known to have ever called the fish kodde." That is the OED doesn't seem to like the effort to connect the 2 cods.
Visiting someone's house, I saw they had "Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages". Pretty funny; clearly written by a crazy person, but he knows it and runs with it.
He makes the interesting point that since no one ever reads the whole thing, just searches for stuff, there are a lot of great words in the OED that no one will ever get to see.
Althodology, an Annthology.
Such as, "lant"
Lant: to add aged urine to stuff
‘It was recommended to freshen the breath, to flavor ale (as in "lanted ale" or "double-lanted ale") and to glaze hard pastries.’
Enjoy your lunch!
Pretty funny; clearly written by a crazy person, but he knows it and runs with it.
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"Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history."
Bread crumbs, follow the bread crumbs. That must be crumbology.
And lest we forget, the early followers of Jesus were an entirely Jewish Sect that called themselves The Way. Their Teacher had spent years telling them that he was opening up a new way to the Father. And they believed that way was Jesus as a New Covenant sacrifice opening a new covenant with a better blood offering, offered by a better High Priest, and built on better Promises than the Moses' Covenant. ( See, Hebrews: 8th Chapter)
"The etymology of "cod" is a little weird. It means or meant a small bag or pouch (apparently codpiece was derived from it). But how you get from that to a joke or jape or prank is unclear."
Pretty clearly, bearded Balbus with a brick in each hand is a cod.
Gadzooks, I ended up with an Althouse tag! My year is complete and it's only February.
To be honest, I'm not sure where I originally read the term, but there are 45 matches in Pubmed for holodogy, presumably the neuroscience version. And then there's this book: Hodos: the Way, Applied Hodology. A few more clicks got me to this article claiming that the term was invented by "the German psychologist Kurt Lewin."
I mostly use it at work as an amusing alternative to "network engineer," my job title. :)
Hodor
Speaking of horology, David Landes' Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World is a fine book, well-written, serious but not too serious. The time I took to read it was well-spent.
Kwenzel...Nice work getting that Althouse Tag. One per year is something to be dreamed of. She seems to like interesting, original, yet subtle comments. And it's hard to do that with the Politics loosed today.
Those old days of Gay Marriage and men being responsible for babies they spawn seem like a gentle springtime era now.
This discussion reminds me of a book I read a few years ago: "Design in Nature" by Adrian Bejan. He applies the second law of thermodynamics to ideas of organic growth and development with pathways as his metaphor for explaining such things as the circulatory system, river deltas, the design of trees or of a leaf, etc. Thoreau seems to explore the same basic organic concept in his description of the melting sandbank in "Spring" chapter of "Walden."
I was going to reproduce the pertinent passage from"Walden" but the comment system couldn't handle it. Here is just a small section. Try to read the whole passage in "Walden," if you can.
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards' paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave
with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom.
Come for the hodology, stay for the homology.
"Homology" is a topic in mathematics. It's weird and confusing (I mean homology specifically, not mathematics, though of course many people find that weird and confusing). There's also "cohomology". Both come up in algebraic topology and related topics.
Unfortunately, mathematicians love to shorten and/or abbreviate some of their technical terms. Homology (and related areas) are frustrating, because one references "homomorphisms" and "finite abelian groups" quite a lot, but one should not shorten the first nor abbreviate the second. Not unless one has a *lot* of tenure and a very forgiving department chair. And dean. And provost. And president.
"Come for the hodology, stay for the homology."
Flounce for the homophobology.
@Richard Dillman
I love that passage in Walden. I remember reading as a teenager.
And, here I thought it was defined as the study of HODOR and closing doors and keeping them closed.
That montage of vertebrate limbs never fails to astonish.
This post raised a bunch of amusing topics, but it also drew in another topic that, looking back I regard as trolling. Even though I participated. I have removed the distraction and would love to see some discussion (if it's not too late) of the material that I worked on to write the post.
In New Testament Greek, referred to as Koine Greek, the common version of the language in the first-century world, Jesus refers to Himself as "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6). The "way" is in the original, ὁδὸς, hodos. So, hodology makes perfect sense.
Personally, I come here for the tribology.
Let's take a closer look at those frictions!
"In New Testament Greek, referred to as Koine Greek, the common version of the language in the first-century world, Jesus refers to Himself as "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6). The "way" is in the original, ὁδὸς, hodos. So, hodology makes perfect sense."
Thanks!
Aren't we all engaged in hodology? Aren't we all looking for the path? Aren't we (if we're old enough) trying to figure out how we got where we are? Aren't we (if we're young enough) trying to figure out the path to follow?
Thanks for the word.
A wordsmith friend of Michael Faraday coined the terms "cathode" and "anode" to metaphorically capture the pathway of flowing electricity back in the early 19th century. "Cat" + "hodos" meant "down way" while "an" + "(h)odos" meant "up way". He got it precisely bass ackwards. That's because no one had yet thought of the electron.
Each of us deals with anodes and cathodes everyday when we plug something in.
Hodos was the standard Ancient Greek word for a road. Think "exodous," the Latinized version of a Greek term referring to the odos (road/way/path) "ex," i.e."out" of Egypt. They lost the H a long time ago, but odos is still the standard Greek word for a street. You see it abbreviated all over the place in Athens.
--gpm
@chickelit
Very cool! Thanks.
@gpm
Fascinating!
Not only that, but "exodus" is still the modern Greek language word for "exit." It sounds similar to this Latin loan word but almost certainly without any relation. If you can read the letters it is kind of cool to just see "EXODUS" (ΕΞΟΔΟΣ) on all the exit signs when there. I like the way that such an ancient and influential language retained so much of its simple vocabulary for everyday concepts to the modern present - especially given how much of it ended up comprising our vocabulary for technical and scientific matters.
Ann Althouse said...This blog is one 14-years-and-counting pathway of the Althouse brain... Althodology.
My (h)odometer has only registered about 12 years for the Althouse blog.
OK, I was typing on my phone (which I hate) in writing my prior post and ended up with "exodous" rather than "exodus." But now I'm home and I've got a real keyboard!
I don't know what TTR means in referring to "this Latin loan word," but "Exodus," i.e., the usual English name of the second book of the bible, is the Latinized version/transliteration ("us" instead of "os," a consistent difference throughout the Latin and Greek declensions of corresponding nouns) of the word that he correctly spells using capital letters in the Greek alphabet (the lower case Greek version of X is more fun, but I'm not going to make the effort to try to figure out how to reproduce it). If you transliterate the Greek, you get "exodos," not "exodus." And, as per my prior post, it means the "way" (odos) "out of" (ex) Egypt.
I believe TTR is right that exodos is still the Greek word for what we call an "exit" (a term that comes from the Latin for "he/she goes out," a bit of a different metaphor than the Greek "path/way out"). And, I wouldn't swear to it, but I think "eisodos" (the path/way "into") is the modern Greek word for "entrance" (again, from a viewpoint slightly different from the Latin one we've inherited/use).
OK, now I think I see that TTR is probably saying that "exit" and "exodos/us" don't have any relationship. Which I agree with, except that the "ex" part is the same in both cases. The "it" and "odus" are completely different, despite the coincidental dentals.
I said before that the Greeks "lost" the "H" in "hodos." From very early on, they didn't have any actual letter H in their alphabet (let us not speak of the mysterious lost digamma), but they had "rough" and "smooth" breathing marks, demarcated historically by an apostrophe and reverse apostrophe (I may have the order wrong), that presumably reflected some difference in pronunciation at some point, involving something like what we indicate by the letter H. In the strictest schools, the kids in Greece probably still need to use those markings accurately, even though there hasn't been any difference in actual pronunciation for some two thousand years.
The exit/entrance examples are only two instances of the marvelous way the Greeks had of stringing together words for simple, concrete concepts to create extremely complex ones. The Germans do something of the same thing, but their versions are heavy and clunky, while the Greek ones were magically musical, ethereal, and inspirational. One simple example I always like is "anesti," which literally just means to be up, get up, stand up. But for the Greeks, "anastasia," i.e., "standing up," referred to the resurrection of Jesus: around Easter, instead of saying "kali mera" (good day) or "kali spera" (good evening), the Greeks use "Christos anesti" (Christ is risen from the dead!) as a greeting. Of course, that facility with language also led to the debates at the ecumenical councils, and resulting sectarian splits, that Gibbon mocked so wickedly.
God, I love this stuff, just like Althouse loves the references she finds in the OED. I leave you with one more: the "hodos" sans "h" is where the name of the odometer in your car comes from.
--gpm
P.S. Coming late to the party, per usual, I was surprised that nobody else had explained the "hodos" reference beyond Mark Daniels' reference to "the way and the truth and the life" and checklit's reference to anodes and cathodes (I hadn't seen the latter before my prior post). Usually somebody else has already prevented (in the sense that Gibbon used that word!) all my learned explanations before I get around to reading the posts.
Is it worth the trip (vaut le voyage in Michelin speak) to see the odos signs in Athens? For better or worse, I've been trending toward Althouse why bother traveling in recent years. But I've put aside a brochure for a trip to Languedoc in the fall. And a friend has a house outside of Florence . . .
Thanks, gpm.
It's interesting to think "Is it worth the trip (vaut le voyage in Michelin speak) to see the odos signs in Athens?"
For some reason, I don't have that spontaneously arising in my mind. I would have to actively look to find things I might want to go see.
I think it's worth going to see art and architecture and landscapes IF they are going to look different in real life. For example, it's worth seeing St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome because you just don't understand the size in person. It's worth going to see sculptures because of the size and the different viewpoints. It's worth going to see mountains, because photographs cannot convey the grandeur. I've tried to photograph mountains, and I think you have to capture something about them that's different from the main thing you get from the personal experience.
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