Seldom-Used Words

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Yes, indeed, that is why one mauve dress in the whole book might fly under detection, hopefully.

I have heard that Sir Francis Bacon had a hand in the King James' Bible, even if he is not openly credited with that, as well as Shakespearean plays, another topic entirely, and therefore, dross would have been read by the literate common folk, I suppose. That and there are not a lot of words to rhyme with cross.

peppery - adj 1. of, relating to, or having the qualities of pepper: HOT, PUNGENT 2. having a hot temper: TOUCHY 3. FIERY, STINGING

A particularly peppery personality, huh? I like that and all alliteration, Naoko.
 
Perhaps the hymn writers read Shakespeare and Marlowe?

That's not unlikely. The hymns I cited, and most hymns sung today, were written in the 18th and 19th Centuries, when folks who hadn't read Shakespeare, and possibly Marlowe, weren't considered educated.
 
This is slightly off the topic we were discussing, but I found this word and what it implies in the movie, Anonymous, which was about who Shakespeare really is, in this case Edward deVere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The line in the movie was, "When I reach my majority..." and I had to look it up.

From Wiki;

The age of majority is the threshold of adulthood as it is conceptualized (and recognized or declared) in law. It is the chronological moment when minors cease to legally be considered children and assume control over their persons, actions, and decisions, thereby terminating the legal control and legal responsibilities of their parents or guardian over and for them. Most countries set majority at 18. The word majority here refers to having greater years and being of full age; it is opposed to minority, the state of being a minor. The law in a given jurisdiction may never actually use the term "age of majority" and the term thereby refers to a collection of laws bestowing the status of adulthood. The age of majority is a legally fixed age, concept, or statutory principle, which may differ depending on the jurisdiction, and may not necessarily correspond to actual mental or physical maturity of an individual.

In practical terms, there are certain specific actions which a person who attains the age of majority is permitted to take, which they could not do before. These may include entering into a binding contract, buying stocks, voting, buying and/or consuming alcoholic beverages, driving motor vehicles on public roads, and marrying without obtaining consent of others. The ages at which these various rights or powers may be exercised vary as between the various rights and as between different jurisdictions. For example, the ages at which a person may obtain a license to drive a car or consume alcoholic beverages vary considerably between and also within jurisdictions.

Age of majority should not be confused with the age of sexual consent, marriageable age, drinking age, driving age, voting age, etc., which all may sometimes be independent of, and set at a different age from, the age of majority.
 
Yes, indeed, that is why one mauve dress in the whole book might fly under detection, hopefully.
...

It sometimes amuses me that women re-enactors go to great lengths to design and make their costumes, especially the large round crinolines, but make the basic mistake of wearing colours impossible at the time of that shape of dress. Mauve/mauvine was just about right for the time just before the crinoline began to extend backwards. Other analine dye colours were not available.


peppery - adj 1. of, relating to, or having the qualities of pepper: HOT, PUNGENT 2. having a hot temper: TOUCHY 3. FIERY, STINGING

A particularly peppery personality, huh? I like that and all alliteration, Naoko.

Peppery used to be associated with retired Colonels of the British Army perhaps because they had spent their service years in the hotter parts of the British Empire. Famous "peppery" Colonels are:

1. Colonel Blimp in the Powell/Pressburger film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. (Blimp was a nickname for a barrage balloon - fat and full of hot gas.)

2. Colonel Mustard in the Colman's Mustard advertisement campaign famously devised with the involvement of Dorothy L Sayers and used in her Lord Peter Wimsey novel Murder Must Advertise, and from him:

3. Colonel Mustard, one of the characters in the board game Cluedo (Clue in the US).
 
Og, how funny! Col. Mustard was my favorite piece in Clue. I had no idea Clue was originally Cluedo and started in England, though. Peppery to describe retired Colonels is appropriate enough, maybe it wasn't the heat, but their lack of patience in later life with underlings that caused their peppery nature. Grumpy old men, I have met quite a few in my life.

Also, I bought a mauve dress, but it is in the 1890s style, so it actually is accurate. I wore it to my 40th high school reunion for fun! Everyone wanted to know why I was dressed like that, and it gave me the perfect opening to talk about my book. (Sneaky writer that I am)

pepper pot - noun 1. PEPPERBOX 2.a. a stew of vegetables, meat or fish, with various condiments common in the West Indies b. a thick soup of tripe, meat, dumplings, and vegetables highly seasoned esp. with crushed peppercorns
 
The Colonel brings the meeting to order:

The-Recipe-Book-of-the-Mustard-Club.jpg


Pepper Pot: my wife and I have been buying reduced price Jamaican Pepper Pot from Sainsburys, made to a recipe from a renowned London-based Jamaican chef.

We enjoy them but most local people have never heard of the chef so the Pepper Pot doesn't sell, ends up in the reduced area, and we buy it...
 
The mention of anoline dyes made me think of a book I got off Gutenberg, "The Riddle of the Rhine, 1923.

This was about the demilitarization of the German chemical factories after WW1, and the chemical industries war potential.

What I found very interesting is a line on the last page. Remember this was written in 1923:

"This age has witnessed the growth of an industry critical for war and disarmament. Others will follow as science progresses. Without them, the possibility of sudden decisions, and therefore war incentive will be removed. Sir Oliver Lodge prophesies the war use of the newly controlled atomic energy. The fulfilment depends on the growth of another critical war industry whose nature it would be difficult to foretell. It is these critical industries which rational disarmament must harness. At present the chemical industry holds the field."

Sorry to disrupt the thread, but it's a fact that someone had figured out how to use atomic power long before the the Manhattan Project started. Interesting ?

Here is a 1913 Dictionary of Slang, Probably some good words in it.
 
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The mention of anoline dyes made me think of a book I got off Gutenberg, "The Riddle of the Rhine, 1923.

This was about the demilitarization of the German chemical factories after WW1, and the chemical industries war potential.

What I found very interesting is a line on the last page. Remember this was written in 1923:

"This age has witnessed the growth of an industry critical for war and disarmament. Others will follow as science progresses. Without them, the possibility of sudden decisions, and therefore war incentive will be removed. Sir Oliver Lodge prophesies the war use of the newly controlled atomic energy. The fulfilment depends on the growth of another critical war industry whose nature it would be difficult to foretell. It is these critical industries which rational disarmament must harness. At present the chemical industry holds the field."

Sorry to disrupt the thread, but it's a fact that someone had figured out how to use atomic power long before the the Manhattan Project started. Interesting ?

The possibilities of atomic power were known long before there was the practical science to produce it. Germany was close to producing an atomic bomb until Norwegian patriots destroyed the stocks of heavy water in transit to Germany.

The Manhattan Project took massive resources in terms of money, material and a team of brillant scientists and technicians. The Germans came close with a much leaner team.

From Wiki: History of Atomic Power

In 1902 Ernest Rutherford showed that radioactivity as a spontaneous event emitting an alpha or beta particle from the nucleus created a different element. He went on to develop a fuller understanding of atoms and in 1919 he fired alpha particles from a radium source into nitrogen and found that nuclear rearrangement was occurring, with formation of oxygen. Niels Bohr was another scientist who advanced our understanding of the atom and the way electrons were arranged around its nucleus through to the 1940s.

By 1911 Frederick Soddy discovered that naturally-radioactive elements had a number of different isotopes (radionuclides), with the same chemistry. Also in 1911, George de Hevesy showed that such radionuclides were invaluable as tracers, because minute amounts could readily be detected with simple instruments.

In 1932 James Chadwick discovered the neutron. Also in 1932 Cockcroft and Walton produced nuclear transformations by bombarding atoms with accelerated protons, then in 1934 Irene Curie and Frederic Joliot found that some such transformations created artificial radionuclides. The next year Enrico Fermi found that a much greater variety of artificial radionuclides could be formed when neutrons were used instead of protons.

Fermi continued his experiments, mostly producing heavier elements from his targets, but also, with uranium, some much lighter ones. At the end of 1938 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin showed that the new lighter elements were barium and others which were about half the mass of uranium, thereby demonstrating that atomic fission had occurred. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, working under Niels Bohr, then explained this by suggesting that the neutron was captured by the nucleus, causing severe vibration leading to the nucleus splitting into two not quite equal parts. They calculated the energy release from this fission as about 200 million electron volts. Frisch then confirmed this figure experimentally in January 1939.

This was the first experimental confirmation of Albert Einstein's paper putting forward the equivalence between mass and energy, which had been published in 1905.

Harnessing nuclear fission

These 1939 developments sparked activity in many laboratories. Hahn and Strassman showed that fission not only released a lot of energy but that it also released additional neutrons which could cause fission in other uranium nuclei and possibly a self-sustaining chain reaction leading to an enormous release of energy. This suggestion was soon confirmed experimentally by Joliot and his co-workers in Paris, and Leo Szilard working with Fermi in New York.

Bohr soon proposed that fission was much more likely to occur in the uranium-235 isotope than in U-238 and that fission would occur more effectively with slow-moving neutrons than with fast neutrons, the latter point being confirmed by Szilard and Fermi, who proposed using a 'moderator' to slow down the emitted neutrons. Bohr and Wheeler extended these ideas into what became the classical analysis of the fission process, and their paper was published only two days before war broke out in 1939.

Another important factor was that U-235 was then known to comprise only 0.7% of natural uranium, with the other 99.3% being U-238, with similar chemical properties. Hence the separation of the two to obtain pure U-235 would be difficult and would require the use of their very slightly different physical properties. This increase in the proportion of the U-235 isotope became known as 'enrichment'.

The remaining piece of the fission/atomic bomb concept was provided in 1939 by Francis Perrin who introduced the concept of the critical mass of uranium required to produce a self-sustaining release of energy. His theories were extended by Rudolf Peierls at Birmingham University and the resulting calculations were of considerable importance in the development of the atomic bomb. Perrin's group in Paris continued their studies and demonstrated that a chain reaction could be sustained in a uranium-water mixture (the water being used to slow down the neutrons) provided external neutrons were injected into the system. They also demonstrated the idea of introducing neutron-absorbing material to limit the multiplication of neutrons and thus control the nuclear reaction (which is the basis for the operation of a nuclear power station).

Peierls had been a student of Werner Heisenberg, who from April 1939 presided over the German nuclear energy project under the German Ordnance Office. Initially this was directed towards military applications, but by 1942 the military objective was abandoned as impractical. However, the existence of the German Uranverein project provided the main incentive for wartime development of the atomic bomb by Britain and the USA.
 
Thanks, Og, for the lovely visual.

JackLuis, after my latest research into the hidden powers that be in the 1850s, nothing surprises me, anymore, except how naive I have been all my life, but not anymore. Unfortunately, gaining true knowledge is not always a pleasant undertaking. In fact, it can be downright depressing at times.

pepper grass- noun any of a genus of cresses; esp: GARDEN CRESS
 
This one I know about because of my love for Mark Twain.

The Pepperbox Revolving Pistol:

The pepperbox revolving pistol contains multiple barrels which rotate about an axis into firing position. This was unlike the Colt Patterson pistol, in which chambers containing powder and ball were successively rotated into alignment with a single fixed barrel.

Gunsmiths had begun experimenting with multi-shot guns since the late 1600’s. However, a safe and reliable mechanism for ignition constituted a difficulty which was never completely overcome, until development of the the percussion ignition system. During the 1830’s patents were approved for percussion types of pistols in the United States, England and France.

In 1834 Ethan Allen, an American gun maker of that time patented a double action mechanism for the pepperbox pistol. Ethan Allen was a leading producer of pepperbox revolving pistols in the United States, producing some hundred variations between 1837 and 1865 under the brand names Allen & Thurber, Allen, Thurber & Co, and Allen & Wheelock. Allen’s success in gun manufacturing came in part from his pioneering the use of machine-made interchangeable parts in his guns.

These revolving barrel pistols were always known as “Pepperbox”, however, during the 1830’s they were generally known as “Revolving Pistols,” or “Rotary Pistols.” At $15 a piece, Pepperbox pistols were relatively expensive compared to single shot pocket pistols of the period. (Remember at this time gold is $20.00 per ounce and an unskilled laborer is earning $70.00 per year.) .

These pistols were generally small caliber, generally ranging from 28-36 caliber, though calibers ranged from 25 upwards to 58. Most have six barrels, though some have as few as three and extreme examples have as many as 18. Barrels were generally smoothbore, ranging in length from four to six inches. As can be expected, these guns are very front-heavy, and with their short barrels, effective at only very close range.

Mark Twain in Roughing It describes the accuracy and effectiveness of the pepperbox:

George Bemis...wore in his belt an old original "Allen" revolver, such as irreverent people called a "pepperbox". ...To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with any "Allen" in the world. But George's was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, "If she didn't get what she went after, she would fetch something else." And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow.
 
Carlus, I can well imagine.

pepperbox - noun 1. a small box or bottle with a perforated top used for sprinkling ground pepper on food 2. something resembling a pepperbox
 
Good day, posters. I hope you had a relaxing weekend.

pepper or peppering - vt 1.a. to sprinkle or season with or as if with pepper b. to shower with shot or other missiles 2. to hit with rapid repeated blows 3. to sprinkle as pepper is sprinkled

pepper-and-salt - adj having black and white or dark and light color intermingled in small flecks
 
I know what you mean, Og. I started out with dark pepper-colored hair, became more salt with the pepper as time went by, and now am totally salt-colored. I prefer to call it silver, but it is still white no matter what. LOL

peplos also peplus - noun a garment like a shawl worn by women of ancient Greece

peplum - noun a short section attached to the waistline of a blouse, jacket, or dress
 
Hello, everyone. A bit more from the peppy peppery group;

pep(1) - noun [short for pepper] brisk energy or initiative and high spirits: LIVELINESS

pep(2); pepped; pepping - vt to inject pep into: STIMULATE
 
I know what you mean, Og. I started out with dark pepper-colored hair, became more salt with the pepper as time went by, and now am totally salt-colored. I prefer to call it silver, but it is still white no matter what. LOL

I had a cousin who's very similar; she was white before her eldest had made it to her teens. Apparently it is in the genes.

Hello, everyone. A bit more from the peppy peppery group;

pep(1) - noun [short for pepper] brisk energy or initiative and high spirits: LIVELINESS

pep(2); pepped; pepping - vt to inject pep into: STIMULATE


From my Fair Lady
Why can't a woman be more like a man ?
. . . .
ready to pep you up whenever you are glum
why can't a woman be a chum ?
 
Handley, my hair started out with a white streak in the front on the right side of my forehead, and branched out. My mother's hair did the same thing, although she tried to dye it dark brown for a while. I never did dye mine. I always told my four children that they gave me this white hair, but now some white hair is showing up on thier heads and they don't have kids, yet, so it really is more likely genetic than stress induced. I often wondered if all the LSD I took in the 60s contributed to my early whitening, but probably not. BTW, I adore My Fair Lady. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.

peony - noun [from Paeon, physician of the gods] any of a genus of plants of the crowfoot family with large usually double flowers of red, pink, or white
 
White forelock is an autosomal dominant, arising from mutations in the PAX genes. It is usually accompanied by premature graying and iris heterochromia in a condition known as Waardenburg Syndrome. A degree of deafness often accompanies the syndrome.
Is one of your irises lighter or a somewhat different colour from the other?
 
Tio, that is very interesting, but no, both my irises are dark brown and my children used to complain to their friends that I had superhuman hearing. LOL

peon - noun 1. any of various Indian or Ceylonese workers 2. a member of the landless laboring class in Spanish America 3. plural peons a. a person held in complusory servitude to a master for the working out of an indebtedness b. DRUDGE, MENIAL

peonage - noun 1. the condition of a peon 2.a. the use of laborers bound in servitude because of debt b. system of convict labor by which convicts are leased to contractors
 
That's good, darling. The white forelock is still heretible as an autosomal dominant without the other characteristics of the syndrome.
 
Nice to know, Tio.

penurious - adj 1. marked by or sufferinG from penury 2. given to or marked by extreme stinting frugality

penury - noun 1. extreme poverty: PRIVATION 2. absence of resources: SCANTINESS
 
Here are two words I have never used in my entire life;

penult also penultimate or penultima - noun the next to the last member in a series; esp. the next to the last syllable of a word

penultimate - adj 1. next to the last 2. of or relating to a penult
 
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