11/22/02’s illustrious band:

Hapax Legomenon

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(HAY-paks li-GOM-uh-non) noun, plural hapax legomena: A word or form that has only one recorded use. [From Greek hapax (once) + legomenon, from legein (to say).]

Example: “Linda Tripp, the faithless friend, says to Monica Lewinsky about the President, ‘Right now I think he's a schwonk.’ This qualifies as what biblical exegetes call a hapax legomenon, the only known use in print, which makes it difficult to define.”

William Safire, Where's the Poetry?, The New York Times, Nov 1, 1998.

Hapax legomena pose particular problems for Biblical scholars and other translators, who see a unique word in only one context instead of many and therefore have fewer clues about its meaning. They must try to determine the word’s origin or derivation, or examine similar words in other languages for guidance.

I think this is just a very scholarly way of referring to stuff that’s totally made-up.

On a somewhat unrelated note, if you want to see the coolest online word toy ever, check out the Visual Thesaurus. Enter a word under the twinkly box at left, press “Click to launch,” and watch a whole bouquet of related terms sprout around your chosen one. Click on any of them for a new bloom. Point at the little circle-buds for extra information. Word nerd paradise (the technical term for which is nerdvana)!

That’s-so-90s aside: When I spellchecked this document, the checker snagged on “Lewinsky,” and I had the very great pleasure of clicking “Ignore.” Don’t you wish we could do that with any news item we wanted to? Perhaps in the future we will. We’ll just aim our remotes at the TV newscast and, if the talking head is droning about something that does not amuse, we’ll laser-click the Ignore icon in the upper right. Lewinsky? Ignore. Local weather? Play. Sports scores? Ignore. This year’s Furby equivalent? Ignore. Pierce Brosnan in the latest James Bond flick? Play! Add to favorites! Zero in!