I was googling around for something and found this fun Web site with some interesting words. I liked Mu, a Chinese word that means "not yes, not no" or "this does not have any meaning." Definitely an ambivalent word!

I also liked the Washington Post words where people were asked to supply alternate meanings for various words, like abdicate meaning to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. I bet you could come up with some good ones!

Mu came up in yesterday's Skin Horse strip.

In Japanese, 無 mu is "(1) un-; non-; (2) bad ...; poor" or "(1) nothing; naught; nought; nil; zero; (pref) (2) un-; non-". In Korean, 무 mu seems to be a negative prefix. In Chinese it's 無 wú meaning "without, not". Doesn't seem ambivalent to me.

What about the Greek letter? It has scientific meanings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...CE.9C.CE.BC_.28mu.29

Geoff, I see in your link they talk about the "mobius function." Is that where "mobius strip" came from? I've always been intrigued with mobius strips.

Not directly. The Möbius strip and Möbius function are both named after the same man, August Ferdinand Möbius.

And yet it is a mathematical function . I have always been intrigued by the mobius strip.

I didn't want to start a new thread but check this out.

I missed one, so I guess I'm Defective-American.

quote:

Originally posted by Proofreader:
I didn't want to start a new thread but check this out.

According to that quiz, buckaroo is from

quote:

Buckra, meaning someone with power or knowledge in the Efik language of West Africa, which passed into American English via Barbados Creole

This isn't true. buckaroo is from Spanish vaquero "cowboy".

Buckaroo is actually Australian. It's the amount you pay to have sex with a wallaby.

The information in this quiz is from Richard Bailey's book Speaking American. The OUPblog provides an excerpt from that book where Bailey argues that buckaroo is from Efik. The OED editor Katrin Thier responds.

Note the difference between Bailey's and Thier's arguments. Thier tries to account for the differences in stress between the English and Spanish word, and mentions how buckaroo first appeared with words of Spanish origin. Bailey, on the other hand, provides no actual evidence of a connection between buckra and buckaroo; he simply talks a lot about buckra and how it was used, and discounts the accepted etymology for no apparent reason.

Thier also seems more open for alternative explanations, while Bailey seems more set.

How about the Ancients of Mu?
*shickers*