Fwd: A.Word.A.Day--logorrhea

[Dave Monroe]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Wordsmith <wsmith at wordsmith.org>
Date: Sun, May 29, 2011 at 11:12 PM
Subject: A.Word.A.Day--logorrhea
To: against.the.dave at gmail.com


Wordsmith.org
May 30, 2011
This week's theme
Words made with combining forms

This week's words
logorrhea

A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

Is there a word to describe .....? I'm often asked this question.
Readers need a word for a particular idea, action, belief, or
occurrence, and often it turns out the language doesn't have a
ready-made word for it. But that's no cause for despair.

If there's no word available, chances are you can find components to
build your own: affixes (prefixes and suffixes), other existing words,
and combining forms.

What are combining forms? You can think of them as the Lego (from
Danish, leg: play + godt: well) bricks of language. As the name
indicates, a combining form is a linguistic atom that occurs only in
combination with some other form which could be a word, another
combining form, or an affix (unlike a combining form, an affix can't
attach to another affix).

This week we'll feature five words that use the combining forms logo-
(word), necro- (dead), hetero- (different), phyco- (seaweed), hagi-
(holy), paleo- (old, ancient), -rrhea (flow), -logy (account, study),
-cracy (rule), and -graphy (writing).

logorrhea

PRONUNCIATION:
(log-uh-REE-uh)

MEANING:
noun: Excessive flow of words, especially when incoherent.

ETYMOLOGY:
>From Greek logo- (word) + -rrhea (flow), from rhoia (flow). Also see
rhinorrhea. Earliest documented use: 1902.

USAGE:
"Dumas suffers from logorrhea, induced by the simple formula that the
more he wrote, the more money he made."
Erik Spanberg; The Count of Monte Cristo; The Christian Science
Monitor (Boston, Massachusetts); Feb 6, 2011.

Explore "logorrhea" in the Visual Thesaurus.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it. -Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)

http://wordsmith.org/words/logorrhea.html