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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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Chortle

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 06:53pm on 2003-06-28

Huh. Learn something new every day ... I just found out that the word "chortle" is of much more recent origin than I'd imagined. According to a web page about the evolution of English, "chortle" was coined by Lewis Carrol as a combination of "chuckle" and "snort". And here I'd thought it was one of those "been around [effectively] forever" words. (Okay, it would obviously have to be Middle English or Modern English, so I knew it was less than a thousand years old, but still, I was waaaaay off.)

Mood:: 'amused' amused
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chortle

posted by [identity profile] anniemal.livejournal.com at 07:13am on 2003-06-29
Dearlove, you haven't read "The Annotated Alice" yet or enough, I guess. There's 'frumious' and 'vorpal' and 'uffish' and... Martin Gardner is a mathematician, too, somewhere in North Carolina. Worth looking up on his own, as well as in conjunction with the Rev. Chas. Dodgson's works.
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Re: chortle

posted by [identity profile] butterfluff.livejournal.com at 07:46pm on 2003-06-30
I have two different Annotated Alices, both by Martin Gardner. Wonderful stuff. I saw an Annotated Snark in the reference section of a library years ago, but haven't found it for sale anywhere.

He used to write the Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions column for Scientific American. I don't know if he is still alive -- I was reading his columns collected in books back in 1965.

Hexaflexagons! Polyominoes! Moebius strips!
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Re: chortle

posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 03:32am on 2003-07-03
Anniemal is correct that I haven't read an annotated version (yet).

As for Martin Gardner, I used to enjoy his column in Scientific American in the 1970s and 1980s; I only stumbled across one slim volume of his work in book form. It was his review of Douglas Hofstader's (oh, I've probably misspelled that) Godel, Escher, Bach that turned me on to that book (not too long before Hofstader's column replaced Gardner's in SciAm, IIRC).
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