Conference thebay::joyoflex

    Oh, how sporting you are with your hints!  Cecity is most likely
    derived from the Latin caecus, meaning blind.  It probably means
    blindness; I'd guess it implies an unwillingness to see.

    I'd argue that any use of this word is prima facie evidence of poor
    writing skills.
    

Cecity = infusion of garbanzos.



Isn't ceci the Italian word for chick peas (a.k.a. garbanzos)?

    While we're at it, I just read a book that used the word "orgulous" three
    or four times, yet it's not in my American Heritage Dictionary, Third
    Edition.

    What is it?

    - Jim

    You all better lay off the John Updike!

    Re .4
    
    The author of your book was probably really orgulous at having come up
    with a word like that.  Proud.

    I wonder... does the etymology go back any further then the French
    "orgeueil(sp?)" which I can clearly recall but can't spell with any
    certainty?  (or was that cecity?) :-)
    
    Mr Binder, front & center pleeyuz.

I'm not Mr Binder, but "orgueil" and "c�cit�" (meaning simply blindness) 
in French.

    Re. .7
    
    `orgueil' in French and `orgullo' [or something like that] in Spanish;
    so they are almost certain to have a common ancestor in Latin. I don't
    know it without looking it up, and by the time I do, Dick will have
    told us anyway.
    
    b

    Spanish:
    
    Orgulloso is proud.
    
    Cegar is to blind and ciego is blind man.

    I accuse these writers of being excessively orgulous about their
    vocabularies and in a state of cecity regarding their readers' lack of
    interest in how many words they know.
    
    I can't even figure out how cecity can be used in a sentence.  
    
    It's useless to use words nobody knows unless you need them to explain
    something and then you need to explain in context the word you're
    introducing.  Neither of these words has *any* value.
    
    On the other hand, "purblind", which has come to be an intensified form
    of "blind" was a much more useful word when it meant something like
    "blind to a degree, partly blind".  Actually, there are many more
    purblind people, in this sense, than there are blind people, meaning
    having no vision whatsoever.

    The earliest known antecedent of orgulous is Old High German urguol,
    meaning distinguished.

>    Cegar is to blind and ciego is blind man.
    
    And Segar drew a man with one eye.
    
    Ray

>   I can't even figure out how cecity can be used in a sentence.
        
        Cecity ne pas une pipe:  |
        
    And for "cegar"
        
        Sometimes a cegar is just a cegar.
        
    Dan

    Re .11
    
    >I can't even figure out how cecity can be used in a sentence.
    
    Wow!  An example of cecity,
    and an example of meta-cecity,
    and an example of meta-meta-cecity,
    and an example of meta-meta-meta-cecity....

    Hmmm.
    
    Ain't that the nickname of Cecily Tyson, screen star of such epics as
    "The Color Purple?"
    
    Ya know, the one in which she co-starred with Whoogo & Ophwi?
    

    Just for the record, at first I didn't understand what all this fuss
    was about simply because, apparently unlike cecity in English, "c�cit�"
    is a fairly common word in French, the meaning of which is usually
    known by your average man in the street. When I need to use a word of
    that meaning in English I use "blindness", but I wasn't aware that
    "cecity" was so little known by the average English speaker. And also
    for the record, "orgueil" and "orgueilleux" are the usual French words
    for "proudness" and "proud". The French cognate (and origin, through
    Anglo-Norman) of "proud" is "preux" which is a medieval word, little in
    use anymore, and the meaning of which is not the same (it means "brave"
    or "chivalrous", the pejorative nuance was introduced by the Saxon
    subjects of the Normans in England when they heard it used as a praise
    among their masters).
    			Denis.

    Thanks, Denis -- you just brought back a pleasant memory of my favorite
    Lit course in college, wherein we read <<le Chanson de Roland.>>  I
    remember some ancillary essay, or maybe it was the entire course title,
    on the mores of the time:  <<le Preux et le Courtois.>>
    
    Bright college daze...  :-)
    

    I wish I could see where all this blathering about cecity is going.

�        <<< Note 1073.9 by FORTY2::KNOWLES "Integrated Service: 2B+O" >>>
�                              -< common ancestry >-
�
�    Re. .7
�    
�    `orgueil' in French and `orgullo' [or something like that] in Spanish;
�    so they are almost certain to have a common ancestor in Latin. 
    
    
    Bong. Well I did say `almost certain'. In my dictionaries I didn't find
    any trace of a Latin ancestor; so how these words got into so many
    Romance languages (Italian and Portuguese too) is a bit of a mystery.
    There are two theories:		
    	
    	o	from something Germanic via Frankish and then Proven�al
    
    	o	directly, through invasions (e.g. Visigoths in Iberia)
    
    These aren't _my_ theories (which are well known to be off-the-wall
    at times); and the debate may have been either amplified or closed down
    in editions later than 1975. If you want an off-the-wall theory, try
    this for size: 
    
    <WAG>
    The word *ORGULIUS was used in late Latin (picked up during the
    Germanic wars - like WERRA (war), and possibly used only
    only in the provinces) but does not occur in any extant text. So
    `orgueil' has Teutonic roots (via Frankish) but `orgullo' etc. have a
    Latin ancestor.
    <ENDWAG>
    
    Note the use of an asterisk. It's a convention that lets a philologist
    get a supposed word into print regardless of the data.
    
    
    Re c�cit�
    
    French is understandably more at home with Latinate words. Another
    example is cari�: there is a fairly obscure English word `carious', but
    I've never heard anyone say `I'm going to the dentist to have a carious
    tooth removed'.
    
    b

    Re carious tooth
    
    But dentists *do* refer to cavities in teeth as caries.

    Indeed. Dentists use the word `caries', and probably `carious', too.
    They presumably mean something more specific than `rotten'. I wouldn't
    expect to hear a layman say `carious' though.
    
    b

If your teeth are continually decaying, you're getting cariouser and cariouser.

My dentist plans to institute a bus service to pick people up and take them
to the office.  He is going to call it the Carie-van.