[FRIAM] Effigification

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Wow, Steve, I never got to “Effigy”.  Because I took 7 years of Latin, I ended up looking at two Latin verbs that have the same  past participle, figo, figere, fixi, fictus and fingo fingere, fixi, fictus and then, the most common of them all, faceo, facere, feci,  factus, the first meaning to fix, the second meaning to form, and the third meaning to make.  At this point, it began to occur to me in good FRIAM fashion, that these assignments of words to root-lineages were the work not of speakers of Latin but of its teachers, and that the etymology of words with such closely related spellings and meanings was almost certainly more “bushy” than teachers of Latin would have it.  

 

It was at this point, that Steve’s note grabbed me by my long ears and pulled me out of this rabbit hole.  Of course, ef-figi-fic-ation.  So, a neologism to be sure, but with good etymological standing, being derived both from fingo and faceo.  So, effigification = the making of effigies or, to go down deeper, =the making of an outside-formed thing.  

 

Hey, studying Latin for 7 years has to be useful for something!  Can you imagine how different my life would have been if I had 7 years of Chinese?!

N

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Thursday, April 8, 2021 12:05 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] Effigification

 

uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

> ... it's a lot of work to do that inferring and the subsequent error 

> correction in straw-steel-etc effigification

 

Damn, that is a great well packed phrase with a word *I* might have conjured in the absence of any better one!

 

I knew right away (I think) what you meant by "effigification" but when I went looking for a precedent for it, I couldn't find any.   Could this be a true neologism?  With a little luck it might find it's way into the OED in an edition or two.   Like we can "verbize any noun", can we "nounificate any verb"?  In this case, however it seems we are verbifying a nounificated verb? (effigy->effigify->effigification)

 

But (mildly?)_ obscured (to me) is whether you consider the straw<->steel man continuum to in fact be *effigies*?

 

My connotation of "effigy" includes the business implied by "to burn in effigy" which in fact *does* apply well to the more flammable end of the spectrum (i.e. straw), but I don't know if you intend that aspect. Straw-Steel men *are* models, and perhaps caricatures in some sense.  

 

I'm not deliberately splitting hairs to undermine your argument, but rather to understand more better what all might be implied by your use of the straw-steel idiom.   I'm late to the party, having only recently

(months) let go of my archaic mapping which was roughly opposite yours... in that "straw-good because it is designed to be discardable or an armature to plaster over into a more elaborate model" vs "steel-bad because it  likely represents premature binding".

 

- Steve

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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