Postultimate

It is here!

This product is not the same as its previous dozen predecessors.

…It is the Ultimate version.

The word ultimate is generally solely used for exaggerations: it means that there is nothing after it, so if a new product truly is ultimate it would mean either the manufacturers will go bust or there will be a catastrophic societal collapse where the manufacturing technologies will be lost. However, doomsday never comes, instead the version afterwards gets a new name… this would make it a “postultimate” version, which is quite paradoxical.

However, it is fully understandable concept and it turns out to be great for making ridiculously nerdy hyperbolae. Eg. "That new Justin Beber album is the postultimate in awesomeness." See?

Unstoppable force?

In a very cerebral book I came across the "irresistible force paradox" (wiki: link) —okay, it was a Superman graphic novel, but still.
The paradox asks what would happen if an unstoppable force encounters an unmovable object.
Classically, the problem has no solution as the definition of each object violates the definition of the other.
Whereas, Kal-El's answer was they surrender, a rather witty, but nonsensical answer.
Another solution I can think up is that the unstoppable force are neutrinos, which don't interact much with matter, making them pretty unstoppable "force", but changing what the force is made of is cheating.
Maths has improved since classical times, we now have words for any big number (million, billion or even trimilliquinquigentisedecillion, i.e. 10^3519) and we now know that Euclid's did not get all his axioms right.  One such mathematical improvement is transfinite numbers. The underlying concept of Cantor's transfinite numbers is pretty powerful, namely infinite values can come in different sizes, with some infinities bigger than others.
So the above problem in this light is obvious, namely that as no finite force can stop the unmovable object, whereas no finite force can move the unstoppable force: the one that will win is the bigger transfinite value. Those silly Greeks, ae?

The Classical flying Spaghetti monster

So, how what do you call someone scared of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

The Greek wikipedia gives the flying spaghetti monster as Ιπτάμενο Μακαρονοτέρας (iptamevo makaroteras). By the process of elimination, the first word is flying*. The second word is rather interesting: makaro sounds like maccaroni, while the second part is τέρας, τέρεος (Ionic)/τέρατος (Koine), monster like in teratoma (a really weird ovarian cancer with many different tissue types, including hair and bone). So in Greek the Spaghetti monster is actually a macaroni monster.
So the fear of the Spaghetti Monster is macaroteratophobia.

Spaghetti-monstrous sounds nice, but what could the Greek adjective be?
Interestingly, τέρας has two meanings one means a marvel, the other a monster —which makes sense as everyone marvels at a monster, albeit in horror and not in awe. So in Greek, the spaghetti monster is also a marvel!
Searching τέρας on the OED gives many medical terms such as hemitery, terata, teratology and teratogenesis, which have to do with misshapen organisms. It also contains the adjective teretical (adj, Relating to marvels or prodigies) and the noun teratism (n. love of the marvellous or prodigious, or monstrosity). Amusingly, the word teretical sounds like the word heretical, which is unrelated, which make sense as all religions other than pastafarianism are heretical and not the other way round —in light of the above, another way of saying pastafarianism could be macaroteratism.
I think macaroteretical sounds rather nice, even though Spaghetti-monstrous is more intuitive.

Another amusing thing is that macaronic means jumbled, mingled and macaronic Latin is a the jumbled Latin (Monty Python's "Romanes eunt domus" scene). It is an odd coincidence, though, given that the flying spaghetting monster is not made up at all…

_____________________
*) Google confirms. It is one of those words that differs in modern Greek from classical Greek. Attic masculine present participles end in -ων, but modern Greek has different endings, so that makes sense. ίπταμαι turns out to be a "late" spelling of πέτομαι via ἵπταμαι (Perseus) —I think late here means Koine, so not late at all.

millionennium and the ennium suffix

Yahoo Answers is probably the only think Yahoo! has going for itself, yet the system is far from perfect. Many answers are wrong or retarded, but once the time has finished the Q/A are fixed and no new answers can be added. I stumbled across one that was wrong and here is the correct answer.

I was curious to see if a word for a set number of years beyond millennium existed, but it doesn't.
However, it does not mean new words cannot be made: the Latin word for year, annus, possess a suffix form -ennium for exactly this purpose. Actually, in Italian -enne is a commonly used as a suffix (on Italian numbers) to say "years old", eg. an undicenne is a 11-yo.

• Year
• biennium
• triennium
• quadriennium
• lustrum
• decade
• century
• millenium
• "decamillennium"
• "centimillennium"
• "millionennium"
• "billionennium"
• etc.

The catch is that all the -illion numbers do not exist in Latin and that their usage only was standardised recently whereas before there were two conflicting systems, called the long and short scale. We now solely use the latter, whereas remnants of the former are still present in some languages, in Italian, for example, billion is called miliardo (trillion is trilione). The word million is actually of Late Latin/early Italian origin and is the word thousand (mille) with the augmentative suffix -one (in Anglish they came up with the cool sounding "micklered", instead of calquing and getting "overthousand"), whereas the Romans and other folk simply would say a thousand thousand. It is rather weird to think that people used get along just fine without having the need to deal with large numbers... or possibly their denial of such need is the reason why the Roman empire's economy was a disaster.

Meline TB

The badger cut has been called off, which I am glad of as the science is dodgy and badgers look cute.
The article I was reading had a lexical knot, which amused me. The adjective bovine was used more often than cow or cattle, whereas when it came to the badgers there "of badgers" or badgers used as adjectival noun. A cool side-effect of the mixture in English is that some nouns are Old English-derived but their adjectives are Latin-derived, (eg. eye and ocular, window and fenestral, mail and postal, technically "collateral adjectives"). The animals ones are quite cool as they mostly end in -ine.
Whereas lupine, asinine, equine, murine, ovine and bovine are commonly known, the rest are stuff for a Wikipedia lists (List of animal names is pretty terrible and littered with errors).
The adjective for badger is meline (I looked it up), so the article could have talked about meline TB.
Googling meline TB gives only a article obviously in The guardian.

What if we were not obsessed with the -ine adjectives?
We would still be stock actually. Badger is probably from badge + ard, so came about solely after 1500 and the only adjective is badgerly and badgerlike, which both mean behaving like a badger (and I assume smelling like one too).
The OE-derived word for badger is brock (from broc) and the adjective brockish means meline, badgerly or beastly. The meaning of brockish is as guessable as meline, so that is of little help.
An amusing twist is that broc is actually of Celtic origin (brocc in Old Irish). Whereas the germanic version is dasse (last used in ME; cognate with German Dachs; plural is dassen).

So meline is the only choice. In addition to the impenetrability of some of the Latin derived adjectives, there is also the problem of animals unknown to the romans or that they could not be bothered to tell apart.
In the endless lists of name of animal adjectives, what seems to happen is the genus name is converted. It works for certain animals, such as walruses, which are odobenine, but it gets into a muddle when the pus/pedis comes in. Are kangaroos and wallabies macropine or macropodine? Are octopuses octopine or octopodine?
The last one actually is case where the Romans could not be bothered telling animals apart. The Romans called both octopuses and polyps polypus, so when Linnaeus came along he made called the form octo- and left the other poly-, which makes sense. In Old English, they did not care either and they simply used the word cuttlefish to refer to all cephalopods (squid appeared from nowhere after the 1600s). Another case is rat. The Romans called mures both rats and mice, whereas the Germanic barbarians did and gave the mediaeval Latin rattus. As a consequence rattine is not commonly used, being a back formation. Rattish should be, but it is not scientific. Which is actually the reason in the first place why they are used…

The correct octopus plural

The whole octopuses/octopi/octopoda/octopodes issue is hilariously tragic.
There is no black and white solution as three languages are involved.

Octopus is from the taxonomic Neolatin word octopūs and zoologically all -pūs words are 3rd declension Latin and generally masculine (genitive -podis and  plural nominative -podes), because they decided so. The Romans called octopuses polypus, a masculine second declension word (plural polypi), where the pus root is the same. In other words, English pedants would have told the Romans off for not getting their Greek right —ironic given that they are fluent at it as opposed to knowing less than a smattering of rules and words.

So if problem does not lies with the Romans, does it lie with the Greeks?

Maybe… Greek was continually changing and has different periods, the Greek in Greece now speak modern Greek, whereas under the Roman empire it was Koine Greek, before that a mix of dialects which waxing and waining prestige.

An archaic dialect was Doric were the word for foot was πός (pous, genitive που, pou, plural nominative ποί, poi), a second declension, whereas in others such Ionic, the early classic one of Homer, or Attic, the classic one from Athens, it was πούς (pous, genitive ποδος, podos, and plural nominative ποδες, podes). The Romans borrowed polypus from the Doric speakers, so their plural was polypi. A similar muddle happened with the Latin letters and transliterations from Greek.

So to recap in order of decreasing idiocy:

• Octopoda.
• Pro: Yes, octopus may be a masculine not neuter, but the order is called octopoda and Stephen Fry said so on QI.
• Contra: Octopoda is for consistency and Saint Stephen does make mistakes (he got his Greek wrong on The liar by writing patrochles)
• Octopi.
• Pro: Octopus was based on polypus and that zoologists have no right to decide and ruin the purity of Latin historical continuity.
• Contra: The word was coined by zoologists, the Roman's borrowed polypi right before they went out of style, anyway, and there is no such thing as continuity with Neolatin, just anachronism.
• Octopodes.
• Pro: The correct Neolatin plural.
• Contra: Rather hard to pronounce.
• Octopuses.
• Pro: it is not the end of the world.
• Contra. But it is fun.

It is curious how the word pedantry has the Latin pedes as a root…

Fossilised participles

What do nature and furniture have to do with the future?

Participles are adjectives formed from a verb, in English there are two flavours, the active present participle (in -ing) and the passive past participle (in -ed).

In English, there are a great deal of fossilised Latin participles, which are hiding…

In Latin there were four, the active present participle in -ans or -ens (-ant or -ent in English), the passive participle in -atus or -itus (-ate or -ite in English), the active future participle in -aturus or -iturus (-ature or -iture in English) and the passive future participle (actually called a gerundive) -andus or -endus.

It is rather cool thing to know as they are easy to spot.

For example,

Expectant means expecting, dependant means depending on, constant means standing with.

Separate means sperated, ingrate means that has not been graced, passionate means that has been given passion.

Agenda means that will be done, graduand means that will be graduated, memorandum means that will be remembered.

And finally, nature means that will beget (nascent is the present participle equivalent), furniture means that will furnish and future means that will be.

What the logic was for nature and furniture to be future participles is a different matter entirely…