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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

> fulminate

Hearby nominated as word of the day. Excellent.

Diablo 2 taught me this. Along with my other favourite word: Gargantuan.

From Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the lands of Lilliput and Gargantua. In one, every resident is tiny, Lilliputian, and in the other: huge, ...Gargantuan

Notably, the book reads in a very modern way, it's a bit shocking to know it was written in the 1700s when stylistically, and according to its vocabulary, it feels so very modern.

Hate to be pedantic, but as a Frenchman I can't help but point out it's actually from Rabelais: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel

Haha indeed, I forgot this existed! What a long and winding trail our languages are!

Thanks, your pedantry is greatly appreciated, it makes HN fun and educational

Wow. Embarrassingly I admit I’ve never read it but you’ve sold me.

Also I love how Gargantua sounds right. Just like Morlocks and Eloi. Language is fun.

Since we're talking language, I hope you won't mind my mentioning it's 'hereby'—etymologically literally 'here'+'by'; nothing to do with hearing.

You are absolutely correct. I missed that on my proofread. Kind of lame since it is such a short post.

The older I get, the more I find myself making spelling mistakes based on word pronunciation. Sometimes I use a totally different word than what I was thinking, which makes absolutely no sense unless you read it aloud. Then you realize what happened. Hopefully it is not early onset dementia. Though it would not be -that- early.

> The older I get, the more I find myself making spelling mistakes based on word pronunciation. Sometimes I use a totally different word than what I was thinking, which makes absolutely no sense unless you read it aloud. Then you realize what happened. Hopefully it is not early onset dementia. Though it would not be -that- early.

I think it isn't, and suspect we all have such quirks, especially at the interaction of writing and sound. I occasionally find, for no clear reason, that when I am trying to say a color name I will instead say another color with the same first letter (e.g., if I meant to say 'green', then I will sometimes say 'grey' instead). I am not so young either, but I have done this for as long as I can remember, and don't think I suffer from dementia ….

And here I was thinking that it was just chemistry jargon, i.e. mercury fulminate.

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