roily

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Michael Trittipo wrote:

> Your comment just sent me running to my Czech dictionaries, Paul.
> There, I do find "runny," in two senses: the texture of something like
> a runny cake mix (basically "thin" or "flowing/liquid"), and the runny
> nose sense.

I had intended to be humorous, but to coin a phrase, in humor veritas...

A check on Google's n-gram viewer shows that "runny nose" has only 
recently become a common phrase. It was relatively rare until after WW 
II, and really took off in the 1970s. And the phrase "running nose" 
(lit. текучий нос), which was so unfamiliar to me that I thought it as 
ludicrous as *жидкий нос, was actually more common until that switch in 
the 1970s. I suppose my dictionaries reflect the previous situation.

<http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=runny+nose%2Crunning+nose&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=>

I also found, by the same technique, that the rare phrase "dripping 
nose" is more common than the even rarer "drippy nose." Go figure.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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