roily

[Matt Tucker]

roily |ˈroilē|
adjective
(chiefly of water) muddy; turbulent : those waters were roily, high, and muddy.

That's what dictionaries are for!

Matt
________________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of John Dunn [John.Dunn at GLASGOW.AC.UK]
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 1:23 PM
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] roily

Help! I have lived for sixty-four years as a native speaker of what I fondly imagined to be English and have never come across the word 'roily'.  What on earth does it mean?

It occurs to me incidentally that there are two possible explanations for the extension of the meaning of 'runny' from boiled eggs and paint to noses.  It may be semantic, but it may also be phonetic, in that it could have originated in speech as a simplification of the awkward (unless you happen to be a native speaker of Bolognese) consonant cluster [ŋn].

John Dunn.
________________________________________
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Paul B. Gallagher [paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM]
Sent: 22 April 2013 03:16
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] roily


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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