lustrum again

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

I didn't know the word, either. What I found interesting (in addition to what 
Larry found intreresting) is that NOAD2 thought it was an important enough 
word to give an entry to in an abridged dictionary--given that, as S. Landau 
says in his wonderful book, if an ordinary desktop dictionary put in all of the 
words that one might think reasonalbe candidates to put in, the editors would 
run out of space somewhere around the letter "D". Why LUSTRUM? Because John 
Wayne used it?

Shucks, I have to look up "gravamen" and "insouciant" every time I see them 
(though not "tendentious"--perhaps for reasons that some will think obvious).

In a message dated 10/16/06 3:39:15 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:


> At 2:57 PM -0400 10/16/06, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
> >LUSTRUM appears to be a common enough word that it appears in the New 
> Oxford
> >American Dictionary, edition 2. I didn't check the usual online 
> dictionaries.
> 
> OK, since that anonymous ignoramus quote below Bill's and Joel's
> postings was me, I should indicate that I wasn't questioning the
> existence of the word in question, just indicating my surprise that
> there could be such a word I had manage to survive 60+years without
> encountering.  In fact, it seems to be relatively rare in use, but
> obviously not unheard of; what I find particularly interesting is
> that the every-5-year ancient Roman ritual purification it alludes to
> is semi-preserved along two different lines:  the "lustrum"
> conference and its kin, which preserves the five-year period feature
> while losing the ritual purification component, and the notion of
> "lustration", which retains the ritual purification (in particular,
> applied to the purging by law in post-iron curtain governments in the
> former Eastern Bloc nations of officials who served in the earlier
> regime) while losing the five-year period component.
> 
> No doubt everyone else on *our* list has occasion to refer to lustra
> every day (or at least every five years), but as noted it was a new
> one on me, and I was guessing it was equally unfamiliar to most other
> Linguist List subscribers.
> 
> LH
> 

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