cacotopia

[Jonathan Lighter]

You mean you don't get puns on "Urine-us" too?

  Long ago I began affecting a pseudo-Greek pronunciation, kind of Oo' rahnus. Now nobody knows what I'm talking about.

  JL

y <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: cacotopia
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If not for the tradition of dealing with Greek by way of Latin in
English letters, the two words would be spelled "Outopie" and
"Eutopie." And Uranus would be spelled "Ouranos," saving us or, at
least, saving me, from all those asinine puns based on mis-stressing
"Uranus" as "y at -RAY-n@s," when it should be "YOU-r at n@s."

-Wilson

On 10/16/06, Mark A. Mandel wrote:
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> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Mark A. Mandel"
> Subject: Re: cacotopia
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,
> while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools.
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> Jonathan Lighter said:
> >>>>>
>
> Jeremy Bentham used the word "cacotopia" in 1818, defining it as "the=20
> imagined seat of
> the worst government." OED labels it "nonce-wd."
>
> <<<<<
>
> That makes good sense as the opposite of "eutopia", which at least in=20
> present-day English is homophonous with "utopia". I always thought More=20
> coined the word straightforwardly as 'no-place', which would make this nonc=
> e=20
> word a derivation based on an eggcorn. Wikipedia=20
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia#Etymology) says, though,
>
> =09The word "utopia" was created to suggest two Greek neologisms=20
> simultaneously: outopia (no place) and eutopia (good place).
>
> and OED supports that:
>
> =09Eutopia: [...] First used by Sir T. More or his friend Peter Giles=20
> (see quot. 1516), with a play on UTOPIA ( [...] =3D =91no place, land of=20
> nowhere=92), the name of the imaginary country described in More's famous b=
> ook=20
> with that title. Some later writers have misused the word for Utopia,=20
> imagining the latter to be an incorrect spelling; others have correctly use=
> d=20
> the two words in an antithesis.
>
> The 1516 quotation is from a text "prefixed to 'Utopia'", I suppose as a=20
> preface.
>
> -- Mark A. Mandel
> [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
>
> --0-631688624-1161021164=:25219--
>
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--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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