they don't make words like they used to (revival)

[Jonathan Lighter]

Yeah, like I always call my four years in high school my "sublustrum."

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: they don't make words like they used to (revival)
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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

>In a message dated 9/18/06 12:11:59 PM, Berson at ATT.NET writes:
>
>
>> At 9/18/2006 11:46 AM, Bill Mullins wrote:
>> >I watched most of "Rooster Cogburn" over the weekend. In it, John
>> >Wayne's character is being forcibly retired for reasons of age and
>> >decrepitude. He maintains that he is good for another "lustrum",
>> >however.
>>
>> Did you happen to catch which university Rooster attended? Or
>> whether earlier he had been detached by his unit to attend and learn
>> Latin? Or was it on an ROTC scholarship?
>>
>> Joel
>>
>> > >
>> > > Just got this notice on Linguist List, which led me to wonder...
>> > >
>> > > >
>> > > >This lustrum workshop offers a forum of discussion between
>> > > researchers
>> > > >from different fields of writing research (theoretical linguistics,
>> > > >psycholinguistics, computational linguistics or language education),
>> > > >from different countries and working on different languages.
>> > >
>> > > ...what exactly a lustrum workshop was. I was pretty sure
>> > > I'd never knowingly encountered a lustrum before, and had no
>> > > conception of what it might be. Anyone else know? I may
>> > > have lived a sheltered (not to say benighted) life, but I was
>> > > somewhat surprised to come across this announcement with its
>> > > apparent presupposition that the reader would immediately
>> > > recognize that a "lustrum workshop" obviously refers to...
>> > >
>> >
>> >------------------------------------------------------------
>> >The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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