2/11/2004: Hoarfrost
 

http://cellar.org/2004/hoarfrost.jpg

An MSNBC Week in Pics shot credited to one Jamie Roper. This one is selected because it's a damn good shot, but also because I had never heard this term "hoarfrost" before.

And also because, looking at this, I couldn't tell what it was without reading the caption.

It's a volleyball net covered with hoarfrost. Sometimes called white frost, this frost can only happen in the right circumstances -- when misty air at near freezing temperature hits a surface that's already freezing cold, such as a net.

How do you make a hoarfrost?

How do you make a hoarfrost?

Umm...look inside your freezer?

no!......how do you make hoarfrost?

you dump her dead body in a frozen lake!

There ya go. I was waiting for the regular answer don't pay her, but this will do.

that pic looks more like some kind of wierd board game.

ahhh... rimes with whore:)

not necessarily "rhymes" but homonyms :)

Yeah, I married one of them. Nice picture, UT.;)

Oh, *well done*, E...the absolutely perfect intentional misspelling.

Hmm... if that's a hole in the net, why are the dangling strands pointing toward the center of the hole, and not down?

Static electricity. No, wait, capillary action. Um, Bernouli's priniciple? The law of crystal formation (I made that one up.)

Homonymian?

Maybe it broke while freezing?

Creative use of scissors :D

The threads are probably coated with resin or plastic.

Re: 2/11/2004: Hoarfrost
 

Mr Undertoad, do excuse for my being pushy, but i do have a request to make of u.

just wondering how many of u Americans have never come across the word "hoarfrost"? a silly question but i want to know the answer. thank u.

My best answer: I don't know! It's certainly not part of the common experience, because most of America doesn't have freezing conditions that often.

I never heard it before so I assume that most people haven't heard it. But I could be wrong!

oddly enough, i have the answer to that question. I know it seems incredible, as the question posed would seem to be unquantifiable, but it just so happens, that it was a question that was included in the y2K US census. I have a copy right here. Let's see.........yup, here it is: question 192: "have you ever heard the word 'hoarfrost'?" official result: 27,932,882.33.

in related news, at that time, 35,908,223 people had never heard the word "asshat". i have to admit that I was one of those people. thank you cellar, i'm a better man because of you!

oh yeah, welcome, noodles. we already have a "mrnoodle".... are you two related?

Re: Re: 2/11/2004: Hoarfrost
 

Some of us Americans have an education and a clue. You will find the level is higher than average here.

I had heard it before. There is a piece of artwork that I had seen as a child called "Hoarfrost" and learned the word then.

Some of us have quite extensive vocabularies, even if we don't use them all the time. "Fuck" is such a versatile word, u know?

i am a university teacher of English-Chinese translation. i posed the question coz some half of the Chinese university students--non-english majors, alas-- know the word hoarfrost. i just wondered why, and to the best of my knowledge, most britishers use the word. i have seen it from time to time in their poetry anthologies, and it is not at all a technical term, but highly poetic. culture shock, isn't it? thank u, undertoad and lumberjim. i do like here. this is my very first time to surf an english BBS. i am not a native speaker of english and i hope i cann make myself understood.

loud and clear, noodles. now. your moniker. a self effacing racial slur?

People learning languages in a university setting often learn words not in common usage in the countries where the language is most commonly spoken. It's in the textbook, so they learn it. The question becomes ... how did such an obscure word end up in the textbook to begin with? Is it to keep other textbook manufacturers from plagarizing? "Hey, you used hoarfrost! That's my obscure word!! I'm suing!!"

Cartography companies add roads that aren't really roads to their maps so they can catch if their competitors are stealing their work.

I'd heard the word, but wasn't certain of the exact definition, other than "some kind of frost."

I'm not that good in english (it's the 4th of 6 languages I learned), but maybe that's why I just knew what it means when I read the word... Maybe I saw it some where during a lesson, can't remember...

Not that its likely to come up but just in case, where does one look when addressing one-third of a person. I'll just wear dark sunglasses till we figure this out.

Oh, and here's a blurb on hoarfrost that tells what it is and how it forms but didn't really answer my other question of where the word came from.

edited to add 2nd paragraph and link. 1st paragraph unchanged.

hanging chad

According to these guys the origin is Old English, Old High German, and Icelandic, and the meaning was something like "brightness of the sky" ... hoar describes the quality of light of the frost.

Thanks Wolf!! What an interesting site. I just read the whole Best Buy receipt checking story, browsed the moon phases and some other neat things.

See, ask a simple question and get extra stuff. Cool.

wolf - fuck yea!
lumberjim - better than a self deffacating racial slur, they're ugly.

Amazingly photo, took me a few minutes to work out what the hell I was looking at. Nicely done.

I knew what it was. Probably because I'm attuned to any words that sound like they might be dirty. I look them up right away.:)

No entry found for asshat.
Did you mean ass hat?

Suggestions:
as shat
as-shat
ass hat
ass-hat
assh at
assh-at
assat
ashet
aashto
ashto
aasha
assart
achate
asha
assh
shat
ssht
ahat
asat
asst
asshur
acht
ashd
osht
aisha
ashaa
ashai
assia
aesat
arhat
ashan
assad
asset
assot
asstt
ashed
aucht
ichat
tosshat
aasta
ahaat
asata
ashanti
assert
assort
cushat
earshot
acheta
ahta
asdar
ashlar
shta

I've heard of it before, seen it a few times. It does form once in a while at southern edge of Puget Sound where my parents live. It does get a bit misty/freezy at times. I tell you, cold and damp is worse than very cold.

thank u again lumberjim. and this brings me to a further, probably sillier, question:
what does that official result mean? Does that mean 27,932,882,33 know the word in question, or do not know? Or u may be kind enough to supply me with a link. I do need statistics, coz i am now struggling with a paper on western reader response for english translations from chinese poetry.

And if it so happens that u are interested in chinese poetry, please go to the Entertainment Section of our cellar. i just posted a poem by Mao Zedong, the late President of China. Comments and evaluation are welcome.

those would be the "yes" answers. I see that you are well versed in the sarcastis ways. But there is something you do not know....."I am noh leff handed!.... And, I ahavva study my grippa. "

That, and my dog ate the link to those statistics. It was the only link there, too. sorry.

I read that poem this morning, and I like it. I think I liked the literal, choppy translation better, though. It was more metaphoric, and direct. In our poetry, ryhmes are optional, but effective. Imagery is more powerful still.

lumberjim, i suspect u misunderstood me, but i may be wrong. english is not my native tongue, and i sometimes cannot succeed getting my idea across, but i never meant to be sarcastic, though, as luck would have it, the reader may well feel that way. sorry for my poor style.

And, to be honest, i could not understand all the cuts and turns in your message, since it has much slang, in which case, my dictionaries refuse to help.

hope this time i said what i meant.

ah. right. i though you were deadpan asking me for my stats because you knew very well that i made it all up. deadpan means "with no laughter in your face" or "sraight faced" ...meaning to say or do something funny, but with a serious face, just to make it more funny. the slang was a couple of quotes from a scene in the movie "Princess Bride" where two sworsmen parry. more metaphors

Wow! quotes from your movie, swordsmen parrying! Bet you never expected my wild interpretations, eh?

forget it.

languages differ;cultures collide;but peoples understand once within the cellar over coffee, and hoarfrost.

i was trying to cast off my deadpan. hope i made it.

been learning english some 20 years, but just found that true language competence can never be learned, but acquired and lived.

thank u for your timely replies.

In language acquisition, practice makes imperfect.

No native speakers of languages speak them as they are taught, or use "proper" grammatical construction. Practice with native speakers is the best way to learn ... listening to spoken conversation (not specifically recorded to go along with a text book stuff) much better.

When I was learning German we had to listen to taped radio interviews. The announcer would usually speak "textbook" German, but the person being interviewed would speak more or less normally ... there are a lot of dialect differences even in a small country like that ... and the differences in spoken English can be much more dramatic.

that's the way the cookie crumbles here in our country, where english is learned not as a living language, but as rules and grammar that impede rather than facilitate our linguistic competence.

But if you can say "rules and grammar that impede rather than facilitate our linguistic competence", you are a very good student.

Noodles, if you really need statistics, don't rely on LumberJim. ;)

hush, bruce. he's new, and doesn't know that i'm a fraud yet. you are violating the prime directive. let him make his own discoveries.

Although no one has ever seen us together, noodles and I are, in fact, two separate people. It's easily proven with one observation.

noodles is smart. :blunt:

unconscious plagiarism:yum:

"smart"? smartass

The rules change for members that don't use English as their first language. They're clueless to sarcasm, so when they finally get it, they can't even say, Doh. ;)

i didn't wish you harm
i can never be cruel
one day you'll find
that i'm more than a fool

clueless to a fraud
sarcasm i miss
pidgin invites laugh
ignorance is bliss

Pidgin will fool,
many of us.
That makes you,
dangerous.
Burma Shave
:)

Your English is a lot better than you let on, isn't it?

Ive heard of hoarfrost from hanging out with Canadians in the hinterlands. I always thought there was an old man's hoary grey hair description connection there...