Saturday, July 28, 2007

hapax legomenon

A hapax legomenon, Greek for "having been said once" and "hapax" for short, is a word that occurs only once, whether in a language, a text, or the works of a particular author. The Old Testament, for example, has at least 400 unique words. (if you want a list, look here).

A hapax is a translator's nightmare. You have only one shot at getting it right, so if the word's meaning isn't clear from the single context you have to work with, you're out of luck. And, of course, there's always the possibility that what appears to be a hapax is actually the scribal equivalent of a typo. So, while there are informed guesses, no-one is really sure what kind of animal a "pygarg" is or what tree produced the "gopherwood" that Noah used to build his ark.

Anglo Saxon was a hapax-rich language with lots of ungainly words like "feolheard" (hardened by iron), "circolwyrde" (approximately mathematician) and "gop" (slave, servant) that surface once in the surviving texts and then disappear forever. "Ptyx," the best-known French hapax was apparently invented by Mallarmé for one of his poems, mostly because there just aren't that many rhymes for "Styx." And when a character in the Tempest went to fetch "young scamels from the rock," we can only imagine what he came back with.

The internet analogy to the hapax is the googlewhack, a series of words that, when googled, produces only a single result. Though if you do find a googlewhack, you'll immediately fall victim to the googlewhack paradox. You can't blog about your discovery because, once you do, it's, well, not a googlewhack anymore.


edited to add: Okay, so I was wrong. Check out the comments for several clever ways to let the whole world know about your googlewhack. Thanks, S, Zee and Manda

13 comments:

S said...

That's fascinating. I don't think I've ever seen Google return only one result.

Julia said...

I've stumbled upon googlewhacks. They are frustrating when you are trying to find something for which that one answer is no good. But I like the Schroedinger's cat aspect of this.

Mrs. Collins said...

You are just dying to tell us your googlewhack aren't you.. You want to tell it but then it won't exist anymore. Kind of like your "story that cannot be told".

S. said...

Y'know, email can't be googled.

niobe said...

S: Good point. But I really don't have one, Monica's comment notwithstanding.

Phantom Scribbler said...

The best commenting fun I ever had was when I loosed my former googlewhack upon the world. I miss it, but the conversation it produced made it totally worth it.

Anonymous said...

S*ure y0u ca*n bl0g ab0ut a g0oglewhack with0ut destr0ying it*s in*tegrity. It*s ea*sy!

Sara said...

Neat stuff. I'd never heard of the googlewhack, but seeing as I also had no idea why I was seeing "teh" all over the place, clearly I'm just not very aware.

Caro said...

Interesting, I hadn't heard of those.

stickybun07 said...

First, thanks so much for your comment and well wishes. I sincerely appreciate it.

and I'm so glad you did because I've now been pouring over your last posts...you are anextremely gifted writer! :-)

niobe said...

Okay, Zee, if I ever discover one, I'll let everyone kn0w.

Phantom: I think I remember that post....

Manda said...

Yeah you can bog about it - just print screen and post the result as a picture :)

Isis said...

I had completely forgotten about hapax legomenon (which I remember learning about studying Old English), even though it used to be one of my very favorite concepts: thanks for the very cool post!

(Great blog too, btw.)