3642 🏆 CLIPSI

[Paul Keating]

The outcome of Round 3642 hung in the balance right to the end of voting. The winner, in a last flurry of votes, was Nancy Shepherdson (#13), whose correct guess for #12 propelled her into top spot with a score of 3 + 2 = 5*.

Runner-up was Daniel Widdis (#3) with 4 votes.

The most popular definition, with 6 votes, was the real one (#12): “Under eclipse, dark.” When Dan Widdis submitted his transit/occultation definition (#3), I knew, before the voting even started, that my hopes for a respectable dealer score were doomed. Every player who voted for 3 also voted for 12 (and two others besides).

Def no	Player	Voted for	Votes from	Score from votes	Correct guess	Total
13	Shepherdson	11, 12	Kornelis, Lodge, Shefler	3	2	5*
3	Widdis	6, 9	Barrs, Bourne, Boxer, Embler	4		4
6	Lodge	12, 13	Mallach, Widdis	2	2	4*
1	Boxer	3, 12	Abell, Kornelis	2	2	4*
9	Bourne	3, 12	Widdis	1	2	3*
10	Barrs	3, 12	Shefler	1	2	3*
2	Kornelis	1, 13	Madnick, Mallach	2		2
11	Madnick	2, 8	Abell, Shepherdson	2		2
7	Embler	3, 12			2	2*
8	Mallach	2, 6	Madnick	1		1
4	Shefler	10, 13				0
5	Abell	1, 11				0

The word is a hapax legomenon, and it comes from The Romaunt of the Rose (1400). I chose it because of the very unobvious spelling of the OED headword. It looks like a borrowing... but not from any language I can think of.

The most readily available edition of the poem (Pickering, 1845) spells the word clipsy. Like most Victorian editions of Middle English, it uses a regularized spelling that stays as close as it can to modern English, but preserves such things as final E so that the metre is not lost. In Middle English the final E would have been pronounced in all four of the rhymes in this extract:

OED policy for headwords is to use the standard modern spelling of the word. But for obsolete words, there is no standard modern spelling. The OED editors then may adopt a spelling that (had the word survived) would be a plausible modern form; even if there is little or no evidence that that form was ever actually used.

In this case that would have been clipsy, but the printed OED occasionally made exceptions. If there was only one recorded use of the word, then the headword might follow that spelling, no matter how archaic. It seems that is what happened here. (But I could not check. The sole manuscript, MS Hunter 409, was digitized 25 years ago, but that project’s advertised website has gone off the air, and the Wayback Machine came up blank. I’ve written to Digital Humanities at Glasgow about that.)

The reasoning, I think, went like this. A reader consulting the dictionary would start by searching for the word as it appears in the passage on the page. That would very likely be the same passage as the editors had excerpted (because there is only one known citation), and the reader would be pointlessly inconvenienced by looking up an entry, that cross-referred to another entry, that would, in turn, present the form initially searched for. Having only one entry also halved the cost; but was of course unhelpful to readers of the Pickering edition.

Online dictionaries do not have to worry nearly so much about space, and cross-references are no inconvenience. So when OED3 gets around to revising the letter C, which may not be this decade, I predict the editors will make a different choice of headword from the one made in 1889.

1	An antacid taken after a meal.
	Votes from Tony Abell, Hugo Kornelis
	Submitted by: Eric Boxer, who voted for 3, 12. Score: 2+2=4*.
2	An art form that combines live music, breakdance, a light show, and short video fragments.
	Votes from Judy Madnick, Efrem Mallach
	Submitted by: Hugo Kornelis, who voted for 1, 13. Score: 2.
3	A brief or incomplete dimming of a star or planet caused by partial alignment.
	Votes from Johnny Barrs, Tim Bourne, Eric Boxer, Debbie Embler
	Submitted by: Dan Widdis, who voted for 6, 9. Score: 4.
4	Any conic section of a degree-two (elliptical) cone.
	No votes
	Submitted by: Mike Shefler, who voted for 10, 13.
5	Done in a hurried or rushed manner.
	No votes
	Submitted by: Tony Abell, who voted for 1, 11.
6	Informal. A female London bus conductor, who formerly was required to punch a hole in paper tickets to validate them for a journey.
	Votes from Efrem Mallach, Dan Widdis
	Submitted by: Tim Lodge, who voted for 12, 13. Score: 2+2=4*.
7	Having a reputation for verbal austerity.
	No votes
	Submitted by: Debbie Embler, who voted for 3, 12. Score: 0+2=2*.
8	Informal, affectionate audiophile term for Klipschorn audio speakers. Originally used by people who had difficulty with the name, adopted by the community at large during the 1970s, fell into disuse by 2000.
	Vote from Judy Madnick
	Submitted by: Efrem Mallach, who voted for 2, 6. Score: 1.
9	The pernicious practice, when replying to a long email, of including the entire text in the reply.
	Vote from Dan Widdis
	Submitted by: Tim Bourne, who voted for 3, 12. Score: 1+2=3*.
10	A recipe for a dessert pudding using potatoes and tomatoes intended to popularize both ingredients when they first arrived in Europe. No record of its being made has been found.
	Vote from Mike Shefler
	Submitted by: Johnny Barrs, who voted for 3, 12. Score: 1+2=3*.
11	A thin curl of hardened pitch from a resinous tree.
	Votes from Tony Abell, Nancy Shepherdson
	Submitted by: Judy Madnick, who voted for 2, 8. Score: 2.
12	Under eclipse, dark.
	Votes from Johnny Barrs, Tim Bourne, Eric Boxer, Debbie Embler, Tim Lodge, Nancy Shepherdson
	Real Definition. Score: D6.
13	A yoghurt from the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent made from sweetened cow's milk.
	Votes from Hugo Kornelis, Tim Lodge, Mike Shefler
	Submitted by: Nancy Shepherdson, who voted for 11, 12. Score: 3+2=5*.

--

Paul Keating

Soustons, Nouvelle Aquitaine, France

[nancy shepherdson]

Swell. I sealed my own fate. Word soon. Im out right now.

Sent from my Galaxy

[Daniel B. Widdis]

1. I'm amused to see in my client, below your signature, "Message clipped"

2. My first thought on a definition was related to Clippy, of Microsoft fame, perhaps the Spanish-language version, but perhaps that would have better served as a NAD.

3. I wrote my def shortly after seeing Project Hail Mary, so the star-dimming was the first thought for my actual fake, and I couldn't escape the "clip" / (e)"clipse" reference for anything more creative.

Glad I dodged the deal :) 

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[Paul Keating]

On MS Hunter 409: I had a response from Digital Humanities at Glasgow and so I was able to check the manuscript reading in the very fine digitized version there. In the scribe’s hand it truly is clipsi. In William Thynne’s edition of 1532 (the first printed edition) it is clipsy, in line with a spelling for past participles applied throughout, along with other changes reflecting linguistic change in the hundred years’ gap.

--

Paul Keating

Soustons, Nouvelle Aquitaine, France

[Tim Lodge]

When Paul announced CLiPSI on Tuesday I was just about to pop out to my barbers for a haircut. Here they are, thanks to Google Streetview:

I thought they must be opening a chain of shops.

-- Tim L