On Sunday, December 9, 2012 8:36:22 AM UTC-8, Don Kuenz wrote:
> Quadibloc <
jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
> > Ah. Cryto is "a powerful demon that grants youth, beauty, and
> > health".
> "Demon + view + affinity?" Now, that may actually fit my needs,
> given my rather low opinion of most televised shows.
Um. By an extremely obvious metonymy, "crytoscopophilia" becomes,
in English, "love of ogling". My experience has been that the
question, "Is [enjoying ogling] morally wrong?" is answered "YES!!!"
by a majority of women, "Not really" by a significant number of men,
and "Hey, how do you like the weather?" by everyone else.
ObSF, of course, Connie Willis: Compare and contrast relations
between the sexes in "All My Darling Daughters" and <Passage>, say.
Sigh, OK: I decided to try to get serious. "Cryto" as a demon
makes sense, but we don't have "cryto" in this word, we have
"cryto-". Which means we need to know the Greek meaning of the
word, or at least of kappa-rho-upsilon-tau-something. (Dunno
whether omega or omicron.) Obviously, I don't know Greek, but
I figured there were some easy dodges.
Oops. Google knows essentially no references to crytozoa (it
much prefers cryptozoa, which are real) or crytophilia. It does
know thousands of references to crytology. The vast majority,
well over 90% and at all levels of seriousness from random
Facebook pages and e-mails to scientific papers and government
documents, are misspellings of cryptology. However, there are
some exceptions. I got all excited about a book on "The
Taxonomy and Crytology of the Genus Hasseanthus" until I found
a report on the morphology and crytology of some sorghum; turns
out the latter, and probably the former, are misspellings of
cytology.
The following, however, lack enough context for such easy
refutations, and may represent a real word crytology:
- A vet in Irving, Texas offers "Ear Crytology", which doesn't
seem plausible under either misspelling.
- A set of flashcards for some subject begins "aspiration
biopsy crytology". Again, dubious for cytology and
preposterous for cryptology.
Now, if any of us knew Greek, this would be easy. I'm tempted
to go consult humanities.classics, but will refrain as yet.
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer
j...@sfbooks.com