lexicon
Many words, many avatars
Deepti

A show-off is said to be playing to the gallery and the interesting aspect is that once upon a time actors actually did play to the gallery! In the 18th century when theatre in Britain was quite popular actors over-acted and raised their voices in order to be appreciated by the larger audience up in the gallery, beyond the orchestra.

One way of calculating the total number of words used in a particular field is to do a corpus study in which a linguist would use a computer programme to pick out all the words used. Words that originate from one base word are treated as a single unit called a ‘lemma’. For instance, all words that are forms of the word ‘cyber’ would be one lemma with many word forms. The 100 most common lemmas in the common use English corpus are single syllable words like you, look, get and any.

Many times, a word that means something very different from what it seems makes sense if you look at its origin. This has nothing to do with onomatopoeia; somehow ‘poppycock’ has always seemed to be an airy-fairy word. But its meaning has nothing to do with fancy as it is used for anything nonsensical. It comes from the Dutch ‘pappekak’ that means ‘soft dung.

‘Contain’ is used in the sense of ‘inside’ as in ‘the bag contains my books’ or ‘the film contained many funny scenes’. ‘Include’ means ‘a part of’ as in this sentence: ‘this holiday package includes a two-day stay in the hills’. When you put something in a packet or an envelope, you use ‘enclose’ as in ‘a copy of my resume is enclosed in this envelope’. If you are talking about all the parts of something, you can use ‘consist of’, ‘comprise’, ‘composed of’ or ‘made up of’. As, for instance, in the following sentences: ‘the text consists of eight chapters and a glossary’, ‘water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen’, ‘this course comprises six semesters’ and ‘this scheme is made up of two stages’.