Re: acorns to ducks

[John Cowan <cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan>]

nik <knoth@hermes.psych.indiana.edu> posted the following to sci.lang:

> Perhaps this would be more appropriately posted to an
> alt.something group, but ...
>
> One of my students recently suggested that she had heard
> of a word (and forgotten it) which meant "the process by
> which an acorn falls into the water and becomes a duck."
> Since she could not suggest the word, i had no way to
> verify the truth of this...  2 questions:
>
> 1> Has anyone heard of this particular (alleged :) word?
>
> 2> Considering that a>science is *always* coining new
> words and b>science is regularly proving itself to have
> been in error, there should be many words which have had
> value and no longer do.  The odds seem good that some of
> these words will be (will have been) rather humourous.
> Can anyone suggest any of these pseudo-scientific
> un-words??

I suggest that an appropriate Lojban word would be:

	cindytsidatkyborbi'oru'e

For conlang subscribers, that breaks down as:

	cindy-tsi-datky-bor-bi'o-ru'e

glossed as

	oak seed duck (hyphen) become process

which the rules of Lojban grouping parenthesize as:

	((oak seed) (duck become)) process

--
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com		...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban