Word of the Day: lampadophory

Camaraderie is a wonderful thing, I suppose.  I was reading Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (which is available for free from the wonderful folks at the Online Library of Liberty), and I came across an unfamiliar word: lampadophory.  I used the not-so-trusty-but-incredibly-handy Oxford New American dictionary on my computer.  Not terribly surprisingly, it was not there.  So, I googled it, but while I was waiting for the page to load, I realized my folly-- why bother to google it, I *know* that I'm going to look it up in the OED, no matter what I find on the internet.  But, in a strange coincidence, the first hit for the word was this blog post that was about the process of reading Trevor-Roper in the library, and wondering what this strange word meant.  Well, I now know that I am not the only one who stumbled on this particular word!

Oh, and for all the people who might stumble on this page while looking up 'lampadophory' while they too are reading Trevor-Roper, the word comes from the Greek lampadedromy:

A torch-race; a race (on foot or horseback) in which a lighted torch was passed from hand to hand.

There, saved you a trip.

Department of Spell-Check

Another day, another set of reading notes, and another word not found in the MS Word dictionary: plagiarization.  As in, a good number of pamphlets on everything from astrological prognostication to the best way to grow cabbages were simply plagiarizations** and cut-and-pastings of other, earlier works.  The OED has quotations for this noun form starting only in the rather late nineteenth century, with the latest quotation taken from the Economic Times from 2003, to wit: "Plagiarisation has become a habit with today's music directors and it probably existed before I was born. There's nothing wrong in it." Well, it certainly has existed for quite a while, in all aspects of creative life, but as to the fact that there is nothing wrong with it, well....

Plagiarism has indeed had a long and venerable history blah blah blah Adrian Johns' Piracy*** blah blah blah.  Now back to my regularly scheduled readings.


** Though, to be fair, I just google-booked the word inside of the book I just read, and the word doesn't appear there either.  But, the OED says it's a word, so I'm running with it.  I like it better than plagiarism in the context in which I have written it.

*** Really good book, and my 'blah's really don't do it justice.