Part two was many moons ago...
Idly flipping through The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, I found the wonderful word "apocope", pronounced a-pock-oh-pee.
It means dropping a letter or letters from the end of a word to create an elision (especially with the word "the").
Examples:
"cinema" is an apocope of cinematograph; "taxi" is an apocope of taxicab; "curio" is an apocope of curiosity.
I love to know that there's a word for almost everything. Interestingly, the American produced spellcheck for this blog doesn't recognise "apocope" and suggests I replace it with "agape" which seems to carry an entirely different meaning. Perhaps this is the first time someone's blogged it.
No comments:
Post a Comment