ORT

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Postby Dr. Goodword » Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:11 am

• ort •

Pronunciation: ort • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. Leftover, a food scrap that remains after a meal is finished. 2. A scrap, a piece of trash left over from any job, as cleaning up the orts on a construction site.

Notes: This word is remarkable in that it is one of the few words in English actually spelled as it is pronounced. It has been in the English language since the 14th century and is making yet another comeback in the 21st. How is that for staying power? It is almost always used in the plural, orts, just as is the case with its near synonyms, leftovers and crumbs.

In Play: The original meaning of today's word apparently was "leftover animal feed", but my experience with animals leads me to believe that animals are careful not to leave food behind. In fact, they tend to help us out with our leftovers: "Ernie, would you let the dog back into the kitchen to clean up the baby's orts?" However, orts can be any kind of leftovers you can imagine: "Oh, the good committee posts go to the senior faculty; junior faculty are left the orts." (Sounds like a faculty feeling its orts, doesn't it?)

Word History: Today's Good Word is probably the reflex of an unattested Old English noun that we surmise was something like *oræt, a cognate of Early Modern Dutch ooraete, now found in a few dialects as oort or orte "remains of food or fodder". If this guess is correct, or- is an old prefix of uncertain meaning found in a few frozen forms like ordeal. It would be akin to the German prefix ur- "proto-" seen in that word every spelling bee enthusiast knows, Ursprache "proto-language". The T is what remains in (an ort itself), which comes from a root found in most Indo-European languages, such as German essen and Russian est'. (We want to make sure that the main course of our gratitude today goes to Mr. Mark Angney's B-Block senior English class of Concord-Carlisle High School in Concord, Massachusetts, and not just the orts.)
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bnjtokyo

Postby bnjtokyo » Mon Jan 23, 2012 10:15 am

Ironic isn't that "The objects in the Oort Cloud . . . are presumed to be remnants from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago." (from one of NASA's web pages) Too bad Jan Oort spelled his name with two Os.


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