Tortiloquy

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Tortiloquy

Postby Dr. Goodword » Mon Aug 16, 2021 7:17 pm

• tortiloquy •


Pronunciation: tor-ti-lê-kwi • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: (Obsolete? For sure, rare.) Twisted, tortured or crooked speech.

Notes: Here is a word struggling to make a comeback. Supposedly obsolete since the 17th century according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Google returns 726 instances on the current Web (9/15/2021). It has no derivational relations, though following other examples on -loquy (e.g. colloquy : colloquial), we could surmise that the adjective would be tortiloquial.

In Play: This word is still rare enough that no examples of it are found on the Web. However, let that not impede us: "Psychobabble is just specialized tortiloquy." Elsewhere, we might say: "Roscoe abandoned his philosophy course because the lectures often drifted into tortiloquy."

Word History: This word was apparently popular enough in colloquial speech to have made it into at least one dictionary, Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656). It is a simple matter to decipher it: it was created out of tortio(n) "torment, torture" + loquor "to talk, say, speak". Torture has historically been associated with twisting, so torture contains the same root as torsion. So, we are not surprised that it comes from PIE terkw- "to twist, turn", which also went into the making of German drechseln "to turn (wood)" and Latin torquere "to turn, twist". Loquor goes back to PIE tolkw- "to speak". Liquid metathesis would have resulted in tlokw- and, since Latin did not tolerate the cluster [tl], the [t] would have been lost. Tolkw- is also found in Russian tolk "sense" and tolkovat' "to interpret", Latvian tulks "interpreter", and English talk. (Today's faint but still Good Word was suggested by a Good Word editor and Grand Panjandrum, Jeremy Busch, in a discussion of another word in the Alpha Agora.)
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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby Slava » Mon Aug 16, 2021 9:25 pm

This one is for tortured language, not necessarily lies. Lies are covered by falsiloquence. Then again, not necessarily lies doesn't necessarily mean not lies. They are just buried in convolutions of verbiage in tortiloquy. Falsiloquence needs some finesse to it, I believe.
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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby David Myer » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:09 am

Not to be confused presumably with its homophone, Tautiloquy which I suppose might be a sort of double-speak.

Slava, you suggest "...tortured language..." Is the torture not for the listener? The speaker is deliberately obfuscating probably; it is the poor listener who is driven to distress, isn't it?

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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby Slava » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:30 am

I know the word tautology, but not a -loqui version. It doesn't show up in any internot search I've tried. I also wouldn't call the tau- beginning a homonym for the tor-.

Tortured language isn't just hard on the ears, it can also be the rambling mangling some people come up with, especially when they are trying to answer a question they'd rather not answer. An example might be many of the quotes from people like Dan Quayle or Dubya. Call it an attempt to lie without actually lying. Poorly executed obfuscation.
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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby David Myer » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:46 am

I haven't heard of tautiloquy either. I made it up. But I am interested that you don't pronounce the two identically. Certainly we would in these parts. Do you roll your 'R's as the Scots do? I know we should - simply in order to differentiate the words, but no-one does in Australia - except a few ex-pat Scots. We have a town here in Victoria called Lorne. It is pronounced exactly the same as the word lawn.

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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby Slava » Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:44 am

My rhyming for those two first syllables:

tortiloquy - door (or torte, to include the t)
tautology - paw (or taught).

Accents being what they are, I'm guessing you open the "daw" (or something along those lines) to let your guests in?
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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby bbeeton » Tue Aug 17, 2021 12:18 pm

Regarding "r"s, around here we consider it "r entropy".

The best example I can think of is "Mahther's Vineyahd". Final "r"s where they aren't needed or expected, and disappearing medial "r"s following an elongated vowel -- "Hahvahd".

A little farther north, some final "r"s disappear entirely: "You cahn't get theah from heah."

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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby Dr. Goodword » Tue Aug 17, 2021 6:14 pm

The last example reminded me of a story I head in Maine one summer. An out-of-stater stopped to ask a New Englander how far it was from that point to, say, Podunkton. The New Englander arose from his gardening and replied, "The way you're going, it's about 25,000 miles. If you turn around and go the opposite way, it's about a mile."
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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby David Myer » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:10 pm

Nice story, Doc.

As for your "farther north", Barbara, here in the very deep south, Australia, we don't really have any 'r's at all beyond the first in a word.

The letter itself is pronounced 'Ahh', as is the word 'are'. And we have no trouble with 'Hahvahd'.

And yes Slava, a door is a daw.

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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby Audiendus » Tue Aug 17, 2021 9:03 pm

As for your "farther north", Barbara, here in the very deep south, Australia, we don't really have any 'r's at all beyond the first in a word.

The letter itself is pronounced 'Ahh', as is the word 'are'. And we have no trouble with 'Hahvahd'.

And yes Slava, a door is a daw.
And it's the same in southern England!

But some of us say 'droring' for 'drawing', and likewise for similar words – probably to avoid giving the impression of an oi diphthong.

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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby David Myer » Wed Aug 18, 2021 3:19 am

I'd forgotten that, Audiendus. I do recall now the quite frequent addition of a superfluous 'r' in drawing. I must say to my own shame, that I do find it depressingly ignorant. It can surely only come from people who have never seen the word written down. Are they taught nothing in school?

On a different note, I see that the word 'drawer', as in the thing you pull out of a desk for example, is now almost universally written draw. The original is an example of an -aw word that has an 'r' as well, for good measure. I don't think I have ever heard anyone pronounce the -er at the end. Perhaps the Scots do? But someone who draws with a pencil is pronounced as a drawer with two syllables (occasionally).

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Re: Tortiloquy

Postby Slava » Wed Aug 18, 2021 7:33 am

Probably from family apocrypha, but my grandmother supposedly wouldn't marry my grandfather unless he took the 'r' out of lawr and put it back in Hahvahd.
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