2019 - Day 204/161 - Tuesday...Logomachy...

So, my brief string of MOST EXCELLENT days has come to an end. There was nothing particularly wrong with today, it was just not most excellent. It was okay. Not even excellent, just okay. It was excellent in a few ways, but overall, not most excellent, just okay. I feel bad for Mondays, because I doubt that they are ever considered most excellent, so perhaps yesterday was most excellent because I was not expecting it to be so. Maybe other days are most excellent, but we kind of take Thursdays and Fridays as better than average because they are so close to the weekend, and we don't expect to have most excellent days on Monday, so if a typical Thursday or Friday day happens on a Monday, we are surprised, and we consider it to be most excellent. It could happen. Today was not a particularly excellent day for journal photos either, but I do have this picture of RACKED CORN for your viewing pleasure, and for the delight of the chickens, once I rack it open for them.

Logomachy -- Noun. 1. a dispute over or about words. 2. a controversy marked by verbiage. "The aforementioned logomachy should tell you that Gold's study is for those interested in language and in the subtleties and small triumphs of translation." Joshua Cohen, The Forward, September 12, 2008

Did You Know? It doesn't take much to start people arguing about words, but there is no quarrel about the origin of logomachy. It comes from the Greek roots logos, meaning "word" or "speech," and machesthai, meaning "to fight," and it entered English in the mid-1500s. If you are a word enthusiast, you probably know that logos is the root of many English words (monologue, neologism, logic, and most words ending in -logy, for example), but what about other derivatives of machesthai? Actually, this is a tough one even for word whizzes. Only a few very rare English words come from machesthai. Here are two of them: heresimach ("an active opponent of heresy and heretics") and naumachia ("an ancient Roman spectacle representing a naval battle"). None of this makes any sense to me, and why would anyone care?