4 ms·

How did "sinister agents" become "sinister agile gibbons?" Is "agile gibbon" a single term in that dictionary?

• hirundo 4y ago
  The seventh word wasn't a noun, so they still needed one. I wonder how they picked gibbon.
  • JadeNB 4y ago
    > The seventh word wasn't a noun, so they still needed one. I wonder how they picked gibbon. They replaced "episode" by "epistolary", so they're not insisting that the replacements be nouns. (They did say "[I] occasionally had to take a few licenses.")
• svat 4y ago
  It's plausible that "agile gibbon" is a single term in that dictionary; cf. the Wikipedia article for "agile gibbon": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_gibbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_gibbon Note also the other transformations involving headwords that contain spaces: "civil war" -> "clabber", "starship" -> "starting pistol", "custodian" -> "customs union", and "galaxy" -> "galia melon". I don't know what dictionary is being used: the post just says "I used a 1999 Oxford English dictionary" but I doubt it's the full OED, as in it "agent" is followed by (I think) entries for "agent provocateur", "agentess", "agential", "agentive", "agentship", "ageold", "ageometrical", "ageostrophic", "age-prier", "ager", "agerasia", "ageratum", … [lots of "agg…" words]… and "agile gibbon" would be very far away. Edit: For example, The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998: not OED but ODE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Dictionary_of_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Dictionary_of_English) has "agile gibbon" as a separate entry in the dictionary, though it is 27 places after "agent" rather than 7.