6 ms·
When my kids were young, I accidentally flubbed the pronunciation of "Santa Claus" once and said something that sounded a lot like "Centiclops", which I decided
by jerf 4y ago
When my kids were young, I accidentally flubbed the pronunciation of "Santa Claus" once and said something that sounded a lot like "Centiclops", which I decided to roll with. Centiclops is a lot like a cyclops with one eye, except the as a reading of the roots clearly indicates, this is a creature with 100 eyes.
Today I learn that Centiclops effectively has a Unicode character. As Centiclops' representative in the world of the non-imaginary, we accept that a Unicode character with a hundred eyes is not practical and we accept the representation with just a few eyes, but generally agree that upgrading to 7 to 10 is a nice improvement, as 7 does not evenly divide into 100 but 10 does. This is important, because... reasons.
- sshine 4y agoFrom "The House of Asterion" by Jorge Luis Borges: "It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose numbers are infinite) (footnote: The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion, this numeral stands for infinite.) are open day and night to men and to animals as well." https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house_of_asterion.pdf https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house...
- Eddonarth 4y agoThat reminds me of the Nahuatl word centzon, which is used to mean either 400, or an innumerable/infinite number. The Aztecs used a base-20 number system, so 400 = 20*20. https://www.mythicalcreaturescatalogue.com/post/2016/06/10/the-centzon-totochtin-the-innumerable-divine-rabbits-mexico https://www.mythicalcreaturescatalogue.com/post/2016/06/10/t...
- tempodox 4y ago“Santa Clause” would translate to “holy clause”. There might be such a thing but I think you meant Santa Claus :)
- dtparr 4y agoMaybe just a big fan of the Tim Allen movie?
- justbaker 4y ago[grunts]
- jerf 4y agoMy fingers love adding the e's on the end of any worde that can conceivably take them. Also have that problem with any word that can take an "ly" even if I don't meanly it. Fixed, thanks.
- partomniscient 4y agoThat's supercalifragilisticexpialidociously strangee.
- JohnFen 4y agoI thought "santa" meant "saint"?
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoIt does; the character originates from Saint Nicholas (or Odin, depending who you ask)
- felix318 4y ago“Santa” means “female saint” in Italian and Spanish. Perhaps the English “santa” came from another language but I always found the name “Santa Claus” just horrible.
- nohuck13 4y agoThe name Santa Claus evolved from Nick's Dutch nickname, Sinter Klaas, a shortened form of Sint Nikolaas (Dutch for Saint Nicholas) https://www.history.com/.amp/topics/christmas/santa-claus#sinter-klaas-comes-to-new-york https://www.history.com/.amp/topics/christmas/santa-claus#si...
- doodpants 4y agoOr perhaps this character is an accurate representation of a Dekaclops.
- jerf 4y agoMy client finds your proposal offensive and an appropriation of his culture, and also that Dekaclops guy is mean and smells bad and hasn't returned the lawnmower my client lent him even though my client has clearly referred to the need to mow his lawn several times now so he totally doesn't deserve a Unicode character.
- tzot 4y agoIt'd be dekaops, because the -cl- is part of “cycle”+“ops” (one round eye, with the one dropped because it's inferred). So “cycle” out, “deka” in.
- MonkeyClub 4y agoI thought ops was from opsis and referred to a “circle-like face”? Like oinops, referring to the “wine-like face” (ie dark read) of a sea passage in the evening. May be wrong, though, I don’t have my tools handy to check now.
- layer8 4y agoThere should be a combining “eye” character so that you can have as many or few eyes as you like. Though to be honest, that Unicode character looks more like a bunch of cells forming a tissue to me than eyes.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> Centiclops is a lot like a cyclops with one eye, except th[at] as a reading of the roots clearly indicates, this is a creature with 100 eyes. Not in any normal sense of "roots". Cent is a Latin root meaning 100. ops is a Greek form meaning eye. The -i- indicates that the word is being formed in Latin, and the -cl- is entirely spurious. The original Greek word divides as cycl-ops, not cy-clops.
- inopinatus 4y agoIn any case, there is already an ancient, general, and perfectly serviceable epithet Panoptes.
- martyvis 4y agoA bit like the heli-copter | helico-pter thing.
- kevinpet 4y agoWow. I never noticed that before. Spiral wings.
- anthk 4y agoCent is easy to grasp if you speak a Romance.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoBut it doesn't combine with ops. You'd need to talk about a hecatops or a hecatontops. And even more than it can't combine with ops, it can't combine with clops because there is no such root.
- Someone 4y agoIt does. Combining Latin and Greek roots is done fairly frequently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_word mentions automobile, chloroform, hexadecimal, micro-instruction, petroleum, television and a few others.
- bitwize 4y agoGreek mythology actually did have a "centiclops" -- Argus Panoptes ("all eyes"), who had a hundred eyes all over his body. Hera assigned him to watch over Io, a nymph who had been turned into a cow, so that Zeus wouldn't come and shag her in secret. Argus was slain by Hermes (a Zeus loyalist); to mourn and honor him, Hera had his eyes transferred to the peacock's tail. The real Greek for a hundred-eyed being would be something like "hekatonoptes", but Argus wasn't called that as far as I know.
- mbrubeck 4y agoThe nice thing about ꙮ having ten eyes is that you can now combine ten of them with U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER [1] to make a centiclops grapheme, as long as your font has a glyph for that particular ligature. (Readers without centiclops-compatible fonts will simply see ten separate ꙮ glyphs, an acceptable fallback for legacy systems.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner