<philoxenia> actually means "lover of the strange", most literally.

This could cover anyone from a Japanese desk clerk who is genuinely happy to see American tourists to Jeffrey Dahmer.

Technically.

Subject to debate.

Yes, please.

Philistines, of course, discovered Phlogiston was the substance that powered candles.

Later, meddling "scientists" proved there was no such thing.

Bloody eggheads. I know there's such a thing as candles because I saw a picture of one from GOOGLE image search.

Subject to debate.

Speaking of which ... how did the original meaning of 'geek' (ie, the lowest form of life on the carny ladder, the guy who bites off chicken heads for a living) mutate into the later one, which is a tad more socially acceptable?

It's one of the best medications for "women's pains" if you catch my drift.

All right you asked for it.

I want answers- but I can't answer your question.

Try this one-

OK the Korean language, as spoken written from time immemorial-

How is it possible that it contains words that are suspiciously virtually identical to words with Latinate and even Kraut/Anglo-Saxon roots?

I've checked this with actual Korean philologists and linguists, and they all swear up and down it's coincidence. They swear these words were in use well before contact with "The West"-

Recall that the <Hangook> have been inhabiting, and presumably speaking on, the peninsula for around 5000 years.

Here is a partial list of some of the Korean words under scrutiny (by me)

1. Oma/Apa = mother/father
2. Weh = why
3. bori = barley
4. no = ani
5. doro = road or path
6. deul = two

And there are dozens of others.

The most striking one is <oma/apa>- and my friend- who is fluent in English and expert in linguistic history- told me that the current theory among Korean linguists is that there is a genetic/bilogical cause for infants to make a phoneme that sounds like "mom and pop" to denote their parents.

I don't buy it. There are as many words for Mom and Pop in other languages that don't sound vaguely similar to "mom and pop".

Also, there's no evidence for this supposition. Although finding said evidence, if it existed, might prove difficult, to say the least.

Sigh.

Ok geek.

More here-

<gook> means "a people" in Korean.

??????

There is no word in Korean for "carny attraction", because all the carvinals were shot.

I will be "there", but only in a tiny village outside of Vancouver-

How many more name changes will we face?

Given your recent activity in this sphere, perhaps you could settle on

"Morph" as a permanent title.

Get it?

HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAH

Or maybe "Morf", to continue your recent flagrant mockery of OUR sacred identical sounding but irritatingly differently spelled consonants.

Bloody English.

'Good' strangeness includes: Nimzo, Beefheart, Pynchon, Duchamp, Ivanchuk, Cronenberg, Cale, and all the usual suspects. Plus quarks, of course.

Hmm. I must have been thinking about the strangeness of quarks when I referred to myself as a wimp back there -- as in <Weakly Interactive Massive Particle>.

I'm a particle. Hit the accelerator.

Did I mention that my favorite website for calculating ratings belongs to CERN chess club?

Must... resist... urge to engage in endlessly fascinating conversation when jam-packed with Merlot and in need of a snooze...

There are only so many sounds and so many things. It would be a surprise if they didn't map onto one another occasionally.

The exception in your list -- and, as you say, the most interesting case -- is omu/apa, mom'n'pop, maw and paw.

Gaelic, let's see ... Mhaimi, pronounced 'Wommy', and Daidi, pronounced 'Daddy'. Notice how the men provide linguistic stability, while of course women have to provide it in real life. Then again ... Irish Gaelic for 'woman' is 'bean', and its plural form (Mna) is a source of delightful confusion on toilet and restroom doors.

But I digresh. I don't think words for mom'n'pop have diffused all over the world or survived uniquely from some lost protolanguage. It probably has more to do with the first sounds that babies articulate.

I don't believe this forum has pain-killing properties, although it does seem to be addictive in regular doses. Maybe you need some kind of genetic susceptibility too.

I know that heroin got its name because the Bayer chemist who first cooked it up thought it made him feel like a mythic hero. Siegfried, probably, ready to chase dragons till the cows came home.

I came across a fascinating example of this the other day. As I'm sure you know, in Polish the letters '-ck-' are pronounced something like 'tch+k'. So GM Socko is pronounced 'sotch-ko' - and should *not* be rhymed with the familiar Scots form 'Jocko'.

Then I heard this guy making PA announcements on a train. Despite a definite 'foreign' accent, he did amazingly well with such obscure half-Ersed placenames as Rathcormac and Portlaoise. Even I don't know the correct pronunciation of some of these places, and I've passed through them many times.

Then he reached what should have been the easiest of all, or second easiest after 'Cork'. He was required to announce Limerick -- and he just couldn't get it out right. He kept saying 'Limeritchk', which is when I thought of Socko.

My theory is that 'educe' originated in Italy (well, it did!) ... as recently as the 1930s.

A visitor would stumble across the late Benito Mussolini making one of his lengthy speeches about trains running on time. The mystified tourist would then collar a local, and ask - in the Pidgin used by travellers in those days - "Who he?"

It beats sitting on a pole and trainspotting.

Good news! 'Entropanto' as a description of The Goon Show has been given the A-OK by the PhD powers that be. I'd have fought hard had it not. So look forward to an acknowledgement in a widely-discredited PhD in about two years, all right?

Oh, Burroughs! That reminds me~ you simply *must* read Taussig's latest dispatch from his funny liminal place, perhaps no-time once-upon-a-time. It's called 'What Color is the Sacred?' and for sure, if we didn't already know that Mick was our best mate, we do now. This time he binges especially on Burroughs and at one point imagines a meeting between him and Walter Benjamin. '[I]t would be hard to imagine two more dissimlar people,' Taussig sez, 'the one so cultured and polite, so quintessentially European, the other irascible, sarcastic, hop and quintessentially American bad boy. But then both dressed in suits, had the same initals, W.B., and were massively curious about drugs, mysticism, revolution, film and cut-outs as mthod for producing literature no less than for writing history. And then there was color. There was so much they seem to have agreed upon. Yet it makes you laugh and roll your eyes to think of them having a conversation, perhaps on one of Burroughs's color walks starting off from the Beat Hotel in Paris...'

After three pages of thinking of them having a conversation on one of Burroughs's color walks, he's suddenly dissecting Malinowski.

<mackinaw>: and more.