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Sunday: October 16, 2005

Cole-ology

Filed under: — site admin @ 12:36 AM GMT-0500

Anton Efendi of Across the Bay calls his analysis of Juan Cole’s miscellaneous ineptitudes ‘Cole-ology’. An interesting coinage. What would it mean etymologically? Short-o kólon means, as one might guess, “colon, part of the large intestine”, so short-o Colology would presumably be more or less the same thing as proctology. However, the ‘Cole’ in ‘Cole-ology’ should have a long o. According to Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (1996), long-o kolê means (1) “thigh-bone with the flesh on it, ham, esp. of a swine”, and (2) “membrum virile”. Just a coincidence, I’m sure. If you prefer to take ‘Cole-ology’ as a Greco-Roman hybrid, like ‘automobile’ and ‘homosexual’, and make it pentasyllabic, it could be formed from Latin colei (three syllables), which is always plural and means either “testicles” or “scrotum” or (I imagine) a combination of the two three. Again, that must be a coincidence, though an amusing one.

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