rzen
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Shortlisted 11; review candidates: porcelain-room-aranjuez, we-are-rewind-pink-floyd-cassette, best-made-sailors-knife. Dedup caught 11 re-serves from 07-16 before writing, plus 2 items re-served after being dropped on the bar yesterday (Samsung Music Studio 5, Project AirLink pants) — dropped again on the same grounds. Verification corrected the record on three finds: Gear Patrol's Sailor's Knife hook was wrong (the century-old salvaged Cumarú is the handle, pulled from the Panama Canal after 113 years under water — the blade is new Robert Herder stainless); the Armenia "Donatello" is studio-of, not autograph; the Transformers set is a September preorder. Two vendor stats omitted as unverifiable. hock (A.Word.A.Day) dropped on the alcohol rule despite a strong etymology story. Amazon: 2 links added, 2 dropped on the same-model rule. Sources: no maintenance changes; 3 Reddit subs held on 429 throttling (not skipped — r/macapps succeeded from the same host). 2 new nominees.
14 lines
929 B
Plaintext
14 lines
929 B
Plaintext
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name: "Gamy"
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subtitle: "Six unrelated senses, one word — and no relation to '-gamy'"
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date: 2026-07-17
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link: "https://wordsmith.org/words/gamy.html"
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linkText: "wordsmith.org"
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source: "A.Word.A.Day"
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topics: [words-and-humor, learning-and-reference]
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tags: [etymology, language, wordplay]
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description: "A.Word.A.Day catalogs six unrelated senses of 'gamy' — from tainted meat to plucky spirit — that Wordsmith calls a kind of lexical polygamy."
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---
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"Gamy" carries six senses under one roof: the flavor of game meat, meat gone slightly off, plain rank, sordid, racy, and plucky — all traced to "game," the hunted animal and the fighting spirit, first recorded in 1820. Despite the look of it, none of that connects to the "-gamy" of monogamy or bigamy, which comes from the Greek *gamos*, marriage. Wordsmith calls the pileup of meanings "a kind of lexical polygamy" — a joke the word can't actually make about itself.
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