Tiny rant

[hearthstone]

I've just done a search including the word "faining" and discovered that most of the hits were actually cases of people misspelling "feigning". I make no claims of having perfect spelling, but anyone who's at all familiar with English should know that you can't assume that the way a word sounds is the way it's spelled.

People of the internet: using big words will only impress if you also know how to spell them.

Comments

[hearthstone.livejournal.com]

Ah! And with fagna also meaning a seasonal celebration, that would have been an easy connection to make.

ut you're saying that there really isn't such a word in Anglo-Saxon? I wasn't able to find one, but I assumed it was my own lack of knowledge or resources there.

[weofodthignen]

The main entry in Bosworth-Toller is fægnian, "to rejoice." Alternate spellings: fægenian, fagnian, fahnian. This translates Latin gaudere. The ancestor of the adjective "fain" is listed under the spellings fægen (by far most common) and fægn, and has not changed meaning (joyful, elated); it's just become rare and faded. I note that fæger, "beautiful"--the ancestor of "fair" as in "fair of face"--is sometimes used in the extended meaning "joyful." (As I can say in Modern English, "That's lovely news.")

But words for sacrificing/offering/doing stuff in temples? None.

Bosworth-Toller is the big book; Clark-Hall is teensy. Bosworth-Toller is online and searchable here. There are 2 disadvantages to using this site: most of the pages are raw scans that have not been proofread, so æ and þ tend to appear as something else; and (often an advantage), after the Bosworth-Toller hits it proceeds to give you hits from the Cleasby-Vigfusson Icelandic dictionary and then Thorpe's Icelandic dictionary--so you have to be careful not to inadvertently cite a Norse word as an A-S one through not seeing where that search took you. With those warnings, this is in effect not only an etymological tool but a reverse A-S dictionary. Wha-hey!!!!

BUT the darned search function seems to be down yet again . . . I wanted to check for all translations of Latin fanum. I cannot see any words derived from that that could be ancestors of the verb "fain" as the theodisc use it. I can only find templ and tempel--and hearg and ealh. I'd like to have run a check. But yes, I think Garman and co. made up the word "fain" as they use it.

Frith,
M