Entry: murated (adj.)
In context: "Several times also Marathe calls U.S.A. to Steeply 'Your walled 'nation or 'Your murated nation.'"
Definition: Surrounded by walls.
Other: Hey, DFW did my job for me today - I'm taking the day off!
SNOOT score: 3
Page: 127 (If you just noticed we're going back in time page-wise, sorry about that. Some how I got a few of my entries out of order, so today and tomorrow should have preceded yesterday. If you catch my drift.)
Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Definitive Jest is a vocabulary-building and SNOOT-approved word-of-the-day blog centered around David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
I don't get it. Is murated a word, or does Marathe mean something else?
ReplyDeleteHad the same question.. Is the context your only source? I looked it up and expected to see "surrounded by walls, walled," but dictionary dot com didn't know what I was talking about or even if I was talking.
DeleteLooks like it's a conjugation of an Italian word.
Deletehttp://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/murate
Do you see where he wrote "Source: Oxford English Dictionary?" On a scale of 0 to 100, in terms of scholarship, I would give the OED a 99 or so, and dictionary dot com about 11. I can access the OED via my public library's web site. Perhaps you can, too. In terms of Hal Incandenza in the narrative, there was no dictionary dot com then, but there was an OED, and his respect for it is evident.
DeleteExcept that it's not in the OED, which I think places your scholarship rating back in the 0 - 5 range. others here who have pointed to the French and Italian have it right.
DeleteIt does appear in the OED, at least beginning with the 1989 second edition. Nathan Bailey’s 1727 “Universal Etymological English Disctionary [Vol. II]” is cited.
DeleteBig whoop
More likely from the French murer than the Italian murare, as Marathe is Quebecois, but both mean the same thing (v. to wall, or conjugated as is either past participle walled or adjective walled) and both come from the Latin root murus (wall)
ReplyDeleteYep, as in the word "Mural"
Delete