iPhone Vocabulary Fail: Clepsydra
The blog Damn You, Auto Correct! posts screenshots of predictive text programs (mostly the iPhone’s Auto Correct) predicting very, very badly.
While most of the humor is related to people sending inappropriately lewd messages to their family members and coworkers (I wouldn’t recommend reading the site at work), sometimes some pretty good vocabulary words pop up! (I am an iPhone user, and I cannot tell you how many times the iPhone has assumed that, by typing “new” or “never,” what I really wanted was “neocolonialism.”)
Here is a classic:
A clepsydra is in fact a Greek water clock! Even more interestingly, clepsydra contains the root “kleps” (“to steal”), which also occurs in kleptomania, which means compulsive stealing.
If you think of the march of time as “stealing” moments of your life from you, then you could think of the clepsydra as “stealing” the water that marks time.
A few other time words you want to know for the GRE are:
Chronological – Arranged in order of time of occurrence.
Anachronism – The representation of someone as existing or something as happening in other than chronological, proper, or historical order.
Dilatory – Intended to delay; tending to postpone or delay.
Temporize – To act evasively in order to gain time, avoid argument, or postpone a decision.
Oh, and a horologium is a clock tower. Now you know!
Every year, your birthday gift to me is dilatory! I can recount in chronological order every time you have temporized to explain why, once again, your gift to me is “in the mail”!
This year, you finally realized that I do NOT like to receive games for the Wii (I think you just buy me those so you can play with them yourself), and that I actually like to receive anachronistic timepieces for my collection.
So, it’s nice that you found me a clepsydra on eBay, but honestly, I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m going to go pout in the horologium.
No, I know that my bedroom is not a real horologium, but that’s what I like to call it, since it’s full of hourglasses and sundials and it’s on the third floor.