From the blog of the rare books collection of the ETH Library, I just learnt that the word for the study and classification of grape species that I was looking for is “ampelography” (ampélographie in French).
(The relevance of this word to my daily life is that the computers on my home network are named after grapes; red grapes are reserved for desktops and white for laptops.)
Topological thinking is rooted in local issues — the soil, the plants, the weather, and the local customs. Peoples’ well-being is its objective.
“Orismology”, from the Oxford English Dictionary Word Of The Day, is the right term for the discussion of technical terminology (the théorie des termes de métier, as we say in French).
Today’s “word of the day” from the OED was “femme incomprise”. The list of nearby words contains:
I wonder if there is a bigger cluster of foreign words with a common root?
The other one I know and like, though it is not in strictly alphabetic order, is also quite impressive:
There is undeniably a certain form a humor in the books of Jules Verne, but of a rather inoffensive kind, and the distracted geograph Paganel would probably be dismissed rather curtly by such a lively girl as Queneau’s Zazie. Nevertheless, while re-reading Les enfants de Capitaine Grant, I found a magnificent sentence that, I think, even Zazie would approve:
Les petits garçons et les petites filles, plus rageuses surtout, s’administraient des taloches superbes avec un entrain féroce.
(Les enfants du Capitaine Grant, 2ème partie, Chapitre XVI)
This is basically untranslatable; the literal meaning is something like
The boys and girls, even fiercer, exchanged superb blows with extreme alacrity.
but English words fail me to convey the finer meaning of taloche…
And I was reading this book because, believe it or not, Jules Verne is now a Pléiade author! Of course, grudgingly, since only four of his novels were deemed worthy of this supreme honor of French letters. In addition to Les enfants…, we have 20000 lieues sous les mers and L’île mystérieuse, a trilogy, and Le sphinx des glaces, but obviously some strong reactionary faction must have resisted any attempt in adding De la terre à la lune, or Kéraban le Têtu, or Hector Servadac, or…
I also had not realized before the embarrassing chronological problems of the trilogy: Les enfants… happens in 1864–1865; 20000 lieux… begins in 1866; but then L’île mystérieuse, which is supposed to take place twelve years after the first part, begins in 1865…