Talk:stim

irish

the Irish sense may be from Irish. i found this book from around 1938, which is unclear, but contains the line

a stim = stím = léás,

where its not entirely clear which accents were intended. This seems to be common in Irish writing. léas and leás are both Irish words. However from the context Im not sure what that word is there for, whether stím is also an Irish word, or whether that word is stím or just stim (since the English word is also written with what looks like an acute accent). All the best, —Soap— 19:38, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

and apparently the informants for this book were children, who were providing words they'd heard in their households, which means that they were already old even in 1938. this may explain why some of it seems so sloppy, and maybe a teacher's pet worked their way into the canon of Irish lexicography by using the name of their favorite teacher as a word for a delicious cake (look further down the page). Probably wishful thinking on my part about that, though. —Soap— 19:49, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Given the context, léas seems like the better choice, since it can mean a ray of light. I still don't know if stim is supposed to be an Irish word, but I'd lean towards saying it's not, since it shouldn't need to be translated twice. But then, if the informants were children, and the teacher was merely writing down what they said, there might not be any common system followed here. —Soap— 08:48, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

like blush, perhaps this word comes from the belief that our eyes emit light, and someone who sees clearly has a lot of light, but someone less fortunate might have not a beam of light, or, after analogy, not a stim of sense. —Soap— 20:19, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Welsh sdim is probably unrelated, despite the sense being a pretty close match. —Soap— 20:26, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/l%c3%a9ar doewsnt really help, but at least gives us a second source for the light metaphor. —Soap— 20:27, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

also, it's possible that léas (they actually wrote léás) in the book above is a mis-transcription for the apparently unrelated léar. —Soap— 20:31, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

to be honest, i might move this to my userspace, since it's getting confusing. this JSTOR link (i havent read it, because my login is buggy, but it shows on google search results) says that stim means

a ray of light; a glimmer; always used negatively. There wasn't a stim of light in the house.

At first that sounds perfectly reasonable, but wait! does that it mean it translates to both léas and léar, two words which supposedly arent related, but happen to look alike? It makes me wonder if there were transcription errors going quite a ways back and that the word lost its connection to Irish Gaelic hundreds of years ago. —Soap— 20:47, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

its possible there are two léars, one which we list and one which we don't, and that the one we don't list really is cognate to léas. That is where my knowledge ends, because I dont know by what means two such words could be related diachronically. —Soap— 20:49, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

video games

seems often to be used in video games as a powerup, still an abbreviation of stimulant but with a wider sense. in Warhammer, the preferred spelling is stimm, at least in some forms of the game: https://warhammer-40k-darktide.fandom.com/wiki/Stimms —Soap— 21:47, 11 August 2024 (UTC)