Talk:warwood

Verification discussion

This entry has survived Wiktionary's verification process.

Please do not re-nominate for verification without comprehensive reasons for doing so.

---

warwood

Moved from RFM. Original posting:

Fictional-universe only term, should be Appendix:Moby-Dick/warwood. See also Talk:cryptex. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:31, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

—Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:50, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Moby Dick is a well-known work. Are we sure this is a nonce word? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 22:40, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

Melville may have had a specific species in mind: there's a pair of Proto-Polynesian roots that happen to be homophones in many of the Polynesian languages: one for brave/warrior and the other for a tree with dark-colored, very hard wood (originally w:Casuarina equisetifolia, but transferred to w:Acacia koa in Hawaii). He's known to have spent time in w:Nuku Hiva, w:Tahiti and w:Hawaii, all three of which have the pair of homophones in question.

Even so, it looks like the term itself is his own coinage: perhaps for the exotic, "primitive"/"tribal" imagery, and perhaps to avoid using foreign names like koa or toa. There's a Warwood place name/surname that muddies things up a bit, so I can't be completely sure- but I haven't been able to find anything outside of Melville. There's a reference in a description of scrimshaw repeated verbatim in several books, (only available as snippets), but it could easily be borrowed from Melville. Chuck Entz (talk) 07:23, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

I've added two citations. Presumably this just means something like "wood that is used for war". DTLHS (talk) 22:51, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

The Moby Dick citation is independent of the other citations that DTLHS and I have found. It apparently refers to a specific, but unknown, type of wood, whereas war-wood is a kenning meaning "spear" or "shield,"[1] used in translations of heroic poems like Beowulf. I've moved the citations for the latter sense to Citations:war-wood, since it only occurs in that form. -Cloudcuckoolander (formerly Astral) (talk) 15:10, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

• This [2] quotes Melville with the unhyphenated spelling; "...little canoes of dark wood, like the rich warwood of his native isle."
• From [3]

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of warwood leafmeal lie.

• I have also found "sweet warwood" in a patent [4] but I guess this is an error for "sweet wormwood".
• SpinningSpark 22:12, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it's an error for sweet wormwood. That, along with sweet annie and annual wormwood are by far the most common common names for the species. It looks like a spellchecker error, except I can't imagine it's common enough to show up in spellchecker dictionary files. Very odd.Chuck Entz (talk) 01:19, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

More likely a simple error from a non-English speaker. SpinningSpark 12:39, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

Found another one, not connected to Melville or canoes. That makes three by my count, I'll add them to the page. SpinningSpark 13:44, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Oh, strike that, I wasn't paying attention to the discussion above about moving cites for OE kennings to the page for the hyphenated form. However, I have now added another cite from Melville which makes the Hawaiian tree theory in the etymology dubious, even if limited strictly to Melville's usage (he is writing about the w:Mexican-American War). SpinningSpark 17:26, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

It can’t stay here forever, so I’m closing it as passed for occurring in a well-known work (Moby Dick). — Ungoliant ^(falai) 05:21, 24 May 2014 (UTC)