[Fictionary] CAXON ballot (due 2/14) -- Eric wins!

eLLioTT morEton em at swarpa.net
Fri Feb 24 22:48:18 UTC 2023


Dear Fictionary,

With all counties now reporting, the winner is Eric's urn plinth, with 6 points.  The OED's definition garnered even more votes, for a variety of reasons, but it can't play, so haul it away, Eric!

Regards,
Elliott


General comments:

Hutch:  I am apparently in a rather extraordinarily bad mood, which I wasn't even aware of until I started dissing on everyone's fictionition. Please don't take it personally. Note that I dissed my own fictionition too.



________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  A glass cork, usually decorative. often used with model ships in bottles.
__Joshua

0 points.

Honorable mention from Jim.

Jean-Joseph:  If it's not made of cork, I'd call it a stopper rather than a cork.

Hutch:  I've seen a few ships in bottles. They usually have corks made of cork or
are simply unsealed. A glass stopper would simply fall out and get lost.



________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  An early moveable-type printer, named for its inventor Jakob Caxon, of Danzig; it enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the late 1400s-early 1500s until losing ground to other printers due to labor requirements.
__Hutch

0 points.

Pierre: Caxton

Eric:  Caxton.
________________________________________________________________________
Caxon, n.  A constructed language in which each word ends with a check letter to prevent misspellings.
__Jim

2 points = 2 points for correct guess

Joshua 1

Jean-Joseph:  Thisa woulds undoubtedlyc resultl inv somew veryo strangez wordsw.

Pierre:  I doubt that a human could learn to speak such a language. Humans have enough 
trouble speaking a language that can be parsed unambiguously by computer.

Hutch:  I'm highly skeptical. A check number is easy to calculate, but a check
letter would be very difficult. One would be more likely, even MUCH more
likely, to incorrectly calculate the check letter than to mis-spell the
word.

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  The traditional hussar braiding of a horse's mane.
__Nick

3 points = Joshua 1 + Ranjit 1 + Hutch 1

Ranjit:  1 point for horsies

Hutch:  1 point, for the other survivor of my bad mood. :-)

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  The circular inverse of a rectangular lattice, with a tangle in the  middle, produced by inverting the complex arithmetic-geometric mean.
__Pierre

2 points =  2 points for correct guess

Jean-Joseph:  The what now?

Hutch:  Complete nonsense! I think this is simply a collection of math terms strung
together higgledy-piggledy.


________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  1.  A kind of wig, now obsolete.  2.  A case or chest of ores prepared to be refined. 
__OED

8 points = Jim 2 + Jean-Joseph 2 + Pierre 2 + Eric 2

Jim:  2 points, because this sounds like the kind of double-definition word Elliott would choose.

Jean-Joseph:  Two seemingly unrelated definitions, the second of which sounds distinctly odd. Makes me suspicious enough to award two points.

Pierre:  Two points. This sounds most likely to be real.

Eric:  I like how the definitions are so disparate. Two points.

Hutch:  I'm trying to figure out how a wig could be related to a chest of ores. I
suspect I'm missing someone's joke.


________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n. (informal)  A cascade sonogram, or (less frequently) a cascade sonography device.
__Ranjit

1 point = Eric 1

Eric:  Mellifluous. One point.

Hutch:  I'm always skeptical of scientific or technical fictionitions. Come to
think of it, that applies quite neatly to my own printing press
fictionition as well.

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n.  A tongue tattoo.
__Jean-Joseph

2 points =  2 points for correct guess


Hutch:  The very idea of tattoos makes me cringe slightly. The idea of a tongue
tattoo absolutely makes my skin crawl. If this is the word, I may have to
vomit.

________________________________________________________________________
caxon, n. (arch.)  A square plinth on which an urn is placed.
__Eric

6 points = Jim 1 + Jean-Joseph 1 + Hutch 2 + 2 points for correct guess

Jean-Joseph:  A pedestrian definition. These often turn out to be right, so one point.

Ranjit:  2 points for inth plurn - i mean urn plinth

Hutch:  Well, I've disliked everything else. 2 points

________________________________________________________________________
Plus one bonus joke def from Ranjit:

joke def: a very loud wassail song
(from klaxon + no el, of course, plus 'wassail' suggests 'wail' for extra noise)
__Ranjit

Hutch:  I had suggested this was the meaning of "caxon". Obviously, I had mistaken
it for "klaxon".




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