Word of the Day
I was watching a show on tv a few minutes ago and they were showing us how apples were processed before being cooked in a factory-made apple pie. The apples are all dumped together in a large (very large) tub (see happy-hippopotamus-pool-sized-tank) full of water, then are singulated by a singulating machine
wait what?
Singulate? I looked it up. This program was on Discovery Max, so I guess they know how to speak, right? Well, “to singulate” doesn’t really appear in any “real” dictionary and, as wordpress keeps reminding me via a lovely little red dotted line under all the “singulate”s I’ve just written, it isn’t really considered a word. But the Urban Dictionary has it (“to un duplicate or divide until there is one unit , reduced.”) and it is being used in the web. To singulate means to choose one of, to take one, to “single-out” one (does that phrasal verb exist or did I invent it now? To single out. No it must… right? Anyway…). Where does this verb come from? “Singulation” is a method in which some complicated machinery thing identifies a tag with a specific serial number (I didn’t make it up, here it is!) but apart from that no official document has been found (by me, in the last five/ten minutes). It’s certainly a word, other people use it and… I guess I will, too.
2 Comments on “Word of the Day”
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Together with Nicole Duplaix, Chair of the IUCN-SSC Otter Specialist Group , I wrote a book all about otters and how wonderful they are. Check it out We Love Otters
fullofdaisies.com 
Ma secondo te c’e’ gia’ qualche italiano che coniuga *singolare* come se fosse un verbo?… Io singolo, tu singoli, egli singola… 🙂
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…tutto è possibile……. I spesso, molto spesso, invento parole, verbi, aggettivi. Mi piace, rende tutto più semplice per il mio cervello, ma ho letto che porta anche ad una patologica pigrizia mentale. Ieri, al supermercato, ho detto al mio ragazzo (con cui solitamente parlo italiano, ma che come me conosce svariate altre lingue): “Dobbiamo comprare un limpia (spagnolo) suolo, soon (inglese)” Suonava bene ma si, era palesemente sintomo del mio cervello pigro. 🙂
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