FWIW, I couldn’t find anything starting with himer- in the Greek dictionaries at the Perseus site that made a plausible root, in terms of meaning.

Faldage - 14 September 2007 03:15 PM

Anthimeria is in wwftd and Luciferous Logolepsy.  I could ask Michael of wwftd fame for an etymology.  Perhaps it’s anth and himereia.

anthimeria (Gk anthos, ‘flower’ + meros, ‘part’)

Welcome to wordorigins, but do you have some support for that etymology, or is it just a wild-ass guess?  “Flower part” doesn’t seem to fit the sense any better than, say “anti-tamed” anti + himera, “anti-desirable” anti + himeroeis, or “anti-yearning” anti + himeros.

I’m having trouble getting the link to insert properly here, but if you google[books] anthimeria you’ll see A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory - Page 41 which gives:  “the term carries with it the idea of ‘flowerizing’ or ‘making decorative’.”

edit: and gives a couple of examples wherein Shakespeare flowerizingly verbed nouns.

Huh.  Here‘s the direct link, and that’s certainly what it says.  I don’t know on what authority Cuddon gives that etymology—it could be his wild-ass guess—but it would explain the -h-.  Still a malformed word, though, because now there’s no explanation for the -i- (anthos + mer- should give anthomer-; cf. anthology).

Anyway, welcome, and thanks for the citation!

Hah.  I posted about this, and a commenter said:

This is a misspelling of antimeria, I would guess popularized by Cuddon’s ubiquitous book. Antimeria was considered synonymous with enallage.

I’ve picked out a couple of definitions in Latin (that predate Cuddon) that I was able to find on Google Books.

John Holmes Art of Rhetoric Made Easy (1755) defined the word in this way:

‘Antimeria solet pro parte ponere partem.’

Very concise, and it indicates the etymology (anti + mer-; the -ia suffix is obviously used to mark the word as abstract).

In E.F. Poppo’s prolegomena to Thucydides defines the figure as:

‘ipsarum orationis partium earumque generum’ permutatio.

Cuddon’s ‘flowerizing’ definition is a good example both of enallage and of folk etymology, albeit of a mistaken form.

Incidentally, *anthimeria doesn’t appear on Google Books until 1960 (before Cuddon), but doesn’t really catch on until the 80s and 90s, after Cuddon had been published and republished.

As I suspected, it’s a false word, and there’s another perfectly good word for it (enallage).

*does a happy dance*

enallage seems to me to be much narrower in concept:

1. Gram. The substitution of one grammatical form for another, e.g. of sing. for pl., of present for past tense, etc.
1583 FULKE Defence 126 In the participle..is a manifest enallage or change of the gender. 1614 SELDEN Titles Hon. 115 Their Grammarians make it [Elohim] an Enallage of Number..to express excellencie. 1656 OWEN Wks. 1851 VIII. 403 There may be an enallagy of number, the nation for the nations. 1737 WATERLAND Eucharist (ed. 2) 373 Enallage of tenses, which is frequent in Scripture. 1832 in WEBSTER; and in mod. Dicts.

2. Rhet. (See quot.) Obs.
1736 BAILEY, Enallage, a figure whereby we change or invert the order of the terms in a discourse. [OED2]

As I suspected, it’s a false word

I don’t really understand what you mean when you call it “false”. If it’s a word, and people use it, what makes it “false”?

If it’s a word, and people use it, what makes it “false”?

Hoist by my own petard!  OK, OK, it seems to have become a real word (like Pinocchio becoming a real boy), but it’s misbegotten, and I hate it.

lionello - 15 September 2007 11:19 AM

As I suspected, it’s a false word

I don’t really understand what you mean when you call it “false”. If it’s a word, and people use it, what makes it “false”?

and people do use it; 9440 ghits to 363 for antimeria—and anthimeria is in Silva Rhetoricae, although they give it as “from Gk. anti- “instead of” and mereia “a part”.”

(talk about guessing at the etymology! <g>)

9440 is a tiny number of ghits, though of course 363 is even tinier.

Is “ghit” now an accepted neologism?  Despite its obvious derivation, it has an “Indian” air to it.  Perhaps I should invent a folk etymology for it, before someone else does.

Yes, doesn’t it --- recalls “ghat” and “ghee”. Perhaps one should spell it with a hyphen, to ensure its being understood to have two syllables. Written as a monosyllable, it’s ambiguous, in the same way as “grumble” --- (another neologism, meaning “an audible fart exhaled while Googling").

Monosyllabic “ghit” also jostles uncomfortably against another good old English word, more commonly spelt “git”, meaning (roughly) “a socially undesirable person” --- “Piss off, yer miserable foocking git!”

context, context, context!

There was a discussion of ghits on language log (This is a link to a cached page.)

I get 589,000 ghits for ~ghit OR ghits. (Perhaps not too meaningful as some like to appropriate these words for their own purposes like ghits.com or some such.)

I sort of liked it. To me ghits made sense early on.