Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception

'messy homosexual urges.... hanging around with sailors...' hmmmm, is there something you're not telling us Marcus!?

and wtf IS a gaping yaw?

You need to hang around with more sailors.

TBH, I don't know what that part means - I know what a gaping yaw is, but the sailors part was added in subbing.

Yaw is a particularly esoteric synonym for cleave or crack.

Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus
Main Entry: gape
Part of Speech: verb 2
Definition: gap
Synonyms: cleave, crack, dehisce, divide, frondesce, gap, open, part, split, yaw, yawn
Source: Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1)
Copyright © 2006 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Yes, I know gape and yaw are also synonyms, but I was using gaping as an adjective.

ehm, actually Doc, methinks you meant to say "gaping maw"...especially considering this is a flight sim and yaw has a fairly specific meaning in this context...not even sure its a noun(in this context)...

And has the same meaning in sailing, hence the sailors reference ... and we're back!

And "maw" is more of a mouth than a gap, which I believe was the original intent.

still don't think "yaw" is a noun in the context of a gap...whearas gaping maw is a fairly commonly used phrase

Roi, you're clearly quite eloquent, and a bit of a sesquipedalian yourself. But those who know me well know that what I say is, usually, what I mean to say. Obvious f**k-ups like typos and completely mis-reading the post I am responding to aside.

But I know what I meant. I have cited my proof. Yaw is a rarely used synonym of gap... derived from yawn, I think.

The fact that it is also a partner, in aviation, with pitch and roll was the very reason I chose it.

A pun, you see.

Yeh, I got the pun. Actually thought the sailors bit was an oblique reference Shenmue (X-Play did some brilliant bits about this) the humor I found in this sorta overshadowed the pun.

At the risk of pedantism (too late, methinks) the thesaurus entry you quoted was for the use of gap as a verb...while it may be equally as synonomous as a noun I was unable to find a equivalent meaning as a noun for yaw, but then I don't have a thesaurus handy, just an unabridged dictionary from last millenium. So I'm prolly suffering for an insufficency of information.

yaw n. 1. an act of yawing
2. the angle formed by a yawing aircraft

If only I could afford that £195 a year for an OED subscription. Hold on! I CAN afford it, I'm just not prepared to pay it.

Bloody thing isn't even based at Oxford University anymore...

damn, now I gotta know...incidentally, the sailing/flying definition comes from Icelandic for to hunt, or move to and fro

My gram got me my unabridged dictionary for Xmas '88...my dad burned a hole in my old one with a candle one Halloween...take it as you will that I went out in my bare feet at 630 inna morning to fetch it from storage in the garage...

as to the OED, is nothing sacred?

I think I am wrong. It appears a verb only. Meaning "to be wide open"

http://www.answers.com/topic/gape-yawn-yaw

So a yawing gap, not a gaping yaw.

Though, according to http://www.etymonline.com - noun usage referring to the "act of yawning" was recorded in 1697 - where is not cited.


There's unabridged, and unabridged. The OED is 20 volumes.

w0rd(s, lots of them).

Guess that puts us yanks in our place.

Is sesquipedaliac a word? 'Cuz I like it...it sounds dirty...

It is a word. It means someone given to using long words. It also means a long word.

There are a lot of words. The OED claims to include over 600.000 words. The University of Texas claims there are 700,000 words in the English language. For comparison, French has only 100,000, German only 185,000 - though some of them are very very long.

University of Texas also claims there are "50,000-100,000 words needed for average adult communication" which is absolute bullcrap - your average English speaker has a vocabulary of around 10-20,000 words (that they know the meanings of) but use only half that many in their lifetime.

Words are great. The way their usage changes is great. You probably know that the original meaning of the word nice was simple or foolish. Or that at the time that British settlers left for the New World, we Brits used to refer to Autumn as Fall, and it is we that have changed while (most of ) America has retained the original word. The great irony being that 'fall' is the word we most often cite to indicate how Americans speak differently to us.

i like a bit of etymology, can anyone recommend a particularly good book on it? (not the dictionary!)

i find the fact that people all over the world use a language effected by the colourful history of a little island moored off the west cost of europe rather interesting

i also find it to be strange that 'fast' can be used to say stuck or static, as well as rapid. maybe that came about as a sarcastic joke? :D

That's an auto-antonym. A word that means something and the opposite of that thing. Often, it's two homonymous words with different etymologies.

But both meanings of fast are from the Old English or Proto Germanic word fæst/fest - which meant firm or strong. Clearly, something can be stuck firm. But also to run strongly, is to run fast.

In reality fast is just an adverb, describing being very stuck or very moving.

So saying that something is 'fast', with out the 'stuck' or the 'moving' is rather like saying that someone is 'very' without the 'big' or 'wet' or 'rich' or whatever.

Then you have the other meaning of fast(v.) from the same root language...wonder how that one evolved...