January 17, 2010

On the uncredited claim of the wangus from Wikipedia


The name of this fortress was derived from the Gothic word "wangus" and describes cutting down trees in an acorn forest.[citation needed]



Claiming the wangus capable of cutting down an oak is one of the oldest tropes of civil discourse. Sure it must have traveled to the Baltic ear frequently enough back in the times, this sort of boast, whether pronounced concisely "wangus" or gone on about at such greater length as might be deemed suitable to the characteristic path of just that sort of talk when engrossed in the occasion which requires it.

[There's no citation for the word wangus in the given dictionary around here, bedraggled bearer of the burden of  the 200,000  or so words most commonly taken to be English back when it was first bound — a large, somewhat dated sample of the language, in other words: hardly the whole of it by now. There's just no citeable basis for talk of wangus there. That will have to come from somewhere else: the actually rather than potentially self-correcting part of the internet, justifying what in other respects is the very model of the marvelous sentence from Wikipedia. This is not to say that I don't see the utility of Goths or anyone else forbidding the arbitrary logging of oaks in their area in an effort to preserve the bounty of freely available acorns, and can easily imagine a history in which a whole bunch of sloganeering to that effect boiled down to shouting "wangus" across the political divide.]

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