AGGLOMERATION

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Dr. Goodword
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AGGLOMERATION

Postby Dr. Goodword » Mon May 28, 2007 10:25 pm

• agglomeration •

Pronunciation: ê-glah-mê-ray-shên • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. The process of forcing unrelated things together into a jumbled mass or union. 2. A jumble of unrelated things forced or compacted together.

Notes: Today's Good Word is one of the nouns from the verb agglomerate "to ball together". The other one is agglomerate itself, pronounced slightly differently, which refers to things that have been shaped specifically into a ball or a jumbled mass like an agglomeration. A conglomerate is a corporation comprising disparate companies. A conglomeration is also an accumulation of different things but things that are related in some way to each other.

In Play: Any association of unrelated entities is an agglomeration: "Cookie Baker's salads are usually an agglomeration of grasses, weeds, and other dubious vegetation growing in her backyard." The term is often used in reference to human settlements and organizations: "I wouldn't call this corporation so much a conglomerate as an agglomeration of companies, none of which has any idea of what the others are doing."

Word History: Latin had two words for "ball": glomus and globus. They apparently came from a Proto-Indo-European root glom/b- "ball, glob, clump" with an M and B which alternated in Latin. We find both in the English word derived from it, clump (after the became [p] as it usually did in Germanic languages). The glom stem in Latin went into the making of glomerare "form into a ball" which took several prefixes, including ad- "to" and con- "with", giving us the basis for agglomerate and conglomerate. When English borrowed Latin verbs, it preferred the past participle of the verb for its stem. The past participle of agglomerare in Latin was agglomeratus. (Today's Good Word is just the most recent in an agglomeration of fascinating terms suggested by Susan Lister over the past several years.)
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engineer27
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Backformation or Original Word?

Postby engineer27 » Tue May 29, 2007 9:35 am

It seems that the verb "to glom" shares enough conceptual space with the root of "agglomerate" that it might either share an origin, or perhaps be a back-formation from today's word or its relative "conglomeration." However, the on-line dictionaries derive it from Scottish "glaum" meaning "to steal."

Perhaps just the modern spelling of "glom" was influenced by today's word?

skinem
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Postby skinem » Tue May 29, 2007 11:03 am

glom

Pronunciation: 'gläm
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): glommed; glom·ming
Etymology: alteration of English dialect glaum to grab
1 : TAKE, STEAL
2 : SEIZE, CATCH
- glom on to : to grab hold of : appropriate to oneself <glommed on to her ideas

engineer27
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glom or glaum

Postby engineer27 » Tue May 29, 2007 5:13 pm

My point is that the conceptual similarities of glom - "attach by grabbing onto" and agglomerate -- "stick together into a single mass" are more than coincidental.

While the two words' origins may be disparate, their usage overlaps somewhat, so the migration of glom from glaum might be influenced by the root glom/b.


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