Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:16:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net>
Allan wrote [of stathm]:
It's too cute a word to stay out of the dictionary.
Yes, but . . . there are precious few citations for it.
I asked a friend, who is a classicist specializing in ancient Greek, about our conversation on "stathm". Here's what he head to say, upon reading one digest of Math-Fun:
From: Mike Tueller <miketueller@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:44:47 -0700 To: Steve Rowley <sgr@alum.mit.edu> Subject: Re: math-fun Digest, Vol 80, Issue 8 (fwd)
[...]
Words with the peculiar English -thm ending ordinarily come from Greek words with the -thmos ending (which is a lot easier to pronounce--as usual, the interference of French complicates matters).
By etymology, stathmos relates to a "standing" or "stopping," and so is used (in the earliest sources) for farmsteads, stables, posts holding up a roof, and lodgings.
Springing from those are uses related to weight (a balance is something that worked when the weights were brought to a standstill, so it Greek its name derived from that), and to stopping while marching.
It is this last use that most students of Greek probably remember best, as it is a very common usage: a temporary campsite that one would make while marching was a stathmos. From this, the word came to apply to a distance that an army would march in a day, and thence to a rough unit of distance measure (probably about 15-20 miles).
I confess that I don't know how any of this would apply to the function described in the e-mail correspondence. That you may have to work out.
On the other hand, I suppose it is possible that the word stathm comes from the Greek stathme, which is equally ancient. This word refers to a carpenter's line or ruler, and consequently is also applied to units of measure.
That is, I think, all I can say about the matter, unless I should come to know more.
Mike
-- Steve Rowley <sgr@alum.mit.edu> http://alum.mit.edu/www/sgr/ Skype: sgr000