Tuesday, March 13, 2012

How To Use the U: UBIETY

UBIETY is the state of having a definite location.

The plural is UBIETIES.

It is pronounced: [yoo-bahy-i-tee]. It is Latin.

I have no idea how you'd use it in a sentence.

I've found a website that tries to explain it - the author is a philogist, I think:

I am not yet ready to return to the list of words in the Collegiate. I am still trying to get over ubiety/ubeity. I think I am coming up with a theory of the development of English as I think of ubeity. The word ubeity in fact does not appear either in the Collegiate or the OED. Ubiety, however, goes back to the 17th century. "To make a body in this sense independent of Place or Ubiety, is as unconceivable as to make it independent of Time." My point is that the 17th century saw the beginning of modern philosophical speculation in England. You never hear of a 16th century English philosopher, but by the time you reach th 17th century, you have all kinds of brilliant minds (Hobbes, Locke, etc.). Hm. Why is that true? Is it only because we today find the 17th century philosophically useful for us, even though there might have been people just as smart, prolific and insightful philosophically in the 16th (or 15th, for that matter) centuries in England?

Well, getting to my linguistic point. The word ubiety became useful as English and Scottish philosophers began to think about place and time, but when that subject became uninteresting philosophically, the word kind of dropped out of usage. Indeed, by the middle of the 19th century, ubiety could be used in a rather seamy context: "Vervain (i.e., verbena) and magic haschisch, which endows Thought with ubiety."

http://www.drbilllong.com/SpellersDiary2/Us2.html

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