I was reading a fantasy novel, and came across a reference to the spriest<\/i> doing something, and spent a little time being confused. It\u2019s like <\/i>priest, but with an <\/i>s at the beginning!<\/i> I thought to myself. Is that some kind of fantasy-world religious term? Instead of priests, they have spriests?<\/i> But I did a search through the ebook, and that was the only place the word appeared.<\/p>\r\n
So then I came up with a new theory: This must be a search-and-replace error, like the classic <\/i>dawizard.<\/i> (Wow, apparently I\u2019ve never posted about that here? In 1994, an editor on a D&D<\/cite> manual did a replace-all to change mage<\/i> to wizard<\/i>, not realizing that that would also turn damage<\/i> into dawizard<\/i>.) So I spent a few minutes trying to guess what synonym for priest<\/i> had been replaced, leading to a nonsense word.<\/p>\r\n But I couldn\u2019t figure it out. So I did a web search\u2014<\/p>\r\n \u2014and realized that (as you may well have already noticed) spriest<\/i> is a perfectly ordinary English word that has nothing to do with priests. It\u2019s the superlative of the word spry<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-specific-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18677,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18676\/revisions\/18677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}