Peculiarly Private

Bear With Me On This -
 - it'll take a bit of explaining.  We've not had a Word Definition here at BOOJUM! for a while, and here we have four all at once, with a common root.

Another common root

     No!  Not Latin.  Which means that other lexigraphical scapegrace, Greek, must be responsible, and it is.
     You need not fear Conrad committing The Sin Of The Pseud, which is to write a phrase out in the Greek alphabet and then - not translate it.  Grrrr!  You could get away with that a hundred years ago, when the well-bred upper class literati who would have been the blog's natural audience* would have studied Greek at their public schools.
     Anyway.  "Idiolect" popped into your humble scribe's mind at work on Friday.  Subsequently so did "Idiom" and then "Idiot" and of course "Idiosyncrasy".  
     "Where do these words come from?" I mused, which alarmed all those sitting around me, since I unwisely spoke aloud.
     Their common root is the Greek word "Idios", meaning "Private" or "Own", hence the derivation "Idiot" which has not infrequently applied to Conrad - in all honesty not unfair or incorrect.  

The word personified

Then we have "Idiom", which is a derivation from "Idioma", meaning "Peculiar", and you might define it as a phrase that is more than the sum of it's parts (Gestalt Grammar?).  One example given is "Over the moon".  This, in English anyway, does not refer to cosmonauts or the Apollo programme, but is idiom for being quite chuffed.  Happy, in other words.  Then you have "Idiosyncrasy" which is behaviour peculiar to a person, which might also be described as a person's peculiar behaviour, again right back at Conrad and his All The Pens All The Time obsession, not to mention BOOJUM! itself.

Conrad being idiosyncratic.
Or stupid.  There's a thin line ...

     Which brings us to "Idiolect", which started all this scrivel off.  This is the language unique to an individual and I refer you to my Bloglossary** - extract below.  Your humble scribe confesses he didn't realise quite how much idiolect he'd created, as I think there's a second post with more details.

     Here's a sample:

"FIRST UNPLEASANTNESS": The First World War, a mostly European irruption 1914-1918.
"SECOND UNPLEASANTNESS": The Second World War, a rather wider and even more nasty business 1939-1945
"FOOFOODILLY": A nuclear weapon, euphemistically described to - hopefully! - fool all the intelligence service eavesdroppers.
"YOUR HUMBLE SCRIBE" "MODEST ARTISAN" "TALENTED TYPIST" "GIFTED AUTHOR": Conrad.  Or, if we are being extra-specially formal and real-world, Rob.
"OSCAR": Conrad's subconscious or memory, depending on what best suits the plot.
"MISTER HAND": Conrad's treacherous, defamatory and libellous /OR/ truthful, honest and self-deprecating Right Hand.

Idiolect!

An Example Of Idiot
I took a photo of my i-pod, which is without doubt the 21st Century's greatest invention, and promptly forgot why.  Art?

With pen for scale

     I am loathe to not post it as it means not only proving that Conrad is a fully-qualified Idiot Of The First Water, but also upping the word count.
     Heh.

Urban Legends
I am about to simultaneously post and also beg the pardon of Sophie, since her post on Facebook kind of got caught up in the screenshot I was after.  Art?

Eyes right!  Eyes right!

     I had problems scaling the page here: any smaller and the print was illegible; any larger and the text vanished.  I shall add in what it says:  "While NASA spent a large amount of money developing the Space Pen, the Soviets just used pencils".
     EYES RIGHT!  Never you mind what Sophie was doing!
     Anyway, this is an urban legend.  NASA never spent a clipped nickel developing a "Space Pen"; some private enterpreneur did so, after asking if they minded.  Do you see the NASA logo on the pen's container?  No, you do not.
     Secondly, using pencils in the environment of a manned space vehicle is stupidly dangerous.  
     "Oooh, get you, Conrad.  You sound like you know what you're talking about," I hear you question. 
     Well yes I do.  SPECTRUM have hauled me aboard Cloudbase often enough for [TEXT REDACTED DUE TO SECURITY TRANSGRESSIONS] so I do.
     What is a pencil composed of?  Wood and graphite.  How do you keep it working?  You sharpen it.  Having inflammable bits of wood floating around in micro-gravity is a very bad idea as you never know where they'll end up.  Graphite is a conductor and is even more dangerous, since the smallest bit of it could get into electrical gear and cause short circuits or fires.

Very possibly due to a Staedtler H4 being incautiously scraped to a point ...

     EYES RIGHT! I said.

*  Conrad gloasting again - the painful truth courtesy Mister Hand
** This, ironically, is idiolect.