So, Is No One Fidelitous?

I was working on a school paper the other day and wanted to use the concept of fidelity to describe how accurate or harmonious a rendering of something was to its original. The sentence needed an adjective. But when I typed fidelitous, the spellchecker flashed red. So I went online and checked Wiktionary, Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, and even the Urban Dictionary. None of them showed an adjective form of the word. (I have to note that there are tons of words under the letter F in the Urban Dictionary.)

I have an account with Wiktionary, which is Wikipedia's collaborative online dictionary. I don't get the sense that the Wiktionary experiment has been all that successful, but I engage in this low impact wordsmith's playground from time to time to see what happens. It's actually not that much fun; it's more of an academic exercise.

If you look at the Fidelity article at Wikipedia, on the right side of the page there is a small box with a link to the Wiktionary entry. That's probably the easiest way to get there. Otherwise, you have to go to the bottom of the Wikipedia main page, where a list of Wiki's sister projects appears, including Wiktionary. (You might want to try Wikiquote or Wikibooks, for example. Or how about Wikispecies?)

Rather than just toss in a new word, why not talk about it? I mean, what do I know about fidelity anyway? (Don't tell my wife) So I added a blurb on the Fidelity discussion page stating my thoughts on the adj form and asked for others to comment. Not surprisingly, I was the first one to venture to launch a discussion topic on that page. And, also not surprising, there hasn't been a nibble yet. But it's only been a few days. I like leaving these issues out there, like seedlings, and I check them once in a while to see if there's been any activity. I posted a discussion item on the Vicar article at Wikipedia a year and a half ago and there's not been a response yet. Patience is a virtue on these more obscure topics.

I eventually looked up fidelitous at Google Books, figuring if it was a real word it would appear in their collection of electronic copies of actual books. I ended up finding 46 hits in books published from the 1920s to the 1960s to today. The more recent books focus on fidelity in gay and bisexual relationships. (I'm not sure whether you can be fidelitious in a bisexual relationship, unless of course the typical relationship is a threesome. If that's the case, Valentine's Day must involve lots of greeting cards and candy.)

Google itself has nearly a thousand hits. There the emphasis switches to audiophiles and their desire for fidelity in sound recordings. And, again, polyamory.

Even if I think fidelity has an adjectival form, I'm still a bit unclear exactly how to make a Wiktionary entry. The precise structure of a dictionary entry isn't for the fainthearted or all that user friendly. So I'll give it a bit more time, I guess. Procrastinate. And hopefully someone else will add the entry or let me know that there simply is no such word and correct the error of my ways. Maybe around Christmastime, if I've not heard otherwise, I'll set my jaw and strive for dictionary perfection.

While I'm on words, I just have to say that I love the fact that Wikipedia has separate articles for fish, fish as food, fish food, and seafood. It even has separate categories for edible fish and seafood dishes. Ah, diversity.

I should mention that in yesterday's post, in which I discussed the US telephone system, I didn't talk at all about international numbers. That is because they can be difficult to get a handle on. They have country codes and city codes instead of codes for states and towns, but their total lengths vary wildly, so breaking them into their component parts can be a challenge. The typical White Pages in a large city has a list of major international country codes with some of the more common city codes included for good measure. For some reason the phone company thinks you also need to know the time difference, so they show something like +6 to let you know that the city is six hours ahead. If you are researching an international number, I'm not sure there are any standard references that break down all the city codes, but Wiki has a decent country codes list.