罕为人知的、陌生而奇妙的——字面就是「少有人识」；这个词自己也活成了自己的意思。 Rarely known, strange and marvelous — literally "seldom-known"; the word has become its own meaning.
Rarely known, strange and marvelous — literally "seldom-known"; the word has become its own meaning. 罕为人知的、陌生而奇妙的——字面就是「少有人识」；这个词自己也活成了自己的意思。
词源etymology
古英语 seldcūth：seldan（罕、少）＋ cūth（已知的——uncouth 的那个 couth）—— 「少有人识的」。前 1150 年已在使用，是英语最老的一批形容词。
Old English seldcūth: seldan (seldom) + cūth (known — the couth of uncouth) — “seldom-known.” In use before 1150, among the oldest adjectives English owns.
背景the story
它活了将近一千年，然后死了：OED 的最后书证停在 1810 年代。 一个古英语的老词，陪着骑士文学走完中世纪，没能挤上现代英语的船。
它与 apricity 同属「词典孤儿」，命却相反：apricity 生下来就没人用， selcouth 是用了一千年才被弃。最妙的是结局——一个意为「少有人识」的词， 如今真的少有人识：selcouth 终于完全成为了 selcouth。 MW 与 OED 都还留着它的名牌，像博物馆留着标本。
It lived nearly a thousand years, then died: the OED’s last citation sits in the 1810s. An Old English elder that walked the whole medieval road with the romances and missed the boat to modern English.
It shares the dictionary-orphan shelf with apricity, with the opposite fate: apricity was never used; selcouth was used for a millennium and then dropped. The ending is the best part — a word meaning “seldom-known” is now, in fact, seldom known: selcouth has finally become fully selcouth. MW and the OED both keep its name-tag, the way museums keep specimens.
中文里的邻居neighbors in chinese
意思那头，「罕见」「奇异」都在；命运那头，中文也有一柜子这样的字—— 「彳亍」「觊觎」里的单字、《说文》里成千的死字，认得的人一年少似一年。 汉字的墓园比英语的大得多，只是汉字死了还留着一张脸： selcouth 死了就只剩词典里的一行，汉字死了还站在碑上。
On the meaning side, 罕见 and 奇异 stand ready; on the fate side, Chinese keeps whole cabinets of such characters — the strays in 彳亍, the thousands of dead graphs in the Shuowen, known by fewer readers every year. The Chinese graveyard is far larger than the English one, but a dead character keeps its face: selcouth survives as one line in a dictionary, while a dead Chinese character still stands on the stele.
The tide pool was full of selcouth machinery — things with too many legs and no obvious opinions. 自拟例句 our own example, not a quotation Every toddler's walk is a parade of the selcouth; adulthood is mostly forgetting to gasp. 自拟例句 our own example, not a quotation 严格说是词典词（MW／OED 都在录），实际上是出土文物——与 apricity 同柜。 用它就是在掉书袋，但掉得可爱：写「陌生而奇妙」的事物时引它一次， 再把它的身世讲给读者，词与义正好互证。
Technically a dictionary word (both MW and OED keep it); in practice, an excavated artifact — same display case as apricity. Using it is showing off, but charmingly: deploy it once for something strange-and-marvelous, tell the reader its history, and word and meaning will vouch for each other.