My job is a constant education... two new N-words from the same journal (Booklist 11/1/06, if you're rabidly curious) that turned out the be vaguely related!
I suspect the first word was not used correctly, or else I'm missing something profound in the definition. Here's the context, from the review of Jean-Noel Jeanneney's Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: "Jeanneney believes that Google's retrievals as presently constituted pass to the reader the merely noetic, not truly the intelligent, insightful, thoughtful, and genuinely helpful information implied by the notion of universal knowledge." Even if we delve into the philosophical definition, we're still talking about a word that essentially deals with the intellect and reason. So how is that meant to contrast with "intelligent, insightful, thoughtful, and genuinely helpful"? (For that matter, how is it that having all the world's knowledge at your fingertips automatically implies possession of the wisdom to select the most helpful bits insightfully and thoughtfully? Were that true, librarians would have been out of a job the day the World Wide Web came into being.) I suspect the reviewer was looking for a word more like facile or perhaps (to be fair) ratiocinative, to contrast between a computer's strict trains of logic and proficiency of language, and a human's intuition and fluency of language. (See? I have big words, too!) At any rate, even if the reviewer didn't use it correctly, I got a new word out of the bargain. ^_^
The second word I thought I'd encountered before, but it turns out I'd confused it with something similar but unrelated. From the review of Jay Lake's Trial of Flowers: "When the city's de facto and largely unknown leader vanishes from a locked room, his apprentice, Jason the Factor, struggles to maintain civilian order in the face of terrifying hauntings from the noumenal world and the threat of advancing enemy soldiers beyond the city's walls." The word I knew was numen-- a Roman spirit-of-place, from Latin nūmen, "a nod, command; divine will or power, divinity." Noumenal comes from noumena (singular noumenon), a word coined by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant from a Greek participle of noein, "to perceive by thought,"-- and lo, we're right back to noetic.
A stereotypical day on my reference desk.... I got these five questions one after the other, about five minutes apart:
1) I'm doing a paper for math class. Do you have any books on Cevian triangles and Giovanni Ceva?
(Not as such, no. Meaning, the most recent monograph I could find on the man at *all* was dated 1915, written in Italian, and certainly not in our little popular-materials collection. But I did find some nice encyclopedia articles and a few good web sites my patron could use. interesting side note-- Gio's brother Tommaso was right next to him in the mathematical encyclopedia, but noted that he's better known for his poetry than his math. And if you're wondering, it's pronounced CHE-va.)
2) I saw a recipe on Martha Stewart I'd like to use for Thanksgiving-- can you look up Turkey Tails?
(Sure. And I printed out the recipe for Sweet Potato Soufflé Pie afterward for myself. ;) Another side note (which I did not editorialize for my patron as it would be highly unprofessional to do so) is that my mother, a former home economics teacher, *abhors* Martha Stewart as the bane of all things practical and economical. I may have to get Mom Martha's latest grimoire as a Christmas gift. Why yes, I *am* an evil child.)
3) I'm doing my master's thesis on Aztec civilization in the time of the Spanish Conquest, and wanted to see what you might have on the shelf.
(Answer: Not terribly much, at the graduate level; there are some good academic libraries around that might be better able to help you. I *really* hope the patron was just browsing for curiosity's sake, because honestly, a master's candidate should know better than to try to do thesis research at a suburban public library. Yes, we do support life-long learning, and yes, online databases have *really* stretched our scope, but what we can lay our hands on for a patron and what we'll have physically in our collection are two very different things. We do *not* have an academic library's clientele or budget. Heck, my personal history collection is better than our library's, and that's as it should be. I'm a specialist, a public library perforce has to be generalist. I was amused to see this title turn up in the results, though.)
4) Do you have the latest in the Clique series?
(Yes, but it's not checked in. If you have your library card, I can add you to the wait list?)
5) The copier's not working.
(I hate our new copiers, they are not at ALL intuitive. I showed the patron how to set the page orientation and size, and lo, it worked.)
(I swear, I nearly wrenched my brain going from #3 to #4. Public libraries-- everything to everyone.)