Mostly I've been on Chamber of Commerce and tourism sites, but on the theory that you can tell a lot about a place based on how heavy-handed city officials are -- or hope to be, at any rate -- I went to the municipal code site. (Like I can decipher most city codes? Who am I trying to kid?) Long story short: trying to read through the bureaucratese made me cross-eyed and I soon gave it up as a waste of time, but not before I learned a new word (bolding mine), in a section titled "Charitable Raffles, Bingo, and Keno":
For the purposes of this chapter, the following definitions shall apply:
(1) Charitable organization shall mean a nonprofit veterans, eleemosynary, benevolent, educational, religious, fraternal or civic and service association or corporation domiciled in this state. Any such organization or corporation shall have qualified with the United States Internal Revenue Service for an exemption from federal income tax under Section 501(c)(3), (4), (8), or (19) of the Internal Revenue Code.
I didn't see a definition of this amazing word there, so I pulled out my Penguin English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, which I imported to this country with the help of an Internet seller based in the UK (and a good investment it has been):
...adj of, supported by, or giving charity. [medieval Latin eleemosynarius, from late Latin eleemosyna alms, from Greek....
...The Greek word requires letters I don't know how to do with my set-up, I'm afraid. The closest I can approximate it with what I've got is eleemoysine. At the end of the definition, it says: see ALMS. By golly, "alms," it turns out, has the same late Latin root. Alms, however, is easier to say, for my money, which might be why it caught on better. Just a guess.
I grab my Oxford American Dictionary, Heald Colleges Edition, mass market paperback edition, which would be my favorite everyday dictionary, I think, if it weren't printed in a typeface that globs in boldface, sometimes making it impossible to tell what the letters are (a serious defect in any book, but especially in a dictionary, I think). It also shoves text into the gutter (the inner margin, going to the spine), which also makes it hard to read. (You might as well know, text shoved into the gutter is one of my pet peeves, since it makes a book hard to read and almost guarantees the spine will be broken even with normal use...) Anyway, it has the word, too, defining it:
adj. of or dependent on charity, charitable.
So, I still don't feel I'm ready to use it in casual conversation, much less in writing, but at least now I have a clue.
Have any of you ever seen "eleemosynary" in any context besides bureaucrat-speak? I suspect it might be good to know for playing Scrabble, but otherwise I'm not sure how useful it might be...
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