Have You Heard Of This Term?

[Stargazer]

Part of my eight year old grandson's homework!
"Kenning"

[piggynose]

Wot an 8yr old doing asking his old fuddy duddy grandad help with homework? Is he parents too busy.?

[Mamyalynne]

Stargazer lives in the same house as her Grandson and they communicate - perfectly natural Piggy.

[Peter Pedant]

you usually find it has been covered in the class

The question - have you done X ? - adding, fractions, partial differential equations, advanced calculus, Russian intransitive verbs,
is always NO.

( whether or not they have)

[Peter Pedant]

The key stages - KS1 and KS 2
are available on the internet
and for maff - I thought how sensible they were
( logs, slide rules, log books out) and functions and algorithms in

[MargoTester]

As used in the old radio programme with Kenneth Horne ' Beyond our Ken' (i.e. Beyond our knowledge)as explained by my English teacher many many moons ago.

[bhg481]

Could it have been "kerning" they were asking about, rather than "kenning"? Depending on the font in the question the two words could be confused.

[Mamyalynne]

From page 1

https://www.theschoolrun.com/what-is-a-kenning

[THECORBYLOON]

MARGO, what did your teacher say the "ken" meant in that example?

[bhg481]

Thanks Mamy - I hadn't read the full thread. I must admit it's a term I've never heard of, which is why I thought the word might have been mis-read.

[MargoTester]

Corby - she gave it as an example of a play on words - Ken being his name, and Ken meaning knowledge. I'm talking about 1960's here when this show was extremely popular and we all listened to it. We were quite surprised that an 'old dear' like her enjoyed too.

[sandyRoe]

Do you ken John Peel...

[fcc]

It's a braw moonlichtnicht tonicht ken do ye know.

[THECORBYLOON]

I know it's a pun and "knowledge" appears logical but it actually means a distance someone can see.

The Oxford English Dictionary states,

"Range of sight or vision;
in phrases in or within ken, beyond, out of, or past ken. Now rare."

[Mamyalynne]

As with all such terms, etymology is wider that it first seems.

//Etymology
The corresponding modern verb to ken survives in Scots and English dialects and in general English through the derivative existing in the standard language in the set expression beyond one's ken, "beyond the scope of one's knowledge" and in the phonologically altered forms uncanny, "surreal" or "supernatural", and canny, "shrewd", "prudent". Modern Scots retains (with slight differences between dialects) tae ken "to know", kent "knew" or "known", Afrikaans ken "be acquainted with" and "to know" and kennis "knowledge". Old Norse kenna (Modern Icelandic kenna, Swedish känna, Danish kende, Norwegian kjenne or kjenna) is cognate with Old English cennan, Old Frisian kenna, kanna, Old Saxon (ant)kennian (Middle Dutch and Dutch kennen), Old High German (ir-, in-, pi-) chennan (Middle High German and German kennen), Gothic kannjan < Proto-Germanic *kannjanan, originally causative of *kunnanan "to know (how to)", whence Modern English can 'to be able'. The word ultimately derives from *ǵneh₃, the same Proto-Indo-European root that yields Modern English know, Latin-derived terms such as cognition and ignorant, and Greek gnosis.//

Kenning though in it's simplest form is a compound word.

[MargoTester]

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/Beyond+Our+Ken

A slightly different version here