Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Word of the day

#1
Magical Realist Offline
"FLOG"--To strike repeatedly with a club or stick, usually violently and in anger. See word spelt backwards...
Reply
#2
Magical Realist Offline
"FLIBBERTIGIBBET"
ˈflibərdēˌjibət/
noun
"a frivolous, flighty, or excessively talkative person.
Reply
#3
C C Offline
(Nov 6, 2014 09:40 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: "FLIBBERTIGIBBET"
ˈflibərdēˌjibət/
noun
"a frivolous, flighty, or excessively talkative person.

Almost seems like there should be a verb spin-off, then modified back to noun.

flibbertigibbeting: frivolous logorrhea.
Reply
#4
Magical Realist Offline
"PETRICHOR"
ˈpeˌtrīkôr/
noun
a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.
"other than the petrichor emanating from the rapidly drying grass, there was not a trace of evidence that it had rained at all
Reply
#5
Magical Realist Offline
"QUALTAGH"--- the first person you meet after leaving your house on some special occasion. Also, the first person entering a house on New Year’s Day (often called a first foot). The new year’s qualtagh, for luck, is supposed to be a dark-haired man. A red-headed or female qualtagh is unlucky. Other things to bring luck to the house on New Year’s Day include serving black-eyed peas, having the qualtagh bring shortbread and whiskey (sounds fine for any day of the year), and sweeping all the garbage in the house out through the front door before midnight on New Year’s Eve (so that any of the misfortune of the past year is gone, not to return).
Reply
#6
Magical Realist Offline
"Floccinaucinihilipilification"
Pronounced /flɒksɪˌnɔːsɪˌnɪhɪlɪˌpɪlɪfɪˌkeɪʃn/Help with pronunciation

Back in the eighteenth century, Eton College had a grammar book which listed a set of words from Latin which all meant something of little or no value. In order, those were flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili (which sound like four of the seven dwarves, Roman version, but I digress).

As a learned joke, somebody put all four of these together and then stuck –fication on the end to make a noun for the act of deciding that something is totally and utterly valueless (a verb, floccinaucinihilipilificate, to judge a thing to be valueless, ccan also be constructed, but hardly anybody ever does). The first recorded use is by William Shenstone in a letter in 1741: “I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money”.

A quick Latin lesson: flocci is derived from floccus, literally a tuft of wool and the source of English words like flocculate, but figuratively in Latin something trivial; pili is likewise the plural of pilus, a hair, which we have inherited in words like depilatory, but which in Latin could mean a whit, jot, trifle or generally a thing that is insignificant; nihili is from nihil, nothing, as in words like nihilism and annihilate; nauci just means worthless.

The word’s main function is to be trotted out as an example of a long word (it was the longest in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary but was edged out in the second by pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis). It had a rare public airing in 1999 when US Senator Jesse Helms brought it out to comment on the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: “I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT”.====http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-flo2.htm
Reply
#7
Magical Realist Offline
"SGIOMLAIREACHD"

A Gaelic word, pronounced scum-leerie, it is typical of the wariness with which English and Scottish view each other, and means “the kind of friend who tends to only drop in around mealtimes” or “the kind of people who loiter around train stations”.
Reply
#8
Magical Realist Offline
aeolist:

A pompous windy bore who pretends to have inspiration. lol!
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Word of the day Leigha 42 4,722 Apr 9, 2021 10:40 PM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)