That word reminds me of someone . . .
And I wonder who that could be?
mardy
Leicestershire slang - origin unknown
used for someone being awkward, obstreporus, throwing a tantrum ....being mardy
sort of misti - but more whingey and complaining with it!
This might fit the thread: not original, but what is these days darling?
Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
.....And, winner of the Washington Post's Style Invitational:
Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
McT
Word Of The Day
That reminds me of the story of a man at a bar announcing loudly "all lawyers are assholes." The man sitting next to him stood up, face red with fury, and ordered him to take it back. "Why" he asked "are you a lawyer?" "No" he replied "I'm an asshole."
Main Entry: ac·o·nite
Pronunciation: 'ak-&-"nIt
Function: noun
1 : any of a genus of poisonous usually blue-flowered or purple-flowered plants related to the buttercups
2 : a drug obtained from the common Old World monkshood
Wow Viv I did not know that being an outsider/primative type. But I love the effect and have been using it a lot recently.
another painting one...
tonking
from Henry (?) Tonks, who taught at one of the well known London art schools.
When oil paintings got too thick and grungey to work on further, he would blot them with newspapaper and this came to be known as 'tonking'. I don't know anyone who actually uses it in conversation though!
Weird Words: Tetrapyloctomy
The act of splitting a hair four ways.
Don't be a mere two-way hair-splitter; grasp your pedantry firmly
in both hands and split your hair crosswise into four. This word
has found a secure if niche existence in the lexicons of academics
with a sense of humour since it was invented by Umberto Eco in his
novel Foucault's Pendulum, published in English in 1989. In a
mocking attempt to reform higher education, one character proposes
a School of Comparative Irrelevance, whose aim would be to turn out
scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary
topics. In it would be a Department of Tetrapyloctomy, whose
function would be to inculcate a sense of irrelevance in its
students. Another department would study useless techniques, such
as Assyrio-Babylonian philately and Aztec Equitation. The word
combines "tetra", four, with "pilus", hair (as in "depilatory"),
and the ending "-(e)ctomy", a cutting. As the component parts come
respectively from Greek, Latin and Greek it's a miscegenated
linguistic sandwich that no self-respecting scholar would invent,
which is no doubt why Umberto Eco found it to be appropriate.
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2004. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
Pedantry and Pedantic are two of my favorite words.
A couple of other words I love are entropy and hubris. I suppose I like these words as I suffer at times from all of there definitions.
Tonking, now that is a strange art term Viv. Turns out I have been tonking too.
I guess the difference between being an educated artist and an outsider is I learn technique from experience as opposed to being taught? Therefore I do not know the terms.
I love learning both ways. But am beginning to understand why I struggle so. I am working from nothing. Art school must be in my future as I am not the most patient person on the planet.
word of today.......... D-Day .
Trivia question -- does anyone know what the D in D-Day actually stands for? (Hont: think of H-Hour.)
yep, apparently all exercises were labelled D1, D2, D3 etc for Day one, two etc - I didn't know that until this week though
Right you are, Vivien. Thus, 'D' merely stands for 'day.' Likewise, the haitch in 'H-Hour' just stands for 'hour.'
my word of the day
FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION
The action or habit of judging something to be worthless.
Back in the eighteenth century, Eton College had a grammar book which listed a set of words from Latin which all meant "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 absolutely valueless (a verb, floccinaucinihilipilificate, to judge a thing to be valueless, could 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 meant a whit, jot, trifle or generally something 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 supplanted by pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis in the second). It had a rare public airing in 1999 when Senator Jesse Helms used it in commenting on the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: "I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT".
EMBUGGERANCE - Military Slang
"a natural or artificial hazard that complicates any proposed course of action".
a development of an older British transitive verb to bugger about, to cause someone trouble and irritation. This appears, for example, in exclamations such as "stop buggering me about!" An embuggerance, then, is an instance of trouble or interference so caused.
Definitely a term to be used sparingly, and with careful selection of audience.
