Perhaps he’s gone off the deep end

While trying to find out where the phrase “lost your marbles” came from, I found this article on the Oxford Dictionaries blog that ties together lumber, furniture, Virginia Woolf and Nicholson Baker. There are some astounding leaps in the progression of the idiom in the theory being proposed, so astounding that they remind me of the origin of “raspberry” (in lieu of “Bronx Cheer”). So that’s making me figure that the theory must be correct. Slang never makes sense.

Why was I looking up “lost your marbles”? Well…

Word of the day for Tuesday, June 12th

Today’s word is for all the folks out there who fear meeting a taco cat, evil olive, avid diva, or Dr. Awkward, but they’re not going to like it much. It’s

aibohphobia, spelled “aibohphobia” backwards. And yes, it is the fear of palindromes, and yes, that is an awfully mean thing to name a fear of palindromes. However, according to a bunch of very respectable–looking websites, there is no such thing as aibohphobia; it’s just some joke. Dammit, I’m mad.

Word of the day for Thursday, February 1st

I was listening to a somewhat boring audio book recently, and I finally had to give up on it, but I’m glad I didn’t give up on it before I heard the refined lady soberly enunciate

“absquatulate.” Absquatulate comes from trying to make “do the opposite of squat” into a faux-Latin word, the latter being something of an 1800s fad. Beat it, scoot, scram, skedaddle, beat feet, hightail it, vamoose. Thank you for the new word, refined boring lady, but shoo.

Word of the day for Friday, September 15th

Today’s word is neat, but it opens a Pandora’s box of other neat words so this post is going to be sort of a mess. Just to tell you. So the word is

apoculamus. Sorry if you can’t read it in the graphic above. It doesn’t really matter, maybe, because nobody is absolutely sure what it means. It’s a Latin word, and it has only been found once in all of Latin literature. It’s something called a hapax. A hapax is a word that only occurs once… in a book, in everything an author’s ever written, or everything that’s ever been written.

Some of these words of course cease to be hapaxes, because other people take them up – Shakespeare’s “bedazzled” and his somewhat lesser known “honorificabilitudinitatibus” come to mind. And others, like the ancient Greek “polemophthoroisin” coined by Aeschylus, have never been properly defined. How do you define a word that has only ever appeared once? As for the version of a hapax that occurs only once during a writer’s career, do you think you have one? I wonder what mine is. I probably have a few, seeing as I collect these words and then sit on them like a level 3 hoarder.

You can read more about hapaxes in an excellent article on Atlas Obscura here. As for apoculamus, etymologists are reasonably sure that it means “we haul ass out of here.” Haul ass and go forth with your weekend, friends.

It’s complicated

Involved can mean a lot of different things: in a relationship, complex, preoccupied with, confusing. I wonder which meaning applies here.

Not sure who originally took this photo; found via Drew Magary’s Twitter feed

May be covered in mint jelly

If you enjoy deadpan humor and you’re not listening to the Beef & Dairy Network podcast, get thee to some earbuds pronto. Not only is it “the number one podcast for those involved or just interested in the production of beef animals and dairy herds,” but it’s one of the few podcasts on the Maximum Fun network not hosted by a member of the McElroy extended family. (Note to Maximum Fun: too many McElroys.)

I bring up the Beef & Dairy Network today because my friend Mara found this lost cat notice that seems to back up the BDN assertion that lamb is a dangerous meat that leads to all sorts of social problems and deviancy:

Bosco would be safe at home now if he weren’t on the lamb. Sure, he looks fine in this photo, but he’s probably unrecognizable by now; he may have moved on to mutton. If you see happen to see any feline who looks to be strung out on kebabs, please call Tom or Geoff.

 

Word of the day for Thursday, June 15th

My somethingth high school reunion is coming up next week, and while I’ve decided not to go, the occasion has obviously dredged up a lot of memories. Mostly bad ones. The terrible job I did as yearbook co-editor (yes, there were line drawings in the yearbook that year). Slighting people that considered me a friend. Being left in a dangerous position with a bad outcome by people I considered friends. Transferring into a class just so I could be lab partners with a boy I had a crush on, and doing really badly in that class as a result. Lying to a trusted teacher. And of course, getting in some serious trouble with the law as a result of following somebody I thought was a real cool genius who I only much later figured out was an

ultracrepidarian, when he stated with authority that the moon was about 5,000 miles away from the Earth. Ultracrepidarian: one who is presumptuous and offers advice or opinions beyond one’s sphere of knowledge.

I actually have a good excuse regarding scheduling for why I’m not going to this reunion, but the fact is that I’m too scared to re-enter that environment and potentially discover that I haven’t really grown up that much from the dumb kid I was so long ago. Oh well. At least I know that the moon isn’t 5,000 miles away.

I now pronounce you

The other day I was listening to a podcast where two guys were talking about how they just realized they had been pronouncing the word “diphtheria” wrong their entire lives, and the first one that realized it only happened upon it when spellcheck corrected their “diptheria” attempt. “It’s pronounced diff-theria, not dip-theria, people. The first h isn’t silent.” And then they laughed that somebody would think that the first h could actually be silent. They were assuming that everybody else was misspelling the word too.

I immediately went, “Wait. What?” because I did think that first h was silent, and I did know that it was there in the word. I was a little skeptical, so I looked it up. And yeah. It’s diff-theria. “But what about those other ‘diph’ words? Like diphthong? You know – dip-thong.” And what do you know? It’s diff-thong. Huh.

But you know what? I’m going to continue to continue pronouncing these as dip-theria and dip-thong, because 1) the “dip” form is noted in the dictionary as a secondary pronunciation, and 2) saying “diff” sounds kind of jerky and smug to me right now. Some words are like that. I know how to pronounce them correctly, but there’s something really snooty-seeming about doing so.

Here are some other words I know how to pronounce correctly but will continue to pronounce incorrectly until something big happens to change my mind:

• karaoke
• ukulele
• Chan Marshall
• Van Gogh
• masseuse
• New Orleans
• lingerie
• bona fides
• forte
• fracas
• gimcrack
• tinnitus

How about you? Please don’t say “sherbert.” I beg you.

Word of the day for Wednesday, April 5th

As I’m typing this post, I’m running my tongue over a chip on the edge of one of my top incisors and trying not to think about that tooth scraping against one of my bottom incisors. As you may have experienced, it is extremely hard to not think about something specific, and right now I’m thinking about this chipped tooth scraping another tooth and I’m experiencing a bit of

grima. Grima is a Spanish word describing the feeling you get when you hear fingernails scratch a blackboard, or when you merely see fingernails scratching a blackboard, or even when you just think about fingernails scratching a blackboard. It can also be induced by an eating utensil scraping a porcelain dish or, in the case of my friend Shelly and a grima researcher in Madrid, the very idea of foam rubber (particularly old foam rubber). A feeling worse than disgust, grima stimulates the brain’s fear processor and markedly affects one’s heart rate.

I don’t have a very nice closing bit for this post, but I’m going have to stop typing now. I need to go find some pudding to meditate upon before I go nuts thinking about my chipped tooth scraping against another tooth. Have a good, grima-free day, friends.

Word of the day for Thursday, March 9th

It’s not a verb referring to what you are doing to your body on a Funyuns-rich diet. It’s not a Don Martin onomatopoeia for Rapunzel Letting Loose Her Hair For Prince #2.

Flabellate. It’s an adjective meaning “fan-shaped.” Merriam-Webster and LACMA are playing a “match the word with the picture” game this week on Twitter, and it’s a much pleasanter distraction from certain daily horrors than the other daily distractions we’ve been getting from said horror-makers on Twitter. Other highlights from the game: kinker and natiform. What will tomorrow bring?