Word Geek

[Pharaoh Cat]

Post here anything at all related to words or grammar, amusing or bemusing, or merely musing-inducing.  Heck, punctuation too, let's be inclusive.  Don't want to offend those cute little squiggles.  After all, what would we do without them?  I mean, shoot, we couldn't make smilies!

Are you a word geek like me?

So any way, my new favorite word is cromulent: http://www.answers.com/topic/cromulent

It caught my attention because I'm a Conan fan, and I thought it was Crom-related.  But the truth is cooler still. 

[Crow]

[DeterminedJuliet]

Lately I've enjoyed calling people "Curmudgeon" when they're grumpy. 

[Pharaoh Cat]

Shakespeare Insult Kit

Thou beslubbering beefwitted bugbear!

Thou gleeking guts-griping giglet!

Yup.  It gets the Pharaoh Cat seal of approval!   

Stan Lee would have coveted this list when he was writing Thor. 

[Recusant]

A few years ago, on a now defunct Go forum, a British member whom I highly respect posted the following Greek myth:

Apostrophes. Son of Ellipses who was visited by Zeus in the form of a gravy tureen. His son Ampersand ruled Crete until the Battle of Hypodiastole.

Apostrophes was known for being selfish, and continuously added letters to his name so that nobody else could have them. In the end his name took over a fortnight to pronounce. This angered Zeus, who once took so long toasting him at a feast that he sobered up, causing him to realize that his new girlfriend was in fact a stoat.

The gods punished Apostrophes by removing every letter from his name, leaving him with a single stroke ( ' ). He is thus used to indicate possessiveness to this day.

— T. Mark Hall

[OldGit]

^

[Siz]

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!

[Siz]

Post here anything at all related to words or grammar, amusing or bemusing, or merely musing-inducing.  Heck, punctuation too, let's be inclusive.  Don't want to offend those cute little squiggles.  After all, what would we do without them?  I mean, shoot, we couldn't make smilies!

Are you a word geek like me?

So any way, my new favorite word is cromulent: http://www.answers.com/topic/cromulent

It caught my attention because I'm a Conan fan, and I thought it was Crom-related.  But the truth is cooler still. 

The coolest made up word for me is 'Grok' coined by Robert Heinlein in 'Stranger in a strange land'. I use it fairly often...

http://catb.org/jargon/html/G/grok.html


I've got a couple of my own too:

Combunsing: the feeling of spiraling in on oneself, or perpetually folding inwards (is that just me?)

Grenocious: Angry at oneself, but taking it out on others.

[Pharaoh Cat]

And then there's "read" which you don't know how to pronounce unless you find it in a sentence.

[hismikeness]

The single most confusing word, surely, has to be 'bi-weekly'. 'Bi-' in front of anything else means both, or two, right? So is bi-weekly twice a week or every two weeks?

Here, I'll google it for you.

???

[OldGit]

flour and flower were originally variant spellings of the same word, meaning the pretty plant.  Ground corn was "meal".  Then traders started calling flour 'the flower of the meal', meaning 'the best of', which caught on.  Gradually meal died out in favour of flour and the spellings settled as they now are, which separated the two meanings.

[unholy1971]

Lately I've enjoyed calling people "Curmudgeon" when they're grumpy. 

Curmudgeon is certainly an underused word. LOL

[squidfetish]

I like the word 'crapulent'.   It's very apt for the weekend.

Another good one is 'pulchritudinous' a word which one of the guys on another forum described as 'the ugliest word for beautiful'

[OldGit]

How come inflammable is not the opposite of flammable?

If you dismantle something, why can't you remantle it?

If something pleases you, why can't you say you're gruntled?

[Tank]

How come inflammable is not the opposite of flammable?

Yes! WTF is that all about!