[Blind Sapper]

Thanks to UoW for worldwidewords.com -- the best site I have seen for etymology!
Also, Thank you to Gust Hubb for his contribution of word and idiom.
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Word of the Week : 5/23/12 : Coprophagy: n, the act of eating feces; a normal behavior for some animals, often a symptom of insanity in humans.

Garth: Hey, that dog is eating it's own crap!
Roark: Gross, man.

Opie: Hey guys, I just found out that my uncle eats his own sh*t!
Garth & Roark: Cool! Human coprophagy!
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Etymology of an idiom: "Bull in a china shop" : Often used to describe a particularly clumsy person in a situation where their clumsiness is a hinderance.

There is not any evidence of a particular event that happened at any point to inspire this idiom, so it is most likely that it has used only metaphorically, not to describe an actual incident happening.

Copy/pasted from www.worldwidewords (Quinion):



By 1834, the idiom was well enough known that a music-hall song full of bad puns was written about it:

Whate’er with his feet he couldn’t assail,
He made ducks and drakes with his horns and his tail.
So frisky he was, with his downs and his ups,
Each tea service proved he was quite in his cups.
He play’d mag’s diversion among all the crates,
He splinter’d the dishes, and dish’d all the plates.

A Bull in A China Shop, an anonymous contribution to The Universal Songster or Museum of Mirth, 1834. Mag’s diversion, or Meg’s diversion, was then a common term for boisterous behaviour or unruly antics.

The following extract suggests that it might have had its origin in a minor theatrical production, though we shouldn’t read too much into this review from two centuries ago. It is, on the other hand, the first recorded use of the phrase I’ve been able to find:

The business is whimsical and amusing; the changes are numerous, and the tricks, though highly ludicrous, are for the most part original; — at least, we do not remember to have met with any thing like them before. The extraordinary spectacle of a Bull in a China Shop afforded great entertainment; and an artificial elephant introduced, was welcomed with loud plaudits.

The London Review and Literary Journal, Jan. 1812, reporting a performance of a pantomime called The White Cat, or Harlequin in Fairy Land

For more info: http://www.worldwide.../qa/qa-bul4.htm
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Quote:


"I saw six men kicking and punching the mother-in-law. My neighbor said ‘Are you going to help?’ I said, ‘No, Six should be enough."
Les Dawson

[Blind Sapper]

Word of the Week: 5/30/12: knismesis: v, the act of light tickling.

Bo: How did you get past the guards?
Larry: With my powers of...knismesis.
Bo: ...
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Etymology of an idiom: "Crying Uncle": admitting inferiority to another, often as a result of a game of the same name.

From worldwidewords.com: Interestingly, the earliest examples — found by Dan Norder — are all in the form of a joke. This has a number of forms which appeared in various US newspapers from 1891 through to about 1907 (and which reappeared in the early 1940s), often on the children’s pages. This is the earliest he has found, from the Iowa Citizen of 9 October 1891:

A gentleman was boasting that his parrot would repeat anything he told him. For example, he told him several times, before some friends, to say “Uncle,” but the parrot would not repeat it. In anger he seized the bird, and half-twisting his neck, said: “Say ‘uncle,’ you beggar!” and threw him into the fowl pen, in which he had ten prize fowls. Shortly afterward, thinking he had killed the parrot, he went to the pen. To his surprise he found nine of the fowls dead on the floor with their necks wrung, and the parrot standing on the tenth twisting his neck and screaming: “Say ‘uncle,’ you beggar! say uncle.’”

Later versions make the reason for choosing uncle as the key word clearer by starting the story “A man whose niece had coaxed him to buy her a parrot succeeded in getting a bird that was warranted a good talker.”

But the balance of probabilities is heavily weighted towards the American idiom being derived from an English joke.
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Quote: You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She’s 97 today and we don’t know where the hell she is. E. DeGeners

[Blind Sapper]

Word of the Week: 6/6/12: anopisthography: n, the practice of writing on one side of the paper

Joe: I am a proud supporter of anopisthography!

Josh: Wasteful bastard.
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etymology of an idiom: "Cute as a bug's ear" : Used to describe someone or something as adorable or endearing.

From worldwidewords.org:
It belongs with a huge set of such expressions, mostly but not all American: cute as a bug in a rug, cute as a button, cute as a weasel, cute as a kitten, cute as a (pet) fox, cute as a bunny, cute as a speckled puppy, cute as a cupcake, cute as a kewpie doll, cute as a razor (nick), as well as the deeply deprecatory cute as a washtub (from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely) and cute as a shithouse rat (in James Joyce’s Ulysses).

You are very cute, aren’t you?” the traveler said sarcastically. “Widder Wheeler says I’m cute as a Bug’s ear, and she knows.”The News (Frederick, Maryland), 21 Apr. 1900.
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Quote: The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.
Thomas Paine

[Use Of Weapons]

A couple of really interesting words in this week's newsletter from worldwidewords:

orarian (adj.): Of or relating to the coast, typically used in scientific names of plants normally found along coastlines. (I now desperately want to use it for a country name in a book, and think Chile should be renamed Oraria.)

epenthetic (adj.): Unnecessary and intrusive, use of extra letters inserted into the spelling of words without affecting their pronunciation, to reflect their derivation. eg. the epenthetic 'b' in 'debt,' to reflect its Latin origins in 'debitum.' What a beautiful potential insult to someone, to call them an epenthetic intrusion -- worthless and ineffective

[Ain't_It_Just_]

SYNECDOCHE:
A figure of speech is which a part is used to represent the whole or the whole for a part.

[Blind Sapper]

Word of the Week: 6/13/12: pogonotomy: n, the act of cutting a beard

Joe: I also practice pogonotomy!

Josh: So does your mother.
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Etymology of an idiom: "Eating crow" - Admitting one's own mistake, sometimes an apology.

From worldwidewords.com:
"The origin seems fairly obvious: the meat of the crow, being a carnivore, is presumably rank and extremely distasteful, and the experience is easily equated to the mental anguish of being forced to admit one’s fallibility.

The British English equivalent is eating humble pie, which contains two ideas rolled in together, a portmanteau dish. The original umbles were the innards of the deer: the liver, heart, entrails and other second-class bits. It was common practice in medieval times to serve a pie made of these parts of the animal to the servants and others who would be sitting at the lower tables in the lord’s hall. Pepys mentions it in his diary for 8 July 1663: “Mrs Turner came in and did bring us an Umble-pie hot out of her oven, extraordinarily good”. However, it seems it was not until the nineteenth century that the expression humble pie appeared in the sense we now know, and some have reasoned that it did so as a deliberate play on words.

The phrase to eat dirt, first attested in the 1850s, expresses the same idea as to eat crow and to eat humble pie. The oldest of them, and most probably the source of all the others, is to eat one’s words, which first appears in print in 1571 in one of John Calvin’s tracts, on Psalm 62: “God eateth not his words when he hath once spoken”. "

The rest of the article: http://www.worldwide...les/eatcrow.htm
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Quote:
"The National Rifle Association says, ‘Guns don’t kill people. People do’. But I think the gun helps."
Eddie Izzard

[Gust Hubb]

Blind Sapper, on 13 June 2012 - 09:26 PM, said:

Word of the Week: 6/13/12: pogonotomy: n, the act of cutting a beard

Joe: I also practice pogonotomy!

Josh: So does your mother.
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Etymology of an idiom: "Eating crow" - Admitting one's own mistake, sometimes an apology.

From worldwidewords.com:
"The origin seems fairly obvious: the meat of the crow, being a carnivore, is presumably rank and extremely distasteful, and the experience is easily equated to the mental anguish of being forced to admit one's fallibility.

The British English equivalent is eating humble pie, which contains two ideas rolled in together, a portmanteau dish. The original umbles were the innards of the deer: the liver, heart, entrails and other second-class bits. It was common practice in medieval times to serve a pie made of these parts of the animal to the servants and others who would be sitting at the lower tables in the lord's hall. Pepys mentions it in his diary for 8 July 1663: "Mrs Turner came in and did bring us an Umble-pie hot out of her oven, extraordinarily good". However, it seems it was not until the nineteenth century that the expression humble pie appeared in the sense we now know, and some have reasoned that it did so as a deliberate play on words.

The phrase to eat dirt, first attested in the 1850s, expresses the same idea as to eat crow and to eat humble pie. The oldest of them, and most probably the source of all the others, is to eat one's words, which first appears in print in 1571 in one of John Calvin's tracts, on Psalm 62: "God eateth not his words when he hath once spoken". "

The rest of the article: http://www.worldwide...les/eatcrow.htm
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Quote:
"The National Rifle Association says, 'Guns don't kill people. People do'. But I think the gun helps."
Eddie Izzard

CAW!!!

[Use Of Weapons]

Just used in chat:


discombobulating (present participle of dis·com·bob·u·late)
Verb: Disconcert or confuse (someone).

This post has been edited by UseOfWeapons: 21 June 2012 - 09:30 AM

[Lady Bliss]

Batrachophagous - Bat`ra*choph"a*gous - (adjective): One who eats frogs



The batrachophagous princess decided to eat her prince instead of kiss him.

[Blind Sapper]

Word of the Week: 6/27/12: hecatomb: n, (In ancient Greece or Rome) a great public sacrifice of 100 oxen at one time.

Bill: Dude, do you remember that hecatomb we saw in ancient Greece?
Ted: Dude! It was, like really cool!
Bill: Don't you mean...
Both: Excellent! (doodly doodly doo)
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Etymology of an idiom: "piss-poor" : used to describe someone or something that lives in poverty or destitution.
"The origin is straightforward. Piss began to be attached to other words during the twentieth century to intensify their meaning. Ezra Pound invented piss-rotten in 1940 (distasteful or unpleasant, the first example on record) and we’ve since had piss-easy (very easy), piss-weak (cowardly or pathetic), piss-elegant (affectedly refined, pretentious), piss-awful (very unpleasant) and other forms.

Piss-poor began life in a similar figurative sense for something that's third-rate, incompetent or useless, as it does in this recent example:

Larkin’s letters, wrote Philippe Auclair, writer and broadcaster, were “very funny, very beautiful, and very sad; the grace of an angel, the precision of a geometer, and the short-sighted, intolerant piss-poor idées fixes of a provincial buffoon”.

The Spectator, 27 Nov. 2010.

Americans who know the idiom so poor he didn’t have a pot to piss in, sometimes in the fuller form ... or a window to throw it out of, might wonder if this is the origin. The idiom appears in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, published in 1936, so it does predate piss-poor." ---Worldwidewords.com

Read more: http://www.worldwide.../qa/qa-pis1.htm
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Quote:

"The man who says his wife can’t take a joke, forgets that she took him."
Oscar Wilde

[Use Of Weapons]

Nice one this week from worldwidewords:

macilent, adj. -- lean, shrivelled, or excessively thin. From the Latin macilentus, lean. Latin macies, leanness also gives us 'emaciated'.

Shakespeare could have said "There are more things in Heaven and on Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your macilent philosophy."
But he didn't.

[Blind Sapper]

Happy Independence Day!
Didn't try too hard to make this one themed, I have brats to grill.
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Word of the Week: 7/4/12 : Spangle: n. A small, often circular piece of sparkling metal or plastic sewn especially on garments for decoration.

Sam: What the heck is a spangle, anyway?

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Etymology of an idiom: "No room to swing a cat" : used to describe a small space

from worldwidewords.com:

"It’s almost certainly derived from your other idiom, which is some centuries older. It is indeed frequently said to be from that awful naval punishment. Most reference books say something similar to this entry from the Penguin Dictionary of English Idioms of 2001: “The original phrase was probably ‘not room to swing a cat-o’nine-tails’, and dates from the time when sailors were flogged on board ship. The floggings took place on the deck because the cabins were too small to swing a cat in.”

The earliest known example of the phrase is this:

One house I know more especially by Cursitors-Alley, where the Man, his Wife and Childe liv’d in a Room that look’d more like, for bigness, a big Chest than any thing else: They had not space enough (according to the vulgar saying) to swing a Cat in; so hot by reason of the closeness, and so nastily kept besides, that it took away a mans breath to put his head but within the doors.

Medela Pestilentiae (To Cure the Plague), by Richard Kephale, 1665.

It’s clear that even by 1665 the expression was idiomatic. This makes it very unlikely that it should derive from cat-o’nine-tails, since the first mention of that term for the punishment device is in William Congreve’s play Love for Love of 1695.

It may indeed be that the origin lies in some such ancient cruel game."
Read more here: http://www.worldwide.../qa/qa-nor1.htm
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Quote:

"Many a bum show has been saved by the flag"

George Cohan

[Blind Sapper]

Word of the week: 7\11\12: ineffable: n, not to be described in words; too great for words

Bil: This word of the week sucks.
Ted: Totally not ineffable.
_____________________

Sorry for the poor quality of this word of the week; I am using a friend's phone to write this because I am travelling right now. next week's installment will be back to the usual quality.

[worry]

Eff you, man, you're not ineffable.

[Blind Sapper]

Your ineffable: Word of the Week! 7/18/12:

agglutinate: v, stick together; join together

Tom: Hurry up! We're late!

Jerry: Just let me agglutinate this propeller to the chassis.

Etymology of an idiom: "Cockamamie" - used to describe something ridiculous or nonsensical;

From worldwidewords.com:


"The original of both cockamamie and decal is the French décalcomanie, which was created in the early 1860s to refer to the craze for decorating objects with transfers (it combines décalquer, to transport a tracing, with manie, a mania or craze). The craze, and the word, soon transferred to Britain — it’s recorded in the magazine The Queen on 27 February 1864: “There are few employments for leisure hours which for the past eighteen months have proved either so fashionable or fascinating as decalcomanie”. It reached the United States around 1869 and — to judge from the number of newspaper references in that year — became as wildly popular as it had earlier in France and Britain. The word was quickly Anglicised as decalcomania and in the 1950s it became abbreviated to decal.

The link between decalcomania and cockamamie isn’t proved, but the evidence suggests strongly that children in New York City in the 1930s (or perhaps a decade earlier) converted the one into the other.

Shelly Winters wrote of cockamamie in The New York Times in 1956 that “This word, translated from the Brooklynese, is the authorized pronunciation of decalcomania. Anyone there who calls a cockamamie a decalcomania is stared at.”"

Read the full article here: http://www.worldwide...rds/ww-coc1.htm

This is one of the oddest explanations I've ever seen, but I suppose anything is possible.
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Quote:
"To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first. And, whatever you hit, call it the target."
Ashleigh Brilliant

[Mrs Savagely Wishy Washy]

some to add to the collection- seen loads of great words, forgot most of them, but these particularly stuck to my mind.

sple·net·ic/spləˈnetik/
Adjective:Bad-tempered; spiteful.
Synonyms:splenic

love that one, e.g. in this particular combination: splenetic bitch.

itinerant
An itinerant is a person who travels from place to place with no fixed home.^[1] The term comes from the late 16th century: from late Latin itinerant (travelling), from the verb itinerari, from Latin iter, itiner (journey, road).

always good to have one more term when talking about wanderers, travellers, pariahs. although, Traveller still sounds better than Itinerant.

and finally, back to the waters again:
euryhaline and stenohaline


Euryhaline organisms are able to adapt to a wide range of salinities. An example of a euryhaline fish is the molly (Poecilia sp.) which can live in fresh, brackish, or salt water. The European shore crab (Carcinus maenas) is an example of a euryhaline invertebrate that can live in salt and brackish water. Euryhaline organisms are commonly found in habitats such as estuaries and tide pools where the salinity changes regularly. However, some organisms are euryhaline because their life cycle involves migration between freshwater and marine environments, as is the case with salmon and eels.

The opposite of euryhaline organisms are stenohaline ones, which can only survive within a narrow range of salinities. Most freshwater organisms are stenohaline, and will die in seawater, and similarly most marine organisms are stenohaline, and cannot live in fresh water.

... such a cool word (and fish)!

This post has been edited by Miss Savage: 24 July 2012 - 09:53 AM

[worry]

Rover! Wanderer! Nomad! Vagabond!

[lastname]

worrywort, on 24 July 2012 - 10:07 AM, said:

Rover! Wanderer! Nomad! Vagabond!

For all I know, those might be names of dogs in the series. They do sound cattle-dog-ish, wickan cattle-dog-ish even.


Anyway, here's one:

sprezzatura
noun
studied carelessness, especially as a characteristic quality or style of art or literature

Etymology: Sprezzatura (Italian pronunciation: [sprettsaˈtura]) is an Italian word originating from Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it"

Usage:
Both as a player and personality, Federer embodies this wonderful Italian word, sprezzatura.
(Peter Bodo writing after Federer's French Open win)

'Grace' doesn't quite capture its extension, though part of it. Not 'elegance' either, though again it is partly right. Vitality and lightness are implied, but sprezzatura is more than gaiety. It's that exhibition of relaxed competence, almost of insouciance, in amateur pursuit of one's goal. . .
(Mark Kingwell in Catch and Release)

[Shiara]

worrywort, on 24 July 2012 - 10:07 AM, said:

Rover! Wanderer! Nomad! Vagabond!

Perabulator! Peregrinator!

This post has been edited by Shiara: 24 July 2012 - 11:56 PM

[Blind Sapper]

I've never heard Peregrinator before. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a bird suit?

Word of the Week: 7/25/12: Bunghole: n, hole in the side or end of a barrel, keg, or cask through which it is filled and emptied.

Shaun: Here, just stick this cork in that bunghole.

Gus: ...WHAT.

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Etymology of a (very old) idiom: "In high dudgeon" -- a state in which the subject is very angry or resentful.

Almost no information can be found on the origins of this one. In the words of Mr. Quinion:
(Taken from worldwidewords.org)

"Maddeningly little is known” is unfortunately a fair summary. I’ll try to add a little more, but it is one of a distressingly large group of words for which we have no idea of their origins. The group includes a couple of others also ending in -udgeon: bludgeon and curmudgeon.

It also records another sense of the word, itself mysterious, for a kind of wood used by turners, especially the handles of knives or daggers.
It just might be that a state of anger or resentment could have led to the grabbing of a dudgeon knife with intent to redress a slight, but there’s no evidence whatever of the connection."
For the full article: http://www.worldwide.../qa/qa-dud1.htm
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Quote: "The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase."
Yogi Berra