Dernier cri is a noun meaning the newest fashion. Personally, I have never heard or read this word (or phrase?) before. Usuallty we say, latest craze, fad, the last word, etc. This hasn’t been used much in one hundred years. Use it if you want, but your readers may be irritated when they have...
The Latin "Exspatiari" means "to wander from a course" or "to digress." What's interesting to me is that this word has no negative connotaions. In this age of instant gratification via the Internet, it seems that anyone going off topic is just wasting my time...
Sometimes we allow ourselves to violate the rules of word formation just for a laugh; gongoozler "gawker" and lollygag "piddle around" are a couple of examples. Since we have historically considered Latin an affectation of the upper classes subject to ridicule by those of us below, making these words sound Latinate adds to the...
This one sounds a little icky. When I first saw it, it made me think of spooge, a word my husband uses for another kind of spray or spatter. Perhaps I've said too much...
Best usage I've seen: D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (1927): "The sun went bang, with smithereens of birds bursting in all directions."
It appears the Webster's omission was intentional so they could show that the two meanings of this word come from different roots. The first is from a Latin root. The other is from the word we all know and love, "mean," which means "spiteful."
Phrenologists used it to refer to a bump on the head that accounted for parental love.
Well ooh, la, la. What a fancy word we have here today! Tantivy is an adverb, meaning “in a headlong dash or at a gallop” This one just sounds wierd in a sentence. I mean shouldn’t adverbs pretty much end in -ly? “He charged tantivy at me.” Almost seems like it ought to be,...
Well I guess we can’t have a winner every day. The mundane word today is: daymare: “a nightmarish fantasy experienced while awake” Now this is a word we hardly ever use. It’s a bit dramatic and honestly, doesn’t “nightmare” do it for you most of the time? Charles Dickens made the word famous in...
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