If you think Hitler’s plan to annex Poland was anti-Semantic, then these malapropisms are for you:
“Did you manage to see the 16th chapel in Rome?”
“No, but I did see some geishas in Rotorua.”
“Department stores rely on excavators to get from floor to floor.”
“I was so hungry I gouged myself.”
“Global warming is a political hotdog.”
“The tutor [...]
Some people collect teaspoons. Other plump for fridge magnets. Me? I can’t resist a good malapropism.
Over the years, riding in trains, eavesdropping kids, scouring newsprint, I’ve gathered a fair swag of these verbal mangles, where one word is meant for another.
Few of us are immune. Blushingly I recall a first date a year out of [...]
Jimmy Barnes is part of Australia’s rock furniture. The former frontman for Cold Chisel has wailed a surplus of national anthems, from Khe Sanh to Flame Trees, from Cheap Wine to Working Class Man. Once that Glaswegian shrill breaks the silence, you can’t mistake the sound for any other creature.
Even after double-heart surgery this year [...]
Hapax legomena (the plural) are words that appear only once. Literally the Greek phrase means ‘once said’ and may label half the Joycean cookery that appear in Finnegan’s Wake, such as:
Pranjapansies
Reinworms
Diffpair
Troterella
Lemonsized
Caith
Rewritemen
And that’s only page 59”¦
Rather than cite Finnegan folderol, or once-only utterances in The Bible, and other sources, the Mac Dictionary goes for the plainspoken [...]
Perhaps provoking more questions than meeting answers, here are the definitions for last week’s mystery words, as provided by this land’s eminent lexicon, the Macquarie 3rd Edition. And I quote:
imparipinnate: pinnate with a terminal leaflet
rupture wort: any of several small herbs of the genus Herniaria, as the glabrous rupture wort formerly used to cure ruptures
Poisson’s [...]
Impatiens is a type of flower. Not only does the Wiki entry provide a purple snapshot of the plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impatiens but also lists a dozen varieties of this humble bloom, including touch-me-not balsam and policeman’s helmet.
Not sure if I could enter The Einstein Factor with ‘impatiens’ as my pet subject, but I do feel [...]
Extending my last post – the verbal fringe-dwellers afoot in any fat dictionary – I’ve gathered a bunch of words that still mean next to nix to me. Chief reason being I remain nonplussed by their supplied definitions.
Earlier this year, under Hazy Definitions, I cited such brain-bending examples as these:
praltriller: inverted mordent
blackman’s potatoes: see early [...]
Trawling dictionaries, as you do in the crossword racket, you encounter some peculiar words. Wittol, for example, is a knowing cuckold. While I’m still aspiring to use champerty in a sentence this calendar year (excluding this sentence).
To refresh your legal expertise, champerty is the scurrilous sharing of proceeds earned via litigation by the one who [...]