Jump to content
OtakuBoards

Word of the day.

Guest Capt. Stephanos

By Guest Capt. Stephanos,
in General Discussion

 Share

Recommended Posts

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Posted
Posted
[COLOR=crimson]To brighten up your vocabulary, here's my [/COLOR]
[SIZE=4][FONT=times new roman][COLOR=darkblue]WORD OF THE DAY ![/COLOR] [/FONT] [/SIZE]


[COLOR=tomato]
[I]GURNING[/I]
The pulling of grotesque faces.

This British term - much better known in Britain and Commonwealth countries than in the US - has at times been applied to the pulling of faces as a competitive activity. A surviving example is that in the Lake District, where the Egremont Crab-Apple Fair has an annual contest, which they call the World Championship Gurning Competition and which they say dates back to 1266. There is also an Australian national competition that I know of, and there may be others, too.
At one time, such face-pulling contests were a common entertainment at fairs and gatherings around Britain (before the days of radio and television you had to get your fun where you could). The rules at Egremont are simple: competitors put their heads through a horse collar and then have a set time in which to contort their faces into the most gruesome, scary or daft expressions possible. False teeth may be left in or taken out, or even turned upside down if desired. The winner is the person who gets the most audience applause.

The word seems to have been originally Scottish, in the form girn, which - appropriately enough - may have been a contorted form of grin. It has had several meanings, of which the oldest - from medieval times - is still current in Scots and Irish dialect, and which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as: "to show the teeth in rage, pain, disappointment, etc; to snarl as a dog; to complain persistently; to be fretful or peevish". These days only the losers in the World Championship Gurning Competition do much of that.

[/COLOR]
Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • Replies 57
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Posted
Posted
[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Transtic Nerve [/i]
[B]

The word of the day should be "shimatta" [/B][/QUOTE]

NOOOO! The japanease are invading. :p another counter j/k

So, enlighten us, what does this "shimatta" mean?
Link to comment
Share on other sites
amibasuki Senior Otaku

amibasuki

Posted
Posted
la perra just means female dog, not the actual 'other' word
I think the word you're lookin' for is puta.... *shrug*
hehehe, shimatta's a spiffy word. I can say it and ppl only think "it's just Stephanie again:rolleyes: " :p
kuso's a useful word too:p
argh! must stop using such language! O.o
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest Capt. Stephanos

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Posted
Posted
[COLOR=darkblue]It's another [/COLOR]

[SIZE=4][COLOR=crimson]WORD OF THE DAY[/COLOR] [/SIZE]

[COLOR=indigo]

[I]RHINOTILLEXOMANIA[/I]
Habitual or obsessive nose-picking.

This word had its fifteen minutes of fame at the IgNobel awards at Harvard University in October 2001. These annual ceremonies recognise research that, in the words of the organisers, "cannot or should not be reproduced". The award for Public Heath went to an article, A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample, which was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry back in April. The judges described this as a "probing medical discovery that nose-picking is a common activity among adolescents".
Rhinotillexomania looks like an example of word invention for its own sake, but it has appeared a few times in scientific publications. I haven't been able to trace it back very far; an early example commonly referred to is a postal survey carried out by two Wisconsin researchers in 1994; this was written up in 1995, also in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, which seems to have a near corner on the term.

The word seems to have been invented in imitation of trichotillomania, an older term for a compulsive desire to pull out one's hair. This comes, in part, from Greek tillesthai, to pull out. The new word should have been rhinotillomania (from the classical Greek rhis, rhin-, meaning nose), but its authors, unversed in classical Greek, added an unnecessary -exo- (from Greek exo, outside).


[/COLOR]
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest Capt. Stephanos

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Posted
Posted
[COLOR=blue]Its another[/COLOR]

[COLOR=deeppink][SIZE=4]WORD OF THE DAY[/SIZE] [/COLOR]


[COLOR=crimson][I]FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION[/I]

The action or habit of judging something to be worthless.

Back in the eighteenth century, Eton College had a grammar book which listed a set of words from Latin which all meant "of little or no value". In order, those were flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili (which sound like four of the seven dwarves, Roman version, but I digress). As a learned joke, somebody put all four of these together and then stuck -fication on the end to make a noun for something that is totally and absolutely valueless (a verb, floccinaucinihilipilificate, to judge something to be valueless, could also be constructed, but hardly anybody ever does). The first recorded use is by William Shenstone in a letter in 1741: "I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money".
A quick Latin lesson: flocci is derived from floccus, literally a tuft of wool and the source of English words like flocculate, but figuratively in Latin something trivial; pili is likewise the plural of pilus, a hair, which we have inherited in words like depilatory, but which in Latin could meant a whit, jot, trifle or generally something insignificant; nihili is from nihil, nothing, as in words like nihilism and annihilate; nauci just means worthless.

The word's principal function is to be trotted out as an example of a long word (it was the longest recorded in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary but it was supplanted by pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis in the second). It had a rare public airing in 1999 when Senator Jesse Helms used it in commenting on the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: "I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT".


[/COLOR]
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest Capt. Stephanos

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Posted
Posted
[COLOR=crimson]Is another[/COLOR]

[COLOR=limegreen][SIZE=4]WORD OF THE DAY[/SIZE][/COLOR]

[COLOR=orange][I] MUNDUNGUS [/I]
Rubbish; refuse.

The Spanish have a perfectly respectable word mondongo for the tripes, the stomach linings of cows or oxen that are served as food. Many people adore tripe, especially served with onions, but others find it mildly repulsive. Hence our slang use of tripe for worthless stuff or rubbish. The English borrowed the Spanish word in the seventeenth century, at first with the same sense , but then hacked it about a bit to fit English mouths and applied it figuratively to any offal or refuse.
Later, it was used in particular for a foul-smelling form of cheap tobacco. In his Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon, published in 1755, Henry Fielding wrote: "It was in truth no other than a tobacco of the mundungus species". It has largely gone out of use, except when an author is attempting to reinforce an historical period, as Patrick O'Brian does in HMS Surprise: "If you have finished, Stephen, pray smoke away. I am sure you bought some of your best mundungus in Mahon".


[/COLOR]
Link to comment
Share on other sites
*GaLxY-GiRl* Otaku

*GaLxY-GiRl*

Posted
Posted
[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by Capt. Stephanos [/i]
[B]
[COLOR=limegreen][SIZE=3]WORD OF THE DAY[/SIZE][/COLOR]

[COLOR=orange][I] MUNDUNGUS [/I]
Rubbish; refuse.

Later, it was used in particular for a foul-smelling form of cheap tobacco. In his Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon, published in 1755, Henry Fielding wrote: "It was in truth no other than a tobacco of the mundungus species". It has largely gone out of use, except when an author is attempting to reinforce an historical period, as Patrick O'Brian does in HMS Surprise: "If you have finished, Stephen, pray smoke away. I am sure you bought some of your best mundungus in Mahon". [/COLOR] [/B][/QUOTE]

[color=red]Can you recite this type of [size=1](needless to say, unusual..)[/size] information off the top of your head....... or do you research your "[i]Word of the Day[/i]"s just for us, Otaku-ians? :laugh:[/color]
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest Capt. Stephanos

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Posted
Posted
[QUOTE][i]Originally posted by *GaLxY-GiRl* [/i]
[B]

[color=red]Can you recite this type of [size=1](needless to say, unusual..)[/size] information off the top of your head....... or do you research your "[i]Word of the Day[/i]"s just for us, Otaku-ians? :laugh:[/color] [/B][/QUOTE]

It's all just for you babe. :)
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest Capt. Stephanos

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Posted
Posted
[COLOR=blue]Its another [/COLOR]

[SIZE=4][COLOR=deeppink]WORD OF THE DAY[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[COLOR=green] [I]BROBDINGNAGIAN[/I]
Of or relating to a gigantic person or thing.

It is given to only a limited number of people to add a word to the language, or at least to have been given the credit for doing so. But Jonathan Swift originated eight words in his most famous and enduring book, Gulliver's Travels, of 1726.
The second part of the book, in which Lemuel Gulliver meets the huge inhabitants of Brobdingnag, has bequeathed us this awkward adjective; these days it can be used for anything huge, not just people. Here's a typical example of its use, from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "When compared to the relatively small red man and his breed of thoats they assume Brobdingnagian proportions that are truly appalling".

His satirical descriptions of the political vices and follies of the miniature people of Lilliput suggested Lilliputian for people who may be small either in stature or in mind. That race's tedious and irrelevant arguments over which is the right end from which to eat an egg have led to big-endian and little-endian for controversies over nothing at all; both terms have been taken up in recent decades by computer scientists to describe ways of organising digital data.

One of the more common of all his invented words from the book is yahoo for the race of brutes in the shape of men in a later part of the book, which has survived as an abusive term for any person considered uncivilised. The race of intelligent horses in the same section also gave us the rare word houyhnhnm, which Swift invented to echo the sound of a neigh. Yet another unusual term is Struldbrug (with its even less common adjective Struldbruggian), for the race of people, unable to die, who survived in a state of senseless decrepitude, a fate which has become one of the great fears of modern life. Yet another rarity is Laputan, in reference to the flying island of Laputa whose inhabitants were addicted to visionary projects; hence its modern meaning of something so inventive or imaginative as to be absurd.[/COLOR]
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest Capt. Stephanos

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Posted
Posted
[COLOR=green]It's another[/COLOR]

[SIZE=4][COLOR=silver]WORD OF THE DAY[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[COLOR=orange][I]ZENZIZENZIZENZIC[/I]
The eighth power of a number.

This word is long obsolete, so much so that the Oxford English Dictionary only has one citation for it, from a famous work by the English mathematician Robert Recorde, The Whetstone of Wit, published in 1557. It turns up from time to time as one of those weird words which is best known for being held up as an example of a weird word.
The root word, also obsolete, is zenzic. This was borrowed from German (the Germans were very big in algebra in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). They got it from the medieval Italian word censo, which is a close relative of the Latin census. The Italians (who were big in algebra even earlier) used censo to translate the Arabic word mál, literally "possessions; property", which was the usual word in that language for the square of a number. This came about because the Arabs, like most mathematicians of those and earlier times, thought of a squared number as a depiction of an area, especially of land, hence property. So censo, and later our English zenzic, was for a while the word for a squared number.

Even by Robert Recorde's time, there was no easy way of denoting the powers of numbers, a great hindrance to effective mathematics. The only term he had apart from the square was the cube, the third power of a number, and formulae were usually written out in words. Recorde, like his predecessors, represented a fourth power by the square of a square, zenzizenzic, which is just a condensed form of the Italian censo di censo, used by Leonardo of Pisa in his famous book Liber Abaci of 1202. An eighth power was by obvious extension zenzizenzizenzic. And similarly the sixth power was zenzicube, the square of a cube. None of these words survives in the language except as historical curiosities. [/COLOR]
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest Capt. Stephanos

Guest Capt. Stephanos

Posted
Posted
[COLOR=red]It's another[/COLOR]
[SIZE=4]
[COLOR=orange]WORD OF THE DAY[/COLOR] [/SIZE]

[COLOR=green] [I] WOBBEGONG [/I]
An Australian shark.

This shark is brown with buff markings and a flattened body, one of an order called the orectolobes, which includes the nurse sharks and the whale shark; another name for them is carpet sharks. Its name probably comes from a New South Wales Aboriginal language, though nobody seems sure which. The wobbegong disguises itself so well on the sea floor that unwary divers often step on it. Actually, one writer on the species says it looks as though it has already been stepped on, but that's just rampant speciesism. It's notable, though, that few of those who describe it have much that's positive to say about it. One list of Australian species calls it "mostly harmless", uncannily like the updated description of Earth in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A textbook on biology describes it as "small, sluggish and cryptic", this last epithet meaning not that it speaks in riddles but that it is well camouflaged. Though a normally inoffensive member of the shark clan, even a wobbegong may take umbrage at such descriptions, or to being stepped on, and bite the unwary. [/COLOR]
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...