Up to

Humour

Language

Site Map

Text version

Curious Words and Phrases

[accolent] [adjunctory] [affine] [ailurophile] [aleatory] [alexipharmacon] [ambisinister] [ancilla] [anent] [apiphobe] [aposiopesis] [arachibutyrophobia] [ballistophobia] [betenoire] [bosky] [brockie] [cag] [carnyx] [chatoyance] [cnidophobe] [commensal] [crytoscopophilia] [cynophobe] [dudder] [enology] [exsanguinate] [famulus] [fewterer] [fictile] [fid] [fliegel] [fremitus] [frenchleave] [fribble] [gilravage] [girn] [glabrous] [glaucous] [glout] [gloze] [haypth] [kitthougue] [leechdom] [leucoderm] [lexiphane] [lucubration] [macadamise] [mattoid] [melissophobe] [misodoctakleidist] [misopedist] [morepork] [mulct] [muliebrity] [myoclonic] [nafrage] [nafragous] [nares] [nebbish] [network] [oenology] [omphaloskepsis] [otophobia] [parasang] [paronomania] [paronomasia] [pawl] [peccatophobia] [persiflage] [phaneromaniac] [phatic] [philargyist] [philocynic] [pococurante] [properispomenon] [punkah] [scobberlotch] [scrobiculate] [scrod] [septentrional] [siege] [sinistral] [sitophobia] [slobberchops] [snottygobble] [spheksophobe] [spong] [squinch] [sternutation] [swinge] [taphephobia] [trichophobia] [ucalegon] [ugsome] [usquebae] [velleity] [vestiphobia] [wimbler] [xanthoderm]

See also:	The f2.org language quotes page Tiscali Dictionary of Difficult Words [Search facility broken (Dec 2001) but browsing by first letter works] Weird Words from World Wide Words Luciferous Logolepsy by Alan Taylor at kokogiak.com

Will the real snotty-gobble please stand up?
"There are many similar examples of common names being applied to disparate plants or plant groups. One is snotty-gobble (the parasite Cassytha [filiformis] in South Australia, Persoonia saccata in Western Australia)."
-- from "A rose by any other name ... the changing names of plants" at the sadly defunct State Herbarium of South Australia web site.
"The Australian National Dictionary has something very similar: Snotty Gobble, which is used in W.A. What's in a name? Gertrude Stein notwithstanding, a rose is a rose is not a Snottgobble. But what an epithet! Snottgobble is so gross as to be almost gracious. It is poetry, Ogden Nash and Monty Python and Dr Seuss rolled into one. So I have revised my position. I think we should postpone the Political Correction of weed names sine die. There has to be a corner of language where prejudice and gratuitous insults can safely grow and fester."
-- Professor Roly Sussex in an interview "The Naming of Weeds"
Curious Occupation
1964 Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia) 21 Dec., The policeman asked Godfrey Booth: `Your occupation, sir?' Mr. Booth..replied `Cag handed straw wimbler.'
-- from OED News, Series 2, No. 7, January 1998 - see Fun_People Archive 17 Feb 1998 ; original URL: http://www1.oup.co.uk/reference/newoed/jan-1998.html

ancilla : The sidekick who helps another to accomplish or master something difficult or complicated. A loyal, trusted aide for whatever task is at hand, from learning Japanese in one month to building a Transylvanian android to just defeating the bad guys. An ancilla can also be called an adjunctory. A trusted assistant to a magician, incidentally, is a famulus.

affine : An in-law, or any relative whom through mere marriage you have acquired, earned, valued or put up with. Announcing that your affines are coming this weekend will impress other people that you're expecting an important delivery.

bête noire : That particular dreaded or detested or feared person (literally, "black beast") to be at all costs avoided, to whom one is perversely averse. An old rival? An aggravating pest? An ex-husband? Whichever, your bugbear and pet hate as a human or subhuman being.

brockie : Anybody with a dirty face (and a word borrowed truly from the barnyard, where it means a cow with a black-and-white face). Brockies include smudged people working on the undersides of cars, housewives on cleaning day, gardeners on rainy days, and children left to themselves for more than a half-hour.

cnidophobe : The person whose grand terror is of being stung, as by a bee or a wasp. Picnicking or summer-strolling cnidophobes tend to overreact to airborne insects, jumping up at the sound of a distant, droning airplane or swinging wildly at a stray dogwood petal that grazes the cheek. More specifically, one who fears bees is an apiphobe or melissophobe, and the fearer of wasps is a spheksophobe. All cnidophobes have their ears cocked for bombination (buzzing or droning).

cynophobe : The dog-fearer or hater, and not just the mailman and milkman. The avoider of canines knows that their bite is even worse than their bark, not to mention the shedding and drool of certain breeds, the yelping and neuroses of certain other breeds, and the big or small do made on sidewalks by all breeds. To say nothing of the cold sweat induced by the sight of a Doberman or German shepherd or the ineffable odor of a heavily rained-on dog.

mattoid : Nobody is ever partly pregnant, but what about being semi-insane? If you know an unhinged genius, borderline psychopath, quirky monomaniac, extreme eccentric, deranged philosopher or restless crank, you know a mattoid. The mattoid is not quite around the bend but always has the turn signal switched on. From an Italian word for "insane".

misodoctakleidist : The piano student who just hates to practice. How many millions of misodoctakleidists have suffered from their key aversions? How many, hard-pedaled by parents into learning the piano, have felt that sitting down to practice octaves and études is like pulling a chair up to a meal of cold dominoes and graph paper? Practice makes perfect, and makes misodoctakleidists, too.

misopedist : The hater of children. When the baby is trundled out to coo, the misopedist sees not an infant but a stubby little flesh-coloured homonculus (grotesque little creature). He or she does not enjoy passing school-yards, visiting couples who have a brood of brats, or answering the door on Halloween. To paraphrase W. C. Fields: "Anybody who is a misopedist and a cynophobe can't be all bad."

nebbish : A haplessly, sadly unfortunate and innocuous being, kind of a cross between a poor soul and a sad sack. Along with schlemiel and schlimazl (and the similar Yiddish words schlump, zhlub, schnook, schmendrick, schmo, nayfish, yutz ...), a jerk. As Leo Rosten explains, the schlemiel trips and knocks down the schlimazl, and the nebbish repairs the schlimazl's glasses.

philargyist : One who loves money, or who is nummamorous or lucrepitous. Estimates vary, but there is general agreement that the portion of our planet not covered by water or ice is covered largely by philargyists. Philargyists are otherwise known as mammonists, chrematists, philoplutaries, aphnologists and plutolators. The money lover who is driven by a fear of poverty is a peniaphobe.

philocynic : A dog lover. The world is pretty much divided into philocynics and ailurophiles, the kitty lovers. A dog keeper, especially someone who looks after greyhounds, is called a fewterer.

phaneromaniac : The picky person - picking compulsively at scabs or pimples or ears, scratching the scalp, or fingernailing possible wildlife on his or her own person. Most people do not enjoy watching skin-frisking phaneromaniacs in action, never knowing, or wanting to, what they'll come up with in their nervous self-scavanging.

pococurante : The incredibly indifferent, careless or nonchalant person, a rolling stone who is less devil-may-care than never-may-care. (The word, from Italian, means "caring little"). The pococurante is gallionic - interested in little, bored with much and fazed by nothing - and might be considered cool if he or she weren't so uninteresting and aimless. Also known as a Laodicean, a word derived from an ancient Phrygian city noted for its lukewarm inhabitants. When two pococurantes get together to argue, they have a shrugfest.

sinistral : A left-handed person, or one who is afflicted with what is very infrequently known as mancinism (as opposed to dexterity, which means right-handedness). "Sinistral" could well be a word, like "mistral", for a mean wind, and indeed major-league managers look annually for hard-throwing sinistrals to add to the bullpen. Another word for sinistral is kitthougue. A person who is clumsy with both hands is ambisinister. A sleight-of-hand artist, or prestidigitator, is a chirosophist.

Ucalegon : A Ucalegon is a neighbour whose house is on fire. It seems impossible that there should be a word for this, but here you are (courtesy of Trojan legend, in which Ucalegon was an unfortunate, burned-out neighbour of Aeneas). An extremely rare word, though one should not be burning to have a chance to use it. A mere neighbour, whose house may or may not be in flames, is an accolent.

xanthoderm : A yellow-skinned person, or a lutescent (yellowish) individual whose race is Oriental. This is not a euphonious word, but then (not to be too jaundiced) neither are some for people whose hue is black (a melano or melanoderm), white (a leucoderm) or red (the aithochroi). Caucasians who have pale skin and dark hair are melanochroi.

-- Robotman --

Lexiphane - "A Word-Monger." From the Greek "lexiphanes" of the same meaning. Thanks to Scott Tregear for this one.
"Network: Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections." -- Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
Naufrage: Shipwreck; ruin. [French, from Latin naufragium; navis + frangere.]
Naufragous: Causing shipwrecks.
"Thus we see the reason for the warning about the naufragous effects of coming too close to another ship in fairly calm conditions." -- John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing, Vintage, London, 2001, p.225
Septentrional adj. Northern [Dates from 14th Century]
"... Mr Zoliparia, who being an important old gent of some note, has got one of the prime positions in all the town for his apartments, viz the right eyeball of the septentrional gargoyle Rosbrith. The gargoyle Rosbrith looks out to the north ..." -- from Feersum Endjinn by Ian M. Banks.
Apparently derived from Latin septentriones (septem - "seven" and triones - "ploughing oxen"), referring to seven principal stars in either of the constellations Ursa Major (big dipper) or Ursa Minor (little dipper)].
The Webster's Dictionary definition of 'scrod':
scrod : a young fish (as a cod or haddock); especially : one split and boned for cooking
Joke heard via Raf:
A friend reports that he was in a Boston taxi last week, and because he'd heard about all the great seafood available in the area, he asked the cabbie, "Say, where can I get scrod around here?"
The cabbie laughed and said, "I've been asked that question a thousand times, but never in the pluperfect subjunctive."
This variant occured at www.total.net/~prems/Jokes.html [page defunct Jan 2002]:
A businessman arriving in Boston for a convention found that his first evening was free, and he decided to go find a good seafood restaurant that served Scrod, a Massachusetts specialty. Getting into a taxi, he asked the cab driver, "Do you know where I can get Scrod around here?" "Sure," said the cabdriver. "I know a few places... but I can tell you it's not often I hear someone use the third-person pluperfect indicative anymore!"
Compare this with a posting on the newsgroup sci.lang.translation:
Newsgroups: sci.lang.translation
Subject: Re: ?? strung-out mother ??

>>ps - and I apologize for any vulgar language in advance, but could someone
>>clue me in as to what the word "skank" means in American English
>
>It's obviously the past participle of 'skunk'. (;-)

Which is the simple past of "skink"?
... and from the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology:
[...] Just a minute now! Everyone knows that 'skank' is the past tense of 'skunk', just as 'wank' the the past tense of, er, .. Well anyway, [...]

From http://luc.aleaume.free.fr/new_site/site_fortune/html/definitions.html:

Ballistophobia: Fear of bullets.
Otophobia: Fear of opening one's eyes.
Peccatophobia: Fear of sinning.
Taphephobia: Fear of being buried alive.
Sitophoba: Fear of food. Dread of eating.
Trichophobia: Fear of hair.
Vestiphobia: Fear of clothing.

See also: phobialist.com

From the book Language Change: Progress or Decay? by Jean Aitchison (1981):

scobberlotch: to loaf around, doing nothing in particular
dudder: to deafen with noise
More quotes from 'Language Change'

From Webster's dictionary:

omphaloskepsis: contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation

From the wonderful Merriam-Webster Word for the Wise site:

leechdom: archaic word for the craft of medicine [2001-Jan-02]
gloze: (v.) fawn ; glout: (v.) frown or scowl [2002-Jan-03]

From the Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary:

alexipharmacon: an antidote for poison

From the dictionary.com word-of-the-day archive:

lucubration: [from Word of the Day for Friday August 11, 2000]
1. the act of studying by candlelight ; nocturnal study ; meditation
2. That which is composed by night; that which is produced by meditation in retirement; hence (loosely) any literary composition

From Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (1990):

If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. There is a word to decribe the state of being a woman: muliebrity. And there's a word to describe the sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. If you harbour an urge to look through the windows of the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition: crytoscopophilia. When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: myoclonic jerk. If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon. [...] In English, in short, there are words for almost everything.
Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too mild to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? [...] Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting. [...] Our dictionaries are full of such words -- words describing the most specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies, the most arcane of distinctions.
And yet there are odd gaps. We have no word for coolness corresponding to warmth. We are strangely lacking in middling terms -- words to describe with some precision the middle ground between hard and soft, near and far, big and little. We have a possessive impersonal its to place alongside his, hers, and their, but no equivalent impersonal pronoun to contrast with the personal whose. Thus we have to rely on inelegant constructions such as "the house whose roof" or resort to periphrasis. Ruthless was once companioned by ruth, meaning compassion. [...] But, as with many such words, one form died and another lived. Why this should be is beyond explanation. Why should we have lost demit (send away) but saved commit? Why should impede have survived while the once equally common and seemingly just as useful expede expired? No one can say.
[...] It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly -- so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cogitate upon a problem. This abundance in terms is often cited as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive lanugage, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really need fictile as a synonym for mouldable, glabrous for hairless, sternutation for sneezing? Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary.
[p. 60-62]
A somewhat extreme example of the process is the naval shortening of forecastle to fo'c'sle, but the tendency to compress is as old as language itself. Daisy was once day's eye, shepherd was sheep herd, lord was loafward, every was everich, fortnight was fourteen-night. [...] With the disappearance of the halfpenny, the English are now denied the rich satisfaction of compressing halfpennyworth into haypth. [p. 81]
[More quotes from "Mother Tongue"]

Morepork is the name of two species of owl found in Australian & New Zealand, known variously as the boobook, mopoke, morepork (from the sound of its double hoot), spotted owl & marbled owl (from its appearance). I'd found a homophone in Terry Pratchet's famous Discworld novels, which feature the city Ankh-Morpork [thanks to Geoff Bailey for the correct spelling!], but it wasn't until almost 20 years later I came across 'morepork' in Ruth Park's novel (see quote below), originally published in 1948. A brief web search turned up the following:

Terry [Pratchett] has said that the name 'Ankh-Morpork' was inspired neither by the ankh (the Egyptian cross with the closed loop on top), nor by the Australian or New Zealand species of bird (frogmouths and small brown owls, respectively) that go by the name of 'Morepork'.

From The Harp in the South by Ruth Park (Published in Ruth Park's "Harp in the South" Novels, Penguin Books, 1987):

"We'll have to get you a nice red dress for the wedding. A nice red dress."
"Sure, I'd look like a house in red," protested Mumma, secretly pleased that he had suggested such a bold and flashing colour. "Black's right for stout people."
"Not black," cried Hughie. "I won't have my wife looking like a morepork's widow." This pleased him, and he lay there chuckling for some minutes, repeating "morepork's widow". [...]
[Chapter 16, p. 357-358]
[More quotes from "The Harp in the South"]

From assorted sources on the internet:

paronomasia: a form of pun ; more generally, any word-play
paronomania: an obsessive interest in word games ; a clinical obsession with word games
Note: 2004-01-29 Thanks to Elaine Morgan for supplying the following information:
Paronomania is actually an invention by Reginald Hill in his book Dialogues of the Dead - on the inside front cover of the book you should see that he states this word is made up!!!!
That is not quite what Hill said -- see the note below.
Note: 2004-11-15 I obtained a copy of Dialogues of the Dead. In fact, Hill simply quotes the entry for paronomania from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition. The entry begins:
paronomania [...] Factitious word derived from a conflation of PARONOMASIA [...] Word-play + MANIA [...]
1. A clinical obsession with word games [... 3 quotes provided dating from the years 1760, 1823 and 1927]
The entry goes on to provide a second definition - the proprietary name of a board game which sounds similar to scrabble.

fliegel -- From The Comic Stories by Anton Chekhov (Translated by Harvey Pitcher, pub. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1999):

The following words of Russian origin have been treated as English by adoption and spelt accordingly [...] To these has been added a word that has yet to appear in English dictionaries: fliegel. Derived from the German Flügel, it can mean the wing of a house, but is used by Chekhov to denote a small house in the grounds of a larger one. It may be in the town or the country, hence the difficulty in finding a suitable equivalent in English. The fliegel may be lived in by part of the family or by employees, it might be reserved for visitors, or rented out [...] [p. 209 -- Notes]
[...] the boys were missing. They were sought in the servant's quarters, the stable and the steward's fliegel: they were not there. [p. 166 -- Boys]
"But good heavens, have my house, dear! Far better than lodgings. Oh heavens above, I don't want any rent," Olenka went on, becoming agitated and bursting into tears again. "You live here and the fliegel will do for me. Wonderful!" [p. 205 -- The Darling / Dushechka ]

Words found in The World of Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse:

mulct n. fine imposed for an offence. ; v.t. to fine a person (in an amount); also, to obtain by fraud, duress or theft.
"I can't face a breach of promise action with a crowded court giving me the horse's laugh and the jury mulcting ... Is it mulcting?"
"Yes, sir, you are quite correct."
"And the jury mulcting me in heavy damages. I wouldn't be able to show my face in the Drones again."
[From Jeeves and the Greasy Bird]
parasang n. ancient-Persian measure of length, about 3¼ miles [5.2 km]. [The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th Edition] any of various Persian units of distance; expecially: an ancient unit of about four miles [6.4 km] [Merriam-Webster]
The Paddock, Beckley-on-the-Moor, was about a couple of parasangs from the village [...]
[From Without the Option]
See also: other quotes from The World of Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse

From The Admirable Crichton, by J. M. Barrie (University of London Press, 1970):

She works the punkah while the master partakes of the soup. [Act Three, p. 99]
punkah (n.) portable fan usually of leaf or palmyra; large swinging cloth fan on frame worked by cord or electrically. From Hindi pankha fan, from Sanskrit paksaka (paksa wing). [The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th Edition]
See also: other quotes from The Admirable Crichton

commensal adj. & n. (one) who eats at the same table; (animal or plant) living harmlessly with or in another and thus obtaining food [...] [Latin mensa table] -- The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th Edition

From The Story of Rats by S. Anthony Barnett (Allen & Unwin, 2001):

In the African continent an important reservoir [of disease] in the south is a gerbil (Tatera brantsi) from which infection moves to black rats and, probably more important, to the small multimammate rat (Mastomys natalensis) which too lives in houses. This exceedingly fecund and widespread commensal may consist of several species [...]
[Chapter 3, p. 42]
[More quotes from The Story of Rats]

From Some cloves of Gallic for the alphabet soup, one of Ruth Wajnryb's weekly word columns (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 Sep 2003, Spectrum liftout, p. 9)

In recent conversation with an acquaintance, I noted that before making a somewhat risque remark, she asked "for French leave" to speak her mind. Before I could grant it, my legs rushed me to the dictionary to check the meaning, the context of usage suggesting an oblique way to hedge any untoward repercussions.
Things Gallic take up quite some space in the dictionary. In the Collins, for example, between "fremitus" (the vibration felt when the hand is placed on the chest of a coughing patient) and "frenetic" (the state in which I arrived at the dictionary), there are 54 entries (60 in the Macquarie) related to phenomena attributable to the French.

From Made In America by Bill Bryson (Black Swan books, 1994):

[The first colonists] brought many words with them that have not survived in either America or Britain, to the lexical impoverishment of both: flight for a dusting of snow, fribble for a frivolous person, bossloper for a hermit, spong for a parcel of land, bantling for an infant, sooterkin for a sweetheart, gurnet for a protective sandbar, and the much-missed slobberchops for a messy eater.
[Chapter 2, Becoming Americans, p. 25]
[More quotes from Made In America]

fid n. a tapered usually wooden pin used in opening the strands of a rope

pawl n. A pivoted tongue or sliding bolt on one part of a machine that is adapted to fall into notches on another part (as a ratchet wheel) so as to permit motion in only one direction [Merriam-Webster]