the Word for Thursday

NUGATORY
1. Of little value; trifling.
2. Having no force; ineffective.
Synonym: worthless,useless,futile,insignificant

the Word for Wednesday

IRASCIBLE

1. Prone to outbursts of temper; easily angered.
   
2. Characterized by or resulting from anger.

Synonyms: irritable,testy,angry,peevish,

the Word for Tuesday

FECUNDITY
1 : fruitfulness in offspring or vegetation : prolific
2 : intellectually productive or inventive to a marked degree
synonym: fertile

the Word for Wednesday

EURDITE
adjective; characterized by great knowledge; learned or scholarly
synonym; educated, knowledgeable; wise, sapient.

the Word for Thursday

Superfetation
the formation of a fetus while another fetus is already present in the uterus.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/ReproductiveHealth/twins-conceived-weeks/story?id=8656369

the Word for Wednesday

GROK



To understand something intuitively or by empathy.

We must look to Robert Anson Heinlein for the origins of this word, which he invented for his science-fantasy book Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961. In this, Valentine Michael Smith, a human being raised on Mars, returns to Earth with psi powers given him by the Martians and is transformed into a messiah.


Grok is a word borrowed from Martian (and you won’t see that written very often) in which it literally meant to drink. To grok is to gain an instant deep spiritual understanding of something or to establish a rapport with somebody.


The book became a cult classic despite its deeply flawed nature (Heinlein remarked self-deprecatingly about it that it was incredible what some people would do for money; it was originally published in a brutally edited form and became available as originally written only in 1990).


The term went into the language, at first among countercultural types in California and among SF fans (there used to be lapel buttons around with the message “I grok Spock”), but was eventually taken up by computer geeks, among whom it has largely remained.

the Word for Tuesday

MUGWUMP



A person who remains aloof from controversial issues.


This archetypal American word derives from the Algonquian dialect of Native Americans in Massachusetts. In their language, it meant “war leader”. The Puritan missionary John Eliot used it in his translation of the Bible into their language in 1663 to convey the English words duke, officer and captain.

Mugwump was brought into English in the early nineteenth century as a humorous term for a boss, bigwig, grand panjandrum, or other person in authority, although often one of a minor and inconsequential sort. This example comes from a story in an 1867 issue of Atlantic Monthly: “I’ve got one of your gang in irons — the Great Mugwump himself, I reckon — strongly guarded by men armed to the teeth; so you just ride up here and surrender”.

It hit the big time in 1884, during the presidential election that set Grover Cleveland against the Republican James G Blaine. Some Republicans refused to support Blaine, changed sides, and the New York Sun labelled them little mugwumps. Almost overnight, the sense of the word changed to turncoat. Later, it came to mean a politician who either could not or would not make up his mind on some important issue, or who refused to take a stand when he was expected to do so. Hence the old joke that a mugwump is a person sitting on the fence, with his mug on one side and his wump on the other.

There is also a slangy sense — less known these days, I believe — of a person who has been persuaded by his possession of a minor official position into a sense of self-importance, often becoming obnoxious as a result.

the Word for Monday

RIPSNORTER

This delightful word from rural America, meaning something violent, extravagant, vigorous or a striking example of its kind, has become known everywhere that English is spoken.



Its first appearance was attributed to Davy Crockett (“Of all the ripsnorters I ever tutched upon, thar never war one that could pull her boat alongside of Grace Peabody”). But as the word appeared in one of a series of almanacs bearing his name in 1840, four years after he died at the Alamo, we must take the link with a pinch of salt — as we must such other supposed coinages of his as circumflustercated and scentoriferous, part of the largely fictitious tall-talking vocabulary of mountain men that the almanacs almost single-handedly invented. Snorter has had various senses that imply that something is an extreme or remarkable case of its kind. To take one example, around the time that ripsnorter appeared, snorter was applied to an especially ferocious storm, a sense that is alluded to in the slightly opaque example from the Crockett almanacs that I’ve quoted. Rip may be a more-or-less meaningless intensifier, as it is in words like rip-roaring, though its sense of “rip” or “tear” may contribute energy and vigour. However, the storm sense of ripsnorter’s second element suggest rip might have another of its meanings, a stretch of broken water, as in rip tide and rip current.

the Word for Sunday

VACCIMULGENCE

The milking of cows

It is, as you may guess, derived from Latin vacca, a cow (which is also the origin of vaccine, because the first was derived by Dr Jenner from cowpox to guard against the much more serious smallpox). The ending is from the Latin verb emulgere, to milk out, which — as well as being the ultimate origin of emulsion — is the root of another very rare word, emulgence, the action of milking out, as for example in extracting money from the unwilling.

the Word for Saturday

senescent
growing old, aging

with each passing day, we all become increasingly senescent.

other words I've been cogitating ..affect/effect,perfidy,objurgate,exacerbate,Luddite

the Word for friday

COULROPHOBIA


An irrational fear of clowns.


What, fear those delightful purveyors of slapstick comedy? One may as well go in terror of Santa Claus (but then a few people do that too, sad cases of Santa Claustrophobia). But clown humour has always embraced cruelty in its teasing and insulting of other clowns and members of the audience. Clowns represent anarchy, the personifications of unreason, and a force of nature out of control. Who knows what really lies behind their unchanging painted faces and outlandish costumes? These are all good enough reasons for even the strongest and most adult of us to feel unease in the presence of a clown. Some children are terrified by them and a surprisingly large proportion of adults confess to finding them creepy and disturbing, so much so that this word for their condition has had to be invented. It’s not old — perhaps from the 1980s — and has been taken from Greek kolon, a limb, which seems strange until you find the related kolobathristes was a stilt-walker. This seems to have been the nearest its coiner could get to a suitable classical allusion, since ancient Greek didn’t have a word for a clown in our modern sense.

the Word for Thursday

ANFRACTUOSITY




A channel, crevice or passage full of windings and turnings.



Not quite describing a maze, though some mazes certainly take on an anfractuous appearance, one that is sinuous or winding. The noun is rare enough that it is hard to find examples, the adjective almost equally so.


One sense is of a broken or jumbled landscape. T S Eliot used this in his poem Sweeny Erect: “Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks / Faced by the snarled and yelping seas”. Another comes from the nineteenth-century interest in phrenology, reading character by the shape of the head, supposedly reflecting that of the brain beneath; the anfractuosities in this case were the convolutions of the surface of the brain.


A rare modern sighting is in A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. Here it refers to a certain kind of opaque and circuitous legal prose, seemingly designed more to confuse than to clarify. Its authors quote this splendid example of literary legal convolution from New York in 1858:


Unless the code, by abolishing the distinction between actions at law and suits in equity, and the forms of such actions and suits, and of pleadings theretofore existing, intended to initiate, and has initiated new principles of law, by which a class of rights and of wrongs, not before the proper subjects of judicial investigation and remedy, can now be judicially investigated and remedied, the facts stated in the plaintiff’s complaint in this action, do not constitute a cause of action, and the demurrer of the defendant to that complaint is well taken.


The word comes from Latin anfractus, a bending around, from the verb frangere, to break. So it is a close cousin of the much more recent fractal, as well as fracture, fragile, refraction, and, rather less obviously, infringe and osprey (the latter ultimately derives from ossifraga, bone breaker, originally applied to the lammergeier).


example: Please be more specific. Your verbal meanderings are at best anfractuous, you obtuse miniscule australopithecine.. LOL

the Word for Wednesday

SHENANIGAN






Trickery, underhand action, intrigue, skulduggery.



You’ll most commonly encounter this word in the plural. It seems to have originated in California at about the time of the Gold Rush, though it was first recorded in print only in 1855. In the years since, it has been spelt in about a dozen different ways, though recent dictionaries have settled on the version above. Where it comes from is still a matter of substantial dispute; the first five dictionaries I consulted gave four different origins (Oxford Dictionaries — as so often — opting for the ultra-cautious “origin unknown”). The word looks Irish, and there was no shortage of Irishmen in the California diggings, so it’s plausible to suggest the Irish word sionnachuighm as the source, meaning ‘I play tricks’, which is pronounced roughly as ‘shinnuckeem’. Others argue it comes from an East Anglian dialect word nannicking for playing the fool. Yet others guess at a link with the Spanish word chanada for a trick or deceit, which is another half-way plausible source, considering California’s history. Yet another theory was put forward in 1948 in American Speech for an origin in German schinnagel for a nail that holds the rim to the wheel, which produced the German slang terms schinageln, to work, and Schenigelei, a trick. As the man behind the market stall said, you pays your money and you takes your choice ...

the Word for Monday

Ostrobogulous

The word is weird not only because it looks strange and is rather rare but because it can refer to something weird (or a strange, bizarre or generally unusual happening). To increase its peculiarity, it can also mean something mildly risqué, indecent or pornographic.

“Ostrobogulous” was Vickybird’s favourite word. It stood for anything from the bawdy to the slightly off-colour. Any double entendre that might otherwise have escaped his audience was prefaced by, “if you will pardon the ostrobogulosity”.

Magic my Youth, by Arthur Calder-Marshall, 1951.

It was coined by Victor Neuburg (Vickybird in the quotation), a gay British Jewish poet and writer and a close friend of the occultist Aleister Crowley, whose sexual magic practices he helped develop.

Neuburg said that the word was formed, highly irregularly as you might expect, from Greek ostro, rich, plus English bog, dirt, from the schoolboy slang sense of the toilet, and ending in Latin ulus, full of. So “full of rich dirt”. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t agree, arguing that the first part is from the adjective oestrous. But we ought to let Victor Neuburg have the last word, as it was his creation, even though he was a bit shaky on his etymology — the Greek word was ostreon, a type of mollusc (it’s the source, via Latin, of English oyster) that was harvested to obtain a rare and expensive purple dye, hence figuratively something rich.

Another meaning of ostrobogulous turns up occasionally.

I started out making toys because it was something I could do with no money, an artistic family and a Victorian sewing machine. In the evenings I made “ostrobogulous” toys, a term my mother used to mean harmlessly mischievous, and sold them in Heal’s, where I worked by day.

The Times, 8 Nov. 2003.

This matches a sense known to reader Graham Hill: “When I was at secondary school in the late 1960s ostrobogulous was used as an alternative name for a gonk.” (For those too young to remember, or who live in a country in which they never caught on, a gonk was a small furry soft toy, popular at the time.)

Ostrobogulous is a favourite of people who collect interestingly weird words. A notable appearance, in July 2009, was in the Daily Mail, a British family paper which might have looked askance at it had its editors known of its indecorous antecedents. It was quoted as the favourite word of Professor Christian Kay, who worked for 42 years on the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.

the Word for Sunday

DIGAMY

A second marriage after the death or divorce of a previous spouse.

Perhaps those few people who have come across it believe it is just another term for bigamy (a sense the word could indeed once have had) or perhaps the ease with which the two words can be confused led to the less common one dropping out of casual use. It does appear on rare occasions in academic works. The word comes directly from Latin digamia, with the same sense, which in turn derives from Greek; its first recorded appearance was in 1635. An alternative that once had the same sense is deuterogamy, though this is now equally defunct.

the Word for Friday

POPPYCOCK

Nonsense, rubbish.

It’s a fine-sounding expletive, but hardly heard on anybody’s lips these days, and with a dated feel. It feels very English: think of elderly ex-Indian-Army colonels in retirement in Tunbridge Wells exploding in wrath over some supposed mismanagement of the country’s affairs and writing disgusted letters to The Timesabout it. And most of the citations for it in the Oxford English Dictionary are from British sources.

But, as the OED reminds us, the word is actually American in origin, first turning up there about 1852. The OED is firm in dismissing one often-heard view of its origin, from the Dutch word pappekak for soft faeces. It says firmly “no such word appears to be attested in Dutch” but points to the very similar word poppekak, which appears only in the old set phrase zo fijn als gemalen poppekak, meaning to show excessive religious zeal, but which literally means “as fine as powdered doll shit”. The word was presumably taken to the USA by Dutch settlers; the scatological associations were lost when the word moved into the English-language community.

The first half of the word is the Dutch pop for a doll, which may be related to our term of endearment, poppet; the second half is essentially the same as the old English cack for excrement; the verb form of this word is older than the noun, and has been recorded as far back as the fifteenth century.

Despite some uninformed speculation, there’s no link with the vulgar meaning of cock. Nor is it linked to the sense of cock for rubbish (as in phrases like that’s a load of old cock), as that’s a shortened form of cock and bull story, which comes from a fable concerning a bull and a cockerel

the Word for Thursday

Cockamamie



Something ridiculous, incredible or implausible.


Cockamamie is intrinsically funny, but it’s truly incredible that word historians believe it’s a close relative of decal, a design prepared on special paper for transfer to another surface. (It is instead sometimes said to be Yiddish, but this turns out not to be the case.)


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. There was a fashion for self-decoration at that period, using coloured transfers given away with candy and chewing gum. 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.”


Quite how the word changed sense to mean something incredible is least clear of all. An early sense was of something inferior or second-rate, which presumably referred to the poor quality of the cheap transfers. It might have been influenced by words such as cock-and-bull or poppycock. Anyone who adopted the craze for sticking transfers on oneself may have been regarded by adults or more serious-minded youngsters as silly — certainly the first sense was of a person who was ridiculous or crazy; the current sense came along a few years later.

the Word for Wednesday

TWITTERPATED


Besotted


This lovely term appeared, slightly differently, in the article Sex in Space in Wired magazine on 18 May 2007: “How do you handle love, sex, romance, heart-break, jealousy, hurt, unrequited longing, crushes, loneliness and twitterpation when you’re 18 months away from Earth and perhaps unsure whether you’ll make it back?”


It refers to the feelings you get when you think about your current object of desire. A contributor to the Urban Dictionary defined it as “An enjoyable disorder characterized by feelings of excitement, anticipation, high hopes, recent memories of interludes, giddiness, and physical overstimulation which occur simultaneously when experiencing a new love.”


One stimulus for its current popularity is that it appears in the film Bambi II, following on its invention in the original Bambi of 1942, in which Friend Owl says, “Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime.” When the film first came out, the Oakland Tribune remarked that “‘Twitterpated’ is perhaps the best adjective coined by Hollywood since the pixilated sisters were invented for ‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.’”


It also shows signs of becoming accepted, at least in the short term, as a mildly derogatory term for those obsessive communicators who use the online medium Twitter to tell their friends every small thing they’re doing with their day.

the Word for Tuesday

SEMORDNILAP



A word, phrase or sentence that makes sense when reversed, but is not the same as the original.

A string of letters that reads the same backwards as forwards is a palindrome (“Madam, I’m Adam”; “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!”; “Was it a car or a cat I saw?”). A semordnilap is closely related, but the reversed text must be different. For example, if you reverse “diaper” you get “repaid”, and if you invert “desserts” the word “stressed” appears. A more complicated example is “deliver no evil”, but you can probably invent better ones for yourself. As semordnilap is palindromeswritten backwards, it’s a self-referential word, one that encapsulates within itself the thing it represents. You could hardly say that it’s common, but many earnest palindromists have accidentally discovered it, and it has some small circulation among word wizards

the Word for Monday

ERGOPHOBIA

Fear of work

Many people experience this as a chronic ailment that blights their weekends and accounts for much of that Monday-morning feeling or post-holiday blues. It is not a new problem: the word was coined by a doctor named W D Spanton, writing in theBritish Medical Journal in 1905. He did so in all seriousness, recognising that it can be a real medical condition, an abnormal or persistent fear of work and the workplace.

Notwithstanding this, the word spends much of its life as the butt of heavy-handed humor, on the assumption that it is a mere synonym for laziness. An early case was an article in the Bedford Gazette, Pennsylvania, in February 1910: “The tramp is in reality a sufferer from ergophobia, or fear of work, often complicated with aquaphobia and sapophobia, which make him shun the bathtub.” Most of its remaining appearances in books and newspapers are in lists of odd phobias, such asarachibutyrophobia for the fear that peanut butter will stick to the roof of one’s mouth.