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Fantastic Words and Where to Find Them


Gus Mears

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Despite its subject matter, colonoscopy is extremely satisfying to say, as is masquerade. 

 

There are various similar Twitter accounts, but would recommend following https://twitter.com/HaggardHawksfor your fill of obscure words. There word today is the outstanding 'lolpooping', which is an 18th century word for idling about.

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i think it was on here i read it but im a big fan of the German insult Spargeltarzen, translating as Asparagus Tarzan, to describe the unbelieveably skinny lads who never put on weight, i liken it to those types whose shirt comes off at the slightest view of sunshine who clearly couldnt escape a wet paper bag

 
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On ‎25‎/‎03‎/‎2017 at 10:27 PM, Fog Dude said:

I also recently encountered 'superergatory', which apparently is a way of saying "beyond the call of duty" in a single word.

Supererogatory - comes from the Latin "super" - "over", "e" shortened from "ex-", meaning "out", and "rogare" - "to ask".

 

The mention of Scots words brings me to one of my favourites, and it's a shame Scots don't seem to use it much any more: "keech", meaning "shit".

Also, a few years ago, Astro demonstrated the brilliance of the use of the word "wretch" as an insult when he used it on TwoSheds - "you absolute wretch". Sounds vicious enough to be a swearing insult like "turd" or "wanker", but can be used anywhere.

 

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1 hour ago, Gus Mears said:

The wonderful Susie Dent from Countdown has Tweeted a belter today. Nicking this.

Nice to see other people getting on the sexy susie train, although I can't approve of you 'pulling a chilli®' 

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2 hours ago, Carbomb said:

Supererogatory - comes from the Latin "super" - "over", "e" shortened from "ex-", meaning "out", and "rogare" - "to ask".

 

Whoops. :blush: I'm going to fall back on the old excuse that wherever I saw it must have got the wrong spelling too. Thanks for pointing this out, though (albeit 6 and a half months later!).

I really should've spotted the link with 'rogare' since it's similar to the Spanish 'rogar' – 'to plead' or 'to request'. "Ergo-" wouldn't fit here as it's either from a Greek root meaning 'work' or the Latin for 'therefore'.

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On 25/03/2017 at 1:19 PM, Rey_Piste said:

Certain portmanteau words are great whether they're twunt or beeriod which describes my bowel movement when I woke up this morning. 

Going back a bit here, but I hate 'twunt'. They both mean the same thing, so just call them one or another. It blunts the impact of calling them either of them too, which may be its purpose, but is a let down.

Imagine Jez saying "I'll stop being Hamlet when you stop being....a massive twunt" and you'll see what I'm getting at.

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I love "bimble" to mean an aimless walk; it just feels so perfectly descriptive. I'd always assumed it was a Black Country word, as I picked it up from somebody from that neck of the woods, and I've only really heard it used since in Wolverhampton, but apparently it has its roots in military slang.

"Snicket" is a bloody lovely one, too, for a shortcut/cut-through. That was one that I'd never realised was regional 'til I moved and found nobody knew what it meant.

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4 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I love "bimble" to mean an aimless walk; it just feels so perfectly descriptive. I'd always assumed it was a Black Country word, as I picked it up from somebody from that neck of the woods, and I've only really heard it used since in Wolverhampton, but apparently it has its roots in military slang.

"Snicket" is a bloody lovely one, too, for a shortcut/cut-through. That was one that I'd never realised was regional 'til I moved and found nobody knew what it meant.

I use "bimble" quite regularly to mean either wandering aimlessly, or to describe what people do when your group has just left a pub, you've all said you're going to move on to somewhere else, but everyone's just bloody standing around half-conversational and half-confused, seemingly with no-one making any moves to actually go anywhere.

24 minutes ago, Sphinx said:

Going back a bit here, but I hate 'twunt'. They both mean the same thing, so just call them one or another. It blunts the impact of calling them either of them too, which may be its purpose, but is a let down.

Imagine Jez saying "I'll stop being Hamlet when you stop being....a massive twunt" and you'll see what I'm getting at.

They don't necessarily mean the same thing. It's only in relatively recent years we've been using the word "twat" as an alternative to "cunt", which is originally the American understanding of it. Prior to that, a "twat" was a pregnant guppy, and we tended to use it to just mean "fool", hence why it's not seen as bad a word as "cunt"; say it to an American, however, and there will most likely be a look of shock on their face. 

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Prior to that, a "twat" was a pregnant guppy, and we tended to use it to just mean "fool"

Is that true? I always assumed that was a bit of an urban legend, for whatever reason.

Doing a quick Wiki of it says that the "pregnant goldfish" definition (which is the variant I'd heard before, rather than guppy) doesn't appear in any reputable dictionary.

I could see it meaning "fool" more broadly as a derivative of "twit", or coming from the same root word with regional variations - I can't quite bring myself to believe that something as niche as a word for a pregnant fish has been used as an insult as far back as the 1600s or earlier.

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