Two smiles this morning . . .

. . . following another restless evening (for far more mysterious reasons than the night before):

First, talk about living on the edge! The bungee walk!

Then this gem from a Words at Play post about Scalia's dissent on the SCOTUS ACA ruling:

Jiggery-pokery comes from Britain, as does most of the finest rhyming slang and spicy mustards . . . 

(I'm ignoring the awkward verb/subject disagreement issue . . . )

More on the latter in today's vocabulary post.

Today's word

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis /are you kidding me? of course I'm not going to provide the pronunciation!/ - a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust, otherwise known as silicosis

This new word is brought to you by Pearls Before Swine; the strip's author has now gone to unprecedented lengths in his writer-as-a-character schtick. I will not bother trying to remember this word, though should I ever encounter it again I expect I will probably recognize it because of its pneumo and volcano roots.

Today's words

First, the WOTD:

tyro (tiro) \TYE-roh\ - a beginner in learning : novice

I might have encountered this one before, once.

feculent \ˈfe-kyə-lənt\ - foul with impurities : fecal

I don't remember running into this one before seeing it in this comic that I didn't get to yesterday, but realized what it must mean in less time than it took to look it up.

Faster keyboards

For an example of when being less efficient is ultimately more efficient, see the title text.



I'm pretty sure I have such activities in my life.

Today's words

threnody \THREN-uh-dee\ - a song of lamentation for the dead : elegy

I recognized this definition when I saw it, but couldn't recall it just by seeing the word. I think it was within the past month or so that I first encountered it, perhaps somewhere where it was identified as a synonym of "elegy."

That last word always reminds me of the hilariously awful story in which I first saw it, which I hope isn't true: 

A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at the death of composer Edward MacDowell.  She played the elegy for the pianist Josef Hofmann, then asked his opinion.

"Well, it's quite nice," he replied, "but don't you think it would be better if . . ."

"If what?" asked the composer.

"If . . . if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?"

A small positive from this story: I have now learned a little of whom both MacDowell and Hofmann were. The latter's life story is another of many that warn of the dangers of addiction; alcohol was his poison.

Then there was this word from today's Dictionary Devil that I also remembered after the fact from a post when it was the WOTD . . .

²imperial noun \im-ˈpir-ē-əl\  3. [French impériale; from the beard worn by Napoléon III] :  a pointed beard growing below the lower lip

. . . not to mention this more-obscure definition of this well-known word, which I must have recognized from somewhere, as it was one of the first definitions that I matched up in the puzzle.

Hungry (physically)

Imaginary conversation:

"Hey, America's on a health kick that shows no sign of letting up, but that's always gonna take a back seat to yummy desserts and convenience.  Let's start making healthy cookies! We'll make a fortune!!"

"Sounds great! See what you can come up with."

Six months later . . .

"They're still not very good. Nobody is ever gonna want these instead of their favorite chocolate chip or sandwich cookies, or even our own vanilla wafers. It was worth a shot, but we've just spent too much on this already. It's time to pull the plug."

"Wait a sec!  What if, instead of 'cookies,' we call them 'breakfast biscuits'?  After all, the middle of our name comes from 'biscuit.' We can market them as - oh, I dunno - a healthier alternative to donuts?"

"Well, they're certainly not more delicious than donuts, but they're at least a little more nutritious than fried dough.  It might work.  I don't know that there's much of a market for 'breakfast biscuits,' but maybe what we've spent on development won't be a total loss . . . "

And thus was born belVita^®.

I believe I'll wait . . .

. . . until after the Mayan apocalypse to catch up on any new words-of-the-day I missed while on vacation.

Cautious with cartoons

There are some things that hit too close to home for me to share very widely, but I'm pretty sure neither of the folks about whom I have that concern with these is a reader . . .

http://nickandzuzu.com/2003/10/taste-in-men/
http://www.dilbert.com/2012-05-24/

Today's QC

Worry Town

Channeling a 1970's comic:

Love is . . . doing what's best for the loved one, even when it isn't what we want to do.

(Oh, it's still around?)

Unmotivated

I feel like one of the people Goat starts off this strip complaining about. (Yes, I know it's just a setup for the stupid gag.)

Today's words

The first comes to my attention not from the Merriam-Webster site (though the definition is from there) but from 9 Chickweed Lane, which has become one of my guilty comic pleasures:

cloaca - the common chamber into which the intestinal and urogenital tracts discharge especially in monotreme mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and elasmobranch fishes; also : a comparable chamber of an invertebrate


Apparently it is also a synonym for "sewer."  (No, not a person who sews.)


Oh, and:


monotreme - any of an order (Monotremata) of egg-laying mammals comprising the platypuses and echidnas (from the Greek for one hole)


which of course brings us:


echidna - a spiny-coated toothless burrowing nocturnal monotreme mammal (Tachyglossus aculeatus) of Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea that has a long extensible tongue and long heavy claws and that feeds chiefly on ants; also : a related mammal (Zaglossus bruijni) of New Guinea having a longer snout and shorter spines


None of these is likely to make its way into my working vocabulary.  And with apologies to any readers who may have encountered this before I had a chance to flesh it out.

I yam what I yam

The original, first-person form of "it is what it is" wasn't nearly so annoying as that phrase has become.  Maybe its context made it more palatable.

A comic strip today reminds me of how I wonder, sometimes, whether everyone longs for characteristics which aren't theirs, or if it's just a relative smattering of us.  I suspect it's a pretty large majority, yet also guess there's no point in belaboring that further with a list of traits that I wish were mine.