Iris .......I am chuckling at that one.
It shall become my new favorite word! I will be sure to find many uses for it .

" Her gourmet meal was so delicious that I almost immediately became crapulent !"

"Holidays always end in crapulence."

"My mother in law's cooking is the quickest route to feeling crapulent."

Just this morning:

obloquy -

1: a strongly condemnatory utterance : abusive language
2: the condition of one that is discredited : bad repute
(From Merriam-Webster)

I am thankful for at last reading a book that has language in it that requires me to look up some words. I have started Ackroyd's biography of Shakespeare.

syntagma : a word or phrase forming a syntactic unit, or a systematic collection of statements

(I doubt I will use the above in conversation, as this definition baffles me.)

I encountered the above word several times in the most recent novel I read, Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess. This experimental novel is about a mysterious viral outbreak in Northern Ontario which turns people into murderous "zombies". One of the very first symptoms of infection is verbal. (The book was the inspiration for the very interesting horror film Pontypool. The movie is a vast improvement on the novel.)

Crapulent is a great word. I love it when a word sounds exactly like what it means.

And imagine being corpulent AND crapulent.......the perfect storm !!!

Lemonhead, how was "bunty" used as a description? I have the notion it meant plump or well-fed. Would that fit?

Annpan - sorry but I can't really remember how "bunty" was used... just that it was an adjective...

A couple of new words for me:

* jeremiad - a lengthy complaint: a long recitation of mournful comments
* thimble rigger - one who cheats using a sleight-of-hand game (e.g. the shell game)

"chillblains".

Never having heard of chilblains must surely mean not living in a cold climate, or one where central heating is available from October to April. ;-) ;-(

Here is a link that might be useful: Chilblains

Choleric - bad tempered

coffler - couldn't find definition and then couldn't remember context... Any ideas?

And had a quick refresher on Queen of Sheba (book mentioned her being "empty-handed"...), Methusalah, and the Tatars... Oh, and a pic of a Breton cap...

Here is a link that might be useful: Breton cap pic

Smirr - A word in Scots meaning a mist-like precipitation. It is deceptive in that it is such a soft rain, but it coats very evenly and very quickly leaves one drenched.

Ex: There's been smirr all day; I was out for just a few and I'm drenched to the bone.

From an entry in The Assassin's Cloak, just arrived from a bookseller in the U.K., purchased for a song on Amazon.

PAUCITY

How old am I? and I've never seen this word in print !

Siobhan: Growing up in the rather damp climate of south-east England, there were many different categorizations of rain (somewhat similar to the many different words for "snow" with North American indigenous people).. Haven't heard of the word Smirr, but really like it. We just called it "wet rain" and "dry rain", but that Scottish word has much more sound to it!!

In The Group, I have come across the following:

* using someone for a cat's paw - apparently from an old UK folk tale (not sure which country) in which a clever monkey tricks a cat into reaching into a fireplace to pull out some roasting chestnuts. The monkey got the chestnuts, but the cat got burned. In the sense used here, to be labeled a "cat's paw" means someone has taken advantage of you and you didn't catch it in time.

* sybarite - pleasure-seeking, oriented to the senses...

* using the word receipts instead of recipes... a couple of sources report that the word recipe came into common use in the middle of the nineteenth century; recipe until then had mostly been used for medical prescriptions (see abb. Rx), and that recipe won out as it sounded more scholarly...!

Here is a link that might be useful: History of Recipe....

"Picaresque" from the Wiki entry for "Martin Chuzzlewit". I had just watched the DVD of an old BBC production and was interested to see how the original novel went without having to read it! (Cheating!)

There are so many British expressions in the Dobb's series that it would take the whole thread to name them all !

One which always makes me stop and think is " walking out" with someone...meaning dating or seeing.
I guess that our ways of saying the same thing are as odd sounding.

There was also a reference to tea and toast but the toast was called by the actual brand of bread... and used like a noun.
Can't recall the brand at the moment, sorry !!

Possibly "Hovis" bread? A very popular brown loaf.
I had to look up "Oakleys" because in a book I was reading, the author used brand names as nouns quite a few times. I was not sure what the character was wearing! Turned out to be sunnies, as they are popularly referred to Down Under!

OK annpan, so what are 'sunnies' aka Oakleys please?!
walking out is a very old fashioned expression, was often used by/about servants who had a 'young man/girl'.

Sunglasses, Vee.

Just remember that Aussies add 'ie' to most things - Uni, tinnie, U-ie, postie, sickie, blowie, ciggie.

Yes...it was Hovis.

It got me thinking about the words we use which are actually brand names, but have come to mean the actual item.
For instance...kleenex.
I think most would say this instead of tissue.

Back in the 60's, before all these snazzy barristas, any decaf was called Sanka.

"Tissue" could be a type of fabric as well, so rather confusing.

Xerox might fall into the same category as Sanka.

When I was reading some of my late grandmother's letters from the late 1800's and early 1900's, the term "sparking" was used to mean courtship, among the young. I wonder when that quaint term died out.

Here in the UK, the word hoover is very common when used to describe vacuuming. ie "My goodness this room is filthy I must hoover the carpet."
'Thermos' instead of vacuum flask, and Band Aid, which isn't used over here . . . but we did understand what Bob Geldorf meant.

I find this strange. On January 8, I posted a word I had never encountered before: susurrus from The Postmistress. This morning, February 12, while reading A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, I came across susurration (which is spelled susuration in both dictionaries I consulted). It comes from the verb susurrate - to whisper or rustle softly - and means the same thing as susurrus.

This word is starting to feel like a friend. (I recall an elementary school teacher who told us to use a new word three times and it would become our friend.)

I had a call from family playing Scrabble. One person had put up 'qi'. This was in their Scrabble word book but did I know what it meant and how to pronounce it?
Not exactly the fount of all knowledge (although flattered to be thought of as that!) I had to try Google as it was not in my dictionary. "Vital energy"
BTW, it is pronounced Chee, rhymes with 'see'

In Peyton Place, I encountered several occurrences of the phrase "in Dutch" to mean an unwed pregnancy. I have never heard that expression before.

Timallan, while growing up in the fifties and sixties when Peyton Place was quite the book everybody was talking about, I heard and used "in Dutch" to mean in trouble of just about any kind. (I probably still use it occasionally with that meaning.) Example: I was in Dutch with my parents when I got home thirty minutes after my curfew. Since an unplanned pregnancy is often referred to as "being in trouble", I can imagine "in Dutch" being substituted for that sort of trouble too.

Qi can also be pronounced KEE like key.......depending on the area of the world.

I.E. qigong the exercise of movement and energy flow

I just had to look up the word "louche", that Martha Grimes had used twice in one chapter. Seeing that it means "of questionable taste or morality", could it be the forerunner of "loose", used that way? Now how can I bring that lovely word into my everyday conversation?!

Well, that's the thing, Phyllis. It's fun and interesting to become acquainted with new words, but if you find a way to use them in conversation, you'll probably be using words that others don't know. Such a dilemma!

The meaning was clear from the context, but I still looked it up:

A catafalque is a raised bier or platform, often movable, that is used to support the casket, coffin, or body of the deceased during a funeral or memorial service.

In the castle of The Distant Hours there was a muniment room. The context suggested a well-protected, secure place for storing valuables while the spelling suggested munitions. But since it was new to me, I checked the dictionary and, sure enough, it meant a stronghold, a place for storing ammunition, etc., a fort.

The Assassin's Cloak is a treasure trove of new words.

Scurf - too disgusting to put down here. You'll have to look it up yourself if you want to know. From a soldier being held in a prison camp.

Enciente - pregnant. Very tragic context - a barmaid had drowned herself; the entry was from the 1930's.

Lagniappe, had to Google this one which was not in my English or French dictionaries.
It refers to the custom of giving a gift to a customer who has made a purchase of goods. Sort of a complimentary bonus. I have only had this happen once in Italy when making a purchase on behalf of a friend. I kept the trinket but afterwards felt guilty about that! Should I have passed it on?

When describing the plants on which hops grow Elizabeth Winspear used the word bine.
At first I was certain this must be a typo but trusted the author to have used the correct word.
However, having grown hops, I knew that they grew up long vines.
My curiosity got the best of me and I finally did a search.

A bine is a climbing plant which climbs by its shoots growing in a helix around a support. It is distinct from a vine, which climbs using tendrils or suckers.
The stems of many bines are rough or have downward-pointing bristles to aid their grip.
The rotation of the shoot tip during climbing is autonomous, and does not (as sometimes imagined) derive from the shoot following the sun around the sky � the direction of twist does not therefore depend upon which side of the equator the plant is growing. This is shown by the fact that some bines always twine clockwise, including runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus) and bindweed (Convolvulus species), while others twine anticlockwise, including French bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) and climbing honeysuckles (Lonicera species).

That is fascinating.
Who knew !

Thanks Roget for your handy Thesaurus.
Mundane words most certainly bore us.
By perusing your book,
Our words make us look
Erudite, but then friends shall deplore us !

by Yvonne

Yoyo - I always remember that Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (a play that I studied at O level and thus have it burned into my skull) mentioned woodbine.... Haven't seen it just as bine though....

My contribution:

* Nacreous - in relation to sea shells: relating to, typical of Mother-of-Pearl

* Atavistic - either relating to genetic appearance OR uncivilised and instinctive

* Pullulating - to sprout out or to germinate

* solecism - error, breach of good manners, grammatical mistake

* The Levant - the name for the Eastern Mediterranean area including Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel.

Martha Grimes gave me another good word...."perfervid". I had to look it up. (oh, yes, I do read other books than hers, but thought, "How good of her to give me these new words.")

Oh, yes, it means "vivid, impassioned, fervent,"

Annpan, I learned lagniappe in New Orleans and, thus, thought it to be French. It is a custom there; e.g., if you buy a dozen donuts, you will be given 13. Nice idea!

I am enjoying this thread and learning the real meaning of some words that I have read over and had a vague idea about but couldn't define properly if my life depended on it.

carolyn, in the UK when you were given an extra bun/cake/roll by the baker it was always known as a baker's dozen. Do you have that expression in the US?
I don't think this happens anymore, especially as so many items come 'pre-wrapped/weighed'.

Yes, we do have that expression AND we do get 13 if it's from a smaller bakery where items can be purchased individually.
Usually these bakeries are privately owned as opposed to being a part of a larger grocery chain.

There is a charming American children's book, beautifully illustrated, that tells the origins of the "Baker's Dozen". The setting is in "New Amsterdam" (old New York).

Vee, the supermarket packaged rolls here are sometimes '15 for the price of 12' or similar offers.

Peccant, sinning. I am reading an old legal mystery.

'regimen' was in yesterday's crossword. Another spelling of 'regime' which can be used in a medical context eg a regimen for dieting.
Spikenard. Can't remember where I read it, but it is an 'aromatic Indian valerianaceous (must look that up) plant' or aromatic ointment.
I thought it might be a medieval instrument of torture.

My French friend uses the word 'regime' to refer to a diet for losing weight.

I'm reading Little Women and came across the word marplot.

I looked it up through onelook.com and found this splendid definition in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: 'An officious meddler whose interference compromises the success of an undertaking.' ETYMOLOGY: After Marplot, a character in The Busy Body, a play by Susannah Centlivre (1669-1723)

What are "brown chitis"?

This term has come up twice in the James Herriot book I'm reading ("All Things Wise and Wonderful"). These true-life stories happened in Yorkshire; so maybe this is a local-ism there??

"leman". (found in Alison Weir's novel "Captive Queen".) Webster's says it means a mistress or love interest.

"obeisance". I'd thought this strictly a French word, but it has made it's way over into English across the channel and dropped one "s" on the way. (Same meaning in both languages).

Lauramarie - I did a quick search for "brown chitis" and think it might be a reference to bronchitis... (just said in a funny way...) Could be wrong, but that seemed to be the general consensus...

* Chimerical - imaginary; having no existence in reality
* Erstaz - artificial; imitating or presented as a substitute for something of superior quality
* unguents - healing ointment
* a priori - based on something known; assumed
* corollary - natural consequence; statement easily proved from another
* logy - sluggish; no energy or enthusiasm
* benison - blessing

I was trying to work out the meaning of benison, not having come across it before, but would never have come up with blessing....

Lemonhead - Thanks for the meaning of "brown chitis." It makes sense because it's wintertime in Yorkshire in the part of the Herriot book where that word came up. With the hard winters in Yorkshire, a lot of people must come down w/ bronchitis.

Discursive...arriving at a conclusion by reason rather than intuition.

The word looks like it might mean someone who does not like to write longhand and prefers printing !!

My wife asked me what "refulgent" meant - she'd found it in a magazine article. I was able to tell her that it turns up in a song in the Mikado, but I didn't know what it meant. So we looked it up - it means "shining, brilliant or radiant" - and it's marked in my dictionary as "Literary".

I've just looked up the G&S - I was actually wrong! This is the song I was misremembering.

The sun, whose rays are all ablaze
With ever-living glory,
Does not deny his majesty
He scorns to tell a story!
He don't exclaim,
"I blush for shame,
So kindly be indulgent."
But, fierce and bold,
In fiery gold,
He glories all effulgent!

And what does "effulgent" mean? Radiant, brilliant...

I have to say that in my opinion, both effulgent and refulgent sound downright unpleasant - it's a surprise to me that they don't mean as they sound. Is there a word for the opposite of onomatopoeia?

Yes, "Re- " almost anything, sounds negative to me-- like going against.

Repulsive
Repel
Remiss

Then there's that "-fulgent" sound, that seems ugly (even "ugly" has a "u", an "l", and a "g" in it!).