Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
wistful
seen here: https://portlandyouthphil.org/blog/b...hony-no.-4/390
heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN7oFdFqtB4
A word worse than “bogey”: Shank.
"Amazing what a minute can do."
Even better in a hot tub with a lovah...
will-ferrell-20080228035505367.jpg
So, last night my wife shows me a piece of mail from the local hospital (not a very good one) that is asking us to fill out a form explaining why they should start an open heart surgery program there (which would NOT be a good idea).
She hands it to me and says, "This is risible."
I have never heard anyone use that word before. I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, because in medicine we have a Latin term "risor sardonicus" which means a sardonic smile (associated with tetanus). So I guessed that it means laughable, which turned out to be correct. The dictionary definition is "such as to provoke laughter."
What a great word!
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust
"While the holiday is commonly printed as Veteran's Day or Veterans' Day in calendars and advertisements (spellings that are grammatically acceptable), the United States Department of Veterans Affairs website states that the attributive (no apostrophe) rather than the possessive case is the official spelling "because it is not a day that 'belongs' to veterans, it is a day for honoring all veterans."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Day
And now I've learned what an attributive noun is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_adjunct
That's enough learning for this day, especially for those who may have gotten caught up in a Marine Corps birthday celebration yesterday -- https://www.marines.com/who-we-are/o.../birthday.html
1. Problematize
2. Situatedness
3. Occam's Razor
Giddy. But not Piddy.
Highfalutin
Dadgumtootin’
festuche or festouche (to encourage further reading, the definition will be in the second quote box below)
This word was used in the 2020 Presidential Election thread (links to the pertinent posts: link, link, link, link).
Notable quote from budwom in the 3rd link:
Now, on to the story from Language Log:My old employer had hundreds of thousands of employees, and its own culture (truly)...part of that culture was a particular vocabulary...fistouche was a commonly used word, though perhaps it's spelled wrong or doesn't even exist elsewhereThis is Susan Dennis, telling a story on her livejournal three years ago about a seeding from some years ago:
Years ago, I was a communications manager for IBM. There was one of us at every plant and every division hq making about 50 of us total around the United States. We were a kind of club. One member of the club had this theory about word usage. He allowed as how if you made up a good enough word and got three people to use it, within a year it would get back to from a fairly untraceable source. I'm obviously forgetting the details of the deal but I do remember the word that proved his theory.
Festuche. It's pronounced fess-toosch (accent on the second syllable). A festuche is a brohaha or a big deal or a tado. "He forgot to get the approval and pretty soon we had a major festuche." or "She's such a drama queen. She could make any staff meeting into a real festuche."
It's a great word and one that doesn't have much competition. When something is a real festuche, the other options for describing it just do not measure up.
About two years after this guy introduced festuche at a bar in White Plains, NY (a few of us gathered to discuss the day long meeting we had just been subject to), the head of communications at IBM stood before a gathering of about 300 IBMers and urged us not to make 'a festuche out of today's announcement'. It was a major coup and one that called for a festuche of a celebration.
This morning I had to use the word with a guy here at work. He allowed as how he had never heard the word before and thought it was a great word and planned to use it a lot. Maybe we'll see a revival?
And to come full circle, the company for which I worked for 25 years amidst many festouches was IBM, of course...solid party of the company's unofficial lexicon.
Just watched a movie the word nerds on this thread might enjoy. The Professor and the Madman. True story about the enormous task of compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, and the certified nut who contributed greatly to the endeavor.
Reminded me of a word I like: fettle (condition, as in "I'm in fine fettle").
And introduced me to these:
Alveary (beehive...but more fun is 'the hollow of the external ear'. Think of that the next time you give (or get) a wet willie, or maybe if invading that body structure is part of your amorous repertoire)
Consanguineous (denoting people descended from the same ancestor, sorry this post is too late for Thanksgiving gatherings)
Decussate (to cross two things to form an X...dare you, at your next gathering at the pub, to ask "Anyone mind if I decussate my legs?")
And my favorite by far:
Louche (Disreputable in an appealing way. 'Nuff said.)
Homogenous, which actually is a word but not the word intended by many users, who just can't find their way to homogeneous.
This is awesome. I'm going to have to hunt that movie down.
By the way, I heard the word "louche" on the radio about two months ago and wanted to post it here, but by the time I got to a computer I was too busy and then forgot about it. A fantastic word.
Consanguineous is another of the words posted in this thread that I have heard and have used many times, being a physician. My clinic and the Genetics clinic are in the same clinic space. Assessing for consanguinity is one of the first things Geneticists do when assessing a new patient. It is a good word, though, especially if you live in eastern Kentucky. ;-)
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust