Category: What’s the Word?

noun Date: 1942 slang lightplane

 Earnful Earn”ful, a. [From Earn to yearn.] Full of anxiety or yearning. [Obs.] –P. Fletcher.  

There is a feeling I have had since youth, a feeling that I am missing something in the English language, missing a history of expression, a heritage of context from which today’s words and biases of articulation evolved. I feel like today’s English is but a headline, a “Daily News” resource which is rich but nevertheless only symptomatic of the rising, the rising of ideas from sparsity to baroque and back to sparsity, the same ideas trading places back and forth across centuries.

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I knew an artist who groused constantly about his lack of money and bleak prospects for future sources of income. We worked on some projects intended to financially enrich him in the future. I donated my time out of a sense of honor and servitude, the sort of vassalage to which one submits themselves when they feel they are in the presence of a great and worthy artist. I was surprised, then, when one day he mentioned that he owned a boat.

side almost completely to ourselves. Our only company on that road were emergency vehicles and other cars moving at what was easily 90mph. As I lurched between being awake and asleep I saw those cars lift off. A police car roared past us, spraying water like a firehose, and I snapped awake when I saw that car rise up off the road. Why were we going the wrong way? Was someone

As summer arrives in New York the noise pollution of the Mr. Softee ice cream truck re-asserts itself after its winter absence.

In alternating 20-minute segments I watched two movies which oddly complemented each other. Both were documentaries. One was about reaching for the skies, the other was about plunging from them.

Reading old magazines with rubber gloves and a dust mask on my face.

The first time I ever said the f-word was in the 2nd grade. I don’t know where I had heard the expression, but I probably learned it from school. My parents cursed like Tom Sawyer but I never heard them use the f-word until adulthood, and even then I found it kind of shocking to hear either parent say it.

I associate the sackbut with the didgeridoo because I learned of the two instruments’ existences at about the same time. The sackbut I further associated with Garrison Keillor, who once wrote that every sackbut player he’d ever known thought the world owed them a goddam living.

Bookbinding used to seem like it would be enjoyable and even useful but with digitization this little joy could be on the brink of deprecated uselessness. Re-assembling a tattered book for future readers seems improvident when zapping said books to digital image form could allow not just for reading of the content but fuller searchability and (of course) ad revenue for whichever of the searchies gets to it first.

Like anything digital, the success of a digital piano depends first on its convenience, then its quality. Digital photography overwhelmed film photography in large part for its convenience, this in the same way that digital audio formats will make plastic compact discs obsolete, and this after said CDs made LP records a relic. Convenience always came first in these trends.

I swam in the Mekong River in Laos but that was different from swimming laps at a pool. There were others around to guide me and, in the Mekong where we swam, one did not just swim shark-bait style. It was more like a big hot tub, and while it was deep enough that one could drown it was too shallow and too rugged for the type of swimming one does in pools.

The word “krill” represented one of my great vocabulary triumphs.
I was something of a wordsmith in high school. My writing vocabulary went beyond mere SAT words and rambled into obsolescence and occasional incomprehensibility.

Something I heard on the radio yesterday has lingered in my mind. A call-in discussion about printers prompted a college professor to call in and say that she requires her students to have printers in their dorm rooms — as opposed to using a printer at the school’s computing center or at a copy shop.

I remember Diana. A college cutie of mixed heritage, she claimed not to know all the nations and cultures represented in her DNA. She knew she had Cherokee, Japanese, and Mediterranean in her bloods, but other nationalities were mostly speculation.

As a child I had fantasies of myself as a politician or self-appointed activist hunting for micro-issues, starved for unique problems to solve. Matters of excess seemed particularly easy prey for me, and I find that today I still see conspicuous wealth and concentrated abundance as targets of derision.

When I lived in Florida I drove long, long miles, directionless and free, with limited regard to the time spent or the destination. I never memorized the roads, just as I have never (in 19 years ofliving in New York) memorized Central Park or even the seemingly obvious numbered street names of midtown Manhattan.

To unite, as timbers, by means of tenons or dowels in the edges or faces.    

Abounding with a thick colored juice.    

The part of a hammerhead opposite the flat striking surface (may have various shapes).    

Close or literal in translation.

A faint sketch; an imperfect representation of a thing.    

Deprive of by deceit.    

Reproach mingled with contempt or disdain.    

To dry by exposing to smoke; to expose to smoke.    

Knowledge of wine, scientific or practical.    

A small inexpensive mass-produced article.

Trifling; vain; futile; insignificant.    

A group of artists and writers with real or pretended artistic or intellectual aspirations and usually an unconventional life style

An artificial language for international use that rejects all existing words and is based instead on an abstract analysis of ideas

To gather or wind into a ball; to collect into a spherical form or mass, as threads.

Habitually idle or indisposed to labor; lazy; listless; sluggish; indulging in ease; applied to persons. Indolent

A person who blathers.

So as to throw into ecstasy.

Praise; panegyric; commendation. Men are quite as willing to receive as to bestow encomiums.

A kind of food made by boiling meat in water; broth. This mixture is usually called in America, broth or soup, but not porridge. With us, porridge is a mixture of meal or flour, boiled with water. Perhaps this distinction is not always observed.

To tread on; to trample under foot.

Marked by up-to-dateness in dress and manners

To stuff; to crowd; to fill full; hence, to make hot and close; to render stifling.

An explanation or definition of an obscure word in a text.

A conspicuously wealthy person, esp. one returned from India with a fortune.

The study or mapping of the moon.

A girl with an attractive bust who wears tight sweaters.

Reading materials (documents, written information) that you must read and deal with but that you think are extremely boring.

To practice plunder; to commit robbery. In time of war, rapacious men are let loose to spoliate on commerce.

American poet (born in Africa) who was the first recognized Black writer in America (1753-1784)

Technical jargon from computing and other high-tech subjects

Desirous or eager to imitate, equal or excel another; desirous of like excellence with another.    

A grotesque black doll.    

To walk with a lofty proud gait, often in an attempt to impress others.    

An early form of bicycle propelled by pressure from the rider’s feet on the ground

The fleshy excrescence that grows under the throat of a cock or turkey, or a like substance on a fish.    

A dolt who is a habitual bungler.    

Of or pertaining to funerals; funereal.    

To be in disorder.

Antaeus, Atlas, Briareus, Brobdingnagian, Charles Atlas, Cyclops, Goliath, Hercules, Polyphemus, Samson, Superman, Tarzan, Titan, bruiser, bully, bullyboy, colossus, giant, goon, gorilla, gun, gunsel, hatchet man, hellion, holy terror, hood, hoodlum, hooligan, mug, mugger, plug-ugly, powerhouse, rodman, roughneck, stalwart, strong man, strong-arm man, terror, the mighty, the strong, torpedo, tough, tough guy, tower of strength, trigger […]

A youth between boy and man; an awkward, gawky young fellow.

A small bubble in glass or on water.

Work of little or no value done merely to look busy.

A swindler, welsher, or cheat. A worthless thing; a failure.

Divination by means of small bones or dice.    

A form of decoration made by scratching through wet plaster on a wall or through slip on ceramic ware, showing a different-coloured under-surface.    

In truth; in fact; certainly; very well.    

A laborer who is obliged to do menial work.    

Any active agent who appears unexpectedly to solve an insoluble difficulty.    

A stupid or insignificant fellow; a fool; a simpleton.

Excrements; as, the dejecta of the sick.    

In language teaching, a cloze test is a test in which words are removed from a text and replaced with spaces. The task of the learner is to fill each space with the missing word or a suitable word.    

Forked; branching like the prongs of a fork.    

If I remember correctly it was not “Saturday Night Live” but a relatively short-lived and mostly forgotten late night show called “Fridays” where I saw a comedy sketch that made a lasting impression on me.

I have had reasonably perfect teeth since forever. I can not say that any more in polite company

A lie, or sham story: also a single stroke on a drum. To flam; to hum, to amuse, to deceive. Flim flams; idle stories.

The quality of lacking any predictable order or plan.

A person convicted of a misdemeanour or guilty of misconduct.

Mildness and suavity of manners; courtesy; civility; good breeding. Wellbred people are characterized by comity of manners.

The minute and often invisible particles which exhale from most, if not all terrestrial bodies, such as the odor or smell of plants, and the noxious exhalations from diseased bodies or putrefying animal or vegetable substances.

Infectious particles or germs floating in the air; air made noxious by the presence of such particles or germs; noxious effluvia; malaria.

Anciently a deed, which, requiring a counterpart, was engrossed twice on the same piece of parchment, with a space between, in which was written chirograph, through which the parchment was cut, and one part given to each party. It answered to what is now called a charter-party.

Rigidly formal; "a starchy manner"; "the letter was stiff and formal"; "his prose has a buckram quality"

To thicken, as fluids; to bring to greater consistence by evaporating the thinner parts, etc.

In beasts, the same as afterbirth in women.  

Lonely; solitary; melancholy.

A large wagon with broad wheels and an arched canvas top; used by the United States pioneers to cross the prairies in the 19th century.

To make a senseless noise.

One of the followers of Quesnay of France, who, in the 18th century, founded a system of political economy based upon the supremacy of natural order.  

Rank; offensive to the smell; as a rank and fulsome smell.

Leathery.  

The hair of a polecat. A brush made from this or similar hair.

A sharpshooter (in the French army) .  

A powerful evil jinnee, demon, or monstrous giant.

To get the better of especially by trickery or cunning.

A man who is the lover of a girl or young woman.  

A tumor or excrescence that forms on the inside of a horse’s hough, not far from the elbow; at first like gristle, but afterwards hard and bony.

The buttocks.  

A jar used in ancient Egypt to contain entrails of an embalmed body.

A plausible but imagined memory that fills in gaps in what is remembered.  

A child’s handkerchief tied to the side.

To practice plunder; to commit robbery. In time of war, rapacious men are let loose to spoliate on commerce.