It comes as no surprise to those who know me that I love playing with words. My dictionary is falling apart and decorated with Post-It notes of words that would make great titles, names, or just ones I love the sound or shape of. Looking up anything always takes me longer than I expect because I get very easily side-tracked. I collect weird meanings and derivations of unusual words and phrases.
But it’s not just unusual words that fascinate me. I love common words with unusual
Homophones
In UK English, we have both practice and practise—noun and
And although in UK English we would ask someone to use their best
One that often seems to cause confusion is callous, meaning to be insensitive or to have a cruel disregard for others, and can also mean hardened and thickened, but callus particularly means a thickening, or a hard thickened area, of skin or bark. So, someone might have either callous hands, or callused hands—or even callous, callused hands—but the meanings would be very different!
While androgynous means having both male and female characteristics, androgenous means having only male offspring.
Everyone knows what angry means, but angary is a legal term meaning a belligerent’s right to seize and use neutral or other property, subject to compensation.
Pursue means to harass or persecute—or, in Scots law, to prosecute—and Spenser
Consent might be to agree or comply, but
The meaning of blanket is familiar, but blanquet is a variety of pear, blanquette is a ragout of chicken or veal made with a white sauce, and bloncket means grey. (That bloke Spenser gets everywhere.)
A lake is not only a body of water, but also a small stream or channel, or a reddish pigment made from combining a dye with
While a block is a mass of stone or wood, a bloc is a combination of parties, nations, or other units to achieve a common purpose.
One that always used to confuse me as a kid was the difference between demure, meaning chaste or modest, and demur meaning to
And I know for a fact I’ve accidentally mixed up defuse, to take the fuse out of a bomb or, according to Shakespeare (and what did he know?) to disorder, with diffuse, meaning widely spread or wordy, or also to pour out all around; to scatter.
A clue might be anything that points to the solution to a mystery, but it’s derived from
To be discreet means to be careful of intentionally unobtrusive, but discrete means distinct or unconnected.
Another I keep coming across in my recent reading is
And this is before we get to the words with one spelling but lots of different meanings...
Homonyms
To
Swanky can be used as a compliment for something that’s strikingly fashionable or luxurious, but it can also mean to be overly ostentatious, or using one’s wealth, knowledge or achievements to try to impress others. In Scots, swanky means an active or clever young fellow, one who is tall but
Pernicious means both destructive and highly injurious, but also (according to Milton) swift, ready and prompt.
A tent could be a portable canvas shelter, an embroidery or tapestry frame, a plug or roll of soft material for dilating a wound, or the Scots word for taking heed or notice of.
A rabble could be a disorderly mob, but also a device for stirring molten iron etc in a furnace.
To cleave is
A race is the descendants of a common ancestor, a fixed course or track over which anything runs, the white streak down an animal’s face, a rootstock of ginger (Shakespeare) to raze or
One of my pet hates is the word feisty,
Anyway, there are LOTS of others, so what are your
No Word of the Week this week. I think I’ve used quite enough, don’t you?
Posts
A reader once took us to task for a character getting their "just deserts" - pointing out that deserts should be spelt desserts (as in the dinner course) since it is pronounced that way. So "deserts" has always been a favourite of mine.
ReplyDeleteI have been taken to task for a character having 'another think coming' which is actually correct, although people usually believe it should be 'another thing coming'.
DeleteIt seems to me that your frequent reference to Scottish meanings is unfair, as Scottish is a discrete language, all its own, that only a callous or pernicious person would practise in pubic. Er... public. He said, with a smirkle.
ReplyDeleteBravo, EvKa. You win the prize for most words crammed into a comment!
DeleteAnd I have just been looking up Glaswegian slang in particular. I think I should just consult the expert -- Caro!
DeleteDecades ago, there was someone who had a daily "made-up words" thing in newspapers, that were then collected into a book or two. The one that has always stuck in my memory is 'cinemuck', that sticky, gooey coating on the floors of movie theaters.
ReplyDeleteYeah, what the hell IS that on movie theater floors?
ReplyDeleteLovely article, Zoë! I like the creative process diagram. So accurate!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kwei. It's certainly following my creative process fairly accurately at the moment, lol!
DeleteHi Stan. Oh, those are lovely words, but there's a whole series of them were a letter is either substituted or added. A couple of my favourites are osteoporNosis, which is a degenerate disease, and Testiculate, which is to wave your arms around whilst talking bollocks...
ReplyDeleteHi EvKa. The Uxbridge English Dictionary, which was introduced on a long-running BBC Radio 4 comedy programme, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, has wonderful alternative meanings for words, such as 'cardiology: the study of knitwear'. And Douglas Adams produced The Meaning Of Liff, which gave definitions to place names, such as 'Grimbister: a group of cars on a motorway all travelling at exactly the speed limit because one of them is a police car.'
ReplyDeleteYour guess is as good as mine, Kwei. Possibly popcorn residue, but I wouldn't taste it to find out!
ReplyDeletePS, Stan. Did you notice my ironic and, ahem, deliberate mistake of missing out a letter in the word 'where' while discussing adding extraneous letters to other words? (At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it...)
ReplyDeleteAdd my love to the creative process flow chart.
ReplyDeleteAs for my most memorable run-in with an accidentally misused word, it occurred back in my lawyering days in an affidavit submitted by an adversary in a hotly contentious divorce action when Husband argued that his Wife's claims should not be believed, because "Wife is driven by disparate values I do not share."
In her response, Wife stated how pleased she was to learn that Husband had finally come around to accepting that the parties possessed irreconcilable differences.
VIVA la desperate.
I love that story, Jeff. Reminds me of a friend who was taken to task for a misplaced aphostrophe in a newsletter she sent out, by someone who, having pointed out the error, explained that he was a strict 'grammerian'. She very politely did not point out his typo...
DeleteI have to admit that it sipped passed me.
ReplyDeleteWhat fun, Zoe! Being a terrible speller and a worse proofreader, I have had to develop ways to avoid embarrassment. Often, even when I know the right thing, my dyslexic eyes don’t see the mistake when I am trying to clean up that my text. I learned, for instance, how to keep desert and dessert straight by thinking that of desserts I would gladly have two, but of deserts, one would be enough. Typos are my downfall. I once wrote an article for a magazine in which “now“ appeared we are “not“ should have been. The sentence came out “this service is now available to the general public.“ Thousands and thousands of telephone calls came in to my employer asking for something they did NOT want to give away.
ReplyDeleteOoh dear, that's a small but vital change of letter. I sympathise entirely. They reckon a good trick when proofreading is to completely change the font before you make your final pass over a document. It looks so different that you tend to spot things you might not otherwise have seen.
DeleteQuite!
ReplyDelete