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Daft Definitions


old man emu

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1. Coffee (N.), the person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (V.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade (V.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (Adj.), impotent.

6. Negligent (Adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.

7. Lymph (V.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (N.), olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (N.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (N.), a rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle (N.), a humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude (N.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon (N), a Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster (N.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism (N.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent (N.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

 

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's winners:

 

1. Bozone (N.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

2. Foreploy (V): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

3. Cashtration (N.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

4. Giraffiti (N): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

5. Sarchasm (N): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

6. Inoculatte (V): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

7. Hipatitis (N): Terminal coolness.

8. Osteopornosis (N): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

9. Karmageddon (N): It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

10. Decafalon (N.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

11. Glibido (V): All talk and no action.

12. Dopeler effect (N): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

13. Arachnoleptic fit (N.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

14. Beelzebug (N.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

15. Caterpallor (N.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating. 

16. Ignoranus (N): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

 

With thanks to:  https://carma.newcastle.edu.au/resources/jon/Preprints/Oddments/werds.pdf

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  • 1 year later...

It's been bugging me for the past two hours, but I've got it now. The word is loganamnosis, a mania, or obsession, for trying to recall forgotten words or a specific word.

 

From Greek “logos” - meaning “word or discourse” + Greek “anamnesis” meaning "a calling to mind, remembrance," noun of action from stem of anamimneskein "to remember, to remind (someone) of (something). 

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5 hours ago, old man emu said:

Remember when your kids were learning to write sentences and the teacher taught them to put a "finger space" between each word?

 

I reckon that the Germans were absent that week. Look how they say "when the girl in your arms is the girl in your heart":  Lebensabschnittpartner, 

Almost as bad as the Welsh!

I believe Hebrew didn’t have a space between words.

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 Ancient Hebrew and Arabic, while they did not use spacing, used word dividers partly to compensate in clarity for the lack of vowels. Spaces were not used to separate words in Latin until roughly 600–800 AD. The earliest Greek script also used interpuncts to divide words rather than spacing. An interpunct 〈·〉 is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centred dot used for inter-word separation in ancient Latin script, although this practice was soon displaced by the scriptura continua, Latin for "continuous script". It is a style of writing without spaces or other marks between the words or sentences. The form also lacks punctuation, diacritics, or distinguished letter case. Word spacing was later used by Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, and  the modern space originated with them and then spread to the rest of the world. The actions of these Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes marked the dramatic shift for reading between antiquity and the modern period.

 

Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. "nowhere".

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Latin used to be all together too didn't it?  I have a vague memory of hearing somewhere that it was Julius Caesar who first thought of putting a dot between each word to make it easier to read.  Not sure if that was just because he was already famous.  

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