Weird Word of the Week

“confabulation”

confabulation noun 1 : chatty talk, powwow ; verb confabulate 1 : converse 2 : filling in the gaps of memory by fabrication  ORIGIN: Latin confabulat- ‘chatted together,’ from the verb confabulari, from con- ‘together’ + fabulari, from fabula ‘fable’. (When confabulating with a friend and telling them a true story, who hasn’t added a bit of confabulation to make the fable, er, story, truth.2?)

Words are like animal species: some have gone extinct, some still flourish,  some have yet to take flight from human lips. Take “lexican.”

If a lexicon is the vocabulary of a person or language, a lexican is a container or receptacle where a person keeps his storehouse of words. Your brain is your lexican.

If you have an obscure word that might make a Weird Word of the Week, send it to Brian@BrianMeehl.com and it might just pop out of the lexican!

In the Can

Former Weird Words

argot  noun 1 : the jargon or slang of a particular group 2 : a secret vocabulary used so as not to be understood by others ORIGIN: French, 15^th C., Argot was the name of a crime syndicate of brigands, thieves and killers who spoke together in jargon (Some advocates of our right to bear arms seem to be weaponizing their mouths with the argot of paranoia and hate.)

avuncular   adjective 1 : of or relating to an uncle 2 : kind or friendly toward a younger person, even to the point of indulgence (A rich uncle is one thing, but an avuncular rich uncle is even better!)

bohemian  noun 1 : a person who has informal and unconventional social habits, esp. an artist or writer ORIGIN: from French bohémien ‘gypsy’b/c gypsies were thought to come from Bohemia. (The feminist artist who was dubbed a bohemian, bristled and said, “That’s boshemian.”

brouhaha noun 1 : hubbub, uproar 2 : publicity or attention beyond the merits of its cause, hullabaloo (Brouhahas sometimes result when too much brew meets too much “Ha ha!”)

dunderment noun : a state of mind that combines wonderment and being dumfounded, astonishment and confusion. (He gazed in dunderment at his three-headed friend. Archaic, 19th Century.)

flâneur noun [from the French flâner, to stroll] 1 : someone who saunters through urban landscapes, feasts on the cornucopia of sights, sounds and smells; a connoisseur of the streets. (Sadly, so many flâneurs have traded in their shoes for a keyboard, and prefer to explore the streets and alleys of the internet.)

flume  noun 1 : an inclined channel for conveying water 2 : a deep narrow channel or ravine with a stream running through it. (The ground, the trees, their invisible, insistent flumes engorged with spring.)

fulminate verb 1 : express vehement protest, hurl denunciations or menaces 2 : explode violently or flash like lightning (Fulminate all you want, but you still have to eat your vegetables before you get your funnel cake. OR, Those who fulminate on Facebook often regret it.)

gallimaufry  noun  1 : a confused jumble or medley of things, a hodgepodge 2 : a dish such as minced meat, hash or ragout (The herald of spring is a gallimaufry of birdsong.)

gimcrack, also gimcrackery  noun 1 : something usually characterized by flimsy or tricky ingenuity, 2 : a cheap, showy ornament; adjective  1 : shoddily constructed, contrived (The pol who liked to cry “Malarkey!” deftly switched to “Gimcrackery!”)

imbroglio noun 1 a : an acutely painful or embarrassing misunderstanding b : an intricate or complicated situation 2 : a confused mass, conglomeration (The firefighter who rushed into a Baskin-Robbins to dose the flames, slipped, fell, and found himself in an imbroglio of flavors.)

innumerate  noun  1 : someone who is ignorant when it comes to arithmetic, mathematics or the scientific approach (The Senate, feeling peevish, passed a bill to change the House of Representative to the House of Innumerates.)

jamais vu  noun  1 : the experience of not recognizing a thing, person, place or word you know you know  2 : the phenomena of having something or someone ‘on the tip of the tongue.’ FROM French, meaning “never seen,” and the opposite of déjà vu, “already seen.” (Encountering someone out of context and knowing you know them but not remembering how you know them or who they are is a common jamais vu, also known as ‘jammy view’ and ‘wreck-cognition.’) 

judder  verb  1 : shake and vibrate rapidly with force and/or intensity (When the aircraft you’re flying in begins to judder, only the foolish don’t feel a shudder.) 

kilter noun 1 : good working condition, proper or usual state or condition 2 : a person who makes kilts  ORIGIN: the phrase “out of kilter” probably comes from the pleats in a kilt not being lined up or made properly. (When McDuff saw that his newest kilter was always misaligning his pleats, McDuff’s day was not only out of kilter, he fired the lad and, alas, Kilts R Us was out a kilter.)

lucubrate  verb 1 : to work by night 2 : to discourse learnedly in writing  lucubration  noun 1 : work produced by burning the midnight oil  ORIGIN: from Latin lucubrare to work by lamplight  (Whether Jack – the one who can’t stop jumping over candlesticks – lucubrates or not is in need of a scholar’s lucubration.)

lummox noun 1 : an awkward or ungainly person, in body or mind (When they pursue their first kiss, teenage boys often turn their lips into the Lummox twins.)

ort noun 1 : a morsel left at a meal, scrap (Several orts rested on his plate but the one we couldn’t stop staring at was the ort on his chin!)

peripatetic adjective 1 : traveling from place to place, itinerant  noun 1 : a person who travels from place to place 2 : anyone, esp. an Aristotelian philosopher, who walks to and fro while teaching (Oh Lord, grant me the peripatetic life of perpetual pacing and pontification. That way, with my feet so occupied, they’ll stay firmly out of my mouth.)

peccadillo  noun 1 : a small, relatively unimportant offense or sin (Seinfeld was a master of rolling a picayune peccadillo like nose picking into an imbroglio.) 

protean  adjective  1 : able to change frequently or easily  2 : versatile, able to do many different things ORIGIN Proteus – minor sea god in Greek mythology who had the power of prophecy but would assume different shapes to avoid answering questions. (Once there was a protean prophet name Proteus: his answers were the shifting sands and when the question too tough, he donned a disguise and dashed.)

quail  verb  (also a noun, of course)  1 : to lose courage, to become cowed or fearful (The forty-six quails who claim to be U.S. senators quailed before the NRA, voted against background checks for gun purchases, and will quail again when they face the outrage of the American people.) 

quixotic  adjective 1 : idealistic and utterly impractical; marked by lofty romantic ideas or chivalrous action doomed to fail  ORIGIN: from Don Quixote (Shortly after the new Secretary of Energy, Don Quixote, declared wind turbines to be either the quixotic folly of environmentalists or aliens from another planet, he mounted his horse, hoisted his lance and vowed to topple every one of them.)

serendipity noun 1 : the phenomenon of finding happy, valuable or beneficial things not sought for (Super-storm Sandy severing my Internet connection and putting me on “e-cation” is serene serendipity.)

ORIGIN 1754: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, a fairy tale of Sri Lanka (nee Ceylon, nee Serendip) in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

sesquipedalian  noun and adjective 1 : a user of long words 2 : having many syllables; characterized by long words; ORIGIN: from Latin sesquipedalis meaning a foot and a half long (Sesquipedalis was a wee soldier who stretched himself to full height with sesquipedalian swagger.)