Today’s word is mentation.
[I]
n : the process of thinking (especially thinking carefully);
: mental activity <unconscious mentation>
Mental activity; thinking: “The heartless hip analysis of crime is… a part of my life and my mentation” (Scott Turow).
[/I]
the above is from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=mentation
A long unicycle ride always clears my head and improves my mentation.
Quiet solitude
Rain pattering on the roof –
Time for mentation
(I wrote that Haiku)
Re: Gallery of Vocabulary Words
It would be a great idea if every new word is exemplified in a haiku.
Klaas Bil
I like dictionary.com’s word of the day e-mail list. Hopefully it’ll help my vocabulary score when I take the GRE.
I personally use m-w.com’s Word of the Day e-mail, but sometimes they use really weird words that I swear they made up, which they can do because they’re Merriam Webster.
exiguous
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=exiguous <— this thing talks
[I]
adj : extremely scanty; “an exiguous budget”
: excessively scanty : INADEQUATE <wrest an exiguous existence from the land> <exiguous evidence>
[/I]
Friends get together
Exiguous mentation –
Dull conversation
(I wrote that Haiku)
Ha, ha! I searched for a word to describe our scant number of vocabulary words. Then, inspiration struck, I put the first two vocabulary words together, and another haiku was born.
A fun word I learned yesterday:
fungible \FUN-juh-bul, adjective:
i like dotard.
when i first read it i thought it was do-tard.
but later i found out it was dot-ard
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about! What a great word!
Um, I think you have to either use it in a sentence or write a haiku.
How about this hiaku ( 5-5-2) instead
with an ass so fine
how can you expect me
to work
the place I got the word is a book I’m reading by Chris Leo called White Pigeons. The context isnt really forum appropriate but I do highly recomend the book.
Contrapuntally - as a counterpoint
now that’s a word!
Today’s word is
epenthesis \ih-PEN-thuh-siss\ noun
the insertion or development of a sound or letter in the body of a word
Professor Seeles explained that epenthesis is the process of adding an extra sound or syllable to a word, as when a child adds a “b” to “family” and says “FAM-blee.”
The epenthesis
caused by his poor speaking skills
made him say ‘shit.’ HA!
(I wrote that Haiku)
Re: Gallery of Vocabulary Words
Your haiku is nice
Is it just a vehicle
for your newest word?
Todays word is unisycochodriac. n. ` ’ a person who is addicted to anything unicycle /
Seriously:
today’s m-w.com word of the day is:
whirligig \WER-lih-ghig\ noun
*1 : a child’s toy having a whirling motion
2 : merry-go-round
3 a : one that continuously whirls, moves, or changes b : a whirling or circling course (as of events)
The more he earned the more he spent, and Sam felt like he was trapped in a never-ending whirligig of debt.
Haiku:
What a stupid word.
who’d really use ‘whirligig’
in conversation?
Raymond Bradbury
in “Dandelion Wine”, page
one seventy three.
I was reading an article in magazine called The Oxford American that contained these two words which I had to look up:
bibulous (n):
given to or marked by convivial drinking
absquatulate (v):
to depart in a hurry
See, I knew that unicyclists could come up with better words than a dictionary web site’s word-of-the-day.
i want the origins of the word
i can see a shared root between imbibe and bibulous
but absquatulate?
shared roots with abscond?
From World Wide Words:
A writer in the New Orleans Weekly Picayune in December 1839 noted that the origin of the word lay in squat, to which had been added the Latin ab– (from abscond), meaning “off, away”, and the verb ending –ulate (borrowed from words like perambulate), so making a word meaning to get up and depart quickly. Or, as a writer in the old Vanity Fair magazine in 1875 elaborated: “They dusted, vamosed the ranch, made tracks, cut dirt, hoed it out of there”.
Klaas Bil
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
Etymology: Mock-Latinate formation, purporting to mean “to go off and squat
elsewhere”
Note: The vibrant energy of American English sometimes appears in the use of
Latin affixes to create jocular pseudo-Latin “learned” words. Midland
absquatulate has a prefix ab-, “away from,” and a suffix -ate, “to act
upon in a specified manner,” affixed to a nonexistent base form -squatul-,
probably suggested by squat. Another such coinage is Northern busticate,
which joins bust with -icate by analogy with verbs like medicate. Southern
argufy joins argue to a redundant -fy, “to make, cause to become.” These
creations are largely confined to regions of the United States where the
19th-century love for Latinate words and expressions is still manifest.
For example, Appalachian speech is characterized by the frequent use of
words such as recollect, aggravate, and oblige.