Roofing contracter - I used a recommendation from a friend.
soupcon
One of those words you read but never use because you don’t know how to pronounce them. Well, I finally found out how to pronounce soup-sawn and I’m dying for a chance to use it. It sounds so Continental! Ooh la la!
Nitpick : that’s soupçon, with a cedilla. Or an ALT+135 if you don’t have it on your keyboard. Otherwise it’d be pronounced “soup-kawn”.
(in case you’re dying to know, in French c is pronounced /s/ in front of an e, i, or y and /k/ in front of o, u and a. Unless it has a cedilla, in which case it’s back to /s/)
All of the major online dictionaries have pronunciation buttons. I use them to attack some of the familial artifacts inherit in my ethnic group.
I always thought the “p” was silent.
Thank 'ee!
Best wishes,
hh
The only new word I learned this week was bustle, which I had to look up while reading “Venus plus X”. A character travels to the future and tries to figure out the wardrobe options. He ends up putting on a hat that is later revealed to be intended to be a bustle (something that makes the butt area of clothing look fuller).
Cromulent. Consistent in a positive matter. This thread embiggens me.
Pareidolia. It is the psychological phenomenon where vague and random stimuli are perceived as meaningful, like seeing faces in the clouds, or the man in the moon, or hearing words in reversed records.
And Mumpsimus - a view stubbornly held even when shown to be wrong (or in some contexts a person holding such a view.)
Paraprosdokian.
Everyday I stumble across a few new words, but today it was a paraprosdokian that caught my eye.
Good word! And, of course, now I keep noticing them. A brilliant example I just saw was one of Czarcasm’s posts.
Tumbarumba:
Form of a word made by inserting an intensifier in between syllables of a word. eg. abso-f*cking-lutely.
I try to visit http://worldwidewords.org/ on a weekly basis. It’s a good source of words, but slanted toward British usage.
Thanks. I wonder what else is in the biz-czarcasms of his mind?
What if ya got one of them bustles in yer hedgerow? Huh?
Just this week I learned that pneumonoultramicrospopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word in an English dictionary.
I haven’t learned how to spell it yet, and probably never will be able, but as I looked it up I also learned that it is not necessarily our longest word. It depends on what definition of word one is using. They all appear to be medical words.
Whatsa matter with those guys anyway.?
Then you know your stairway lies on the whispering wind. Duh.
I don’t think medical or chemical words should count, since their length is potentially indefinite. For instance, given the agglutinative structure of organic chemical nomenclature, morphemes would continuously be added to a word as groups were added to the compound.
Yeah.