Defenestration: The act of throwing someone or something out of a window.
Okay. Just why do we need a word for that? I was 40 before I encountered it the first time and now that I’m about to turn 42 I’ve seen it exactly twice.
How many other words are out there because someone was bored and decided to create one?
How many of you are reading this because you saw the topic and thought WTF?
It’s useful when you use that term in context, and the person you’re talking to has no idea what the word means, such as in . . .
“I was so mad at my dog humping my new couch, I defenestrated him.”
The look on the face of the other person is usually priceless.
You obviously haven’t studied European History. The Defenestration of Prague started the Thirty Years War, after all.
It’s one of those odd words that sounds like it should mean something closer to ‘removal’ such as ‘The peacock was defenestrated by Hurrican Andrew.’ I’ve known of the word for years but never seemed to have any use for since I wasn’t 100% sure of the meaning.
Thanks for clearing it up!
What else could Max Shreck do to Selina Kyle?
I learned this word (among many others) from Calvin and Hobbes.
sigh
True. I threatened to defenestrate a co-worker yesterday and he didn’t know whether to duck or cross his legs. 
But part of the purpose of this thread was to collect words that have struck other people in the same way… ie. Why is there a word for this…
I still say defensetrate means to remove windows, and to throw someone through the window would be to transfenstrate them.
My senior year English teacher was fond of using this word. In fact, she demonstrated it a couple of times when some of the kids were being stupid with their not paying attention habits. Those kids were lucky it was just books.
I think that it’s one of those words that doesn’t mean what it sounds like. It should mean to remove the windows from a building.
How often do we use the word ‘saponification’? I’m tempted to write some code that makes SOAP calls so I can make a method called ‘saponify’.
Defenestrating someone has a tendency to accomplish that, though.
I’m assuming that at your house you throw slops out the window less frequently than in days of old, obviating the need for both “defenestrate” and the cry “Garday-loo!”
When first viewing ‘Nobody’s Fool’, the word flashed in my head as Paul Newman’s character, Sully, daydreams of defenestrating his former employer.
What would we do with Ermintrude Inch without it?
Precise words such as defenestration make it easier to eschew obfuscation.
Okay, here’s one: uxurious. Hubby ran across this word in a book some years ago, had no clue what it meant, and brought the book to me. I’d never seen the word, either. We had to look in three dictionaries before we found one that had it. It means “to be foolishly infatuated with one’s wife”. Ummm, what?
However, the one purpose that word served, is that for several years afterwards, our test of whether a dictionary was a good one or not was whether it contained the word uxurious. Oh, yeah, it also helped me score a 100% in a Reader’s Digest “Word Power” quiz.
Psst, Olive: your epidermis is showing! :eek: 
I defenestrated my friend’s computer the other day. Now it runs Linux.
The OP’s point remains: does anyone use “defenestrated” unironically? I would never seriously use it. Watterson’s use is tongue-in-cheek at best.
I appreciate accuracy, but “I threw the cat out the window” is in almost all conceivable cases easier to understand and more satisfying to read than “I defenestrated the cat.”