My sidekick just found out that “nosh” is a completely different word than “gnash.”
The bad news is, he found this out when I dissolved into helpless laughter when he used “gnash” rather than “nosh” in a piece of writing he submitted to me.
The good news is, he will never make that particular mistake again. Ever.
Well, you know, particularly enthusiastic gastronomites[sup]*[/sup] have been known to gnash when they nosh, so in his defense he wasn’t too far off the mark.
[sub]* I know this is not a word. It should be, though. It has such a lovely ring to it.[/sub]
If it matters, I have a buddy whose grasp of language appears to have arrived through his ears. Either that or whenever he reads a strange new word he just does the Fonix trick and lets it go at that. Anyway, it’s hard to hold back giggling at some of his “fox pauses” as in:
He also had the habit of reducing any verb he couldn’t think of at the moment to “thing.” He’d be in the middle of explaining how to do something and he would say something like, “so when you get to this part you just take and thing this part over there…”
He’s not the only one to “take and (verb)” things. It’s not uncommon to take and ride over to Mama’s house or to take and wash your clothes or to take and watch a football game on TV.
Okay. I’ll make it quick, Oprah is involving her audience in the topic of the day which seems to be Psychic Phenomena and Seeing Through To The Other Side. Before her guest comes out she asks for everybody who ever saw a ghost to stand. Maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of them stand. Then she asks anyone who ever touched a ghost to remain standing. All but maybe 10 sit down. Then she asks if any of them ever had sex with a ghost. One old guy in the back raises his hand and Oprah invites him to the stage. She asks him," What was it like to have sex with a ghost?" The old guy looks at her with a puzzled look and says, “Ghost? I thought you said “goat.””
I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered the word “nosh” outside crossword puzzles, but it shows up there all the time. So I figure it must be one of those words made up by crossword puzzle constructors. (Not that twickster would know anything about that.)