Fred: Super Chicken, what happened to your super vision?
Super Chicken: Fred, if I had supervision, would I be riding in a flying chicken coop with a lion?
And an even longer word for something even less remarkable: antepenultimate.
Third from last.
Formication is also a lot less pleasant than you might expect.
Noisome is another confusing one. You’d think that something that’s noisome would offend your ears rather than your nose.
Intubate means to stick a tube in, but I feel like it should mean to incubate in hot water.
Speaking of enervate, there is also innervate, which means to supply with nerves.
Anyway, matriculate sounds a lot worse than what it means.
No way should a fortnight be two weeks long.
And then there’s the sinister defenestrate which I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know the meaning of.
I might as well mention “enormity” before anyone else does.
Indeed. The words should be uncant, unvoke, and unnounce. Unnounce might cause problems because it sounds too similar to announce.
The Greek anti- might be better. Anticant and antivoke work and antinounce is still somewhat similar to announce but less so than unnounce.
According to the Cambridge online dictionary (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/) and my Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary:
fornicate = to have sex with someone you are not married to. American dictionary indicates same definition (it adds voluntarily" to the definition).
noisome = very unpleasant and offensive. American dictionary indicates “as in an odor,” so it’s not limited to stench.
enormity = very great size or importance. American dictionary indicates same definition in third place.
“Formicate”, not “fornicate”. To crawl like an ant or be swarmed with ants.
onomatopoeia
Bladder infection? Nope. BOOM.
So many people use these words improperly that dictionaries feel obligated to acknowledge these improper usages.
Whoops, should have looked more closely before posting. Interesting that it seems to share the same root as that of formic acid.
Sorry, that doesn’t make much sense to me.
Inflammable should not be.
“Prescriptive” and “descriptive” are extremes along a continuum – there is a big gray area in the middle. Most dictionaries will include definitions that are gaining in popular usage such that they may soon not even be considered “wrong” by the “experts.” Almost every word I’m writing in this post once meant a different set of things than it means today. That’s how language works.
When spoken, particularly on news broadcasts, “the house was razed” sounds like a positive thing, until they add “to the ground.”
“Raised” and “razed” aren’t antonyms, but they have a reasonably opposite feel.
I get incandescent when people say things like that…
‘Spendthrift’ always strikes me as the opposite of what it means.
See entry #12 above