Once again, in lieu of an OED, try Etymonline.
motley
Thanks for maybe the best (and also my favourite) sentence I’ve read so far at SDMB.
I get really contumely at the word “remiss”.
Really? Anyone here seriously uses that word, other than, say, being pissed at your lawyer?
I can understand the “miss” part, suggesting missing, suggesting negligence. But that bothersome “re” prefix: which usually means “again” or “repeat”, so…to “miss again”? to be “negligent again”?
Get “remiss” the fuck outa my face.
I’ll bet nobody here uses “tremendous” to mean a large quantity. Then again I wouldn’t use it for its other definition.
XD
Jejune - oh come on.
That doesn’t sound like it means anything, other than…ok I’m still stumped.
I can see this definition of fulsome: “of large size or quantity; generous or abundant” having way more traction than its other (and possibly original?) definition: “complimentary or flattering to an excessive degree”. The “ful” prefix definitely suggests fullness and quantity, but still…I have vague memories of ages ago coming across the phrase “fulsome breasts” and instantly thinking, what - the breasts are being unctuous and fawning? To who? And how?
Cool! That’s a new one to me.
Always thought that too, sounding just as you described.
nonplussed
Vermillion. It means a color sort of like a underripe lemon. It doesn’t? A kind of reddish orange? Really? Even as I type this I have to try to keep that one straight in my mind.
Spelled that way, it’s usually a city in South Dakota. ‘Vermilion’ is the usual way to spell the bright shade of red that word most often refers to.
Pulchritudinous is the one I came here to mention! It sounds like something that has putrified!
Close. Pooping.
I must have been about seven, and learning the Ten Commandments in preparation for First Confession and First Holy Communion. My older brother had been bossing me around, just as though he was an adult with the implied authority to monitor and correct thhe behavior of little kids such as me (he was not yet nine).
So I accused him of adultery (which I presumed meant “pretending to be an adult when you’re really not”).
Nutria - sounds like it should be a good-for-you fruit
Cromulent - sounds like something you should eat with butter and jam at tea time.
noisesome…noisy?
nope.
stinky.
Nobody’s mentioned sweetbread? As Ogden Nash put it:
This sweetbread gazing up at me
Is not what it purports to be
Says Webster’s in one paragraph
“It is the pancreas of a calf.”
Since it’s neither sweet nor bread
I think I’ll take a bun instead.
Palendrome sounds like it should be a prequel to “Videodrome”, maybe shot by Bava or Argento.
Which is why the guy who asked the genie to “make me a 12 inch penis” didn’t get what he asked for.
Disingenuous. I always have to do the linguistic algebra, to back-form what “genuous” seems to mean, and then cancel out the double negative “not not genuous”, and then remember by a rule of thumb that it means the opposite of “genuine”.
I used to like crapulous because I thought it meant crappy (“ok that’s just plain crapulous, right?”) but when I found out it meant drunk/hungover it lost its appeal for me.
Interesting how restive means the opposite of rest - not quite (almost!) getting in autoantonym territory.
Rectilinear. Guess why.
Crepuscular.
Beautiful time of day. Really unattractive word.
Syphilis is the opposite of crepuscular in that it sounds beautiful in a poetically sibilant way, yet has a really unattractive meaning.
A former prof, the poet Robin Skelton, pointed that out to us in his final year of teaching.
If you’re asked to introduce some levity, it sounds like it means to get serious.
In fact, it means to get silly.