SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR was beautifully written and a delight for a word lover like me. One new word for me: Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.

Ambisinister - Clumbsy or unskilled with both hands.

Andres wrote: "Ambisinister - Clumbsy or unskilled with both hands."

Brilliant :D (problematically right-hand-biased etymology aside).

I would've likely assumed something along the lines of 'hopelessly evil'.

Lout which means aggressive man or boy I looked it up on google.

I must be old - I knew what lout meant

I never thought about that, Jemina! Ambidextrous means skilled with both hands, but it literally means two right hands. There’s a saying, “He’s got 2 left feet” meaning he’s clumsy. But that and calling people ambisinister (clumsy with both hands/feet) is probably not PC or sensitive to left handed/footed people, which is, of course perfectly natural.

I’m in your old folks camp, Chessie!

CBRetriever wrote: "I must be old - I knew what lout meant"

Oh goodness, if we ever start measuring age by the words we know... (!)
Tangent: (view spoiler)[It's interesting to notice though how generation factors into which words we encounter. (It seems to me perhaps moreso in spoken vocabulary?) Out of curiosity, I checked Ngram, and although some words, like let's say... abnegation or groovy have a distinct peak, lout doesn't seem to have the same dramatic curve. (hide spoiler)]

As much as a love sonorous and extravagant descriptors, I really get excited learning everyday words for tangible things. Especially when it's something commonplace, but simply never realized it had a name. A couple recent ones:

stale - a live bird used as a lure used in falconry, live bait
culvert - a drainpipe or tunnel that allows water to pass under a road

lout was used in 50-70s romance novels, gothic romances, mysteries etc quite a bit

and I never used groovy even though I was part of the generation that supposedly used it. I can't believe it had a bump in the 2000's - perhaps those Michael Myers movies bumped it? But no, that site looks like it just uses books, specifically Google books, for it's charts.

Melissa wrote: "As much as a love sonorous and extravagant descriptors, I really get excited learning everyday words for tangible things. Especially when it's something commonplace, but simply never realized it ha..."

Interestingly, culvert is in common use here. In fact, we have one just below our house, which allows the creek to run under the road! (My friend's dog likes to run through it when she's being naughty. This possibly makes more sense when you realise that in Australia, many creeks only run occasionally.)

By coincidence, someone used the word 'culvert' to me yesterday for the first time in years.
The same with 'lout', like CBRetriever states, it was quite common in my younger days, often associated with football hooligans in the UK during the 70s when such behaviour was common at soccer matches. The term 'lager lout' was also common in the media.

I must be old, too, because lout has been around for eons!

Leonie wrote: "Interestingly, culvert is in common use here. In fact, we have one just below our house, which allows the creek to run under the road!."

I've never heard a culvert called anything but a culvert when it ran under a road in the US. However if you don't live anywhere where they exist, you might not know the word.

However this is one that gets me:

Pavement; any paved area or surface.

North American
the hard surface of a road or street.
British
a sidewalk.

so if you walk on the pavement in the UK, you're safe, but if you walk on it in the US, you'll be run over by a car

CBRetriever wrote: "so if you walk on the pavement in the UK, you're safe, but if you walk on it in the US, you'll be run over by a car."

That's why we drive on parkways and park on drive ways.

Was Palooka ever used in any of those 70/80s romance novels?

I used to tell my brother this when I would slap him in the double chin. I think it sounds funny.

Palooka was way earlier originally - there was a comic strip called Joe Palooka (1930-1984). It's a boxing term so that might be where people heard it.

Melissa wrote:

"stale - a live bird used as a lure used in falconry, live bait"

Oh, now, that's very interesting! I've never come across that meaning of "stale" before, but I have seen it used as a word for "prostitute", and I can't help wondering if that usage is a metaphorical reference to this one (in the sense of the prostitute luring men into sin).

Every once in a while I come across a new word. I tell myself to remember it, but I don't. Sometimes, really interesting ones I post on FB to share with friends. At the moment, I can't remember any specific words.

Judder is a new one. I like it as it combines shaking and vibrating into once action.

Culvert was commonplace where I grew up. Maybe because kids would crawl through them and it resulted in news reports?

Lout I have known for a long time. Most of what people have listed, are new words for me.

I think some words are a reflection of our age and how commonplace they were when we were young; others are the result of what we choose to read. Yet, others are the result of where we have lived and what type of work we are invovled in. Many times I can guess at a word pretty closely if it has a Latin root and it somehow related to the legal field.

Being able to look up a word immediately on kindle does make it more likely that we will learn new words.

"Dipsomaniac". I'd never heard it before, but it means "alcoholic". It was in The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Martin Booth. A fascinating book, and Booth seems to excel at using words not in common usage...

"we don't borrow tomorrow's problem today"
- casteel da 'neer (akofab)

Oh, just now: "beleaguered".

I came up with these from reading Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic - it's a mystery, not SF&F and the words are all Australian terminology

Duco was a trade name assigned to a product line of automotive lacquer developed by the DuPont Company in the 1920s. Under the Duco brand, DuPont introduced the first quick drying multi-color line of nitrocellulose lacquers made especially for the automotive industry. It was also used in paintings by American artist Jackson Pollock.Duco is still used as an Australian colloquialism for automotive paint.

A lamington is an Australian cake made from squares of butter cake or sponge cake coated in an outer layer of chocolate sauce and rolled in desiccated coconut. The thin mixture is absorbed into the outside of the sponge cake and left to set, giving the cake a distinctive texture. A common variation has a layer of cream or strawberry jam between two lamington halves.

rego (Automotive Engineering) slang in Australia for the registration of a motor vehicle

koori = a native Australian

gubba = an offensive name for a white Australian

ambos = Can refer to either the ambulance (vehicle), or one of the staff of the “ambo”; i.e. the ambulance driver

B-double = a lorry or semi-trailor with two trailor

globe = light bulb

I've got a couple

Poltroon- what George Washington called Benedict Arnold when he did his dirty deed.

Booga-Wooga: non-offensive Jamaican term for Female equipment.

Bougie: I've had this one explained a few different ways but the consensus is: pretentious, taking on airs.

Rinrin, I thought that was Hakuna Matata!