ROBUST discussion

Ineffable.

Too [something] for words.

Worse than unspeakable!

Please add your own rare, wonderful or obscure WORD OF THE DAY.

Thanks to Claudine for suggesting the thread.

Ubiquitous


Present, appearing, or found everywhere: "his ubiquitous influence".

Eish! A South African slang word which has many meanings. When used with an amazed expression it could mean Wow! When said with some pain it could be an expression of sympathy for whatever happened. When said in anger it could mean you are expressing disgust. We're complicated.

Pronounced AY (as in mAY)- SH.

Vicissitude

A change of circumstance: 'She is wonderfully adept at dealing with the vicissitudes of life'.

Actually, we could make great hay out of a sub-thread just borrowing from most any post of Andre's.

Sharon wrote: "Actually, we could make great hay out of a sub-thread just borrowing from most any post of Andre's."

I'm pretty sure he makes up 95% of his words.

95%? I think you're being generous!

Katie wrote: "95%? I think you're being generous!"

LOL ... That was a typo. I was thinking 99.5%.

I'm death on neologisms. Every word I use has been in a good dictionary since before I was born, except one.

The single word I own up to creating is "lindavan", as in a person's name, a word I coined to describe a writer's friend at court.

I love making up words. Sometimes somebody has to. The etymology of words has always fascinated me. Many good words now in good dictionaries are not that ancient.

A word I would love to coin but have never come up with is the equivalent of he/she. Sometimes 'they' just doesn't cut it...

Shemales Sharon.

Hermaphrodite.

People.

'He/she put the book down'.

'People put the book down'.

None of them cut it...

It's a rod you cut for your own backs. He/she/it and they always cut it for the Fowler brothers, and thus for me, but if you insist on being politically correct and genderless there's always a peep, the peep, and peeps, which at least sound streetsmart.

LOL. Over my dead body will you see that crap in my books, except sarcastically.

Sharon wrote: "'He/she put the book down'.

'People put the book down'."

No, silly. It's: Person put the book down.

LOL, Patricia.

Street smart or not, I would not use peeps unless it were suitable for some dialogue (which is not likely to happen). This is what happens when one posts when he/she is (in this case of course I could use 'they are') tired and on the fly. That is the context within which I would like to see a genderless word. I detest typing in he/she as above, but on the other hand no, the noun 'he' does not represent the entire human race, as became the norm ages ago, and sometimes we just need another one that does.

I use "s/he" in posts but wouldn't ever use it in fiction unless it was for a specific effect.

No, I won't be using peeps either, unless you're imagining a big plug of tobacco in my cheek. But you asked a very specific question, and peeps is would've been a good unswer if it hadn't already moved downmarket.

In generic statements where no individual person is identified, I use he to include both genders, throw in the occasional she to remind laggards that I was a meaningful feminist before they even heard the word (not nonsense like politically correct words making the language ugly), and use they for plurals. If it was a good enough for Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, it's plenty good enough for me, and no one has ever mistaken my meaning, which is what matters.

Patricia wrote: "I use "s/he" in posts but wouldn't ever use it in fiction unless it was for a specific effect."

ditto me

Andre - nah, never mind, too tired to argue any point right now...

Unsavoury

Not my favourite word when applied to food.

Especially when it's a truckle of a certain food...

Truckle

Andre you don't strike me as the kind to truckle!

I don't actually know what truckle means. I goes you mean now-tow. But I found it attached to a round cheese in a black wax covering.

http://dictionary.reference.com/wordo...

Word of the Day Archive
Friday March 18, 2011
Today's Word | Yesterday's Word | Previous Words | Subscribe for Free | Help

truckle \TRUHK-uhl\, intransitive verb:
1. To yield or bend obsequiously to the will of another; to act in a subservient manner.

noun:
1. A small wheel or roller; a caster.

Only where there was a "defiance," a "refusal to truckle," a "distrust of all authority," they believed, would institutions "express human aspirations, not crush them."
-- Pauline Maier, "A More Perfect Union", New York Times, October 31, 1999

The son struggled to be obedient to the conventional, commercial values of the father and, at the same time, to maintain his own playful, creative innocence. This conflict could make him truckle in the face of power.
-- Dr. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, quoted in "Theater Friends Recall Life and Works of Odets," by Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, October 30, 1981

I am convinced that, broadly speaking, the audience must accept the piece on my own terms; that it is fatal to truckle to what one conceives to be popular taste.
-- Sidney Joseph Perelman, quoted in "The Perelman Papers," by Herbert Mitgang, New York Times, March 15, 1981

From Wikipedia: A "truckle" of cheese refers (sic) a cylindrical wheel of cheese, usually taller than it is wide, and sometimes described as barrel-shaped.[1][2] The word is derived from the Latin trochlea, 'wheel, pulley'. Truckles vary greatly in size, from the wax-coated cheeses sold in supermarkets, to 25 kilogram or larger artisanal cheeses.

My golfing buddy bro always buys a truckle of the best artisan aged Gouda cheese I've ever tasted, found in a small town near the city in which he lives in the next Province over, brings me a 'slice' (about 2 kg) for my cupboard, and brings along a smaller slice for us to snack on between rounds...

I picked up some imported Irish Gouda from the PX yesterday. It had the most delicate taste.

A closed-long-ago but fondly-remember department store where I grew up would bring in a massive wheel of cheese once a year. They'd cut from it however much a customer wanted, but mostly people came for the spectacle of the entire shopping experience. Roasting peanuts, grinding coffee beans, popping corn, and baking fattening goodies filled up the place with wonderful aromas. Musicians performed live and there was one of body-distorting fun-house mirrors that had kids laughing and strenuously resisting when parents tried to pull them away from it. That first floor of the store was like a carnival every single day and it was always packed with shoppers. 'Twas a chaotic experience for the senses.

That sounds SOOOO cool. I'm envious

K. A. wrote: "That sounds SOOOO cool. I'm envious"

I just found a video link to a local PBS show about the store. For a brief time when I moved from Chicago back to Ohio, I worked at the store (Tiedtke's) doing advertising. Can't remember how long I was there; it was just a stopping off place while I looked for work with an ad agency. Probably two or three months at most. But long enough that they ordered me to dress up in a fluffy, feathery, highly-padded owl costume and parade around the store one night holding a big sign that said "Follow me to the Moonlight Specials!" My husband trailed along, trying to take photos, but he was laughing so hard it made the camera shake. That's just as well. I wouldn't want that episode to be documented anywhere. In fact, this post will disappear in exactly ten seconds.

Here's the video:

http://www.wgte.org/wgte/item.asp?ite...

I just watched the video (it's long, but still entertaining if you're interested in the what retailing used to be and how alive downtowns could be). About 15:00 in there's a bit about the cheese wheel I mentioned. It weighed 3,200 lbs. according to the video, and would be gone in a couple of days. They had footage showing it.

My wife woke me at eight and asked me what I would like for dinner. I said soda bread and the rest of my truckle of high octane cheddar before you lot snuck in overnight to grab it. Very nice it was too.

You're right, Katie, I don't truckle. I smile agreeably, promise nothing, and do exactly as I've already decided to do.

Thanks for the elucidation, all. I vaguely knew the brownnoser meaning of the word, but it was the cheese meaning that beffled me. Taller than it's wide, eh? The one I have (had) is wider than it is tall, as most cheese rounds are.

Patricia wrote: "K. A. wrote: "That sounds SOOOO cool. I'm envious"

I just found a video link to a local PBS show about the store. For a brief time when I moved from Chicago back to Ohio, I worked at the store (Ti..."

Watching it now, Patricia. Now that's my kind of store. I sure wish we had more like that now. Thanks for sharing this.

WRT "inspirational" preferred elsewhere to "spiritual"...

My memoirs will be aspirational.

"In consumer marketing, an aspirational brand (or product) means a large segment of its exposure audience wishes to own it, but for economical reasons cannot."

(snicker)

Story of my life, making the A/B socio-economic group want what they shouldn't...

When I wrote for an auto manufacturer, the point of their advertising was not to sell the product, but rather to reassure the purchaser he'd made a good investment in a ridiculously priced product.

Stupendous - I find myself using this word often these days when referring to anything that is classified as an advertisement for anything. Some days those advertisements have nothing to do with the actual product.

I don't use fancy words, and even the meanings of some simple words are not what I thought they were. Example: for the longest time I thought volatile meant explosive. I've relied on context too often without bothering to look up the official meanings of words. But we have the master wordsmith among us: Andre. He uses words, fancy and plain, and more often than I'll ever admit to him, he does it beautifully.

Yes he does indeed.

I use dude a lot. For anything and everything. Simply because it makes me sound like a 12 year old boy keen on playing with his Xbox all day. It especially irritates my sister. She keeps telling me to act my age (almost 42) but what's the fun in that?

If I acted my age, I'd be dead.

I don't think of words as fancy or plain. I think of them as right or wrong for a particular task. For almost everything you may ever want to say, there is only one word that stands head and shoulders above all others to express that idea.

That's true, Andre, and you seem to find them on the fly...

"If I acted my age, I'd be dead".

Patricia uses one-liners like Andre uses words...

I don't use fancy words either, but when I began writing books, my dd said, Mom, you're not going to use big words in your books, are you? ... It's all perspective...

Patricia wrote: "If I acted my age, I'd be dead."



Okay, Patricia, I am laughing so hard I nearly feel off my chair. I sure am glad I came to Goodreads this morning; too bad I have to go to school but then it's a good thing I have a job I love.

Sharon said - It's all perspective.

Yup. That sure is true. I often think that authors who chuck a dictionary at a screen or page and hope it works are bad writers or writers trying to impress.

Patricia thanks for the laugh! Who wrote this line btw - my favourite line in Prettiest Feathers - I want to see her fully alive before I make her fully dead. Just love the simplicity.

You know, that's one of the lines that could have been either one of us writing. I suspect it was my line because I'm the one who came up with the idea of a serial killer coming across a victim who actually wanted to die. I thought it'd be interesting to see how he'd handle that challenge, and I figured he'd have to bring her to life to make the killing satisfying. I suspect it was in the proposal I wrote for Philpin and he used it. I can't swear to it, though. Since I did the editing on that book, there's bits and pieces of my work throughout his chapters. And he wrote parts of my chapters (especially whenever violence was involved!).

This might interest you now that you've read the book: That chapter where the victim is killed started out as two separate chapters, a Sarah chapter and a Wolf chapter. Philpin's son read the book and suggested that we combine the two chapters into one with the characters taking turns talking and sharing their inner thoughts. He said we could keep the characters separated by having one character shown in italics. We loved that idea and did it. I think it's the best suggestion we ever got in our writing.

The power of an outside perspective...

Truly epic decision that one. It brought them together in a way that seperate chapters never could have. That one chapter,for me at least, showed the natural progression of the seperate characters up to that point. The whole time as a reader you knew it was leading up to her death, where the two of them merge into a union of killer and victim. It's like coming across a sex scene done very tastefully in a porn book, very well done. A true gem. I actually wanted to put something similar in my review on Amazon but one has to be so careful there with word usage and offending someone to the extent of having your review pulled.

Amazon is the lowest common denominator of the nanny state.

Oh yes, where all the Mother Grundys congregate. I had a complaint lodged against a review of a vampire novel that takes place in Jerusalem at the same time that Jesus starts out his evangelical life and all because I used the words Heathens would enjoy the books too, being one myself. Someone apparently took offence on behalf of atheists.