(no subject)

[devi]

ARGH AM INCAPABLE OF DOING ANY WORK WHATSOEVER.

I need help to get enthused about words. What's your current favourite word and why do you like it?

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

BORK
It just works. 'The Northern Line is borked' is so much more satisfying than 'buggered', 'knackered', or 'subject to minor delays due to a signal failure in the Camden area'.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I've never seen that out of the context of the phrase "oh noes! I borked it!"

[voiceofsauron.livejournal.com]

how about floccinaucinihilipilification.

noun: an act or instance of judging something to be worthless or trivial

If only because I find it hard to believe there is such a word.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

Does it have to be English? I'm quite fond of nani nani - Japanese for blah blah blah.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I don't have a favourite word. They are all my children and I love them equally.

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

Do you mind if I link to this?

In return I offer

fluich - wet in Scots Gaelic
doldrums
tinkunakunakama - until we next meet, in kolla quechua

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Not at all, go ahead!

In Irish 'drenched' is 'fliuch baite' - drowned wet.

[sweet-pickles.livejournal.com]

persnickety -- I just love the way it rolls off your tongue. It tends to have a negative connotation, but honestly I don't see anything wrong with going after and expecting what you like. You only live once (well, in some theories anyway).

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Street.

I tried to think of the ordinariest word around me, Latin but not Latinate, a common monosyllable. Yet it has so much more interest than these articulated juggernauts of words.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

An ordinary word, oh my.

This, from a man who has been driven up Wæcelinga Stræt in a Morris Minor to the very center of England. The word 'street' today is an urban construct: houses, offices, shops in a line by a raised paved strip: the strata - a Roman word which we Saxons and Celts and Norsemen took for the long, long lines through the landscape that the Romans left behind them.

Those streets are the stuff of the dark ages - journeys through forests and abandoned villages, a civilised and literate past falling into disrepair: features in the landscape so old and so familiar that local people had no names for them, naming their own places Stretton, Stratford, Streetly, Street.

Where our distant and darkened ancestors forgot the word 'Roman' they remembered that someone or something laid down these lines in stone: giants, perhaps the Gog and Magog who feature in the landscape you have walked in, all those suspiciously-straight lanes and paths by Fulbourne. As have I, further East down Stoneygate Lane and the Fosse Way, and Kirby Road that goes from the 'street' I grew up in to Mandvessedum that Aethaelstan named for himself, not knowing or caring that his own name, if he could've read it, spelt out the street he lived on.

Those ordinary streets saw legionaries, traders, invaders and barbarians, monks and missionaries, peasants, crusaders, robbers, monellenders, troubadors, roundheads and cavaliers, tarmacadam gangs and navvies as foreign and frightening to the villagers as Tartars; the Stræts of England will outlive us all before they fade completely into the landscape, long after travellers in Morris Minors join the knights and pilgrims on the lanes of fading history.

Sometime I will mention 'Kitchener Streets', street politics from first-hand experience, and show you where your own street comes from. But not today. I think the word 'Street' has worked quite hard enough, for now.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Hurrah!

This reminds me of reading Jill Paton Walsh's novel Torch when I was little. It's set in a (post-apocalyptic yadda yadda) future and I remember being impressed by the shift in perspective where motorways had become - or had reverted to - pilgrims' routes.

[immoline2.livejournal.com]

immolation: to be totally consumed by fire.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Although “cagómetro” looks good (purportedly Spanish for “shitting-themselves-ometer”).

[evilrobotshane.livejournal.com]

Sadly, in the past couple of days I've been chuckling with merriment at "dictaphone", because it's so damn rude.

(see also: igaming, Dickinson, Idaho)

But it's okay, see, because I'm a college student, right.

[specialknives.livejournal.com]

I like short work that ignite dischordantly, burn expansively then extinguish suddenly.

And today I think that chalk, cloth and spark fit the bill.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I bet Warren Ellis's has some actual content, though. Funny how it's the really short ones that get most comments. Like that entry I did that consisted only of four blobs of paint!

(And people are probably sitting there in huge numbers thinking about commenting on his posts but being too shy.)

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

quim

because it just sounds right.

How latin, on a whole, your commenters are. Can't have a favourite-word thing without mentioning that philologist Tolkien's was 'cellar door'.

sesquipedalian.
Ubiquitous.
autodefenestrate,
sesquipedalianagain
Spurtle.
Its a stick used for stirring porridge.
"kumquat"
'Toggle'
Quechua
pernoctation, the act of staying up all night.
INCENDIARY!
Cushion
Spiral
callipygian
palimpset
'skulduggery'
streamlined
Dongle!
“beige”
paneity
"Autonomy"
"punnet"
Perseverate
Phastasmagoria

[philipstorry.livejournal.com]

I don't have a favourite word.

But I am using the word "spangly" quite a bit.

Spangly - new, shiny, cutting edge, intrinsically joy-bringing.

As in: "My new Nintendo DS is quite spangly, actually."

花街

[gm000.livejournal.com]

“SERENITY” HOLIDAYS
You get to go on a Wired-up campervan or Winnebago holiday in deepest China; characters + games master crew. Or across Mongolia. Or through Russia. Or down into Africa. Or on South American mountain roads.
*Kebab & chips please.

DOCKSIDE: NU ORLEANS
What is going on here? Free the Slaves by Slaves Freeing themselves
The Best Darn Present a Man could ever have. Is it in the faces of those men? Flags all a-flutter on the hot July breeze. There are no alien culture left on this planet… It’s been shelled to pieces; Non-progressive, I think you can go anywhere with it. Ways of playin’ a Gumbo. Or, do you actually need nine players and a GM?

Huge craters everywhere. We had used it all up, Bio-Reavers - like genetically engineered ghouls on PAX. Operate in packs like attack dogs, used savage any enemy. Core Idea - An Eastern - Something really deep East that gives these Ley-lo-mo-hum-mah-lao some reproach squeezed together so tight so as that you can’t tell whose race is whose nation; you all indentured workers now.

"Cowboy Bebop" + "Jacob’s Ladder" meets Weapon X via "The Naked Lunch". Cavemen are gonna kick your arse.

A steamboat chuffing down the muddy Mississippi filled with Whores
I’m imagining a whole Islamic planet, but nothing’s ever that simple, as it has always commenced. See right through it. A Clustered Desire - Basically combines a back-packing holiday in the Third World with all the fun of a Live Action roleplaying game/digital fan film. Without a Marine Corps backing your play, in other words. Traditions are cultures are common sense

Wood smoke
Thick on the breeze
Clogs your nose and eyes
Multimedia meant hypermedia
The delights of intelligent female companions
Academy Trained
Flower and willow world
The Devil takes back his own artwork one night
It just looks like a Western
With a Mardi Gras