Word Of The Day

[The Bedlington Terrier]

Alf on the beer...CACOEPYifed!

[Altobelli]

Alf on the beer...CACOEPYifed!

Our alf likes his drink BT

[Altobelli]

MAFFICK verb (maf-ik)

verb

1. British. to celebrate with extravagant public demonstrations.


Quotes

Have a procession a week / Stopping the workaday traffic; / Victories, won by a squeak, / Give you excuse to maffick.
--*"The Age of Display," Current Literature, May, 1903

It is evidence of his freedom from pedantry that Doctor Bradley seemed to be willing to accept to buttle, from butler, to bant from Banting, the name of the Englishman who proposed a new method for reducing fat, and to maffick--that is, to indulge in a riotous demonstration in the street, like that which took place in London in 1900 when there came the glad news of the relief of Mafeking, long beleaguered by the Boers.
--*Brander Matthews,*"The Latest Novelties in Language," Harper's Magazine, June–November, 1920



Origin

Maffick is a humorous back formation from Mafeking, a city in South Africa that was besieged by the British for about nine months in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), as if mafeking were a gerund or participle as making is to the verb make. The lifting of the siege in May 1900, prompted exaggerated celebration in Britain. The Victorian and Edwardian ages are well known for their puns, e.g., “I say, Bonds, do you like Kipling?” “I don’t know, French, I’ve never ‘kippled.’” Maffick entered English in the early 20th century.

[Altobelli]

DOUBLETHINK noun (duhb-uh-l-thingk)

noun

1. the acceptance of two contradictory ideas or beliefs at the same time.



Quotes

Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies ...
--*George Orwell,*Nine**** Eighty-four, 1949

It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms.
--*Jia Tolentino,*"The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death," The New Yorker, March 22, 2017



Origin

Doublesthink comes from George Orwell’s novel Nine**** Eighty-four (also 1984), published in 1949. It appears alongside Orwell’s other neologisms thoughtcrime and duckspeak. Doublethink, has a more sinister meaning than the relatively innocuous doubletalk, which appeared in the late 1930s and referred at first to the kind of speech that Casey Stengel (1891–1975) was famous for, and later to jargon or pompous language. Doublethink entered English in the second half of the 20th century.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

I can imagine a proper old Maffick in Burnley next May when we win the FA Cup!

[Altobelli]

BEATINEST adjective (beet-n-ist)

adjective

1. South Midland and Southern U.S. most remarkable or unusual: This is the beatinest town I ever did see.


Quotes

"I'll introduce you to the whole team." "Dang!" the boy exclaimed, tugging his cap lower on his head. "That'll be the beatinest! ... "
--*Darryl Brock,*Two in the Field, 2002

“My land sakes alive, if it isn’t the beatinest.”
--*E. J. Craine,*The Air Mystery of Isle La Motte, 1930



Origin

Beatinest may be best or only known nowadays to readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1874). In chapter 13 Huck tells a tall story worthy of Odysseus to the watchman of a ferry boat, who reacts to Huck’s tale of woe with, "My George! It's the beatenest thing I ever struck. And then what did you all do?" Beatinest actually predates the book by about a quarter century, but as one would guess, it is 19th-century country dialect.

[SERVERNOTRESPONDING]

Rottack

NOUN

Scottish
rare
Something decayed or musty; (figurative) rubbish, nonsense. (Like the rubbish Corbyn spouts)
Origin
Late 15th century; earliest use found in St. Erkenwald. Probably from either rot or rot + -ock.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

I proudly present to you all, the Queen of Rottack...

Attachment 5108

[SERVERNOTRESPONDING]

The secret face behind Jeremy Corbyn is revealed !!!

[Altobelli]

PARALLAX noun (par-uh-laks)

noun

1. the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.
2. Astronomy. the apparent angular displacement of a celestial body due to its being observed from the surface instead of from the center of the earth (diurnal parallax or geocentric parallax) or due to its being observed from the earth instead of from the sun (annual parallax or heliocentric parallax). Compare parallactic ellipse.

3. the difference between the view of an object as seen through the picture-taking lens of a camera and the view as seen through a separate viewfinder.

4. an apparent change in the position of cross hairs as viewed through a telescope, when the focusing is imperfect.
5. Digital Technology. a 3D effect observed when images and other elements in the foreground of a screen move at a different rate than those in the background (often used attributively): parallax scrolling; Does this phone have parallax?


Quotes

It is hard for a man walking rapidly along like Arthur not to mistake the parallax of objects in the different planes for the motion of a person in the shadows ...
--*Paul Goodman,*The Empire City: A Novel of New York City, 1959

Voices ... come from everywhere and nowhere, sometimes catching up with lips, sometimes floating in the general parallax that sitting near the sides of the Penthouse Theater (where the movie opened yesterday) brings on.
--*Renata Adler,*"Petula Clark and Fred Asaire Head Cast: 2 Other Movies Begin Local Engagements," New York Times, October 10, 1968



Origin

Parallax drifts into Mr. Leopold Bloom’s head about 1:00 in the afternoon as he is walking to Davy Byrne’s pub for lunch (Episode 8, “Lestrygonians,” of Ulysses), and he attempts a partial etymology: “Parallax…Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.” Parallel and parallax both come from the same Greek elements: the preposition and combining form pará- “beside, from beside” and the adjective állos “other.” Parállēlos “beside one another, side by side” comes from pará- and the reciprocal pronoun allḗlōn “each other,” a derivative of állos. The second element of parállaxis is from another derivative of állos, the verb allássein (one of whose inflectional stems is allag-) “to make other, change.” Both parállēlos and parállaxis are most common in Hellenistic Greek technical and scientific works, e.g., in medicine, geometry, cartography, and astronomy. Parallax entered English in the 16th century.