Word Of The Day

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HEEBIE-JEEBIES noun (hee-bee-jee-beez)

noun

1. Slang. a condition of extreme nervousness caused by fear, worry, strain, etc.; the jitters; the willies (usually preceded by the): Just thinking about ghosts gives me the heebie-jeebies.


Quotes

In the sudden swelling of the shadows, the dolls appeared to shift on the shelves, as if preparing to leap to the floor. Their painted eyes--some bright with points of reflected light and some with a fixed inky glare--seemed watchful and intent. I had the heebie-jeebies. Big time.
--*Dean Koontz,*Fear Nothing, 1998

... we enjoy Pixar's Wall-E and Nintendo's Mario, but we get the heeby jeebies from the ultra-realistic faces of The Polar Express or the upcoming Tintin movie.
--*Mark Brown,*"Why Brains Get Creeped Out by Androids," Wired, July 19, 2011



Origin

The American cartoonist William (“Billy”) De Beck (1890-1942) was most famous for his comic strip Take Barney Google, F'rinstance (1919), which became Barney Google and Snuffy Smith in 1934. De Beck is responsible for coining heebie-jeebies, balls of fire, and time’s a-wastin. Heebie-jeebies entered English in the 20th century.

[Altobelli]

I know someone who is a very soft, white maggot (Gozzer)

[alfinyalcabo]

Gozzer

(Sport: Fishing)
Definition

A very soft, white maggot that is the larvae of bluebottle but smaller in size, with a jet black body.

annattogozzer... Is a maggot that has been dyed with a reddish coloured dye and gives the appearance of a yellow colour ..

[Altobelli]

BONCE noun (bons)

noun

1. British Slang. head; skull.


Quotes

There's ... guys with great big bandages round their heads from being hit with blunt and heavy objects or simply falling over lagging and landing on the bonce.
--*J. J. Connolly,*Layer Cake, 2000

Let's face it, Des. Her bonce is going.
--*Martin Amis,*Lionel Asbo: State of England, 2012



Origin

The head or skull sense of bonce perhaps finds its origins in a British term meaning “marble.” It entered English in the 1860s.

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HYPOGEAL adjective (hahy-puh-jee-uh l)

adjective

1. underground; subterranean.


Quotes

When planted, germination is hypogeal and following emergence the plant produces a lax hollow stem which cannot usually climb without support.
--*R. H. M. Langer and G. D. Hill,*Agricultural Plants, 1981

Henry just informed me that I'd better pack you guys extra-heavy fleece jackets because it will be very cold in the hypogeal domain.
--*Christine Lehner,*Absent a Miracle, 2009



Origin

Hypogeal is an uncommon adjective used in biology to describe organisms (e.g., insects, plants) that live underground and in geology for subterranean geological features. The main components of hypogeal are Greek. The Greek preposition and prefix hypό- “under, down, from under” is thoroughly naturalized in English. Formerly words beginning with hypo- were pronounced with a short vowel, as in “hip”; nowadays the prefix rhymes with “high” except for hypocrite and hypocrisy. The second component, -gaios or -geios, is a derivative of the Greek noun gê (dialectically géē, and in poetry gaîa) “earth, the (planet) earth, land, country.” Gê has the combining form geo-, familiar in the English nouns geography (Greek geōgraphÃ*a “description of the earth”) and geometry (Greek geōmetrÃ*a “measurement of the earth”), and, not so obviously, in the personal name George (from Greek geōrgόs, from unattested geoworgόs “farmer”—literally “earth worker”; the combining form -worg(os) is related to English “work.”) Hypogeal entered English in the late 17th century.

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EBULLIENT adjective (ih-buhl yuh nt)

adjective

1. overflowing with fervor, enthusiasm, or excitement; high-spirited: The award winner was in an ebullient mood at the dinner in her honor.

2. bubbling up like a boiling liquid.


Quotes

Howie is ebullient. He bounds up to Alberta to hug her awkwardly.... "You were great!"
--*Marge Piercy,*Braided Lives, 1982

Troy Schumacher, who is one of the company’s most buoyant and ebullient Pucks, told me, “The role is unique in that you are responsible for just about everything! Puck has twenty entrances—the most, I believe, in any ballet—and he is often carrying props! He’s the catalyst for the action, and everything depends on him!”
--*Cynthia Zarin,*"Dreaming with Shakespeare During a Summer of Chaos," The New Yorker, August 24, 2017



Origin

The English adjective ebullient comes from the Latin present participle stem ebullient-, from the verb ēbullīre “to bubble, boil, boil over.” The Latin verb derives from the noun bulla “bubble, knob, stud,” i.e., something that swells up and becomes round. From the Latin noun bulla, English has bull (as in a “papal bull”), bowl (as in the sport), and bulla (a medical term meaning “large vesicle”). The verb ēbullīre has the prefix e-, from ex- “going out or forth, changing condition” (as when water boils) and derives from the simple verb bullīre “to bubble, boil.” Bullīre regularly becomes boillir in Old French (bouillir in modern French), the source of the English verb boil. Ebullient entered English in the late 16th century.

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MUSETTE noun (myoo-zet)

noun

1. a small leather or canvas bag with a shoulder strap, used for carrying personal belongings, food, etc.,while hiking, marching, or the like. Also called musette bag.

2. a French bagpipe of the 17th and early 18th centuries, with several chambers and drones, and with the wind supplied by a bellows rather than a blowpipe.

3. a woodwind instrument similar to but smaller than a shawm.

4. a short musical piece with a drone bass, often forming the middle section of a gavotte.


Quotes

Reaching down the first workman pulled out of his musette a bottle of good red French wine. They had a long drink.
--*Ernest Hemingway,*"French Speed with Movies on the Job," The Toronto Daily Star, May 16, 1923, republished in Dateline: Toronto, 1985

The lieutenant groped into his musette for a pad and scribbled out a pass.
--*Donn Pearce,*Nobody Comes Back, 2005



Origin

There are still some American men who served in the army (if not another branch) during World War II and know what a musette or musette bag is. Musette in the sense “small, lightweight backpack” is an Americanism that first appears in the early 1920s. The word musette comes from French musette “bagpipe” because the shape of the backpack is similar to the sack or bag of the bagpipe. Musette in the sense of bagpipe entered English at the end of the 14th century.

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ATEMPORAL adjective (ey-tem-per-uh l)

adjective

1. free from limitations of time.


Quotes

He seemed to recall--within the memory banks of the body itself--those unconstrained, atemporal afternoons of childhood, twilight playing, parental calls to return home like hooting apes in the suburban gloaming ...
--*Will Self,*Great Apes, 1997


And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer--the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks ...
--*Ursula K. Le Guin,*"The Author of the Acacia Seeds," The Compass Rose, 1982



Origin

The first syllable of the English adjective atemporal “not subject to time, timeless” is formed from an, a-, the Greek prefix of negation, absence, or privation (called in the grammar books the “alpha privative”). The Greek forms derive from a reduced form of Proto-Indo-European ne “not,” the same source as Sanskrit an-, a- (the identity of the Greek and Sanskrit forms is one of the features linking Greek and Sanskrit), the Germanic (English) prefix un- and Latin in- (and its assimilated forms il-, im-, ir-). Atemporal entered English in the 19th century.

[Altobelli]

ENJAMBMENT noun (en-jam-muh nt)

noun

1. Prosody. the running on of the thought from one line, couplet, or stanza to the next without a syntactical break.


Quotes

... enjambment is a word that means that you're wending your way along a line of poetry, and you're walking right out to the very end of the line, way out, and it's all going fine, and you're expecting the syntax to give you a polite tap on the shoulder to wait for a moment.... But instead the syntax pokes at you and says hustle it, pumpkin, keep walking, don't rest. So naturally, because you're stepping out onto nothingness, you fall. You tumble forward, gaaaah, and you end up all discombobulated at the beginning of the next line ...
--*Nicholson Baker,*The Anthologist, 2009

Hip-hop historians call this period the Golden Age (Bradley and DuBois date it from 1985 to 1992), and it produced the kinds of lyrical shifts that are easy to spot in print: extended similes and ambitious use of symbolism; an increased attention to character and ideology; unpredictable internal rhyme schemes; enjambment and uneven line lengths.
--*Kelefa Sanneh,*"Word," The New Yorker, December 6, 2010



Origin

Enjambment is a term in rhetoric and poetry with the same meaning as “run-on (line).” The French noun derives from the verb enjamber “to stride over, encroach,” a derivative of jambe “leg.” Jambe is the normal French development of Late Latin gamba “(horse’s) hoof, leg,” used in a treatise on veterinary medicine of the 5th century. Enjambment entered English in the 19th century.

[Altobelli]

LOGROLLING noun (lawg-roh-ling)

noun

1. U.S. Politics. the exchange of support or favors, especially by legislators for mutual political gain as by voting for each other's bills.

2. cronyism or mutual favoritism among writers, editors, or critics, as in the form of reciprocal flattering reviews; back scratching.

3. the action of rolling a log or logs to a particular place.

4. the action of rotating a log rapidly in the water by treading upon it, especially as a competitive sport; birling.


Quotes

While spending on earmarks is a tiny portion of the budget, critics like Mr. Flake and Mr. Boehner said they played an insidious role in pushing up federal spending through what is known in legislative terms as logrolling.
--*Carl Hulse,*"How Budget Battles Go Without the Earmarks," New York Times, February 26, 2011


They objected to a lot about Senator Manville. Pork-barreling. Logrolling. One rule for the rich. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
--*David Rain,*The Heat of the Sun, 2012



Origin

Logrolling is an Americanism first recorded at the end of the 18th century and meant exactly what it says: rolling logs away from land being cleared, or a meeting of neighbors to perform the clearance. In the early 19th century, logrolling acquired its distasteful political sense of swapping or trading votes, and by the mid-19th century it also referred to the “literary” practice of authors and reviewers engaging in mutual puffery.