Posted in The crazy calendar, tagged Calendar, Definitions, Fun, Humor, Life, Misc, Random, Rants, Vocabulary, Words, Writing on March 30, 2009| 5 Comments »
The coolness of “mummichog” just wasn’t enough. I guessed “munchkin.” For those who saw the crazy multiple choice question that my malicious calendar asked me this morning, THIS IS THE ANSWER.
“Mummer.” Yeah.
My life is so enlightened, I don’t know how I went so long without knowing the true meaning of the “mummer.” Or that such a thing existed.
Alas, such sweet ignorance is no longer mine. Thank you crazy calendar for cluttering my mind with another word that I will NEVER use.
Posted in The crazy calendar, tagged Books, Calendar, Definitions, Fun, Humor, Knowledge, Life, Vocabulary, Words, Writing on March 29, 2009| 3 Comments »
Sometimes the calendar likes to torment me with a multiple choice question. Today it asked me “Which word can be defined as a masked or costumed merrymaker?”
A. mummer
B. munchkin
C. mummichog
Really. You can probably read it in the picture I took to prove that, yes, it does exist. I’m not making this up.
I’ll tell you now, I got it wrong.
Now you have to guess! No cheating.
The answer is on the back of the calendar, I’ll post it before midnight.
I’ve written about my ridiculous calendar and it’s plethora of mostly useless words before. You can see from this example what I put up with every day! So from now on, I’ll try to post a word from my calendar a few time a week, so you can enjoy, discuss, and rant about the words with me.
Posted in The crazy calendar, tagged Random, Rants, Thoughts, Vocabulary, Words, Writing on March 27, 2009| 7 Comments »
I should have been tipped off by the fact that it was one of the last calendars there and I paid about a fourth of the original price. No, I bought it anyway, thinking, “This is great, I love learning new words!” Now I have this word-a-day calendar, one of those rip-off paper blocks with a page for every day of the year. Being the optimistic and naive person that I often am, I didn’t think it would contain an extensive collection of generally useless words.
So every day I rip off a page, and am surprised to find yet another word I didn’t know existed and will probably never be able to incorporate into a normal sentence. Maybe a zoologist would use it, but I would love to see an ordinary person find a way to fit “fissiped” into an everyday conversation. It isn’t often that it really becomes necessary to use an adjective that describes “having the toes being separated from one another, as in the feet of certain carnivorous mammals.”
My word for today is “plugola.” It means “Advertising or publicity that is intended for self-promotion and not paid for or underwritten by an independent sponsor.” Now I might actually be able to use this word if I were going into public relations, or were writing something about a publicity stunt. Obscure words are fun, but if you are going to go through the trouble to remember them, they should at least be mildly useful to you. Most of these words are industry specific, the kind that you would only know if you were a specialist in whatever field the word belongs, such as a zoologist or PR agent. Some of them are very out-of-date, and may only be found in old literature.
In addition to being mostly worthless, if people can actually manage to use a word like “fissiped” they just end up sounding conceited and arrogant. Enjoying unusual vocabulary words is an innocent enough pastime, but enjoying making people feel stupid through the use of bizarre terms is not quite so harmless. Now if they appreciate ostentatious words in their conversation or writing for the purpose of attempting to feel superior and sound more intelligent, I simply hope they acquire a good deal of pleasure from it. Congratulations to them, they have succeeded in entertaining themselves at the expense of being utterly incomprehensible. They have probably wasted a good deal of words communicating nothing to their unfortunate audience.
These kinds of words don’t seem to come up every day, and for me they only seem to come up on this ridiculous and slightly amusing calendar. Unless you specialize in animal foot conditions, you may only say “fissiped” once every five years. I can’t wait to be reading a book, and then realize, “Wow, I know that word, it was on that silly calendar.” I imagine one out of every hundred words in this calendar are useful to me within the realm of ordinary conversation, which means that this calendar has effectively expanded my vocabulary by… 3.65 new words in a whole year. Although if you really want to learn some impractical new words, I highly recommend it. After all, it is a rip-off.
ShanShanigans 