Vocabulary Exploration

[DGSquared]

Are you game to expand your vocabulary?

It might help to go alphabetically but opening the dictionary and pointing to a random word works too.


  I'll begin with,
A - Acersecomic:   A person whose hair has never been cut.

[Spell Chick]

bocconcini
: small balls of fresh mozzarella

[Mark Hoffmann]

capelocracy ~ government by shopkeepers

[DAnuchan]

cucking -- An instrument of punishment consisting of a chair in which offenders were ducked in water

I've seen these but never knew the name.

[DGSquared]

dactyliomancy ~ divination by means of a finger


Ha! That's one way to get flipped off.

[Spell Chick]

Sticking with digits


epollicate
1 : lacking a thumb
2 : lacking a hind toe —used of certain birds

[DGSquared]

Falsiloquence or fallaciloquence  - lying or deceitful speech.

Fatiloquence or fatiloquy is soothsaying or predicting the future.

If you enjoy or are good at deliberately using ambiguous language to confuse people, you are flexiloquent.


*It would stand to reason that if you are also simultaneously flatulent, one may suspect you are full of crap.

[Gyppo]

Farctate

Farctate. Related to farctate: Boulangerie. farctated, farctate - A farctated diner is one who cannot eat another bite; if you are farctate, you are stuffed to the gills or bloated from eating a large meal.

(botany, obsolete) Stuffed; filled solid. a farctate leaf, stem, or pericarp

I like this word as it is written.  But according to the pronunciation guide the 'c' is more or less silent, so it sounds more like fartate, which doesn't sound anywhere near as jolly as it does with a hard 'c.'

[DGSquared]

Gossypiboma - also called textiloma or cottonoid - a foreign object accidentally left inside a body cavity during an operation.

Get the gossypiboma outta here.

[Jo Bannister]

(In surgical circles, a gossypiboma is described as a foreign object retained by the patient - as if the poor unconscious sod on the table was responsible, not the surgical team who were probably gossyping at the time!)

HAGIOCRACY - government by a group of persons looked upon as being holy.  More or less the direct opposite to Westminster.

[Gyppo]

'Hagazussa':  From an Old German word.  A hedgewitch or hedge witch.  Usually a solitary practitioner.  Could be loosely identified with the village Wise Woman or Cunning Man who generally knew a bit more about hedgerow herbs and their myriad uses than most people.  They tend to be pragmatic souls and don't get tied up in festoons of ritual which, for some modern practitioners of the craft, are the big attraction.

More likely to be found in a quiet woodland clearing or their own comfortable kitchen or rocking chair than cavorting naked on their fitted carpet in a centrally heated home.  Therefore not what my Mum used to gently disparage as 'Shagpile Pagans.)

Also sometimes called a Hedge-Rider, the hedge in this case not being the herbal cornucopia for those with arcane knowledge but the metaphorical barrier between this mundane world and any others which may be there.

In this respect many writers of fiction, who easily slip in and out of their characters' worlds in order to write about them, could also be called Hedge-Riders.

[Spell Chick]

intumesce

verb (used without object), intumesced, intumescing.
1. to swell up, as with heat; become tumid.
2. to bubble up.


You men out there want to bubble up?

[Jo Bannister]

Jipijapa - a palmlike plant of Central and South America, whose leaves are used for making panama hats.

[DGSquared]

kainotophobia  - fear of change, resistance to something due to fear.
(Noun)

[Mark Hoffmann]

Limacology - To study slugs in an attempt to work out how they get elected. (I may have made the last bit up.)