Tuesday, December 12, 2006

List Tuesday: I Can Hear All the Cries of the City



Stupid Dictionary.com Words of the Day from the Last 25 Days That I Didn't Already Know


  1. Subaltern - Ranked or ranged below; subordinate; inferior. This will be put to good use immediately

  2. debouch - To emerge; to issue. No no no, you are thinking of debAUch you sick weirdo.

  3. Argus-eyed - Extremely observant; watchful; sharp-sighted. I'm pretty sure that this isn't even a real word.

  4. None. Seriously, out of 25 words, I already knew all but three of them. Come on dictionary.com, you are supposed to be really helping me bone up my vocabulary. Risible? Sartorial? Proclivity? Exacerbate? Mollify? Yeah, maybe a few people don't know those words already. IN PRISON!!

8 comments:

Sonja Andrews said...

#3 - from Greek mythology ...

[REDACTED] said...

Yes, yes, yes, I know about Argus and his 100 eyes or whatever. It still doesn't count as a word any more than Reagan-haired, or Arthur-bearded do.

Anonymous said...

Um, it's kind of creepy to make fun of people in prison.


Aside from that, really? Galvanic? Well, you are an engineer. Those of us in the theological arts don't do much with electricity. And trencherman! Was that a word tossed around your family? And I didn't officialy know bootless, but I probably could have figured it out in a sentence.

I guess maybe you were paying better attention to those orange vocab books in high school.

[REDACTED] said...

Just so you know, the "IN PRISON" line is actually a quotation from *whisper* Friends.

And yes, we regularly bandied around such words as trencherman and bootless e.g. the following example.

"That obstreporous trencherman sure acts like a bootless mountebank from time to time."

Anonymous said...

Wordsmith.org ! It's the most trippindicular word-a-day thingy.

P.S.(TMBG would be good for song/blog titles)

Anonymous said...

Um, Friends? FRIENDS? I guess that makes sense. Friends is like the most xenophobic/classist show ever. So weird. My friend and I used to drink whenever anyone made a "I'm not GAY! DUDE!" or "Monica used to be FAT! FAT! FAT! Did you hear? FAT FAT FAT FAT!" joke and we used to be pretty tipsy by the end of a couple episodes (hey, it was on right after class in reruns. Sometimes you've had enough Thomas Aquinas for the day). And somehow NYC is a white town for them? Somehow they live in those huge apartments?

[REDACTED] said...

Oh come on, those complaints against Friends are soooooo 1997.

But funny you mention drinking games! My friend and I used to drink whenever some pompous philosophy student name dropped Aquinas, Descartes, Derrida or Kierkegaard and we used to be pretty tipsy by the end of a couple minutes (hey, it was usually right after class, and sometimes you've had enough equations of change for nonisothermal systems for the day)!


Obviously, I kid.

Liz said...

Ahhh... well, I certainly believe that you know all of those words. I agree they are not exactly difficult words. But alas, we are seriously in the minority. You obviously haven't been reading the writing of people who do not blog. Which leads me to a question that my friend and I were seriously contemplating the other day... Is it possible to be too stupid to live? And if so, does that give us the right to dispose of the stupid ones as we see fit?