From Rhadamanthus + -ine, after Rhadamanthus, a king in Greek myths.
I recently realised that I haven’t got round to unpacking my word calendar but in the meantime I came across this word today and liked it very much.
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Category: Words
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Royal Nicknames
- Worst Nickname – James the Be-shitten
- Most like a Comic Book Villain – The Universal Spider
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1661 Syndrome
From a GOOD article about overuse of the word ‘syndrome’ (and underuse of the word ‘snorkel’):
…1661 syndrome (someone, usually a woman, who looks 16 from the back, 61 from the front)
Made me chuckle.
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“…to which wise men stoop and fools aspire”
This is one for Jonny methinks.
The true punster’s mind cycles through homophones in search of a quip the way small children delight in rhymes or experiment babblingly with language. Accordingly, the least intolerable puns are those that avoid the pun’s essential puerility. Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, was a specialist. He could effortlessly execute the double pun: Noah’s Ark was made of gopher-wood, he would say, but Joan of Arc was maid of Orleans. Some Whately-isms are so complex that they nearly amount to honest jokes: “Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But what brought the sandwiches there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred.”
*aptronym (n): A name that inadvertently describes its bearer’s occupation.
I think my personal favourites from this list have to be Dr. Kevin Blinder the Opthamologist, Les Plack the dentist, and Dr. Bonnie Beaver, the gynaecologist.
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Fancified Words
Hornswoggle hasn’t appeared on my Word Calendar (yet) but I came across this word today and decided it’s time we brought more fancified words from the American West back into fashion.
We do not know the origin of hornswoggle. We do know that it belongs to a group of “fancified” words that were particularly popular in the American West in the 19th century. Hornswoggle is one of the earliest, first appearing around 1829. It is possible that these words were invented to poke fun at the more “sophisticated” East. Some other words of this ilk are absquatulate, also first appearing in the 1820s, skedaddle, first attested in 1861 in Missouri, and discombobulate, first recorded in 1916.
I still use skedaddle but have never even heard of absquatulate.
Also as it’s Friday the thirteenth I should probably mention friggatriskaidekaphobia – unfortunately for any friggatriskaidekaphobics we’ve still got two more to come this year.