Word of the Day. Post it Here

wegs said:
Serendipity - ser•en•dip•ity

Definition - the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way

It could be viewed as a fortunate stroke of serendipity that she stumbled upon a science forum, and made quite a few unplanned, yet pleasant connections.
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This is how I try to live my life.
 
Me too. I ditched the watch I can't remember how far back.

I always felt that if I waited long enough good things would happen to me.

Kind of the opposite of the "make your own luck" attitude that seems to be everywhere.

Hope everyone knows where the word came from ?

Serendos ,the name for Ceylon and now Sri Lanka ,I think.
 
Great scrabble word:



piz·zazz
/pəˈzaz/
noun
INFORMAL
noun: pizazz
  1. an attractive combination of vitality and glamour.
    "a new way to add graphic pizzazz to your desktop-publishing project"
 
come·up·pance
/kəˈməpəns/
noun
INFORMAL
  1. a punishment or fate that someone deserves.
    "he got his comeuppance"

    Similar:
    just deserts

    deserved fate
    due

    due reward
    just punishment
    retribution

    requital
    recompense
    in recompense"


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whangdoodle

"The Whangdoodle is a fanciful or humorous being whose undefined appearance and essence is left to individual imagination. Other connotations may include an object of humor, something noisy but of no consequence and insignificant.

19th-century usage[edit]
It appeared in 1858 as a title for and text within a parody sermon "Where the lion roareth and the wang-doodle mourneth," published in Samuel Putnam Avery's The Harp of a Thousand Strings: Or, Laughter for a Lifetime.[1] Possibly due to its resemblance to or formation from existing words whang[a] and doodle,[4] it soon became common to spell it as whangdoodle. The term appeared derisively in 1859 correspondence published in The Cincinnati Lancet & Observer.[5] Mark Twain used it disparagingly in a letter in 1862.[6] By 1877 it had been included in a dictionary."--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whangdoodle
 
From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows...

etterath
n. the feeling of emptiness after a long and arduous process is finally complete—having finished school, moved to another country, finished a marathon, etc —which leaves you relieved that it’s over, but missing the stress that organized your life into a mission.

I'm not sure if any of these words will ever catch on, but this one is relatable.
 
wegs said:
From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows...

etterath
n. the feeling of emptiness after a long and arduous process is finally complete—having finished school, moved to another country, finished a marathon, etc —which leaves you relieved that it’s over, but missing the stress that organized your life into a mission.

I'm not sure if any of these words will ever catch on, but this one is relatable.
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But this not a real word. It’s just made up by someone, isn’t it?

If we are allowed to nominate made-up words I have a few, starting with peepslatch, a word I invented when I was 4, for a crack in a wooden fence that one can see through.

And then there are the splendid ones in Douglas Adams’s “Meaning of Liff”, such as whaplode drove, which means a homicidal golf stroke.
 
exchemist said:
But this not a real word. It’s just made up by someone, isn’t it?

If we are allowed to nominate made-up words I have a few, starting with peepslatch, a word I invented when I was 4, for a crack in a wooden fence that one can see through.

And then there are the splendid ones in Douglas Adams’s “Meaning of Liff”, such as whaplode drove, which means a homicidal golf stroke.
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Thought they were real.(That book is a best seller- well on the NYT list- and I think I looked up an entry or two )

Then again I consider myself a "litteralist",meaning I take things at face value a bit too much.
 
exchemist said:
But this not a real word. It’s just made up by someone, isn’t it?

If we are allowed to nominate made-up words I have a few, starting with peepslatch, a word I invented when I was 4, for a crack in a wooden fence that one can see through.

And then there are the splendid ones in Douglas Adams’s “Meaning of Liff”, such as whaplode drove, which means a homicidal golf stroke.
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If you are able to get your “invented” words published, we should be able to list them here.

I could see “peepslatch” catching on. ;)
 
geordief said:
Thought they were real.(That book is a best seller- well on the NYT list- and I think I looked up an entry or two )

Then again I consider myself a "litteralist",meaning I take things at face value a bit too much.
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I was just being silly, posting a word from that “dictionary,” but I’m surprised that Simon & Schuster is the publisher. Maybe they should rename it a fictionary so others aren’t fooled. :wink:

Okay, back on track…

Participle

A participle is a form of a verb used as either an adjective (“the hidden treasure”) or a part of certain tenses (“we are hiding the treasure”)
 
wegs said:
I was just being silly, posting a word from that “dictionary,” but I’m surprised that Simon & Schuster is the publisher. Maybe they should rename it a fictionary so others aren’t fooled. :wink:
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I checked out a few entries in that book about a month ago and came to the conclusion they were existing (if obscure) words.

I was wrong.
 
wegs said:
I was just being silly, posting a word from that “dictionary,” but I’m surprised that Simon & Schuster is the publisher. Maybe they should rename it a fictionary so others aren’t fooled. :wink:

Okay, back on track…

Participle

A participle is a form of a verb used as either an adjective (“the hidden treasure”) or a part of certain tenses (“we are hiding the treasure”)
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There a gerunds too
https://www.scribbr.com/frequently-...articiples and gerunds look,“I enjoy jogging”).

eg "Hiding the treasure is wrong"
 
Peepslatch?

OGC.cb127121d4ab655b8bb82abc489c27fa
 
This maybe of interest.

The Language of Science
How the words we use have evolved over the past 175 years
Since at least the 17th century, science has struggled with words. Francis Bacon, visionary of a new, experimental natural philosophy, called language an “idol of the marketplace”: a counterfeit currency we trade in so habitually that we no longer notice the gap between words and the world.
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True to its Baconian ideology, the Royal Society of London, one of the world's oldest scientific societies, made nullius in verba (roughly, “on no one's word”) its motto soon after it was established in 1660. Satirist Jonathan Swift parodied the Royal Society's suspicion of language in Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726: instead of conversing, some members of the Academy of Lagado carry around a sack of things that they exchange instead of words. Science aspired to show, not tell.
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Yet science has never been speechless. Scientific journals also began in the 17th century, and since then, science has been all about communication—first and foremost between scientists and other scientists, but also with a broader public fascinated by the latest discoveries, inventions and speculations about fossils, electricity, atoms, computers, genes and galaxies.
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How to communicate about the world in words? Into the crack between words and things sprang images: woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, photographs, diagrams, graphics of all kinds. Modern science is ingeniously, intrinsically and extravagantly visual. No wonder “see” is a word whose popularity spans all 175 years of writing about science and technology in Scientific American.
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more...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-language-of-science/
 
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