desenrascanço
Desenrascanço is a Portuguese word more or less meaning “disentanglement,” used to refer to improvising solutions, or, as one web page puts it, “an ability to solve a problem without...
Archive for New-to-me Words
vagina et alia
The brouhaha over a Michigan state Representative being banned from speaking on the House floor after saying the word “vagina” has led to, among other outcomes, a spate of articles...
arsy-tansy
Not long ago, I read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (in a printed copy, on paper—the relevance of which I'll explain later), and was struck by this...
A slash by any other name
A couple of days ago, I wrote about abbreviations containing slashes; researching that reminded me to mention that there are a couple of different names for slashes, and a couple...
time gun
Sadly, a time gun isn't what I, as a science fiction fan, initially thought it was. However, it is nonetheless kinda cool. A time gun is apparently a cannon or...
scrummy
Apparently “scrummy” is a portmanteau of scrumptious and yummy. I had initially assumed it must mean something like “scummy.”...
woop woop
I recently encountered the term Woop Woop, which turns out to be, according to answers.com, “An imaginary town in the remote outback, supposedly backward.” The example sentence, from the Sydney...
roving
A roving, says Wikipedia, is “a long and narrow bundle of fibre [...] usually used to spin woollen yarn.” I'm sure y'all fibre-arts people knew that already, but I hadn't...
bondoon
I was reading Suzanne Brockmann's novel The Defiant Hero, and I came across this phrase: as they crossed the roof on their bondoons. I had no idea what bondoons were....
SIPDIS and NOFORN
Just came across a couple of terms I hadn't encountered before in an article about leaked US diplomatic memos: SIPDIS (applied to items for DIStribution on SIPRNet, the Secret Internet...