Words of the Week

Well, this is just blatant hyperpromotion of Anu Garg and his nefarious team of lexicological geniuses responsible for the dee-lyt-full A.Word.A.Day email I receive every weekday in my inbox. Garg et al. are so cool in fact that they don't even need a great looking website. It's like they're stuck in 1997, but I don't care. Nobody seems to really.

Every week has a special theme and, since there's been a 98% political humidity index lately, last week's theme was:

Words that appear to have been coined after the 2012 US presidential candidates:

• obambulate
• bidentate
• mitty
• pauldron
• barrack

And now, storytime! 

 

Percival and the Primrose Path

 

Though he wasn't on the team, Percival had worn his pauldrons to the football game, with the Mitty fantasy that a series of bizarre and injurious accidents might incapacitate the four quarterbacks who were on the team. In this event, the coach would magically notice that Percival was a football prodigy and call upon him to throw the game-winning touchdown. In the third quarter, he began to obambulate over to the player's bench, when suddenly he was elbowed in the mouth by a barracking fan. Sadly, Percival had failed to wear his helmet, and the incident left him with a bidentate lisp for the rest of his life. Eventually, he changed hith official name to Perthival. Then, he moved to Authtralia.

A.Word.A.Day : The magic and music of words.