Search Results for: in a word

In a Word

expergefaction
n. waking up

matutolypea
n. ill humor in the morning; “getting up on the wrong side of the bed”

“An Extraordinary Sleeper at Newcastle”

In the year 1752, during the summer, the following particulars happened at Newcastle, in Staffordshire, related by a lady of discernment and veracity, who went to see the sleeper several times. She was a girl about 19 years of age; she slept 14 weeks, without waking, although several methods were tried to wake her, as bleeding, blistering, &c.; in all which time she took no sustenance, except about nine o’clock every night, she opened her mouth, and then some person that attended her, dipped a feather in wine, and with that wetted the inside of her mouth. Her father often gave her an airing in a horse chair, and sometimes took her several miles, to have the advice of the physicians; but neither the motion of travelling, nor any thing the physicians could do, could awake her; she appeared to be healthy all the time, breathed freely, and her pulse beat very regularly, but rather too slow; she never moved herself all the time, except once, it is thought, she moved one leg. When she awaked, it was very gradually, being two or three days from the time she began to stir and open her eyes, before she was quite awake, and then seemed to be very well, but complained of faintness. I heard, last summer, that she had good health, and had no return of her sleepiness.

— Gentleman’s Magazine, 1753, quoted in Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum, 1820

| Language · Oddities

In a Word

semiopathy
n. the tendency to read humorously inappropriate meanings into signs

CROSS CHILDREN WALK. Don’t listen to their screams,
But watch the CAUTION MEN AT WORK. It seems
They’re making sure that all DEAF CHILDREN DRIVE
CAREFULLY. Now let us look alive,
And take TRUCKS TURNING (named for Captain Trucks,
Who turned here when he went out hunting ducks).
Here on a sign the advertising’s clear
(Though deer can’t tell the time) for WATCH FOR DEER.
At FREE MUNICIPAL PARKING let us pause,
And wonder who enslaved it, for what cause.
A DANGEROU is what we’ll hope to see:
DANGEROUS CROSSINGs certainly abound.
Now will they leap across from tree to tree,
Or buck the passing traffic on the ground?

— Ralph P. Boas Jr.

| Language · Poems

In a Word

cark
v. to worry

kedogenous
adj. produced by worry

Some of your hurts you have cured
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!

— Emerson

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In a Word

bubulcitate
v. to cry like a cowboy

(That’s from Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionary of 1623, so it doesn’t refer to a cowboy of the American West. What it does refer to is unclear. Cockeram said he included “even the mocke-words which are ridiculously used in our language,” but this word appears never to have been published outside of his dictionary, so we don’t know what a “cowboy” is or why he might cry. Make up your own meaning.)

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