n., A girl or woman who is always in a relationship with someone, and who moves from relationship to relationship. I learned this term from my daughter. When I attempted to look it up to see if a coherent definition already existed, I found quite an oddity in Google’s autosuggestion: What the heck?
MadMania
Faith, Books, and Stuff
Category: words
One of my children used to have an imaginary friend, a rabbit named Hop-Hop Bunny, who had a brother named Hop-Hop. They were from Hop-Hop Land (I know you didn’t see that coming). We heard several Hop-Hop Bunny stories from the time our daughter was in preschool through first grade. One day we were working […]
verb, adjective; to face a chair toward a wall and/or turn its back to a person. Example: “She’s pickle-faced her chair and won’t come out.” The word, its usage, and the example I just used came to me in a dream last night. After some research I have found out that it is actually a […]
“Will you let me go?” “Bismillah no, we will not let you go!” –Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody Bismillah is an exclamation that means, “in the name of Allah.” The etymology is Arabic, coming from the first phrase in the Koran, “bi-smi-llah.”
Someone pointed out to me that I hadn’t disclosed the entire story in my previous post. The truth is, my friend’s real name isn’t Logan; we just call him that because he looks like Wolverine. To that end, he is the recipient of lots of Weapon X-related teasing. Like the day I looked at his hand […]
So I was talking to my friend Logan, who is also a logophile (pronounced LOG-o-FILE). “What’s your favorite onomatopoeia?” I asked him. First, logophiles like words, and not logs, and second, in case you’ve forgotten your middle school English class, an onomatopoeia (ON-o-MOT-o-PEE-uh) is a word that is formed from a sound, like buzz, zip, […]
One malaprop that drives me crazy is when people say, “Put your John Henry on this.” What they intend to say is, “Put your John Hancock on this.” This idiom comes from John Hancock, the last signer of the Declaration of Independence, who signed his name in a large, flourishing script. John Henry, however, is […]
You can’t call it Swine Flu anymore. It’s H1N1, ever since U.S. pork producers lobbied to have it changed. The difference between the terms ‘Swine Flu’ and ‘H1N1’ is that Swine Flu just rolls off the tongue, while Aitch One En One does not. I therefore propose the following pronunciation for the overhyped malady: pronounce […]
adjective, pronounced phonetically. I learned this word from my wife, who I suppose coined it, as I haven’t seen it anywhere else. It means “at a wrong angle, misaligned, uneven, out of level, out of plumb, and/or out of square.” UPDATE: one of my readers pointed out that woppyjarred appears to be a corruption of […]
Before you try pronouncing it with any kind of J sound, I’ll tell you: it’s pronounced MEE-ho, and in Mexican Spanish it’s a term of endearment for boys (mija, MEE-ha for girls). I learned the word from my brother. He heard it from one of his Army buddies, who told this story: “When I was […]