Wednesday 29 December 2010

Tiddlypush (Word of the Week)

I have a tendancy to overthink things and I've been wracking my brains trying to think of a deep and significant word to be our first ever word of the week. I've given up however, and decided instead to go for a nice inane word that makes me grin somewhat. So, here goes our first ever Word of the Week is:

Tiddlypush
A colloquial noun that turned up sometime in the mid 20th Century, so not that old in the word stakes. It has two meanings that I've come across
1) A nonsense word meaning 'goodbye'
2) A person or thing whose name is unknown, or is indelicate to mention.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary suggests that it is similar in meaning to: thingy, thingumajig and thingumabob. I guess we could add whatjamacallit, whatsisname and doohickey to the list as well.

I particularly love the idea of it being used for someone that it is indelicate to mention, perhaps the mother-in-law?

Sources:
Shorter Oxford Dictionary (2 volumes) 6th edition, 2007.
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 2005 by E. Partridge and P. Beale


Von

Tuesday 28 December 2010

First things first...

Everything has to start somewhere, so hello and welcome to our small blog. I'm not much good at beginning new things and have spent some time cogitating and fulminating on how to get started. I figured the best thing to do would be to explain the kind of things we're planning on bloggificating about...

Basically this is going to be a blog about words. Words that interest, amuse or puzzle us. Ju and I are by no means experts in language or grammar (something that may become obvious as we go!) but we are both interested in words and how they came about. We're planning on having a Word of the Week. Not a very original idea I'm aware, but it will give us something solid to base the rest of the blog around and hopefully will help us to post on a regular basis.

Besides our regular weekly word, we're also hoping to post here and there with favourite quotes, interesting place names, words that don't exist but we think should, authors who use words in interesting ways, people's names, words in other languages and anything else that takes our fancy.

We're not expecting a vast readership. In fact I suspect I'm mostly typing to myself right now, but I'm looking forward to having a go at this blogging thing and hope that anyone who stumbles across this enjoys it along with us.

Vocabulation
Start:  beginning, commencement, embarkation, foundation, inauguration, inception, initiation, onset, genesis, emergence, origin.

Von