Happy New Year! And welcome back to Webb’s Weird Words; we were on a multi-week hiatus while your local linguist labored on seasonal fare like Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life. And while we’re on the welcome wagon: a hearty “Woo-hoo!” for the exciting new update of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Released in November, the
Happy New Year! And welcome back to Webb’s Weird Words; we were on a multi-week hiatus while your local linguist labored on seasonal fare like Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life. And while we’re on the welcome wagon: a hearty “Woo-hoo!” for the exciting new update of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Released in November, the
In 1989 Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter and George Carlin starred in a low-rent time-travel comedy called Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Making a virtual institution out of slacker-dude subculture — and providing an indelible lesson in how not to pronounce “Socrates” — the surprise hit generated two B&T sequels: Bogus Journey (1991) and Face the
Last week, Webb’s Weird Words trotted out one of our standard oddball vocabulary lists — this one including succedanea (suck-suh-DAY-nee-yuh). The plural form of a noun meaning “substitute” — especially a replacement medicine — it’s perhaps best known from a brief appearance in Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting for Godot. Now more than 70 years old,
According to Merriam-Webster online, the English language contains roughly one million words — though that tally includes “myriad names of chemicals and other scientific entities.” Furthermore, this site — which offers lots of other cool info besides just meanings — also points out that there’s considerable disagreement on the actual total; as an example, even
Here at Webb’s Weird Words, oddball vocab is our stock-in-trade. Articles on these usually come from my sprawling list of terms encountered in my nonstop reading. But lately, we haven’t done many of these randomly chosen selections; this is due in part to busyness, but also to thematic groupings — like “sailing words,” in honor
