Dictionary Flip – Page 2 – Flipping pages, turning tables.

Guys, stop gushing about geezers

11/10/2018

Good [insert your time of day so this greeting is personalised]! How about them sports, huh? Okay, enough chitchat.

Today I want to talk about a word that is a bugbear of mine as I dislike all iterations in regards to how it’s said. This is a targeted attack, I’ll grant that, but it deserves it.

geyser (noun) (ugh)

1. A hot spring which intermittently sends up fountain-like jets of water and steam into the air.

Or, my preferred, more alliterative interpretation:
2. Giant gushy gust of wet.

The Macquarie Dictionary says that geyser can be pronounced either as ‘geez-ah’ or ‘guys-ah’. I’ve been raised in the former way to say it, so in my head, a geyser always spits out a bunch of elderly men before it moves onto the steaming hot water.

As a child, I said ‘geh-sher’, because I didn’t know what to do with the ‘y’ and apparently had a ball of cotton wool in my mouth. Child-Amber did have some interesting views on how to pronounce words, other candidates of note being ‘vehement’, ‘gambol’ and ‘anaesthetist’. To be fair, anaethetist wasn’t pronounced so much as I used to go, “Anehthththssssthththssthth,” until my Mum was forced to slap me back into reality. As an adult, I’ve switched to anesthesiologist because the introduction of more consonants is a godsend to someone with an occasional lisp.

Back to geysers. I think it’s a hard word to say and offer up a new one in its place:

wetjet

It’s fun! It’s splashy! It can’t be misconstrued! Picture it: “Old Faithful is one of Yellowstone National Park’s most famous wetjets.”

The Comic Sans burns, doesn't it? Perfect.

Feel free to leave a comment telling me that I’m totally right about this and continue to build up my ego. I mean, I know I’m right- even destroying one of my own photos of Old Faithful with ComicSans and dinky text placements doesn’t shake my conviction in this matter.

Ultimately, if you have a word whose pronunciation has always bothered you, it’s okay. I feel your pain and I will campaign on your behalf – unless I disagree with you, of course. Then I’ll probably just sit back with a cup of tea while you’re burned at the stake by Grammar Nazis. I’m fickle, alright?

Side note, apparently a wetjet is actually a brand of mop. Righto. It’s still better then geyser.

Prairie dogs in cotton smocks

10/10/2018

There are no oddly attired prairie dogs below, unfortunately. But I did see some recently!

And it is with that pronouncement that I advise I was on holiday in America just a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. And I suppose I should really put a picture of a prairie dog in here so that this post isn’t just a total waste of your time. I’m not here to clickbait anyone, not badly anyway. That reminds me, have you heard about the one simple way to get a six pack and grow a second head? Scientists are outraged!

Prairie Dog: Zen Level 120 Et tu, human.

So the States were fun. Saw some amazing places and a load of natural beauty, and we stayed out of politics as much as possible. I traveled with my Mum and we went in a bus tour, so there was much driving around Southern California, Utah, Nevada, North Dakota, frigging a whole bunch of states. As a person with little to no sense of direction and/or ability to retain where I am or have been, I’m still having a whole heap of difficulty understanding where the heck we went to. But still.

I’ll probably randomly make reference to the USA in other posts to make myself seem well traveled and cultured (I totes am), but for now, let us talk of a word that I shall flip through and find now as I am criminally under prepared, as usual.

Aha, let’s make a massive

blunder (noun)

A gross or stupid mistake.
To move or act blindly, stupidly, or without direction or steady guidance.

Blunder is one of those interesting words that has a sort of onomatopoeia to it. It sounds clumsy, it sounds like a word that’s tripped its way into your kitchen, broken three wine glasses and your entire drawer of crockery right before landing face first on the floor.

Let’s do an experiment with what is expected to be delicate or graceful and chuck a blunder in: “The ballerina blundered across the stage, pirouetting unsteadily as the other dancers fled.”

I editorialised a little, but as soon as I wrote about a ‘blundering ballerina’ I could only picture the ballerina ripping across the floor like a drunken hurricane. ‘Blunder’ forces you to think unwieldy, ignorant things almost because the word itself is dorkily blunt upon your tongue.

Having performed a quick Google search (we spare no expense here at Dictionary Flip), ‘blunder’ is a Middle English word that first arose in the 14th century and likely has a Scandinavian/Old Norse origin, possibly the word blunda, which meant to shut one’s eyes. Huh. I’d have laid money on a Germanic origin, possibly an old German folklore of a troll that moved sluggishly and once erred by stepping on a princess, causing her knight errant to kill the troll in revenge.

Guess I made a bit of a blunder in my thinking there. But that’s it for the moment, I have to go shove my dog off my lap now, he’s too bloody hot.

Gone to seed

27/08/2018

A couple of weeks back, I got proud of myself that I’d managed to do weekly updates, what, twice in a row. Lo, said I, how productive and consistent! Be this the new routine? Then my head swelled an unseemly amount and I preened for a while.

Hence, when I was then unable to post for a while, I was forcibly reminded of the whole ‘pride comes before a fall’ thing. But no matter! Today I shall flip through the dictionary and bring forth a new word to delight myself and you with. Without further ado…

tamarind (noun)

Woohoo? I mean, it’s not even those cool little monkeys. The addition of one stupid letter at the end and all the years I spent watching David Attenborough documentaries building up for this moment… wasted.

Wait, I have to share something before I go on. It’s not a tamarind or a tamarin, but it is an animal and therefore I can eke out the slightest connection.

Marcus, please, there are people watching.

It’s a photo of couple of African Painted Dogs I saw at the zoo last year. One was so clumsy and flopping around everywhere, and his friend was just like, “What are you doing?” Silly Dog was trying to scratch himself or something (unsuccessfully), while the rest of the pack snoozed.

Anyway, back to the actual word of the day.

So tamarinds are both trees and the fruit thereof. The dictionary states that it’s, “The fruit of a large tropical tree, Tamarindus indica,a pod containing seeds enclosed in a juicy acid pulp that is used in food and beverages.” Apparently the tree itself is also useful and nice for its shade, wood and fragrant flowers.

Tamarinds look like this, in case you were wondering and didn’t want to google it yourself for fear of alerting the government of your interest in this plant. (Understandable.)

Photo by Malcolm Smith on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/malcolm-smith/)

Now, this is something really special that I want to tell you – an age old recipe for tamarinds handed down through generations in my family and made up by me a few seconds ago.

Step 1: Get some food, anything you’d like to use as a base. Bread, avocado, bubblegum. Go wild.
Step 2: Add one to two tamarind pods, shells still intact, on top of your food.
Step 3: Walk away and let someone else who knows what they’re doing into the kitchen.

And there you have it!

(of the bowels) to operate

29/07/2018

The title of this post reflects where my finger landed in the definition of today’s word. I’m thankful that there are so many meanings to this one that I don’t have to concentrate on that bit.

Without further ado, let’s move on.

move (intransitive verb)

Firstly, let’s tackle ‘intransitive verb’. Is it a doing word that’s imbibed intravenously? Is it just kind of shy, and that’s why it comes off a little cold and aloof? IT’S ALL OF THESE THINGS! Haha, no it’s not.

I’m sitting here with my dog on my lap and chuckling at my own jokes. This is the absolute epitome of high achievement.

I’m not Googling it because that would be a sign of weakness and I’ve got a dictionary at hand – an object with all the answers, literally the only object you would need on a desert island, if that desert island’s sand was made of Scrabble tiles and you had to string them together to form food-words. That sounds like the perfect subject for a fever dream, to be honest.

So an intransitive verb is, “a verb that is never accompanied by a direct object, as come, sit, lie, etc.”, or, “a verb occurring without a direct object, as drinks in the sentence he drinks only when thirsty“.

Here are some example sentences using the word of the day:
“The body on the floor moved slightly, enough to catch her eye.”
“Maggots moved across the rotting flesh, their fat white bodies searching for new mouth holds to latch upon.”
“Screaming, she moved out of the room with some alacrity.”

You get the drift. The ‘move’ part is not related to an object in the sentences. Full disclosure, I understand it right now but in a day, I will be confused again, so I really need to try and drum this into my skull.

Move can become a transitive verb in some of its incarnations, i.e. to change the place/position of something; to set or keep in motion, shake or stir; to prompt action, et cetera, et cetera. But think about it next time you move your shoulders back. Your action is both correcting your posture and a transitive verb when the Narrator in your life runs its commentary. Bonus!

I’m getting a headache.

Running through the definitions of move, let’s stick to the first one. Thus:

move (intransitive verb)

1. to change place or position; pass from one place or situation to another.

What I like about the above is the dichotomy of thoughts I had about it. You could be moving a step to the right; you could be moving halfway across the world. You could be moving to a better place or even just something banal – the move from work to home, the relieved sigh that moves from your lips to the air around you as you step across the threshold. It could be a move to a worse scenario than the one you were just in. Say hello to my little friend? Keep the tommy gun, mate, there’s a sniper rifle trained on me now.

The saying that popped into my head was out of the frying pan and into the fire. I guess that’s a sign of my perspective on things.

Whatever your next move is, I hope it’s a good one. Carry a fire extinguisher with you at all times and stay out of kitchens; that should keep you safe.

Curly hurdy gurdy

22/07/2018

I didn’t even have to lift a finger to get the word for today. No flipping, no nothing. How quickly I’ve sold out.

Recently, I’ve got pretty obsessed with The Cranberries, the Irish rock band from the ’90s whose lead singer died earlier this year. Yet again, I’ve missed the boat on something BUT this word was used to describe Dolores O’Riordan’s voice in a review I read and it fits so well.

Side note: as soon as I like something, music especially, I immediately look up reviews to validate my opinions because I cannot do so without external influence. Who wants to be an individual with fully formed views and thoughts? Sounds like too much hard work.

Wow, I don’t update for a few weeks and suddenly it’s logorrhoea all around. Onto the word!

curlicue (noun)

According to Macquarie here, a curlicue, also spelled as curlycue, is a “fantastic curl or twist”.

…

It’s astonishing sometimes how a dictionary entry strips the magic of the word back to something quite stark or possibly about Shirley Temple’s hair.

Anyway, with the sound of Cordell ringing in my ears, I implore you to picture a feather-light voice twisting high in a modified yodel, the filigree patterns of a wrought iron gate, the tight green spiral of unfurled fern fronds when you read this neat little word.

Have you paid your pound of flesh yet?

08/06/2018

fine (noun)

To be honest, flipping onto this word randomly was a bit… off-putting, at first. My Dad died on Tuesday, and seeing ‘fine’ come up felt almost like the universe was like, “So… are you?”

Universe, remember: This is a purely business relationship, we’re not friends, I am just here for the chance to exist and eat cheese. Honestly. So nosy.

Anyway, then I realised that this wasn’t fine as in, “Yeah, I’m doing okay,” or, “Isn’t the weather just lovely!” This was the mean fine, the nasty fine, the fine you don’t want to come up against in a dark alley with no change on you. Because this fine… it ain’t playing.

You owe this fine. You owe it big time.

Definition:

“You were supposed to be watching it.”
“I was! I just, my eyelids, they were really heavy and they fell shut for a moment, I pushed them right back up but it… it was already gone.”
“Uh huh.”
“I swear- ”
“Sure. You know what the penalty is.”
“I know. Here, take it.” (glumly pulls out a fistful of cash)
“Oh sorry, mate, did I forget to mention we changed our definition of ‘money’ the other day?”
“P-pardon?”
“Yeah, cash is so last year.”
(nervous laugh) “So you take, um, credit now?”
“Something like that.”

OR

1. A sum of money exacted as a penalty for an offence or dereliction.