ROBUST discussion
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WORD/QUOTATION of the DAY
message 51:
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Andre Jute
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Feb 01, 2012 08:22PM
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Claudine, thanks. I will pass your comments along to John. Stinker that he is, he won't come hang out here. He's a hermit, even virtually.
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I'm trying to remember if he actually met with Danny Rolling when he wrote his book about him. I know he has dealt with serial killers face to face. Brrr...I think maybe he did meet with Rolling because when he was being interviewed about the case on Court TV he mentioned that Danny was scary-big and intimidating -- and John is not a little guy.
He gave me a very freaky tape recording way back when the Rolling case was going on. It was something Danny recorded the night he killed one or two students. He was hiding near the apartment where the victim(s) lived. He was rambling, talking about his father, I think -- then he cut the tape off, saying there was something he had to do. What he had to do was go murder someone. Can't recall the details, but I think during his spree he killed five students.
You might find Shadow of Death interesting. It's the book that introduced me to Philpin. It featured his profiling work on the murders of several women in New England. It's probably available used on Amazon.
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I love that word! I can even say it without thinking (showing my age here). It's kind of the antithesis of my word for the day, which describes the way I've been operating of late:ennui
I doubt it's true, but I read somewhere that a guy name Titsling invented the bra.
Just trying to keep you abreast of the rumors...
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I've seen it used recently in more than one book. I find it quaint...
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Sharon, I see it in older books, not so many recently published ones. It's fine in print, really. In real life, all the time? Not so much.
Sounds like your friend fell in love with the word.I can relate.
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I hate it when someone adopts a pet word... It gets old fast!
"Whilst" is not a a very efficient word. Takes more breath to say than "while".
loucheBecause I honestly had to look up the word when I read it today on another thread. And it's such a good word. Sigh...
Think I'm gonna have to adopt it as my new pet word.
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What I want is a definitive reference to where Graham Greene defined the Loucheness Factor which in turn separates the real writers from the pretenders. You know, when he is supposed to have said, "You can't believe in a character if you don't know who launders his shirts." (Paraphrased, of course; if I could quote it exactly, I would have a reference, wouldn't I?)
All my characters do their own laundry. :-)
All my characters wear dirty clothes or none at all.
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She likes her characters to let it all hang out.
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Mostly they just reach for gravity, which is a unidirectional trend.
K. A. wrote: "She likes her characters to let it all hang out."ROFLMAO, literally. Well, perhaps not as literal as Andre in his black clothing, but I've been having a dance with an Android, and I don't seem to know the steps. I needed the laugh...
If you insist Andre:
America seems to be having a love affair with Donald Trump, but I believe he epitomizes the word louche...
As for GG, this is what I came up when I Yahoo'd him: http://www.thenation.com/article/not-.... You're a speed-reader, perhaps you could find the content you're looking for somewhere in there.
Patricia, rhymes with douche. 'Nuff said...
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Louche is Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind.
Sharon, I was afraid it'd rhyme with that.
From the Oxford English Dictionary:louche
adj. disreputable, shifty.
From Wikipedia:
louche m (f louche, m plural louches, f plural louches)
1.shady, dubious, seedy
2.(of a liquid) cloudy
Does the UK have a different meaning? Clark Gable in GWtW wouldn't be at all the same fun word!
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****
louche |lo͞oSH|
adjective
disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way: the louche world of the theater.
DERIVATIVES
loucheness noun
ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from French, literally ‘squinting.’
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"Disreputable in a rakish way," describes Clark Gable in GwtW exactly.
Just as well the first dictionary I laid hands on -- it came with my new Mac -- backs me up or I would have lost faith in it.
"disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way: the louche world of the theater." is exactly the top entry google throws back at me, lol.
Well in that case, Donald Trump in no way defines the word louche - and I'm not as enamoured of it anymore either.I would have thought the English Oxford dictionary would trump the Amercian version, which is why I deliberately have it downloaded as my first choice. Sigh...
Though I can still see uses for the word.
Robert Downey Jr would have fit, but he's apparently all cleaned up now and diched the dis...
Robert Downey, Jr. Does seem to have come through his messy life intact. I give him a lot of credit for that.Here are some words to add to our vocabularies today:
http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/20-o...
Andre is probably using all of them routinely already.
The #10 word (Freck, which means to move swiftly) has an ironic connection to a news story that appeared locally a day or two ago. A 2-year-old whose last name was Freck ran across his yard and into the street, where he was run over and killed. His mother was running after him, yelling, trying to stop him. He must have thought it was a game. He turned, smiled, and continued on into the street.
Shiver...Frecking along, I hereby suggest we adopt the word 'kench' in place of lol. Except of course it would always be an in-joke as it appears to have a newer meaning of 'a box in which fish or skins are salted' (which could start a whole new round of kenches - over to the clever folks...), and furthermore we'd have to shorten it to something like kch...
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19. Twitter-light
Noun – “Twilight” – Used in the early 17th century, “twitter-light” sounds like a romantic way to refer to the hours as the sun goes down.
From that website.
If you use Twitter-light, people will think it's a lesser version of Twitter (maybe messages of 70 characters or fewer).
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Yes, good suggestion!
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Patricia Sierra writes on ROBUST: "Here are some words to add to our vocabularies today: 20 obsolete English words that should make a comeback. Andre is probably using all of them routinely already."
I used deliciate in an after-dinner speech last year. Sadly, everyone in the room (mostly college teachers) knew it, or at least thought they knew it, from the familiar root.
Brannigan I used once to describe a fistfight that broke out in a rugby scrum which resulted in four players (all on the other team) being carried off, and the disciplinary committee let me off on the grounds that, if they couldn't understand what I was saying, I was likely preparing to make fools of them again if they presumed to discipline me. When one of them asked me later what it meant, I described it as, "An action approved by Duke Wayne," and he nodded his head briskly in wise agreement.
Quagswagging I used once in a novel as quagswagged for grabbing a miscreant by the shoulders and shaking him until his teeth rattle. The commissioning editor knew better than to argue with me, but three copy editors went in cabal to the publisher who called me and said, "Over my dead body." I knew when I was beat. It deserves to be revived and recast for my purpose.
I also know and occasionally in the right company use jargogle, pronounced with two hard gees as jargoggle, corrade, kench (which Sharon Tillotson suggests we use in place of LOL), brabble, bibesy (because it shares a root with bibulous and is thus semi-familiar to the educated), widdendream, twitter-light for twilight.
Ludibrious is likely to be mispronounced by Americans as bry- whereas it should be bree- and is anyway superfluous when we have risible.
Sanguinolent is pompous when we have bloodthirsty.
Jollux doesn't mean just fat, it means a buffoon. Falstaff in the Shakespeare two-parter about King Hal is jollux.
Malagrug shows promise if we need a neologism to replace grim or dismal. Malagrugrous just sounds too inelegant for words. Don't do it.
Freck sounds too much like genteel form of f*ck.
Perisollogy and hoddypeak are just too prissy for words.
Scriptitation too is prissy, but could usefully encapsulate my mantra, "A writer writes" as scriptitatum scriptitator for those with, or pretensions to, a classical education.
A teacher who tells a student he is yemeles (pronunciation yeemless) deserves what he gets. Better perhaps to misuse the harmless word casual to mean careless, heedless, negligent.
Illecebrous is one of those words whose sound is contrary to its meaning. It doesn't sound alluring, enticing or attractive to me at all. Perhaps we can revive it with a new meaning to describe those D-grade celebrities who are celebrated only for being criminal or crooked or plain nasty.
Copyright ©2012 Andre Jute
Andre Jute is a best-selling novelist and, through his non-fiction books, a leading teacher of creative writing, graphic design and engineering. He was previously an adventurer, advertising executive, political and military advisor, and performing arts critic. He is currently editorial advisor to the micropublisher CoolMain Press. He is the founder of the notorious free-for-all discussion group ROBUST, which those who read this article all the way through will probably like.
This article is reprinted from Andre's blog Kissing the Blarney.
Andre wrote: Deliciating in the power of words, quagswagging the prissy ones by Andre JuteWe knew you would come through, Andre. Those are two great words that would add much to one's vocabulary.
Illecebrous is one of those words whose sound is contrary to its meaning. It doesn't sound alluring, enticing or attractive to me at all. Perhaps we can revive it with a new meaning to describe those D-grade celebrities who are celebrated only for being criminal or crooked or plain nasty.
I second that, and would inform the arbiters of etymology for Oxford English Dictionary that it was used that way first in print by you on your blog. You could become even more famous, kench (or should that be knch).
What a hoot!
I think "kench" is proper when we aren't texting. Otherwise, "knch"...
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But I'm not overly keen to have my name attached to any neologisms or even retreads of obsolete words, as I think English, with half a million words in common use, already has a word for every occasion.
Except of course for the one word I deliberately coined, "lindavan", noun.
I know that Andre. Sometime in the last 10 years or so I read a biography of James Murray, the key lexicographer of the original Oxford Dictionary. Can't remember the book's name or author. He literally devoted his life to it, though he somehow managed to have a dozen or so kids. I believe I recall that after his first wife died, he married a strong woman who took care of business along with the kids. I was fascinated by that book, and still remember much of the struggle he went through to get it right. Boggles the mind... Perhaps that's why I feel the English Oxford Dictionary should be the premier English language one.
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The OED is a lost cause. A preference for it is anyway based on a wrong premise, that the purest English is spoken in England. It isn't. In Boston and the surrounding colonies, English has remained truer to Shakespeare's time than anywhere in England. And modern English is most purely spoken, according to the BBC's Pronunciation Unit, at St Columbine's School in Dublin.
We came to live in Ireland not only because the Prime Minister promised me security and a tax-free existence, but because in Cambridge the primary school teachers spoke such a horrid patois that my mother, a teacher of English, offered to pay to send our child to school anywhere else.
I'm not keen on other languages and dialects, including dialects of English, at all. I would like the entire world to speak English, and standardised English at that. Boston English will do fine. Or Oxford English, anything really, as long everyone spoke it. We'd suddenly have a whole lot fewer wars if idiots couldn't claim that some obscure little language gave them a right to nationhood.
Andre said: I'm not keen on other languages and dialects, including dialects of English, at all. I would like the entire world to speak English, and standardised English at that. Boston English will do fine. Or Oxford English, anything really, as long everyone spoke it. We'd suddenly have a whole lot fewer wars if idiots couldn't claim that some obscure little language gave them a right to nationhood. Kench!
Andre, you are getting fiestier again. I'm taking that as a sign that you are getting stronger every day. I hope that is the case. Have you managed even a small bike ride or are your hills just too steep?
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http://www.thorncycles.co.uk/forums/i...
I went into hospital for surgery and I haven't finished the reassembling the bike yet. Instead I take walks on those hills.
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"I love words, and occasionally, they love me back."
