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Mr. Poltroon's Lack of Vocabulary #3


Mr Poltroon

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Let's get a bit into the exact rules for the words on this list.
One of two things must be true: Either it's the first time I hear a certain word, or that word has more meanings than I knew it had. Simply not remembering a word's meaning, which happens quite often, is not enough to get on this list. What could happen is that I forget I had ever heard a given word before, and in which case it gets onto the list just fine.

  • sultry
  • suss
  • nugatory
  • crick
  • chiropractor
  • abattoir
  • perennial
  • rum -- as in odd.
  • apostate
  • stiff -- as in, a dead body

From 14/03/2017 to 19/03/2017

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In fairness, I did have to look up nugatory. I've certainly heard it before, but couldn't remember it without any context. The only other stumper this time was that usage of "rum," which is apparently British, old-fashioned, informal speech. Not shedding any tears over not knowing that one.

"Abattoir" is only a good word when you're writing a high fantasy novel and you want to make your carnage-covered battlefield sound fancy, in my experience, but I guess I don't read a lot of horror fiction, which is probably another good place for it to show up.

"Sultry" and "suss" are great words; use them all the time!

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I know abattoir mostly because once upon a time my WoW guildmate used it when asked where he worked, probably wanting to euphemise the whole slaughterhouse thing somewhat. Google was my friend.

I kind of but didn't exactly know what sultry meant, didn't know suss that well though I did know suss out meaning find out or figure out or something of that nature. Nugatory and the meaning of stiff you found I both had no clue of, same with rum but like ftb I'm not worried about that one.

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I'm actually surprised that neither of you knew that meaning of "stiff", but I was raised on a strict diet of American television and whatever books I could get my hands on, so maybe that's really not all that well-known... Don't know if I learned that from Get Smart or from Dashiell Hammett, but if I were ever writing a detective show or something, that word would come to mind immediately at the right times.

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I mostly watched Midsomer Murders, which might be too cultured to use that kind of thing. Or I just forgot. I did pick up a lot of random britishisms from that show, though.

The main character of Midsomer Murders actually uses "motes and beams, sir, motes and beams" at one point. I've sprung this on native English speakers and had them not comprehend, but I actually got the bible quote soon as I heard it. The Swedish translation I was taught is very similar to the English proverb, though funnily enough, it used the word for the "big wooden object" kind of beam. I wonder if it was intentional, or a mistranslation...

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14 hours ago, Zakamutt said:

The main character of Midsomer Murders actually uses "motes and beams, sir, motes and beams" at one point. I've sprung this on native English speakers and had them not comprehend, but I actually got the bible quote soon as I heard it. The Swedish translation I was taught is very similar to the English proverb, though funnily enough, it used the word for the "big wooden object" kind of beam. I wonder if it was intentional, or a mistranslation...

Interesting. Didn't have a clue what you were talking about, but looked it up and am familiar with the parable. That said, I'm not much of a bible person — until I looked it up, I couldn't even remember where "through a glass darkly" came from when I encountered it in the last year.

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