Word of the Day. Post it Here

Fraggle Rocker said:
...It's the title of a song in the 1964 Walt Disney musical movie "Mary Poppins," starring Julie Andrews as a British nanny who can unfurl her umbrella and use it to fly, and Dick Van Dyke as the clueless single dad who unwittingly employs her to take his children on supercalifragilisticexpialidocious adventures. ..
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LOL, Have you even seen this movie? Are you confusing it with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?
 
Lawksamercy!

Burt ain't Meery Poppin's guvnor
ees a chimerny sweep!

(Moving elbows up and down in a typical cockney manner)
 
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Orleander said:
LOL, Have you even seen this movie? Are you confusing it with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?
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No I haven't seen either one, but the movie "Mary Poppins" is an icon of American culture. Apparently I was wrong about Dick Van Dyke's character being a single father. But everything else I looked up on Wikipedia before posting. The umbrella isn't listed there but "Mary Poppins umbrella" yields a zillion Google hits. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a flying car, they didn't have any need for a flying umbrella in that movie, did they?
 
THE OWL IS GONE? :eek:

The Owl is the best thing on here.
He's a crusader for justice.

Come back feathered crusader!

Mr Owl. I read your comment of having outgrown the forum.
Nonsense, you are in no way stupid enough yet.
There's a lot of development needed :)
 
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Chris Cremin said:
Have you ever seen a Harry Potter film?
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I've read the books--well I'm a patient man who waits to buy them used, so I just finished "Order of the Phoenix." I could borrow one from any of fifty friends but their hard-backs are too bulky to take on the subway.

I saw the first movie. I wanted to love it but it lived down to my expectations. It was a wonderful portrayal of a world in which magic is real, wizards go to college and goblins run banks. The quidditch match, mythical creatures, the halls of Hogwarts--I really felt like I was there. Unfortunately it was not the world I had developed in my mind from reading, so the images kept conflicting with the ones I had stored. I rarely enjoy films made from the books I love.

All said, to me the draw of Harry Potter's saga is as much the story, with all its nuances of history, relationships and kids growing up, and the archetype of the hero being dragged kicking and screaming by fate into his heroic role, as it is the escapism of whimsy being real. It would take several hours to render that story into film. Condensing it into standard "feature length" leaves in the whimsy but condenses out the nuances.

Lord of the Rings was a major exception precisely because it was not: They took nine hours to tell that story.

Have no fear, I am a tireless fan of magic and whimsy. My list of all-time favorite films includes Allegro Non Troppo, Bedazzled (the original), Being There (I also loved the book but it was a tiny book), the Dark Crystal, Fantasia, Ghostsbusters, the Muppet Movie, the Music Man, the Neverending Story, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Wizard of Oz and Yellow Submarine.

I love Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger books, and I carry Piglet in my pocket because "somewhere in the woods, a little boy and his bear are still playing."

About what you'd expect of a Fraggle, I suppose. Some people still think we are mythical creatures and all those noises in the basement are just the pipes expanding and contracting. :)
 
"Internuts"

"The phenomenon that occurs when someone becomes a badass when addressing others on a message board.

It is a common practice for the reticent, meek, and cowardly to make bold statements, on the internet, knowing there is no way to be held accountable.

The poster was getting badly flamed, so threatened to kick everyone's ass. His anger made his internuts grow."
 
cosmictraveler said:
"Internuts"

"The phenomenon that occurs when someone becomes a badass when addressing others on a message board.

It is a common practice for the reticent, meek, and cowardly to make bold statements, on the internet, knowing there is no way to be held accountable.

The poster was getting badly flamed, so threatened to kick everyone's ass. His anger made his internuts grow."
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Same as the average milksop becomes when
strapped in the seatbelt of his family car.

A woman on the TV the other day claimed that her husband
suffered road rage because he swore under his breath at other drivers,
even though he never made any physical gestures
or shouted at them.

In comparison with most drivers he was a Road Saint!
 
Chris Cremin said:
A woman on the TV the other day claimed that her husband suffered road rage because he swore under his breath at other drivers, even though he never made any physical gestures or shouted at them. In comparison with most drivers he was a Road Saint!
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In order to qualify as "road rage," a behavior must affect or be observable by the driver or passenger in another car. Giving the finger is so common these days that even that doesn't really count except in the eyes of the law. Here in D.C. people have stopped their cars and pulled guns. Now that is road rage! A woman was sent to jail for tossing a soft drink cup through the open window of another car. Muttering to oneself is absolutely not road rage. Who knows, maybe it's a good safety valve.
 
Here's a word that I just came across and had to look up:

éclat
n.
1. Great brilliance, as of performance or achievement.
2. Conspicuous success.
3. Great acclamation or applause.
4. Archaic Notoriety; scandal.

Etymology

1674, "showy brilliance," from Fr. éclat "splinter, fragment" (12c.), also "flash of brilliance," from eclater "burst out, splinter," from O.Fr. esclater, of uncertain origin, perhaps from a W.Gmc. word related to slit or to O.H.G. sleizen "tear to pieces; to split, cleave." Extended sense of "conspicuous success" is first recorded in Eng. in 1741.
 
A word from an advertisement

A Stickthrow
A human being (from a dog's point of view)

Etymology
Hyundai car advertisement.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
I've read the books--well I'm a patient man who waits to buy them used, so I just finished "Order of the Phoenix." I could borrow one from any of fifty friends but their hard-backs are too bulky to take on the subway.
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What do you make of the fact that children are so in love with such an old fashioned kind of entertainment. No i-pods , no computers or mobiles.
It's Enid Blyton crossed with Bewitched.
 
Chris Cremin said:
What do you make of the fact that children are so in love with such an old fashioned kind of entertainment. No i-pods , no computers or mobiles.
It's Enid Blyton crossed with Bewitched.
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Children are in love with the story, not the medium. Clearly Rowling is a good storyteller who knows how to use her strengths of her medium. The story might not have been so effectively told by another writer, much less in a video or audio medium. But still, for children to muster the attention span required of such remarkably long reading assignments, not to mention the sheer inconvenience of their heft which even I find daunting, tells us that this story touches them very deeply.

My wife with her master's degree in English and her familiarity with Jung's work assures me that I'm wrong to call Harry an archetype (I garbled the "reluctant hero" archetype) and to put his story on the exalted level of Odysseus, Hamlet and Don Quixote. Nonetheless, how many of us--especially you younger members--have dreamt of waking up one day and discovering that this crappy life isn't really your life at all? That you're really someone else? That you can punish your abusive cousin by growing a tail on his butt? That magic is real and you're one of the elite few who can work it? That there's something going on in the world far more important than taking out the trash and cleaning your room, and that you're the important person who can help make it come out right?

I didn't discover Winnie the Pooh until I was in my thirties, and I was touched by the notion that although the world is a serious place, there's still a little boy inside me playing with his teddy bear. (And as I mentioned, I've carried a tiny Piglet in my pocket on a keyring ever since.) Imagine if I'd read about Harry when I was a little boy, and was told that the world is actually a rather whimsical place, but there's a grownup inside me with the awesome ability and responsibility to save it from evil?

As the Baby Boomers aged, they were told that they needed to "get in touch with their inner child." J.K. Rowling tells children that they need to get in touch with their inner adult. How nice that they're listening!
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
My wife with her master's degree in English and her familiarity with Jung's work assures me that I'm wrong to call Harry an archetype (I garbled the "reluctant hero" archetype) and to put his story on the exalted level of Odysseus, Hamlet and Don Quixote.
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He is predated by Frodo perhaps, the ordinary person who is required by circumstances to do extraordinary things.

The archetype of that is possibly the character "Christian"
in Pilgrims Progress.
 
" booty call "

" A late night summons-often made via telephone-to arrange clandestine sexual liasions on an ad hoc basis.

The student's mother was thankfully ignorant of her son's "booty calls."
 
A word that deserves to be preserved...

Fustigate
tr.v. fus·ti·gat·ed, fus·ti·gat·ing, fus·ti·gates
1. To beat with a club; cudgel.
2. To criticize harshly:

Etymology
This word was described back in 1896, when its entry was published
in the Oxford English Dictionary, as "humorously pedantic". These
days "fustigate" is mainly fodder for lists of difficult or rare
words. But then the word hasn't had a particularly extensive or
distinguished history - it only came into the language around 1650
and even in its prime it was always rather an uncommon or literary
word. Its creators took it from the Latin verb "fustigare", to
cudgel to death (from "fustis", a staff or club).

Sir Richard Burton used it in the 1880s in his translation of The
Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (better known as the
Arabian Nights Entertainment): "And she bade them bash me; so they
beat me on my ribs and the marks ye saw are the scars of that
fustigation."

It was also used earlier by George Huddesford, who in 1801 told of an
angry Jove who "cudgell'd all the constellations, ... / Swore he'd eject
the man i' the moon ... / And fustigate him round his orbit."

A writer in the Living Age in 1896 used it figuratively for
severely criticising somebody or something. He wrote of Matthew
Arnold's "fustigation of dummy opponents" as part of his style.
This figurative sense survives to some extent. It appeared in the
Rocky Mountain News in 2001: "Actually, most of today's complaints
seem weak and whiny, almost apologetic. They lack the scorn and
vitriol the writers evidently feel in their hearts. So - just this
once, at the dawning of a new year - let me pass along a sample of
real fustigation from real experts, a no-nonsense, in-your-face
style for local critics to aim for."
 
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