the worthless word for the day is: night-foundered


distressed for want of knowing the way in the night
  - James Barclay's Dictionary of the English Language

Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam
The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff,
Deeming some island, often, as seamen tell,
With fixed anchor in his scaly rind
Moors by his side under the lee, while night
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays
So stretched out in length the arch-fiend lay
Chained on the burning lake... (Milton, Paradise Lost)

"Yet I'm still night-foundered, still blind so much of the time."
  - Harper's Magazine, March 1997

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the worthless word for the day is: cryptozoology


/KRIP-tuh-zoe-ah'-luh-gee/
the study of the lore concerning legendary animals
esp. in order to evaluate the possibility of their existence

Cryptozoology is, literally, the study of hidden animals.
It is the study of such creatures as the Australian bunyips,
Bigfoot, the chupacabra, and the Loch Ness monster. It is
not a recognized branch of the science of zoology.
  - the Skeptic's Dictionary
    http://skepdic.com/crypto.html

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the worthless word for the day is: avernal

(also avernian) infernal, chthonic
/ah-VERN-ul/ or /ah-VER-nee-un/

from L. Avernalis, of Avernus, a lake
near Pozzouli, Italy; reputed bacause
of its depth and stench to lead to
the underworld

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the worthless word for the day is: horrisonant

sounding horribly; of terrible sound
[from L. horrere + sonant]

also horrisonous  [f. L. horrisonus]

"To exact implicit and profound belief by
mysterious and horrisonant terms."
  - Robert Southey, The Doctor

"I listened to the ululating wail and
horrisonous mewl."
  - Len Deighton, The Ipcress File

[thanx to Theresa]

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the worthless word for the day is: feuillemort

/fu-ya-MORT/ [F. feuille morte, dead leaf]
the color of a faded leaf

The shadow of a cloud
Falls on the gnarled and boulder-buttressed oak
Beneath whose boughs I pause,
Noting the mistletoe
Already pearled with wintry berries white
'Mid leaves of mottled bronze and feuillemort.
  - from Hesperian Fall, by Clark Ashton Smith

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the worthless word for the day is: chronotherapy

treatment of a sleep disorder by changing sleeping
and waking times in an attempt to reset the patient's
biological clock

"Only in the past few years, however, have chronobiologists
begun to seriously challenge the medical community to
recognize the importance of body time. Once considered an
emerging field, chronotherapy -- diagnosis and treatment
based on the body's biological rhythms -- is now being used
to treat a range of ailments, from sleep disorders to
depression,  and even, in some cases, cancer."
  - Molly Knight, The Baltimore Sun  Sept. 26, 2003

suspicions  confirmed: this whole Spring Ahead, Fall
Back thing is just another government conspiracy

(I hope you used your borrowed hour wisely..
you'll have to pay it back come spring.)

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the worthless word for the day is: eglomerate

[obs., faux L. from e- + glomerare, to wind or gather into a ball]
to unwind, as thread from a ball

<the kitten proceeded to once again eglomerate the yarn>

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the worthless word for the day is: mole

[Chem.] the molecular weight of a substance
expressed in grams; gram molecule

Celebrated annually on October 23 from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m.,
Mole Day commemorates Avogadro's Number (6.02 x 10^23), which
is a basic measuring unit in chemistry. Mole Day was created
as a way to foster interest in chemistry.
  - http://www.moleday.org

Happy Mole Day!
[thanx to jnova]

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the worthless word for the day is: gemelliparous

[rare, from L. gemellus, twin + parere, to produce]
/gem-el-LIP-a-rous/  producing twins  [Bailey, 1727]

Double your pleasure:  http://www.vocabula.com/vrNOV00Sheehan.htm

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the worthless word for the day is: lucripetous

[obs. from L. lucripeta]  /loo-KRIP-eh-tous/
eager for gain (money-hungry?)

"When he was made a Bishop no man was less
lucripetous, he desired to hold nothing in
commendam."
  - Thomas Plume, Life of John Hacket (1675)

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the worthless word for the day is: zeptosecond

one sextillionth of a second

not to be confused with a yoctosecond,
one septillionth of a second

"Of course, one day, perhaps not so very far
in the future, even the speedy attosecond will
fail to satisfy. Electrons will look downright
poky. "As you go into smaller structures of
matter, inside the atomic nucleus, processes
become even faster," Krausz says. "In nuclear
physics, the natural timescale is several orders
of magnitude faster -- in the realm of
zeptoseconds," or sextillionths of a second."
  - Alan Burdick, DISCOVER (June 2003)

cf. femtosecond (not to be confused with attosecond)
http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2003/06/11.html

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the worthless word for the day is: aroint

[archaic, origin unknown]
verb imperative: begone -- used with reflexive thee
   <aroint thee, witch - Shakespeare>

trans. verb -- to drive away by or as if by an
  exclamation or curse
   <the Yankees duly arointed the Red Sox>

---

our condolences to Red Sox and Cubs fans worldwide..

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the worthless word for the day is: extropian

an advocate or adherent of the theory of extropy;
a person who believes that cultural and technological
development tends to oppose, and will overcome, entropy

"I want to believe the cryonicists. Really I do. I gave up on religion
in college, but I often slip back into my former evangelical fervor,
now directed toward the wonders of science and nature. But this is
precisely why I'm skeptical. It is too much like religion: it promises
everything, delivers nothing (but hope) and is based almost entirely on
faith in the future. And if Ettinger, Drexler and Merkle are the trinity
of this scientistic sect, then F. M. Esfandiary is its Saul. Esfandiary,
on the road to his personal Damascus, changed his name to FM-2030 (the
number signifying his 100th birthday and the year nanotechnology is
predicted to make cryonics successful) and declared, "I have no age.
Am born and reborn every day. I intend to live forever. Barring an
accident I probably will."

"Esfandiary forgot about cancer, a pancreatic form of which killed him on
July 8, 2000. FM-2030--or more precisely, his head--now resides in a vat
of liquid nitrogen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale,
Ariz., but his legacy lives on among his fellow "transhumanists" (they
have moved beyond human) and "extropians" (they are against entropy).

"This is what I call "borderlands science," because it dwells in that
fuzzy region of claims that have yet to pass any tests but have some
basis, however remote, in reality. It is not impossible for cryonics
to succeed; it is just exceptionally unlikely. The rub in exploring the
borderlands is finding that balance between being open-minded enough to
accept radical new ideas but not so open-minded that your brains fall out.
My credulity module is glad that some scientists are devoting themselves
to the problem of mortality. My skepticism module, however, recognizes
that transhumanistic-extropian cryonics is uncomfortably close to religion.
I worry, as Matthew Arnold did in his 1852 poem "Hymn of Empedocles," that
we will...
feign a bliss / Of doubtful future date,
And while we dream on this / Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose."
- Scientific American; New York; Sep 2001; Michael Shermer

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the worthless word for the day is: miridically

[obs. rare]  (from L. miridicus, from mirus, wonderful)
amazingly, remarkably

"Those things that are miridically done
by the Devil, and Magicians."
  - John Gaule (1652)

bonus word: miribilist (from L. miribilis, wonderful)
one who works wonders
  - from James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1908

---

SpartAnn writes: I wonder, is a $4 million purple diamond
ring an uberdrachenfutter?  A superuberdrachenfutter?

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the worthless word for the day is: drachenfutter

[G] a peace offering to a wife from a guilty husband
(literally: dragon fodder)

from "They Have a Word for It", by Howard Rheingold

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the worthless word for the day is: dotterel

/DAH-teh-rel/ or /DAH-trel/
[from ME; related to dote, dotard]  also dottrel
1) a species of plover (said to be very easily caught)
2) [Brit] a silly, foolish person, esp. one who is easily duped

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the worthless word for the day is: bovarism

(domination by) a romantic or unreal conception
of oneself: conceit; hence, bovaristic - conceited

"The French philosopher, Jules de Gaultier, has
said that one of the essential faculties of the
human being is the power granted to man to
conceive himself as other than he is. He calls
this power bovarism after the heroine of
Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary."
  - A. Huxley, Olive Tree

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the worthless word for the day is: legerity

[from OF leger, light]  /le-JER-i-tee/
lightness; quickness or agility of mind or body

And when the mind is quickend, out of doubt,
The organs, though defunct and dead before,
Break up their drowsy grave, and newly move
With casted slough and fresh legerity.
  - The Life of King Henry the Fifth, Act 4, Sc. 1
    William Shakespeare

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the worthless word for the day is: haecceity

{Scholastic Philos.}
[from L. haec, this] /hek-SEE-ih-ty/
that which gives something its unique quality: thisness
(compare quiddity, whatness)

"Of course, if provision is made only for
his general humanity and not for what makes
him hic or ille, not for his haecceity as
the schoolmen used to say, a man will have
cause to complain."
  - Journal of Education (1890)

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the worthless word for the day is: bdellotomy

/de-LOT-eh-my/  [from Gr. bdella, leech]
the surgical application of leeches; the practice of cutting
leeches to empty them of blood while they continue to suck

"When the little blood-sucker has taken his fill and is about
to release his bite.. a small incision is made in his side
that serves as an outlet for the blood, and he goes on
sucking... Bdellatomy [sic] is the name given to the practice."
  - Daily News; 30 July, 1868

bonus word: bdellometer - a mechanical leech (for that purpose)

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the worthless word for the day is: offscum

[archaic]
that which is skimmed off; scum, dross, refuse;
fig., that which is rejected as vile or worthless

"The offscum and the offscouring of
the very dregs of your society..."
  - Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a
   residence on a Georgian plantation 1839

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the worthless word for the day is: yirn

/yurn/
to whine; to pout or show petulance

an abecedarian insult, from "The Superior Person's Book of Words"
by Peter Bowler:

Sir, you are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalial, dasypygal,
excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic,
jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial,
papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, thersitical,
unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, xylocephalous, yirning zoophyte.

(for a translation, check the website --
I fear it might trigger the spam assassin)

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the worthless word for the day is: omnisufficiency

[obs., rare]
the quality of being 'all-sufficient'

"To find an Omnisufficiency in ourselves
is an Intrusion, an Usurpation upon God."
  - John Donne, Sermons (1622)

"In the sermons, as in the poems (where it has led
to occasional corruptions of the text), he uses
words that, if not obsolete, were growing rare--
"bezar," "defaulk," "triacle," "lation"--but, more
often, he coins or adopts already coined "inkhorn"
terms--"omnisufficiency," "nullifidians,"
"longanimity," "exinanition."  (of John Donne)
  - The Cambridge History of English and American Lit.

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the worthless word for the day is: peregrinate

[adj, rare]  (from L. peregrinatus)
having the air of one who has traveled or lived abroad: foreign

HOLOFERNES: ...his humour is lofty, his discourse
peremtory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious,
his gait majestical, and his general behavior vain,
ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too
spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too
peregrinate, as I may call it.
SIR NATHANIEL: A most singular and choice epithet.
- Love's Labours Lost, Act 5, Scene 1

the OED says: A purposely pedantic term put by Shakespeare
into the mouth of Holofernes; thence taken by Lytton.

"Imagine this figure, grotesque, peregrinate, and
to the eye of a peasant, certainly diabolical."
  - Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, My Novel

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the worthless word for the day is: nympholepsy

[from Gr. numpholeptos] /NIM-feh-lep'-sy/
1) a frenzy supposed by ancient peoples to have been induced by nymphs
2) an emotional frenzy, as for something unattainable

"This is not a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of
nullifidians. Rather it is hoped that the haecceity of this
enchiridon of arcane and recondite sesquipedalian items will
appeal to the oniomania of an eximious Gemeinschaft whose
legrity and sophrosyne, whose Sprachgefuhl and orexis wlll
find more than fugacious fulfillment among its felicific pages."
  - from the forward to the first edition, "New York Times
    Everyday Reader's Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused,
    and Mispronounced Words", by by Laurence Urdang

this looks like a week for arcane and recondite sesquipedalian quotes..

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the worthless word for the day is: rampallion

[origin unknown] /ram-PAL-yen/
  (also rampallian)
a good-for-nothing scoundrel: wretch

"[Did you have to] raise that rancescent
rampallion's rabid rantings to mind?"
  - maverick, 9/27/03

[thanx mav!]

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the worthless word for the day is: exonumia

[NL] /EK-su-nOO-me-uh/
objects that resemble money but are not
designed to circulate as money; e.g.,
medals, tokens, badges, scrip, etc.
(also includes the sort of stuff the
Franklin Mint issues)

"This year the editorial department of
The Numismatist is pleased to introduce
a monthly series reporting on the vast
and varied gamut of exonumia."
  - The Numismatist, Jan. 1977

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the worthless word for the day is: fewterer

[obs, from F. veltre, greyhound]
a keeper of dogs, esp. greyhounds

"The fewterer was the keeper and handler of
the greyhounds in medieval and Renaissance
society... While being a fewterer was a
peasant's position, it was a well-respected one."
  - from http://www.fewterersguild.org/fewterer.php

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the worthless word for the day is: barathrum

[L., from Gr., a pit, gulf]
a) a deep pit at Athens, into which condemned criminals were thrown
b) the abyss, hell
c) an insatiable extortioner or glutton

"Aristeides himself is reported to have said,
'If the Athenians were wise, they would cast
both of us into the barathrum.'"
  - George Grote, The History of Greece

/BAR-ah-thrum/

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today's classic wwftd is: abderite

/AB-de-rite/
usually capitalized
(from the Greek city Abdera, whose
inhabitants were reputedly stupid)

1) a native or inhabitant of Abdera
2) simpleton, scoffer (so called from
  Democritos, the laughing philosopher)

<You have no more mind than an Abderite.>

An Abderite saw a eunuch talking with a woman
and asked him if she was his wife. When he
replied that eunuchs can't have wives, the
Abderite asked: "So is she your daughter?"
  - from the jokebook "Philogelos"
   (The Laughter Lover, 4th/5th century CE)

oh, those abderian, fun-loving Greeks..

[thanx to Jo]

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