Increase your word power

I'll kick us off with a word I used everyday (well today !) that is perhaps related to the origin of this thread :-

PROLIX

Thanks Pompa, I'll try to use that one.

Mine isn't terribly obscure, it's just a favourite word

Gadzookery - noun

(British, dialect) the use of archaic words or expressions, especially in historical novels.

I like fossicking.

I may just try a spot of that the next time I've got the GDCs out by the riverside.

Nesh is a good Yorkshire word. It means a bit wimpy, particularly someone who feels the cold and needs to wear a coat just because it's freezing.

Perhaps Gadzookery would have been a good title for this thread.

Good word pompa. I can be meandering and verbose when I want to be too.

The synonym 'Circumlocutory' appeals to me; I do a lot of that.
When I first read Prolix, I had just woken up and saw it as prolapse

Marmight, I like Circumlocutory, it has a melodic sound, far better than prolix, that is an unpleasant sound. Verbose is a word I use quite commonly , it was a term commonly used in computer programming.

It was Charles Dickens who invented the 'Circumlocution Office' in Little Dorit - the means by which action on almost anything could be delayed almost infinitely.

Not exactly relevant, but Charles Dickens can claim the first use of the word cocktail in a written work – Martin Chuzzlewit I think.

Lovely I enjoy a nice word- here's mine - praxis. I shall go off and fossick about on the golf course today and see if it improves my score.

Transmogrify....applied to bread that I have forgotten about!

I always liked tintinabulation after I first read it in the John Betchemin (sp?) poem 'summoned by bells' but its a hard word to introduce in everyday conversation -or at all!

I wish all those words had been in the word list in the link on the Other Thread. I know all of them, but there were some on that link that foxed me. I was discombobulated.

I love the word 'discombobulation'. Never mind the meaning, it has a cosy , rounded, bobbly feel to it ! [duh emoticon]

I too love tintinnabulation, a very onomatopoeic word.

Another favourite is defenestration, the act of throwing something or someone out of the window. How lovely to say, casually, when asked where something is, "Oh I defenestrated it."

discombobulation, I am confused as to it's meaning.

It was only in relatively recent years that I realised "discombobulate" was a real word - I'd thought it was a jokey, made-up word. A great example of a word that sounds like what it means.

Absent, I think that is very relevant, it is interesting to know the origin of common words. It surprised me that Gadzookery is a relatively modern word.

1618 Defenestration of Prague – funny how you remember stuff isn't it? Although now I think about it, wasn't there one a couple of hundred years earlier?

Yes, absent, the first was in 1419.

Pompa I have just realised you are one of the digerati

The nearest I get to the digerati is digging the garden until I'm called in for tea.