saw the word on livejournal.com ("send us pictures of your pantry, cupboards...)

"Pantry - a room, usually alongside the kitchen, designated for storage of beverages, food stuff and if large enough any additional kitchen appliances such as a dishwasher, deep freeze etc"

allegedly comes from the French "pain" (bread => bread room); has absolutely nothing to do with pants.

stumbled upon this one while reading the new-yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/07/09/070709fa_fact_sedaris?currentPage=1)

hunky-dory |ˈhə ng kē ˈdôrē| adjective informal fine; going well : everything is hunky-dory. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.(originally U.S.): hunky from Dutch honk ‘home, base’ (in games); the origin of dory is unknown.

i've always thought this word had something to do with david bowie. indeed, wikipedia says it's the title of his fourth album.

haven't learnt anything today so i've got to take measures :)

i have the financial times right before me (how did it get into my flat? good question. must be roger), so i'll just read until i stumble upon a new word.

"into the pack: apple takes risks in its bid to shape up the mobile market"

ok, there it is: raucous , as in "chief executive said to raucous applause"

raucous |ˈrôkəs| adjective making or constituting a disturbingly harsh and loud noise : raucous youths.

DERIVATIVES raucously adverb raucousness noun

ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: from Latin raucus ‘hoarse’ + -ous

mmm i wonder why it didn't occur to me that raucous is actually an equivalent of the french "rauque" (e.g. une voix rauque), an adjective that i know and love!

dally

INTRANSITIVE VERB: 1. To play amorously; flirt: “Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work” (Willa Cather). See synonyms at flirt. 2. To trifle; toy. 3. To waste time; dawdle.
TRANSITIVE VERB: To waste (time).

c.1300, possibly from Anglo-Fr. dalier "to amuse oneself," of uncertain origin.

also to dilly-dally
informal
we can't dilly-dally when there are critical decisions to be made
waste time

incisif - last thursday's word of the day, heard in a conversation involving my three bosses and myself. i've got no idea what the the context was, and i only remember thinking "incisif? i've got to write this one down".


"incisif" is one of these words i kind of know, a word that rings a bell (together with its English counterpart "incisive"), and yet i'm incapable of giving a clear-cut explanation of its meaning.

so the answer is two clicks away at wordreference.com:

Principal Translations:
incisif adj sharp (incisive)
incisif adj biting (satire)

Additional Translations:
incisif adj incisive
incisif (force clarté netteté) adj trenchant

seems soo obvious post hoc.

claquer sa dém'=claquer sa démission=resign

this is what you call it at L'Oréal

and this is what I'm going to do next Tuesday

*cheerful*

i'm completely absorbed by Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso". i didn't really expect a medieval text to be this engaging and beautiful but it makes me forget where i am, who i am and the check-up i need to run on my promotional budget.

reading a late medieval italian saga is not exactly like reading comic books - vocabulary's sometimes tough, so let me note down a couple of words before i forget.

l'elmo - for some reason, i thought it stood for "sword". it actually means "helmet" (duh) and a sword is of course "spada" (oh, the wordspotter blog. showcase for my quick-wittedness). As in:

Era, fuor che la testa, tutto armato,
et avea un elmo ne la destra mano:
avea il medesimo elmo che cercato
da Ferrau fu lungamente invano.

affanno - breathlessness (figurative meaning -> anxiety). can't give you an example from Orlando - i stumbled upon the word a couple of times but where exactly ?
my guess is that they (medieval people, that is) used "afanno" when we would normally use the word "stress". no stress guys! - niente affanni, sir lancelot!

means what it says, i.e. something is anxiogène if it generates anxiety, okay, clear enough.
my favourite part is actually its usage at my employer's headquarters => when developing communication for a new product, managers often dismiss copies as "anxiogènes".
as in: (gay-o manager of a beauty product range): "non mais c'est trop confusant ET anxiogène!"
can be said about anything that is supposed to attract people but fails its purpose.

the word i learnt today is "choyer" which is "pamper, indulge". as in "on doit choyer la conso" - "we've got to pamper our client".

well, my employer is good at pampering everyone except its own employee wordspotter.

choyer. pamper, indulge.

i finally got to searching www.bestlyricsupforgrabs.com (OK, not this one, but you know, a site of the sort) for "nessun dorma" because i have always been humming "la-la-la notte, tramontate stelle, all'alma vincero" (this singer guy doesn't articulate well and i just can't hear what comes before "notte") - and now i know the answer. it's "dilegua notte" - something like "vanish, o Night!".

dileguare. disperse

don't ask me how i stumbled upon the expression "word salad". so,

word salad
a confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases, specifically
• (in psychiatry) as a form of speech indicative of advanced schizophrenia.
• as a means of bypassing a spam filter for e-mail

i already see a couple of ways to use this one (something like "OMG when she speaks, you don't understand a thing, it's word salad")
but the problem is, i also can very easily imagine someone saying the very same thing about me when i speak Dutch.

and there's this Dutch word i saw on my train ticket today - "bovengroend" (=above-ground, the opposite of underground). "en surface" on the French side of the ticket (OK, we could've guessed this one).

bovengroend.

stunning. i've just created a journal on word spotting and language learning, and there you go, Frank asks me if a have a writer's block and handily suggests that i answer a question on this very topic!

awrightie then.

hmm. i like the word "gorgeous" as in "hello, gorgeous!". oh i almost forgot it's the name of my personal journal. hellogorgeous. where the hell did the "lj user" option go? whatever.

i like "roger" as in "roger that!" (as in "jack bauer says: "the bomb has NOT been secured, i repeat the bomb has NOT beeen secured. send the chopper now! okay, roger that!".

ever since i was a kid, i've liked the word "lynx"

and i like the French word "tergiverser/tergiversations" as well its English counterpart. and the Russian "ptichka" (my nickname) and the Italian "uccellino" (my other nickname).

i don't think there are any words i really hate.

so much for the writer's block.
otherwise i worked all day and didn't learn a single word. so see you next time.