Imagine if this was still how we referred to teens / adolescents. “Hobberdehoy fiction.” “Hobberdehoy angst.” “He only moved out of his mother’s basement, like, last year. I don’t know, he just seems so hobberdehoy.”
To dance upon nothing is to be hanged, which in turn is to be married? I can’t tell if these 19th century sailors were really existentially obsessed with the inseparability of sex / marriage and death, or were just really confused about it.
We all come from the same place. This is an important thing to keep in mind.
Hello everyone!
The school year has started again and Weird Word Wednesday is back! Not that those two things are connected. They’re not connected at all, because Weird Word Wednesday is certainly not run by a student. That would be an absurd assumption to make.
Today’s word is “resurrection men” (I know it’s two words, but we’ll let it slide). Kinda makes you wonder about what the Medical Schools are up to nowadays, huh?**
**Disclaimer: Johns Hopkins Medical School definitely doesn’t dig up dead bodies for experimentation, so there’s no need to make any absurd assumptions.
It’s Wednesday again, and you know what that means—time for a weird word! Well, actually, today’s word isn’t really weird per se, but the definition here is certainly not the usual one, and would be rather embarrassing for us if we weren’t lucky enough to be part of the Peabody Institute and Johns Hopkins University (no Academies here!).
This definition of the word is actually not as strange as one might think. In one of his philosophical dialogues called “The Symposium,” Plato, the founder of the original Academy, suggests a connection between the erotic and the life of the mind—the word “philosophy,” in fact, actually means “love of wisdom.” Still, I don’t think this is exactly what Plato had in mind!
ACK! Ruffians! ACK! Pirates!
Welcome to another edition of Weird Word Wednesday!
Today’s words are brought to you by the letter “Ack.” (Fun fact: did you know that the British military began to pronounce the letter A as “ack” in early wireless communications to avoid confusion? For example: “ack-ack,” an abbreviation of “anti-aircraft.”)
How “ack” has come to refer to water is unclear. Was it an abbreviation of “aquatic”? Or were the aquatic pirates and ruffians of the days of “Andrewe’s Dictionary of the Cant and Slang Languages” so much more frightening than their terrestrial cousins that only they would elicit the eponymous expression of surprise and fear: “ACK!”? I think I need to go take an ack-break to think about this one…
This gives new meaning to the phrase “tying the knot.”
