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Unique word of the day5/26/2023 Believe it or not, this actually wasn’t the sort of word that would make people snicker back in the day. We’re officially retiring “hungover” and going with “ crapulous” from now on, which describes a, well, crappy feeling you get from eating or drinking too much. Not “wyrd” as in a fate we can’t escape, necessarily, but more as in “the way things happen,” like an interconnected series of events. “ Wyrd” as in the resonant ways that fate and destiny interact with our own individual choices. No, not “wyrd” as in “weird” - though the first word eventually became the second one. We can probably trace the eventual adoption of the word “ arse” to this word - the “ears” sounds more like “arse” than the “ears” on the side of your head. The distant relative of “asshole” was “earsgang,” which literally referred to the anus, or the lower opening of the digestive tract. And yes, they were so named because of the way people would simply spew out of buildings. The word “vomitorium” comes from Latin, and it refers to a passageway or egress in a large building, like a theater, where lots of people could pass in and out. There’s a stubborn myth going around about this word, but contrary to what you may have heard, a vomitorium wasn’t a special room for the ancient Romans to throw up halfway through a meal so they could keep gorging themselves at the banquet. John Locke once wrote, “I fear, that the jumbling of those good and plausible Words in your Head.might a little jargogle your Thoughts.” You could basically substitute “jargogle” for “jumble” and make a day of it. Old English Words For Your Consideration 1. Let’s get to work restoring the English language to its former glory. Nevertheless, we’ve rounded up an entertaining collection of old English words that happen to include some real Old English words. Real Old English words would be so unrecognizable to us that we probably wouldn’t even know how to begin to pronounce them. This was the language spoken by Germanic invaders in Britain before the Norman Conquest of 1066. That Shakespearean argot you’re thinking of is actually Elizabethan English and came centuries after what is properly known as Old English, which refers to the earliest recorded beginnings of English - up to the year 1150 CE. It’s worth pointing out that a lot of what people casually refer to as “Old English” is actually Middle English or Early Modern English. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to restore a few Old English words to our current-day vocabulary. Perhaps to restore some equilibrium to the restless trajectory of the English language, we should take it all the way back to the slang of the Anglo-Saxons. But all it takes is a quick scan of The Canterbury Tales or Beowulf to grok that the so-called “gold standard” of proper English hasn’t been around for that long, either. It’s not exactly unheard of for older people to fret about what younger people are doing to language - it’s a tale, one could say, as old as time.
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