There is a lot to love about this word.
- How many words can boast three E’s in the first four letters? (Okay, epee is one, but that word is lame).
- It has two Y’s, and we all love Y because it’s the underdog of the vowels; everybody wants to see more Y (it sleeps with both X and Z, what a slut!)
- It just sssslides off the tongue…eleeMOsynary…eleeMOsynary.
- Its meaning is a complete surprise: “of, relating to, or dependent on charity”.
- It weighs in at a bulky six syllables but moves like it’s three.
- It can actually be defined in less syllables than it takes to speak the word (i.e. “of charity”). And considering how few people are familiar with it, using it in public means…
- …there is no way to actually use this word without sounding like a complete suckfuck. Normally, I have a problem with this. But there is a point at which a word becomes so completely out of complete snooty proportion, it becomes loveable, like a bad movie, or a puppy with two broken legs and also somebody chopped its tail off and made it wear a stupid hat.
My first question: do people who work for charitable organizations get to use this word a lot? Do they call up donors and say “may we count on your eleemosynary contribution this year”? Of course, the recipient of that phone call would probably just hang up, but oh! Maybe the executives say it a lot! They’d be all like “our eleemosynary activities for the eleemosynary year are expanding in an eleemosynary way thanks to our eleemosynary phone banks working ’round the clock to raise eleemosynary capital”. And then the other guy would be all like, “dude, you are so high right now…”
My second question: does NPR know about this word? Considering their audience is pretty snooty, they could really bank it on this word. So you’d have Tom Ashbrook going, “we are, like, SOOO eleemosynary. Really really really eleemosynary. EleeMOsynary.”
For most people, this is not a hard word to love. Everybody loves sex, except for nuns, virgins, Mormons, and guys with very very small penises. But I love the word itself, not just its meaning. I love it because you take this complicated act, this act that dominates so much of our thinking, an activity that creates new worlds and destroys others, and you reduce it until you have a one syllable, three letter word. And not just any three letter word. It’s got the most common letter of all (”E”), the third most common consonant, letters everyone loves and is familiar with, and then you toss in that dirty little “X”. The S and the E would be NOTHING without that enticing X at the end. We love the X. It’s a filthy, slutty whore of a letter and it’s tag-teaming that innocent lowercase E. X isn’t just wrong, it’s even the symbol for “wrong” or “do not do”. That makes me hard.
Interesting “fact” about this word: D.H. Lawrence invented it. I’m pretty sure he also started the company DHL.
This is an easy one. I love the word “onion” because the O looks like an onion. Actually, there are two onions in the word onion.
Not only is this the greatest word to describe this vegetable, it’s also the best word for it in the WORLD.
- Spanish: cebolla
- German: zwiebel
- Swahili: kitunguu
- Chinese: yang cong (pinyin)
- Icelandic: laukur
- Russian: some horrible-sounding word
- Korean: totally illegible
Also, “Onion” is a great name for a yellow labrador retriever. Particularly one who gets hit by a car when you’re six.
We have plenty of words for regurgitation in English:
- Throw up
- Vomit
- Puke
- Upchuck
- Hurl
- Spew
- Blow chunks
- Cough up
- Heave
- Spit up
And for such a wonderfully repugnant activity, it’s great to have so many words at our disposal. But “barf” is the king. Besides representing both the action and the product of regurgitation (a quality shared with throw up, vomit, and puke) it is the lone word that sounds like the activity. And when you consider how complicated and ridiculous is the act of barfing, this is no small feat.
It’s also special because it only rhymes with one other word: scarf.
The OED has the definition of “agency” I’m interested in listed first:
The faculty of an agent or of acting; active working or operation; action, activity.
In typical OED style, I can’t fucking understand that. God bless you, Random House (def. 10):
a means of exerting power or influence; instrumentality
I did not know this definition of “agency” until just a year and a half ago, when I took a class called Advanced Sociological Theory. The kids in this class said “agency” a lot, and I spent weeks trying to fully wrap my head around it (they try not to talk about agency in economics, which was my major). If I have “agency” it means I have the ability to act, or to determine an outcome. So, in a way, a prisoner has less “agency” than a free man, although “agency” is typically used more for mental constructs than physical ones. What I love about it is that I learned it so late in life, and it seemed like such a difficult concept at the time, but once I wrapped my head around it, I found it tremendously useful. Now I say it way too much and at wholly inappropriate times.
There is an intrinsic moral agency in all human beings, except ugly people, who are automatically bad people.
Sorry, babe. I just don’t have the agency to sex you up tonight, what with my penis being cut off and fertilizing the rhododendrons and all.
For stupid men and women who are afraid of their own vaginas, “menses” is the medical term used to describe the vaginal discharge from menstruation (answers.com calls it “blood and cellular debris” while dictionary.com calls it “blood and mucosal tissue”, but it’s also medically correct to just call it “pussy goo”). And if you think that’s gross then get lost. I didn’t ask you to EAT it, just enjoy the word. Grow up!
I found this word relatively recently, in fact I went looking for it, and was so pleased I did. It is such a nice word, when you consider how much people seek to avoid talking about menses, hearing about menses, or looking at menses, and now, probably, reading about menses.
I also love menses because it is underutilized, but could be very useful:
- “Hey! Wipe off your damn menses when you’re done with the stationary bikes!”
- “This isn’t hamburger! It’s beef menses!”
- “You really should have said something, dear. Now I have all this menses in my beard, and I have a job interview in twenty minutes! What will I tell them? Oh, sorry about my beard, it’s only menses. I’m not a cannibal or anything.”
- “I love you so much, babe, I would eat your menses.”
- other gross things
If you just cannot bring yourself to say “menses”, you can also say “catamenia.” But people might think you’re talking about this, and that could make for a much stranger conversation.