asteism /ASTEE-izm/. noun. A backhanded compliment. Pleasant mockery; genteel, refined or polite irony or insult. Asteisms of the first sort include statements like “that dress makes you look so thin.” The second includes the work of many wits, such as Winston Churchill’s comment about Stafford Cripps that “he has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” From Greek asteismos (wit or witticism), from asteios (of a city, rather than the country).
Persons, places, things...you know the drill.
sough
sough /SOW/. noun or verb. The sighing sound of wind or water; a murmuring or humming. To make such a sound, to draw a deep breath. Also, to preach or pray in a hypocritical manner. Or to whine. Or even a drain or sewer. From Old English onomatopoeic verb swōgan (to resound; to rustle), related to swēgnjan (sigh).
“We laughed happily, and for a moment all the harbour noises stopped at once, so that we heard the sough and lap of the green water against the quay steps.” (Malcolm Lowry)
“As winds pass through leaves, deep and visible undulations of felicity passed through those who lay in the grass. We could hear the sough of dreamers who did not sleep.” (Nick Tosches)
“I have heard nothing but the sough of the sea
And wide upon the open sea my friend
The sea-wind crying, out of its cave to roam
No more, no more … until my memory
Swung you back like a lock…”
(John Berryman)
“When the racket was lost a moment, only a cosmic sigh; they heard the sough of time and space, the wave poised over everything.” (Nadine Gordimer)
“…a Certain Person who has bequeathed his children a caravan of fractions, and chatted, to the accompaniment of the nocturnal sough of trees, about something extremely domestic and silly, but therefore all the more awful…” (Vladimir Nabokov)
“This is the silver lining of
Pathetic fallacies: the soughOf Populus that taps at last
Not water but the author’s past.”
(Vladimir Nabokov)
“At night Coyle listened, the wind wrapping a sough around the keening timbers of the ship and the grim sound of the stricken.” (Paul Lynch)
“…the shouts of the bathers and of children at play, punctuating like the cries of sea-birds the sough of the gently breaking waves…” (Marcel Proust)
“Why should that trace not be what would, in a human or a Chelgrian, be a perfectly natural predisposition towards boredom caused by the sheer grinding relentlessness of their celebrated altruism and a weakness for the occasional misdemeanour; a dark, wild weed of spite in the endless soughing golden fields of their charity?” (Iain M. Banks)
frammis
frammis /FRAM-əs/. noun. A generic term for a thing that someone can’t name, similar to thingamabob or gizmo. A common invented surname in comics and invented company name in technical writing. More generally, nonsense or jargon, commotion or confusion. Origin unknown, perhaps derived from a family name.
“It [the comic strip ‘Silly Milly’] has its pet vocabulary—all names are Frammis, laughter is Yuk Yuk, and the language of animals is Coo.” (M. Farber)
“I could not write most science-fiction films, especially the kind where there is all that lunatic ‘Captain, the frammis on the right engine is flummaging’–type dialogue.” (William Goldman)
“We didn’t have a flangella voltometer with us. Very important during electrical work, otherwise you can fry the frammistat.” (Tom Piccirilli)
“The kook really meant it. He wanted to go find that uppity creepy cemetery where Ginny’s blue-blood parents had stuck her body, and blow trumpet for the dead. It was all at once laughable and pitiable and creepy. Like a double-talker giving you the business with the frammis on the fortestan, and you standing there wondering what the hell is happening.” (Harlan Ellison)
“Let’s do an example with some data. We just bought a frammis cutter for $10,000 five days ago…” (Joe Celko)
“In this little frammis, one of the oldest, you were persuaded to leave your clothes on the bureau… You see, honey? No one can touch ’em.” (Jim Thompson)
gobbledygook / gobbledegook
gobbledygook (gobbledegook) /GOB-əl-di-gook or GOB-əl-di-guuk/. noun. “The overinvolved, pompous talk of officialdom.” Pretentious verbiage. Unintelligible jargon. The first recorded use was in 1944 by U.S. Representative Maury Maverick who banned “gobbledygook language.” Maverick later noted he’d coined the word because it was onomatopoeic…it sounded like a turkey. See also: bafflegab.
“If a Super-Power wanted to contact man, it seems unlikely to me that it’d be all wrapped up in a lot of complicated gobbledegook. It would all be very clear indeed.” (Dallas McCord Reynolds)
“‘I am not at liberty to tell you what is wrong.’ It can’t be much fun having to parrot such gobbledygook. But who would want to work for a service where you earn promotion not for the number of people you let through but for the number you turn back?” (J.M. Coetzee)
“Ask a toad what beauty, great beauty, the to kalon is? He’ll answer that it’s his female toad, with her big round eyes starting out of her little head… . Ask philosophers, finally, and they’ll respond with gobbledygook; they have to have something in conformity with the archetype of the beautiful in its essence…” (Voltaire, trans. by P. Gay)
“A spider, a spiral, a one-eyed man”? What is that? A shopping list? A dance track? A line from a sodding haiku?
“Crispin, if I knew, I’d tell you, I swear.”
“Then it may just be random gobbledegook.” (David Mitchell)
“The multi-media self-consciousness of U2’s Achtung Baby/Zooropa phase, which simultaneously embraced and debunked the mythology and gobbledygook of rock stardom, capitalism, and power, and of which Bono’s white-faced, gold-lamé-suited, red-velvet-horned MacPhisto incarnation was the emblem, is what Wenders was criticizing.” (Salman Rushdie)
“But in reality the psychologist is simply tapping random and meaningless taps onto the lip, he doesn’t give a damn what he’s tapping, and the paralyzed, deaf-dumb-and-blind dentist gets enormously confused, there in the numb black, and he begins trying to move his upper lip, to communicate his confusion to his wife, to ask what the problem is, what’s this gobbledygook being tapped onto his lip, but the psychologist is meanwhile engaging the woman in clever conversation, and mild flirtation…” (David Foster Wallace)
fleer
fleer /fleer/. verb or noun. To grin or grimace; to sneer or jeer; to jibe…or the look of one doing so. A mocking speech. Unknown origin, possibly related to Norwegian and Swedish flira, Danish flire (to grin, to laugh inappropriately).
“What, dares the slave
Come hither, cover’d with an antic face,
To fleer and scorn at our solemnity?”
(William Shakespeare)
“Hebuiza laughed aloud, a fleering, raucous sound.” (Robert Boyczuk)
“The gas-lights hissed with a faint, malicious susurration, and except for their infinitesimal mechanical vivacity, that jetted fleeringly from obscenely open small slits, all life was extinguished.” (Hermann Broch)
“Nat wore the look he got when he was listening to something amazing that was new to him. A fleer of analysis, like he was startled to learn that he could have missed this before, given that he knew everything about anything worth knowing.” (Michael Chabon)
“My jaw muscles tightened and I think my lips fleered back like a wolf’s at the kill.” (John Steinbeck)
“I have always seen her critical, scornful and fleering; but now it is with genuine ill nature that she tears those she calls her friends to pieces.” (Simone De Beauvoir)
“As I went up by Ovillers
In mud and water cold to the knee,
There went three jeering, fleering spectres,
That walked abreast and talked of me.”
(Ivor Gurney)
humstrum
humstrum /HUM-STRUM/. noun. A musical instrument of crude or primitive construction. A hurdy-gurdy. Sometimes, music played equally badly. Obviously a portmanteau of hum + strum, favored for the pleasing repetition of sound even describing something displeasing.
“Bonnell Thornton had just published a burlesque Ode on St. Cecilia’s day, adapted to the ancient British musick, viz. the salt-box, the Jew’s-harp, the marrow-bones and cleaver, the humstrum or hurdy-gurdy, &c. Johnson praised its humour, and seemed much diverted with it.” (James Boswell)
“A musical instrument made of a mopstick, a bladder, and some packthread, thence also called a bladder and string, and hurdy gurdy; it is played on like a violin, which is sometimes ludicrously called a humstrum…” (Francis Grose)
“I went the other evening to the concert, and spent the time there much to my heart’s content in cursing Mr. Hague, who played on the violin most piggishly, and a Miss (I forget her name)—Miss Humstrum, who sung most sowishly.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
“They are the Fipple-Flute, a word
Suggestive of seraphic screeches;
The Poliphant comes next, and third
The Humstrum — aren’t they perfect peaches?”
(Punch, or the London Charivari, 1920)
scurf
scurf /skərf/. noun. Scaly dry flakes of skin. Any encrustation or flaky, scaly deposit on a surface. The “foul” remains when something adhesive is removed. Rarely: a contemptible person. Also: a sea trout. Probably derived from Old English sceorfan (to gnaw) and scearfian (to cut into shreds).
“Guy offered up his delicate and increasingly emotional nostrils to a familiar experience: the scurfy smell of old money.” (Martin Amis)
“Here I sit, naked under my prison garb, wads of pallid flesh trussed and bagged like badly packaged meat. I get up and walk around on my hind legs, a belted animal, shedding an invisible snow of scurf everywhere I move.” (John Banville)
“I have no heart to be left behind, not even
if Zeus himself would swear to scrape away
the scurf of age and make me young again…”
(Homer, translated by Robert Fagles)
“They were young men, subalterns, well set-up, their metal ashine and their black unmaculated by hairs, scurf or food-droppings.” (Anthony Burgess)
“In the distance before him a fire burned on the prairie, a solitary flame frayed by the wind that freshened and faded and shed scattered sparks down the storm like hot scurf blown from some unreckonable forge howling in the waste.” (Cormac McCarthy)
“Remove the scurf spots, and broil the same as given above. Use plenty of butter.” (Mary Ronald)
“After all perhaps I knew nothing of mother Molloy, or Mollose, save in so far as such a son might bear, like a scurf of placenta, her stamp.” (Samuel Beckett)
“Stanley Spencer anticipates with relish the droppings in all his pockets, the scorched stink of wheat bunt, the dark odor of blight, mealy mildew, the reek of fomes and juniper conk, of black punk rot, potato scald, bruised galls, and scurf.” (Guy Davenport)
“Already I was wondering what makes them
hunger so, for the cause of their leanness and sad
scurf was not yet manifest”
(Dante Alighieri)
“Wild heights untravelled of the wind, and vales
Cloven seaward by their violent streams, and white
With bitter flowers and bright salt scurf of brine”
(Algernon Charles Swinburne)
“There stood a hill not far whose grisly top
Belched fire and rolling smoke; the rest entire
Shone with a glossy scurf, undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic ore…”
(John Milton)
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