scuttlebutt (scuttle-butt) /sku-təl-but/. noun. Rumor; gossip. In nautical terms, a water cask or a drinking fountain. From scuttle (a hole/opening in a ship’s deck) + butt (barrel). Like furphy, the name of the object became slang for the idle talk that commonly took place around it.

“The scuttlebutt (which actually is scuttlebutt and not gossip, because we’re on a ship) is that the ship is being taken back to Bermuda…” (Tina Fey)

“He feels bad for having designed the see-through cow. Of late he’s been kicking the diorama apart, and the scuttlebutt is he’s one building away from dismissal. I say good morning and he sits down disconsolately on Mount Hood.” (George Saunders)

“He asked whether I was going to breakfast. The scuttlebutt on breakfast was sausage-analog and OJ with palpable pulp, he said.” (David Foster Wallace)

“Rick Raymond taps the microphone and the men stir from their scuttlebutt and applaud. From more than one man’s oily lips issues that whistle one only hears in crowds.” (Colson Whitehead)

“We arrived home to a very special heroes’ welcome: the town had been starving outright for good scuttlebutt. So hip hip hooray, welcome home the pitiful Prices!” (Barbara Kingsolver)

“She was not as easy to place as Astrid or Jackie; she was a newborn, after all, and, well, the scuttlebutt around the family has it that as she was so dark no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her.” (Junot Diaz)

Select Synonyms: furphy, tittle-tattle, bush telegraph, clishmaclaver, causerie, whispers, blather.

Elsewhere: Wordnik.

synathroesmus /si-nə-TREEZ-mus/. noun. A piling up or accumulation of terms, usually adjectives, usually in the employment of extreme—often negative—emotion. From Greek synathroismos (collection, union, grouping).

“Well, then, if you want to know,” rejoined Mrs Squeers, “I’ll tell you. Because he’s a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-up-nosed peacock.” (Charles Dickens)

“But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” (Charles Dickens)

“Who can be wise, amazed, temp’rate, and furious,
Loyal and neutral, in a moment?”
(William Shakespeare)

“When you say exergasia, synathroesmus, and incrementum together in a list, it seems to me that you have thereby given an example of all three devices in that same phrase.” (Kim Stanley Robinson)

“Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, that thing last night beat—as far as the acting and story went—and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tuneless and scrannelpipiest—tongs and boniest—doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went.” (John Ruskin)

scaramouch(e) /SKAIR-ə-moosh/. noun. A cowardly, foolish braggart. As a proper name, a stock character in Italian farce who is routinely beset by the Harlequin. From Italian scaramuccia (skirmish).

“…here he wears the Jack-Boots, there the Small-Sword; is here an Enthusiast, there a Buffoon; on this Side he acts the Mountebank, on that Side the Merry-Andrew; nothing comes amiss to him, from the Great Mogul, to the Scaramouch; the Devil is in them more or less…” (Daniel Defoe)

“…if I may lean on Perian’s punning style, The Malacia Tapestry could unfussily be retitled Tom Cojones and left at that. De Chirolo, a raffish scaramouche, is a terrible ‘one’ for the girls…” (Martin Amis)

“If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow
Scorched by Hell’s hyperequatorial climate
Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow:
A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at;
In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello.”
(Percy Bysshe Shelley)

“They revelled last night in ‘Don Juan,’ whom we left in hell at half-past eleven. We had scaramouch and a ghost, and were delighted. I speak of them; my delight was very tranquil, and the rest of us were sober-minded.” (Jane Austen)

Keith wore a brown shirt of moire silk with raised stripes (its texture reminded Guy of pork crackling), hipster cream flares, and a new pair of coarse-furred ferret-like loafers (with a hint of the scaramouch or the harem-creeper in their curled tips). (Martin Amis, from London Fields)

Select Synonyms: Jack-pudding, merry andrew, jester, tomfool, farceur.

Elsewhere: Wordnik.

sgrìob /skree-UP/. noun. According to Robert Archibald Armstrong’s A Gaelic Dictionary, this so-called untranslateable means “an itching of the lip, superstitiously supposed to precede a feast or a kiss from a favorite.” Thus sgrìob poige (before a kiss) and sgrìob dibhe or sgrìob drama (before a dram).

“…the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob.” (Bill Bryson, from The Mother Tongue)

“[Allan Brown writes:] ‘You might think, for example, that the word sgriob is just a bad hand at Scrabble; it’s actually the Gaelic word describing the tingle of anticipation felt in the upper lip before drinking whisky. The fact that Gaelic has a six-letter word for this while English has a twelve-word phrase reveals a lot about Gaelic ways and priorities.’

No it doesn’t. It reveals nothing. I happen to know a one-syllable word (turd) for a piece of excrement shaped by its expulsion from the anal sphincter, but that doesn’t reveal a lot about my ways and priorities. It is a completely meaningless and useless random factoid about the lexicon of the language I happened to grow up speaking. That lexicon also contains scrum, buttercup, ogre, bong, and thorium. If you try to form an impression of my ways and priorities from such things you’re a moron.” (Geoffrey K. Pullum, from Language Log)

syzygy /SIZ-i-jee/. noun. The conjunction or opposition of two astronomical bodies, particularly involving the Sun, so usually the Sun and the moon (new moon and full moon). A pair of connected or correlative things. The combination of two feet in one meter, such as iamb (du-DUM), trochee (DUM-du), and spondee (DUM-DUM). In biology, the conjunction of two organisms without either losing their identity. Also, a mathematical concept I can’t really understand, much less explain plainly. From the Greek syzygia: a pair of yoked animals, a union of two.
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sehnsucht /ZEN-zuukst/. noun. Inconsolable longing; longing that cannot be expressed. A compound of the German das Sehnen (fervent yearning) + die Sucht (longing), sehnsucht is often called (wrongly, but you get the idea) untranslatable. See also saudade and hiraeth.

“Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt Weiß, was ich leide!” — “None but the lonely heart can know my sadness!” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Arthur Westbrook)

“They were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing—Sehnsucht; made me, for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.” (C. S. Lewis, from Surprised by Joy)

Select Synonyms: yen, yearning, craving, aching, longing, desire, pining, coveting.

Elsewhere: Wordnik.