High-falutin' definition of food fight: becoming refractory with refections in the refectory.

So high-falutin', refections isn't in my spellchecker. Hmph!

War is not a word to play with...

Well, there goes one card game!

Disrelish! I like it. I imagine the noun can be negated, too: If I were starving and all there was to eat was relish, I could force myself to eat it, but it would be with disrelish.

Fun crossword puzzle clue: give up a condiment = relinquish relish.

By the by, could you tell me how you produced the image?

Copied from their site, pasted into a Word document, enlarged, converted to a jpeg file, saved to desktop, uploaded to the Agora. Whew!

Do the French capitalize nouns but not adjectives, perhaps?

Here's the logo:

Franco-Spanish circus talk: Allez, allez, into the cage, ole!"

New definition: infantry - the cannon fodder of war that does not have the right to speak.

Lighter note: do infants have as much fun in infancy as adults do in adultery?

If the undesired news is true, would that be derogation/derogatory? Or perhaps denigrate/denigration? Those aren't of necessity lies.

Another Good Word for defamation is calumny.

To make this word mean what it does, I guess they had to milk it for all it's worth!

I wonder if parlance is in a parlous position these days. I don't have any research to back it up, but it does seem to be quite rare. I can't recall even seeing it in a crossword puzzle.

Just to put in my two cents here, but in Meaning 2, the involuntary response is not necessarily 'unlearned'. Think of the beaten dog that cowers at a raised voice. It took some teaching to get there.

Our gratitude may not be ineffable, but in general, especially with a qualifier, it could be: "the extent of our gratitude is ineffable". Interesting that the ineffability can be for both good and bad things. The ineffable name of God, and the ineffable name of "He Who Shall Not Be Na...

This is an old, old post, so I can't say I don't know I'm wrong, but I do find myself going for folk etymology on the inky definition of this word. I keep thinking of it as being from the repetitive pounding of the needle, beating a tattoo on the skin, to put a tattoo under the skin. Stab, stab, pok...

I wonder how the transitive/intransitive usages break down in numbers. I'm not sure I've ever seen arrogate used in the sense of assigning something to someone else. It's always 'to oneself'. So I arrogate to you the onus of looking that up. (Doesn't work, does it?)

Polite society may accept tuchus, but I wonder about the diminutives. They don't quite fit in there, do they? Too childish sounding?

Polite society may accept tuchus, but my spellchecker doesn't. It suggests schuss instead. I guess I'll have to add it, eh? Or just give it a kick in the schuss?