P S: And bless L. Frank Baum, too.

Bravo for recalling the Terrible Wizard of the Emerald City and his excellent if incendiary vocabulary - many thanks for the memory.

Or perhaps the word was devised after observation of a pending bad storm, which then dumped a blinding snowfall that finally ceased after sundown?

This sounds like a Lewis Carroll word, right up there with frumious bandersnatch and frabjous and thinking six impossible things before breakfast. And caliginous. Yep.

You're right, it was the noodles; I'm gluten intolerant, so pasta is verboten in my life. The repercussions are grim. You really know how to get to a person. . .

Mea culpa

Would it be possible that you were an obnubilator (-er?), if that's the correct way of saying 'one who enabled their condition' with your teaching methods? Surely not!

Oh I quite like this word. There are days when I'm so preoccupied with necessary things that "foggy" just doesn't do the state of my brain justice. I once had a sister-in-law who was lovely but a bit ditzy, and her name was Nubia. Do you suppose her parents had foreknowledge of her persona...

PS - and thanks!

I certainly can empathize with Perry Yare and his need for the daily soothing (and entertaining) qualities of the Good Word as an anodyne for the pains of the encroaching world! Please carry on, Dr. Goodword!

i would say "No problem,", except that it's one of my bigger pet peeves. Instead: you are most welcome, sir.

The daily word newsletter for June 8 featured yes. But at the bottom of the page, after the word history and the Good Doctor's sign-off, a small contained sidebar (bottom bar?) mentioned a college essay written about Hell expanding or contracting and freezing over. It sounded familiar, so I tracked ...

The "yes" history was interesting, primarily because one rarely thinks about derivations of such short, common utterences. My eye was caught by the Alpha Dictionary entry, however. I've seen it before, several years ago, and was curious enough about its legendary status to check with Snope...

This word takes me back several decades, when I was a cabin crew member on the Freedom Birds in the early 1960s. Our flights to and from the Far East usually went north out of San Francisco and followed the polar route from Anchorage along the Aleutian chain into Japan and Indochina. But sometimes w...

I am married to one of these technophobes, whose communication instrument of choice is either a #2 wooden lead pencil or a ballpoint pen. Cell phones are acceptable. The computer is my bailiwick. 'S okay. Latin texere "to weave, fabricate", and Russian tkat' "to weave". This must...