• confabulate •
Printable Version Pronunciation: kên-fæ-byê-layt • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb
Meaning: 1. To converse casually, gab, chatter, chew the fat. 2. To fabricate filling for the gaps in memory, to mix fact with fiction intentionally or unintentionally.
Notes: Today's word comes from a large and happy family. The noun is, as expected, confabulation and the adjective, confabulatory. Someone who readily confuses fact with fiction is a confabulator.
In Play: The first meaning of today's word is simply to gab: "When Hardy and Sandy Beech wake up in the middle of night together they often confabulate for several minutes before going back to sleep." The second meaning is by far the more intriguing: "Constanza confabulated a resume from facts about jobs she had held and wishful thinking about how she performed on them."
Word History: Today's word comes from the past participle of Latin confabulari, confabulatus. This word is made up of con "with, together" + fabulari "to speak, talk". The base verb is a variation of fabula "speech, conversation", the noun of fari "to speak". Fari came from the same PIE root (bha- "to speak") as Old English fae which later became fairy, beings known for their enchanting speech. The spells they uttered became your fate, so it is appropriate that this word shares the same origin. People gifted with the blarney, of course, are affable, a prefixed form of the same root. With the suffix -n, this PIE root became phonos "sound" in Greek, which we borrowed in our words telephone, phonetics, and microphone. (We can't complete today's Good Word without speaking a few words of thanks to Chris Berry for nominating it.)
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