Should you so desire, you can read up on spanner, too.

Another one of those words that look like they should be related but aren't. Scarper is no kin. It's related to escape, which has different roots but similar letters.

Revisiting this suggestion I was reminded that it can also be a verb. Which gives us cartoonery, too. I see that it comes from the original idea of drawing such sketches on stiff paper, i.e. carton. Then it spread out from there. Speaking of Herblock, he designed a US postage stamp . It's not a cart...

Dick Dastardly was probably how I first came to know this word:



He ranks right up there with Snidely Whiplash:

For a word with no history we know of, finis sure has a good-sized family: finish, finite, finitude, finity, infinity, definite, etc.

I recently learned that some people have tried to give the etymology of picnic a racist bent, saying it comes from a game called Pick-a-N*****.

Whilst picking on Spiro Agnew, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In gave me the word tomentose , which I gather he deployed in some fashion. Judging from the definition and images, it means velutinous. https://www.healthbenefitstimes.com/glossary/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Tomentose.jpg Not exactly, but pr...

"We must go through a lot of tribulation". In case you're interested, I found a video recording of this cantata to spare others the tribulation of searching. Here it is, on youtube.

It is not merely US states that have parodies of legislatures, I dare say.

Politics aside, the parodies of Mel Brooks were sheer genius when they came out, and most remain so to this day.

It's interesting how sometimes when you look up a word, it's definition is rather recursive. Recourse means resort, which means recourse. Fun? You decide.

Resort itself might make a decent GW, too.

Taken up and treated here.

I gather that for the same reason, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" is "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" in the US.

I seem to feel that this is often used in the sense of making the first move in order to gain an advantage over a perceived or actual foe. As in the Taiwan example.

Question for our British readers; do you use gossip in meaning 3?

Cenation is another one, and Cenatical was out there, too (lower right corner):.