Words & Phrases: June 2011

[mcgillianaire]

01. Gloaming
02. Redoubt
03. Venal
04. Après moi le Deluge
05. Every which way
06. Maudlin
07. Bravura
08. Scrivener
09. Carpetbagger
10. Caroused
11. Kippered
12. Anchor store
13. Piquancy
14. Largesse
15. Bint
16. Bang tidy
17. Check yourself before you wreck yourself
18. Chew the cud
19. Moribund
20. Claggy
21. Churlish
22. Ignorantio elenchi
23. Signal-to-noise ratio
24. Splitting the baby
25. Miranda warning
26. Recuse
27. My giddy aunt
28. Pulp fiction
29. Stemware
30. Between Scylla and Charybdis
31. Fane

Many more words this month compared to May but just the one from French (4) and for the first time, one from Latin (22). There's also a couple of bawdy slang terms again (15 & 16) and a few Americanisms (9, 17 & 25).

[Poll #1757775]

Comments

[loganberrybunny.livejournal.com]

Not a clue what "fanes" are; looking it up revealed a village on Rhodes! I wasn't actually sure about "bang tidy", either, which I'm going to count as a plus!

Carpetbagger

This one doesn't have the same meaning in the UK as in the US. Over here, it came to prominence during the wave of demutualisations of building societies in the 1990s. A "carpetbagger" in British English meant someone who joined up to the society with the express aim of getting it demutualised, receiving the free shares members were given when that happened, and selling them for a quick profit.

[mcgillianaire.livejournal.com]

Ah! I've changed it to fane and added a link so that should clear it up. I meant to get rid of the "s" and forgot.

And thanks for the British definition of carpetbagger - I had not idea it even existed as a term over here and had such a different meaning. Wonder why it acquired such a name.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

By analogy with the US usage, I think; demutualisation was a key Thatcherite policy, and the Thatcher era felt like a civil war to many people who lived through it, so carpetbaggers (in the UK sense) were seen as profiteering on (what felt like) the defeat of the working class.

[mcgillianaire.livejournal.com]

Ah gotcha, thanks! :)

[messicat.livejournal.com]

Gloaming - I thought it was about soil, turns out, I was wrong!

My giddy aunt is such a ye olde phrase, I never hear it anymore!

[mcgillianaire.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard of that phrase before until I saw it in the text commentary during Wimbledon. Might've even been the match that put my beloved Federer out.