Wordcraft Home Page    Wordcraft Community Home Page    Forums  Hop To Forum Categories  The Vocabulary Forum    Miscellaneous Words
Go
New
Find
Notify
Tools
Reply
  
Miscellaneous Words Login/Join
 
Member
Picture of wordcrafter
posted
I'm feeling uncreative this week, and so will present miscellaneous words, without a theme. Maybe I can turn it into a theme as we go!

fourberie – trickery or deception
This word, from from Webster's Unabridged, is not in OED.
    The latest ad uses some technical fourberie to create an image of the five-year old Tiger [Woods] carrying his bag down the 18th hole of the Old Course as fans run behind him.
    – Chris Noon, Forbes, July 18, 2005
 
Posts: 2701Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted Hide Post
I get 162,000 hits on Google but surprisingly only one in OneLook: http://onelook.com/?w=fourberie+&ls=a

suggesting it's either a rather recent term or it's obscure and obsolete. In this case it's apparently the latter; tho the number of hits suggest it's making a comeback

However I've noted it's usu difficult to determine the age of an expression and especially its currency if it's making a comeback, without tediously checking out each hit, one by one. Surely there;'s an easier way

This message has been edited. Last edited by: dalehileman,
 
Posts: 657Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of shufitz
posted Hide Post
You get so many hits because you're accepting all languages, and fourberie seems to be a reasonably common French word. If you set your Google preferences to "English" only, you'll get far-far-far fewer hits, and even many of them are French.
 
Posts: 2666 | Location: Chicago, IL USAReply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of wordcrafter
posted Hide Post
Today's word has an interesting variety of meanings.

chicane1. chicanery 2. bridge (game): a holding of no trumps 3. motor traffic or racing: a sharp double bend [or other obstacle made to slow traffic?]
    A war of chicane is a war of artifice and bickering …, a warr where a fortnight's delay before some awkward lines or fortress would run an enemy short of bread or cash, a war where time would count more than action, a baffling war; a war ofd deadlocks, a war where the enemy must face continualy an ebbing tide. This was not Marlborough's kind of war.
    – Winston Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times (Book Two)

    London's most hated trafficcalming scheme - a brutal chicane that has caused scores of collisions - is being redesigned. … Motorists said it was so tight their cars collided with the kerbs, causing damage to tyres and wheels.
    – David Williams, Evening Standard, Aug. 23, 2002
 
Posts: 2701Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of arnie
posted Hide Post
quote:
trafficcalming

Ugh! Eek

I'd prefer traffic-calming or perhaps traffic calming, but not that ugly compound word with an unnatural-looking double "c" in the middle.


Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
 
Posts: 10940 | Location: LondonReply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
posted Hide Post
Kerbs? Curbs -- I had no idea we spell that differently.
 
Posts: 345Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of wordcrafter
posted Hide Post
Today, another word with divergent meanings.

chouse
1. a cheat; a swindler (verb: to dupe, cheat, trick or swindle)
2. to disturb or harry (cattle)

The first sense seems to come from Turkish chiaus, an official messenger. The story is that a Turkish chiaus, in England in 1609, swindled home-country merchants out of a substantial sum. But OED is skeptical of this tale.
 
Posts: 2701Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of wordcrafter
posted Hide Post
obreptitious – making false statement to obtain something

In ecclesiastical law obreption is distinguished from subreption in that the former involves misstating facts, and the latter suppressing or failing to reveal facts. But the latter, like the familiar word surreptitious, has been generalized to cover both cases.
    The feeling which Burr's actions inspired, that he was obreptitious, was overcome by the fascination of the man when one was under his personal influence; yet the impression of indirectness and duplicity which he caused …. made it possible for his enemies … to build up about his name a structure of public suspicion, and even hatred …
    – Albert J Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall
 
Posts: 2701Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of wordcrafter
posted Hide Post
I managed to create a theme of "deception and trickery words"

One of today's words is antique, the other modern, but notice how similar they are in each of their meanings.

tregetry1. juggling 2. deception; trickery
legerdemain1. sleight of hand; jugglery; conjuring tricks 2. trickery, deception, hocus-pocus
    Ther saugh I Colle tregetour
    Upon a table of sicamour
    Pleye an uncouthe thing to telle;
    I saugh him carien a wind-melle [carry a windmill]
    Under a walsh-note shale. [walnut shell]
    – Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame
 
Posts: 2701Reply With QuoteReport This Post
  Powered by Social Strata  
 

Wordcraft Home Page    Wordcraft Community Home Page    Forums  Hop To Forum Categories  The Vocabulary Forum    Miscellaneous Words

Copyright © 2002-12