This theme is a personal challenge for me. To make it work, I’ll have to come up with a few brand new words in the next few days. Wish me luck!

sillage - the “wake” or “trail” of a perfume’s scent. Does it spread quickly or slowly, a long way or a short one, strongly or weakly? Does it linger in the air after its wearer has left the room?
(The ll is pronounced like a consonant y.)

A new perfume can transform a woman instantly and entirely ... It can change the way she feels about herself and the way the world responds to her. ... In my thirties I took to Isey Miyake’s L’eau for an unfussy sillage — the scented trail that lingers — of clean, fresh water.
- Marcia DeSantis, 100 Places in France every Woman Should Go

or occasionally, figurative:
[T]he street has no real memories for me — other than the countless stories my father would share — but the sillage of our past lives still lingers in the air.
- Toula Drimonis, Montréal, Mon Amour, cultmtl.com, June 4, 2019

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As opposed to the aroma of silage, I suppose.

I'll hold fire on my "You Are Not So Smart" posts for a while now that the real boss is back.

Hi, Bob. Feel free to fire away!

I learned today’s word from a video about the most populous bird in all history, by far: gallus gallus domesticus — otherwise called the chicken.

alectryomancy - divination using a rooster (a cock). Arrange the letters of the alphabet in a circle, put grain on each letter, place a cock in the center of the circle, and record the order of the letters he picks … pardon me, pecks. An Etruscan practice, adopted by the Romans.

I didn’t see or hear him approach on the soft sand. “What do you want?” I said rudely. One of my chief reasons for renting a cottage on the island of Bequia was the private beach. “Please excuse my intrusion,” said the native politely, “but when I heard that the author of Cockfighting in the Zone of the Interior had rented a cottage, I wanted to congratulate him in person.“ I was mollified, and at the same time, taken aback. “Where did you get a copy of that?” I said. “Gamecocks are my source of livelihood,” he replied simply. “Thank you, but in 1857, cockfighting was prohibited throughout the empire.” “I don’t fight gamecocks, Mr. Waxman.” He smiled again and held up a hand. “My interest in gamefowl lies in a parallel art: alectryomancy
- Charles Willeford, “A Genuine Alectryomancer,” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder Magazine, December 1959 (as anthologized by Linda Landrigan (2011))

quote:

Originally posted by wordcrafter:alectryomancy - divination using a rooster (a cock). Arrange the letters of the alphabet in a circle, put grain on each letter, place a cock in the center of the circle, and record the order of the letters he picks … pardon me, pecks. An Etruscan practice, adopted by the Romans.

I parse that word as a- meaning without, lect- meaning read, tryo- (ryo?) presumably meaning rooster, and -mancy, divination. That comes out to be "predicting the future by a rooster, who can't read"?

I think we could use a variation on that to choose our respective country's leaders. Couldn't be any worse than our current systems.

Great new set of words.

Geoff, I was thinking of "silage" too, having grown up on a farm and all.

FOMO - fear of missing out
A great stock-market word, currently in heavy use about the rush to invest in Bitcoin. Other very-recent examples:

FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, is driving soccer clubs to invest in data collection without an understanding of how to effectively use it. Dr. Kenneth Cortsen told me that some clubs lacked the skills to properly interpret the data they are collecting. “The FOMO aspect should never be the guiding principle,” Cortsen said.
- Forbes, June 16, 2019

When you’re so tired but you have serious FOMO! You don’t want to miss anything on your first day of life.
- Video: a newborn giraffe, exhausted, struggles to stay aWake.

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Orbiginally posted by haberdasher:

quote:

I parse that word as a- meaning without, lest meanibbng read, tryo- (ryo?) presumably meaning rooster, and -mancy, divination. That comes out to be "predicting the future by a rooster, who can't read"?

Then does the name “Alexander” mean a man who can’t read?
Or a man of few words?
Or perhaps a man above the law?

I like it!

Naturally, I looked up Bequia on GoogleEarth. Just offshore from it, I learned, is a tiny island which “is uninhabited, but is used by whalers to flense their catches”. “flense”?

flense - to strip the skin or fat off a carcass, especially that of a whale

This might strike you as a useless word. But consider its figurative potential.

[concerning the drug industry] Even with all the FDA-mandated testing we have now, the trial lawyers flense the flesh from our bones when anything goes wrong.
- Derek Lowe, Fixing the Drug Industry?, in blog “In the Pipeline”, December 13, 2004

Not quite sure how, but for once you came up with a word that I already knew.

You may be getting in on the ground floor here. Our quotation today is from a very interesting article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. I highly recommend it to you. Perhaps the word has been bandied about in the relevant scientific community, but as best I can tell, this quote is the first time it has been used in public print.

[A]pproximately four billion chestnut trees have been lost in the U.S. due to blight that spread when [a] fungus arrived with chestnut trees imported from Asia. A once-dominant hardwood species is now rare.
...... A blight-tolerant American chestnut tree is the latest example of what the science community has begun to call a GRO — a genetically rescued organism. Scientists use a gene from bread wheat that produces an enzyme. The enzyme is found in all grain crops, plus bananas, strawberries and more.

(I reordered the quotation a bit, to make this excerpt more clear.)

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footling - trivial and irritating
(Used in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, but rare in the US.)

I almost always find my quotes on my own, but this one, stolen from OED, is too good to pass up. “We had to cancel a seven-week trip to New Zealand at the last moment when my wife became ill,” the author explains, and you completely understand how he felt about his £18,000 travel-insurance claim.

Three times they have come back to me with footling questions, the answers to which were either obvious or irrelevant to the claim – and every time I have responded promptly. They now tell me that every such response goes to the back of a long queue, along with new claims, and is not looked at for at least two weeks.
- The Telegraph, July 25, 2014

Love the quote!

quote:

Originally posted by wordcrafter:
Naturally, I looked up Bequia on GoogleEarth.

This brought back fond memories. A visit to that island (BECK-wee) was part of a long-ago family trip. Our parents bought us hand-sewn garments made from locally-woven cloth. Mine was a 'dress' w/a '69-length hem I'd wear as a shirt today . Each had a tag sewn in back of neck "Crabhole, Becquia." In a small-world postscript, 4 yrs later when my brother was traveling in India, he met a local wearing a shirt with the same tag.