This sounds like a video game word.
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yeah it’s from Dante’s Inferno
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Yesterday I hit on the portmanteau perambivalate (perambulate, meaning to walk around + ambivalent, meaning having mixed feelings about something). I think of it as needing to walk around to deal with that feeling of conflict or to sort the feelings out.
PER-am-BIV-uh-late
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Seeing one of my local artists post Halloween themed flash designs made me kinda overcome with love for the word ‘planchette’ that refers to the vaguely heart-shaped thing you use with a ouija board that points to letters, yes/no, etc. (It was also a mainstay of automatic writing and other spiritualist pursuits of the nineteenth century)
Anyway I think I’m going to get a planchette tattoo!
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I had a friend in high school who was a martial arts student mainly of Kyokushin karate but was training at a kung fu gym in town for a time and he introduced me to a Cantonese idiom that he’d picked up: 花拳绣腿, or flower fist and brocade kicks as he translated it. I think it refers to martial arts that are showy and impractical.
Other cool words that end in -cade:
- ambuscade
- motorcade
- cavalcade
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i’m not sure what that song has to do with the thread, but it’s good
(i’ve only ever listened to the album lovebeat by that guy, guess i should give take off and landing a listen as well!)
on the words front:
casuistry
some that stood out when i thesaurused “sardonic:”
mordant
acerbic
laconic (listing this as a synonym seems like a stretch, to me, but it’s a good word!)
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It’s in the sample! Here in case the yt link ever breaks:
Listen now to a cavalcade of the sounds that have shaped our time.
if I’m not mistaken??
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oh! i wasn’t paying enough attention, i guess…
uh, here’s another yoshinori sunahara song, why not:
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Very cool words. I did a deep dive on -cade. The OED calls it a “false division” based off of cavalcade and used to mean a showy event, hence motorcade and (TIL) aquacade. The etymological suffix for cavalcade is -ade (comp. blockade, masquerade - basically a suffix indicating an action: doing a block, doing masking).
Brocade is older than all of that and is from Spanish and Italian via French. (Think “doing studding.”)
If you like -ade words, there is also Ruskinade - “A discourse or tirade characteristic of Ruskin.” I know him mainly as the guy who helped define the Gothic revival in architecture of the 19th century, but he was one of those influential 19th century writers who dabbled in several things.
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I totally didn’t mean to imply the -cade in brocade was a suffix lol, that would seem to suggest like a procession of bros. But I didn’t know about false divisions or how cavalcade led to one such, that’s cool!
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I walk my dog by a skate park some days and there are homemade ramps in the corner. There used to be a castle turret painted on one and I would get rampart ramp art stuck in my head.
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Something I just learned within the past twenty-ish minutes: the Japanese translation of fight or flight response is “闘争・逃走反応.” 反応 means “response”, and is read hannou; that’s not the interesting part. What is interesting is that 闘争 and 逃走 mean fight and flight, respectively, and they’re both read tousou. One of those rare instances where a translation captures a very similar wordplay dynamic to the word it’s translating.
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Bonk feels like a very common interjection, right? Potential onomatopoeia. I assumed it had been around for centuries.
It has been around for century. One century. Bonk is modern.
“Bonk” as riverbank is a little older - 1175 or so. But that’s eight centuries where, if English speakers heard a bonk in the night, they might have to resort to bong (1855), dong (1587), or ting (c1400).
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I’m adding Bonk! I biffed him. to the list of phrases I want to incorporate in my writing sometime.
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Honest question here - do people outside of the UK not know the other meaning of bonk, and only know it as the knocking or banging of sonehthing?
I have always know it as slang for having sex, and I think most Brits do as well.
Ironically a bonk could be caused by a bonk!
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I’m not sure if I actually ever heard that usage of bonk but I always just silently assumed that it could also be used in that way.
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Was and is. Not my first memory of it, but clearest was in Red Dwarf, 1989 so I was 10
Cut to almost the line to not spoil the rest of the scene!
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Yes, I know that meaning of “bonk.” It’s probably not as common as in the UK, but I’d picked it up by college.
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