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08 July 2008

Words

A while ago, Justine blogged about words she can never remember the name of. Talking about it with some friends, we discovered that nobody knows what 'erstwhile' means. Nobody. I certainly didn't. Some of the suggestions were:

-absent
-distinguished
-naughty
-roving

All wrong. Read the definition here.

B also pointed out that nobody knows what 'palaver' means. I thought it meant 'hubbub' or 'fuss'. It doesn't.

I remember getting all confused about 'caucasian' as a kid. I thought it meant 'asian'. It has 'asian' in it!

English. Wacky. Discuss.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember "erstwhile" because it begins with the same letter as "ex".

I had no idea about "palaver". Huh.

Justine L

LiteraryMinded said...

Jill Jones shares a word in her latest blog post http://rubystreet.blogspot.com/2008/07/interstitial.html

:-) LM