I am madly in love with the word luscious because when spoken aloud in a slightly seductive tone, it sounds exactly like what it is supposed to be describing. If someone offered me a luscious steak, I would eat it even if I didn’t know the meaning of the word luscious. Simply because the word it’s self sounds so luscious. Not to mention that flows freely from your temporal lobe (the part of the brain that forms sentences, obviously), through your nervous system, over your vocal cords like a graceful flowing river, does a few mid-air flips before landing and perfectly executing an upbeat musical theater dance number that is punctuated by a full cast tableau.
Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration but still, the word is beautiful. And does true beauty really require an explanation?
Simon
Canada
(60 votes, average: 8.35 out of 10)
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Your description of “luscious” leaves me slightly out of breath with a ever-so-slightly damp forehead.
WOW. i’m speechless in the movie of your words. thanks
Weird is a very weird word indeed:
It describes itself, just as stifle is an anagram of itself.
It’s an exception to the spelling rule “I before E except after C”.
It’s onomatopoeic, where the sound suggests the meaning.
It’s an anagram of WIRED and WIDER.
Try shouting it aloud, prolonging the sound at a high pitch: WEEEERD!
The neighbours or workmates will think you are, too.
Other onomatopoeic words are murmur, boo, buzz and SHOUT, boom, cuckoo and quick.
More than a century ago, Albert Harris Tolman wrote:
Strangely enough the word weird has come into modern English entirely from its use in Macbeth. The word occurs six times in this play as usually printed: five times in the expression “weird sisters” (I. iii. 32; I. v. 8; II. i. 20; III. iv. 133; IV. i. 136), and once in the phrase “the weird women” (III. i. 2).
Stranger still, weird does not appear at all in the only authoritative text of the tragedy, that of the First Folio. In that edition the word is weyword in the first three passages in the play, and weyard in the last three. It was Theobold, the dearest foe of Pope, who saw that Shakespeare must have written weird, and that this rare word had been changed because of “the ignorance of the copyists.”
Before dictionaries existed, English words were spelt in various ways. Shakespeare even spelt his own name several different ways. “The name Shakespeare is extremely widespread,” says Linda Alchin, of William Shakespeare Info, “and is spelt in an astonishing variety of ways including Shakspere, Shakespere, Shakkespere, Shaxpere, Shakstaff, Sakspere, Shagspere, Shakeshafte and even Chacsper as can be seen via details of possible ancestors.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE is an anagram of I AM A WEAKISH SPELLER.
As for the “I before E except after C” rule, Bob Cunningham lists these exceptions:
beige, cleidoic, codeine, conscience, deify, deity, deign, dreidel, eider, eight, either, feign, feint, feisty, foreign, forfeit, freight, gleization, gneiss, greige, greisen, heifer, heigh-ho, height, heinous, heir, heist, leitmotiv, neigh, neighbor, neither, peignoir, prescient, rein, science, seiche, seidel, seine, seismic, seize, sheik, society, sovereign, surfeit, teiid, veil, vein, weight, weir, weird.
Come to think of it, it’s weird that the weirdest word of them all is listed last.