There’s a word for it

If you know anything, anything at all, about me, you’ll know that I like words. Which is quite the understatement. Oh how I veritably venerate verbiage, lavishly love language and wantonly worship words! I’ll tell you a secret: whenever I meet a new word I particularly like, I repeat it over and over to myself, sometimes even giggling rather foolishly. Oh how I want to eat the Latin ruminare (what cows do with their food)! How I rage and rumble and ravage when I taste the Flemish rulokte (‘wild’) on my tongue! Or how I get misty-eyed when I read the French larmoyant (‘to cry for’). To me, many words feel like what they mean. Conversely, some words feel like the opposite of what they mean, like linoleum, which should have been the name of a pleasant Mediterranean seaport, as one of my word heroes L.P. Wilkinson once observed, not the rather unpleasant floor covering. And so every word tells a story to me. Which has been a blessing, because it's probably the sole reason I'm not living in a cardboard box today!

But why am I telling you the presumably bleeding obvious? Well, some time ago a few of you told me you were happy that I introduced you to the word meteo sensitive (i.e. your temper follows the weather). To be exact, my friend W. mentioned it to me first a while ago, so I shouldn’t claim credit. However, this reminded me of a few other words that you might not know but find funny or deem interesting. Fred himself used one in his very first blog: retrotort, and so I thought I’d teach you some more just in case you have to spice up a boring dinner party (Caution: Fred and Fred will not be held accountable should anyone use these in a frantic attempt to keep the conversation going on a date. The results could be unforeseeably disastrous.)

(1) Backronym

We all know an acronym, right? It’s a word that’s actually not a word but a compilation of the first letters of a phrase, like radar which was coined in the 1940s from ra(dio) d(etection) a(nd) r(anging). Well, a backronym is the opposite of that. A word which people think is an acronym, or make into one, but really isn’t. A good example is SOS. I always thought SOS was short for Save Our Souls. Turns out that’s not how it originated. The army just wanted a simple Morse code for a distress signal, so they chose …---…, which spells S O S by chance, not because it’s short for something. Alternatively, a backronym can also be used to (somewhat corny) comic effect. Like when you’re fed up with your old Ford-car and tell a friend Ford actually stands for Fix Or Repair Daily.

(2) Complisult

Another good one is a complisult, which is a compliment and an insult mixed together, like in the sentence “That’s such a nice dress. It does wonders for your figure” or “You’re smarter than I thought!”. At first it looks like a compliment, but in fact when you think about it, it’s more like an insult. Sometimes you can leave the insult part elliptically, like in the famous “Do you think she’s pretty? - She has a wonderful personality.”.

If you’d like to know more unusual but fun words that fit into this category of There’s a word for it, you can check out the homonymous (there’s another one!) book for sale on Amazon! And if you’re still not convinced why you should like words, have a look at what Stephen Fry has to say about it, typecast in the craftiest of kinetic typographies:

Word.