Welcome to the Antediluvian Word Preservation Society's blog. Here are the latest entries:
hullaballoo
(hul·uh·buh·LOO, noun) — posted August 14
A great noise or commotion; an uproar. (Example: “After hearing the hullaballoo that eight kids hopped up on sugar could make, Rupert decided to never again volunteer to help out at a Halloween party.”) This is a fun word to use in conversation, and it’s perfect if you need an unusual synonym for noise or commotion. It’s just obscure enough that it doesn’t get overused, but it’s not so obscure that most people won’t recognize it and chuckle to themselves. Hullabaloo began its life as the word halloo, meaning “to urge or incite with shouts.” Then, via the process of rhyming reduplication, the balloo part was added to form halloo-balloo, which eventually morphed in hullabaloo. Some synonyms that register about the same on the fun-meter are brouhaha, hubbub, and hurly-burly.
codswallop
(KODZ·wol·up, noun) — posted August 7
Nonsense, rubbish, or drivel; also cod’s wallop and cod’sem>. (Example: “The old story about alligators in the sewers of New York City is nothing but a load of codswallop!”) No one has any idea where this word came from. The tale most often told concerns a gentleman named Hiram C. Codd, who sold bottled lemonade in England in the 1870s. In those days, wallop was a slang term for an alcoholic drink, especially beer, so “Codd’s wallop” became a sarcastic reference to any weak drink, and then to anything of little or no value. Of course, it's entirely possible that this story is itself just a load of codswallop! If you don't want to use codswallop, but you're still in the mood for making ironic use of an old-fashioned sounding word, try balderdash (BAWL·dur·dash), flapdoodle (FLAP·doo·dul), or horsefeathers (HORS·feth·urs, "th" as in "the").
flibbertigibbet
(FLIB·ur·tee·jib·it, noun) — posted July 31
A silly, irresponsible, flighty person, especially one who chatters constantly. (Example: “After listening to Muriel jabber mindlessly for ten minutes, Macon realized he was dealing with a real flibbertigibbet.”) The origin of this word is obscure, but the Oxford English Dictionary speculates that it’s an imitation of the sound of idle, trivial chatter. That makes it onomatopoeic (on·uh·mat·uh·PEE·ik, adj.), which describes a word formed from the imitation of the sound associated with the thing or action it refers to. This approach has produced dozens of English words, including splash, buzz, murmur, meow, chirp, hiss, sizzle, and cock-a-doodle-do. Onomatopoeia (the process; pronounced on·uh·mat·uh·PEE·uh) is also responsible for two other terms that deal with idle chatter: babble and yadda yadda yadda. Here are a few other fun words you can use instead of flibbertigibbet: scatterbrain, birdbrain, featherbrain, dingbat, rattle-head, and giddy-head.
galoot
(guh·LOOT, noun) — posted August 24
A clumsy, uncouth, and not overly smart person. (Example: “Some big, dumb fool kept knocking into me on the subway this morning. I think they need a ‘No Galoots’ policy during rush hour.”) Somewhere back in the shrouded mists of movie history, a leading lady called John Wayne or Clark Gable or some other leading man a “big galoot,” and the word stuck. (Actually, the words “big” and “galoot” have been used together so often that it now seems wrong to apply galoot to a small person.) These days, you’re more likely to hear people use a dull synonym such as oaf, but another fun word that I like is clodhopper.