Tonight I am #CrossAtWords that are obscure or use alternate spellings in #crosswords.
ern - a sea eagle which is usually spelled erne
viand - archaic English for food, but my francophonic brain wants a final E again
anele - obsolete for anoint
This word is cool though:
adit - horizontal entrance to a mine, so perpendicular to a shaft
And I also learned that Adar is a month in the Jewish calendar.
Today the only clue deserving #CrossAtWords was a spelled out letter S. But I do want to commemorate my new vocabulary from today's post-breakfast crossword puzzle:
sarod - Indian guitar
stere - cubic meter (!?)
ret - soak flax/hemp
tret - obscure shipping term for a waste allowance
eft - a newt (I've seen this word in several puzzles now, and this time I actually remembered it!)
bur - a prickly seed husk (aka a burr)
The original meaning of woke in Black English comes from a comment by a singer after he sang a song about Lynchings in the South.
He said you need to watch yourself out there.
"Stay Woke"
Whenever conservatives bandy the word around not knowing the meaning, it just reminds me. The people saying this are not your friend. They could hurt you.
Stay Woke!
#wordMeanings
I am not cross at all these words (some I am even glad to learn!) but a few earned an angry face drawn next to the clue.
smew - a small duck I am unlikely to ever see myself 😢
amah - nursemaid in India
erose - eaten away (suspiciously thin entry in Wiktionary)
sloe - aka blackthorn, a wild plum (relative of roses!)
ameba - who spells amoeba this way!?
rale - crackling noise from the chest, though seldom used in singular
#CrossAtWords #crosswords #definitions #WordMeanings #EnglishLanguage
Just finished a crossword. These are the answers to the clues I am "cross" about. That is, obscure (to me) words. So new hashtag: #CrossAtWords
olio - a stew
olla - a jug
brocket - type of deer
sera - crazy plural for serum
transom - crossbar of a doorway or window (in addition to many other meanings)
My wife wanted "transom" to be a way to describe a really attractive trans-masc person. We may start using it that way.
The Psywar glossary... 👇🧼🧠 :thinking: (an interesting glossary to take a look at... )
I have always been confused by folks’ interpretation of high tea as being a fancy affair. I grew up with the understanding it is just supper. Low tea, however, is fancy-ass. Not sure how the meanings changed so much. I grew up calling the midday meal dinner, the evening meal supper or high tea, and a late night snack was lunch. Breakfast is the only meal name I use that remains unambiguous to most folks. I guess this is what happens when I grow up in the Maritimes and Newfoundland. #meals #WordMeanings #tea #HighTea
Milley says military is not woke: ‘I’m not even sure what that word truly means
#MilleyMilitary #NotWoke #MilitaryLeadership #WordMeanings #UnderstandingWoke #MilitaryValues #Politics #News
Similarly, 'planet' (wanderer) used to mean just the 'wandering stars' (Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter), and only got applied to our own world retroactively when we began to acknowledge that Terra was also one of these things. Similarly, Terra is only a name for this celestial object we live on (as well as the phrase 'Terra Firma' [firm land]) because that's the latin word for soil/dirt.
#languages #etymology #wordmeanings #astronomy #linguistics
The reason 'earth' is a common word for the world AND a word for soil is because it was soil first, and 'the earth' was a collective way of referring to the soil beneath your feet, thus the 'whole of the earth' was 'all the soil'/the planet. Similarly, 'world' used to mean 'all there is', much like we use the word universe now, because the planet was all they thought there is, with the moon and sun being things in the orbit of 'the world' and thus part of it.
#languages #etymology #wordmeanings
