Word: slubberdegullion
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There is not much inventiveness of language these days either, no Menckenish words like "pecksniffian," no Rabelais around to rail against "slubberdegullion druggies, ninny lobcocks, or scurvy sneaksbies." Our social conscience interferes as well-the feeling that life offers enough abuse without adding insults to injuries. In short, we are simply too reverent, too reverent about the wrong things. In the past no one was safe. Macaulay said of Socrates: "The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned...
...prodigious ("amazing, astonishing, portentous, enormous") feat, a one-man job ("a low word now much in use") comprising 2,300 folio pages of definitions and examples accomplished in nine years (from 1746 to 1755), with the help of only six copyists. Only a fopdoodle ("a fool") or a slubberdegullion ("a paltry, dirty, sorry wretch") would deny the greatness of the work, and only one who had carried it out had the right to define a lexicographer (as Johnson did in the dictionary) as "a harmless drudge." Privately, he was not so humble. As he told his Boswell: "I knew very...
...world was ever so sincere and modest in his self-devotion," wrote Marie in her secret notebook. When her husband discovered the notebook he was furious. "A bad wife is to her husband as rottenness to his bones," he roared. Screamed Marie: "Do not provoke me . . . you Stinkard, Base Slubberdegullion, Cheesy Plagiarist, Immortal Whip-Arse, Eater of Stinking Beef!" Poet Milton hurriedly sent her home to learn manners, and Mother Powell shrieked that he deserved to be whipped. But after a few years Father Powell saw that the Parliamentary forces were going to win the Civil War, so he sent...
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