Word: worded
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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...DEAR HERALD EDITORS: In spite of all that you have so kindly said about ventilation in general and the Freshman Chemistry in particular, we freshmen still suffer very much from the foul odors engendered in experiments. - (I looked up the word in the dictionary, it's all right). Now, mother says I am looking quite badly, and father says I smell like a barkeeper, and my cousin Mary says I am horrid, so that she has to use her smelling-bottle. And . . ." [Here we cut out some affecting lamentations.] "Help us ere we dye. Very sincerely yours...
Some literary wags were once assembled at a late dinner in London, when one of them made a large wager that he would invent a word that would soon be recognized as one of the most expressive. The next day the city was placarded with huge posters containing the strange-looking word "humbug," and it is needless to relate that it travelled like wildfire, was accepted by even the most fastidious, and is today understood wherever the English language is spoken...
...annual dinner of the New York Harvard Club, which took place at Delmonico's on the evening of the 21st, President Weld read some verses which "were intended," he explained, "to illustrate the plenitude of rhymes for the word Yale, while the fact was well known that there were none rhyming with Harvard...
...Dartmouth speaks of the habit of punning as "paranourasia" and says : "The inveterate punster soon comes to regard words as mere symbols on which he is to strike the tinkling changes of his word-music; he takes all the beauty out of Homer's "winged words" by making them shuttlecocks which he is to bandy back and forth at the mere catch of sounds...
...that rowdyism which, we are sorry to admit, has characterized the actions of some in previous years. The Post man goes on to say that students in colleges have left behind them that careful surveillance which as boys curbed their restlessness and "bumptiousness." "Bumptiousness" is a good word, and we feel sorry to call forth the powers of invective and sarcasm of the Post man who copyrighted it, by asking what it means. But, nevertheless, we do ask, and hope soon to be informed...