Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional, cleverly named series on words I'm looking up)

Chartreuse


This word seems to have fallen out of my world for more than a decade. I had almost forgotten it. Then, yesterday, Michelle Obama's outfit revived this word in my mind. From Webster's New World:

Chartreuse (after La Grande Chartreuse, Carthusian monastery in France) trademark for a yellow, pale-green, or white liqueur made by the Carthusian monks
n.
1 [occas. c-] this liqueur
2 [c-] pale, yellowish green
adj.
[c-] of the color chartreuse

Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional cleverly named series on words I'm looking up) (plus late addendum)

cheeky

This is by no means a new one for me. Strangely, it figured prominently in one of the philosophy texts I read in college. But I'm just so flabbergasted by an AOL news headline that I simply must bat it around a bit. The headline:

Cruise passengers describe "cheeky" pirate attack

From the story:

"We didn't think they would be cheeky enough to attack a cruise ship," Wendy Armitage, of Wellington, New Zealand, told The Associated Press.

Definition:

cheeky: impertinently bold; impudent and saucy — American Heritage Dictionary

Well done, Ms. Armitage. Weird, but well done. Ah, pirates. Cheeky, spunky, frisky, sassy, saucy, Disney-approved theiving raping murderers!

* * *

Late addendum we'll call "Words I'm Looking Up for Words I'm Looking Up."

In one of my trademark bouts of after-the-fact insecurity, I decided to look up "flabbergasted" to make sure I used it okay above. I saw this at Dictionary.com:

flabbergasted
adjective
as if struck dumb with astonishment and surprise; "a circle of policement stood dumbfounded by her denial of having seen the accident"; "the flabbergasted aldermen were speechless"; "was thunderstruck by the news of his promotion"-- WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University

I love seeing "policement" in a dictionary entry affiliated with Princeton. Now I'm truly in a state of flabbergastment. (Yes, I looked up "policement." No entry.)

Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional, cleverly named series on words I'm looking up)

clad

File this one under Lessons from the Spam Folder. Today I got an e-mail with the subject line, "Clad your feet in luxury." I realized I'd never heard the word "clad" in the imperative -- or even the simple present tense, for that matter. I hear it only as a past tense or past participle: "Clad in his best armor, the knight rode into battle. "

I realize that a lot of people might know what the present tense of clad is, but I (and I'm not too mortified to admit it) did not. Here's American Heritage Dictionary:

v. a past tense and a past participle of clothe.

Therefore (surprise, surprise) the spammer used it wrong.

Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional, cleverly named series on words I'm looking up)

spline

The guy is talking about architecture. And, as a docent at the Gamble House in Pasadena, he knows quite a bit about the subject. It’s clear I could learn a great deal from him if only I could maintain focus. But I can’t, because this docent has just used the word “spline” and I am one of those people for whom a bizarre fixation on words paralyzes other areas of my brain to create a sort of subject-specific mental retardation.

So as our docent continues to share fascinating and downright impressive insights about architecture, a voice in my head is saying. “Spline, spline, bobine, bananafanabospline. Where’s the spline? What’s this spline? Whence came this word 'spline' and am I the only one in this tour group who thinks that it just might have too many consonants?”

Fast forward just 22 hours, and I’m at my local hardware mega-retailer buying materials to make a window screen. 3x5 piece of aluminum screen: check. Two 8-foot pieces of cuttable window frame: check. Gray rubber spline: what?

And that’s enough spline-endipity to persuade me to actually look it up.

spline. n.
1. Any of a series of projections on a shaft that fit into slots on a corresponding shaft, enabling both to rotate together.
2. The groove or slot for such a projection.
3. A flexible piece of wood, hard rubber, or metal used in drawing curves.
4. A wooden or metal strip; a slat.

So the good news is I have a new word and a new window screen. The bad news, of course, is that I still don’t know jack about architecture.