This has been making the rounds. I found it yesterday quite by accident, so I assume it’s been in the friendfaces for a month or better and everyone who isn’t me has already seen it:
Due to the wave of popularity this thread has imparted upon me, and my overflowing inbox related to it, I’ve decided to conscript it to mention another fun thing that happened to me today.
I enjoy words and their etymology; I’m not ‘into them’, as in, if you are, I’ll probably astound you with my lack of knowledge and impress you with my total disregard for accuracy. Nevertheless, I enjoy reading about word facts, especially when it comes to me in small, easily digestible in 5 minutes or less, chunks (and they say I can’t get along in a Millennial world!). Merriam-Webster has a Word of the Day which in general, feeds this interest appropriately, providing my daily 3-5 minutes of “interesting facts” about words. Today’s word of the day is confabulate. “Oh, BOY!”, I thought. Another stupid neologism, treating slang as if it’s a real word…". I am okay with that, but I like, generally, to keep that crap to a minimum in my Word of the Day-ness. MW does a decent job. I just wasn’t really “in the mood” this AM for “yet another 1960’s media-hype creation” or another “bromance”, as modern “journalists” are so fond of “minting”, and considered skipping today. Am I glad I did not! In their words:
Did You Know?
Confabulate is a fabulous word for making fantastic fabrications. Given the similarities in spelling and sound, you might guess that confabulate and fabulous come from the same root, and they do—the Latin fābula , which refers to a conversation or a story. Another fābula descendant that continues to tell tales in English is fable . All three words have long histories in English: fable first appears in writing in the 14th century, and fabulous follows in the 15th. Confabulate is a relative newcomer, appearing at the beginning of the 1600s.
I’ll confess to not having even suspected this word would have such history.
If you’d like to join in the fun:
I’ve always found it fascinating how evolution can sometimes be so specific. We have evolved to recognize faces in a specific orientation…but turn them upside down and most of us are completely useless:
Unfortunately this exercise is made trivially easy by the set of choices under each one, but if you hide/ignore the choices, you will likely be complete bamboozled on most of them even though they are easily recognized (assuming you were around, and generally compos mentis, in the 80s) when flipped upside-right.
It’s been brought to my attention that my Viper/Daffy Duck linked pic has been broken. Poo!
Here’s a steal from a different site, just in case all the after-the-fact-ers that are hoarding to this thread for the skinny need that tidibit:
