Saturday, May 19, 2018

Learning A New Word--"Shambolic"

While reading journalist Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt, 2018), I came across this sentence in the chapter about Donald Trump's former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon: "By default, everybody had to look to the voluble, aphoristic, shambolic, witty, off-the-cuff figure who was both ever present on the premises and who had, in an unlikely attribute, read a book or two." (See page 60.) [Italics mine.]

The word that caught my attention was "shambolic." I'd never seen it before. Being someone who enjoys learning new words, I consulted two of my American dictionaries and I could not find this word. I then went online and learned that "shambolic" is British slang for chaotic, disorganized, or mismanaged.

Looking further, I consulted the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd edition, a book I found, I think, on a street corner almost two years ago. It defines the word as "chaotic, unorganized." Now I have a new word to add to my vocabulary.

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