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.

Searching For The Word "Upscuttle"

I recently flipped through an old, battered dictionary that I own with the express purpose of looking up the definition of  "gulag." My search was prompted by a radio interview I  had heard that detailed the brutalization of inmates by guards at an upstate New York prison.

That brought to mind the late "Grandpa" Al Lewis, a former cast member of the 1960s sitcom, The Munsters, and his comparing American prisons to gulags, or Soviet prison camps, on his weekly New York-based radio show on WBAI.

While looking up the word, I found a slip of paper tucked inside the dictionary on which I had written the word "upscuttle" and the name of the person I had heard use it, conservative talk show radio host Barry Farber. I probably heard him use the word sometime in the 1980s when he was on the air late nights on New York's WMCA. ("Upscuttle" is not a word you hear every day.) Unfortunately, I neglected to write down how he used the word in a sentence.

I searched for the word in the same battered dictionary, but I couldn't find it. Neither could I find it in five other dictionaries in my apartment, including the Canadian Oxford Dictionary and a huge dictionary that weighs almost as much as a ten-pound bag of sugar.

Here is urbandictionary.com 's definition of "upscuttle": "When everything in a given area seems to go topsy-turvy at once. A sudden capsizing of circumstances and conditions."

What Do You Call A Massachusetts Resident?

I knew that a person from New York State is called a New Yorker, a person from California is called a Californian, and a person from Texas is called a Texan. But what do you call someone who hails from Massachusetts or Connecticut? None of my dictionaries were helpful on this particular question.

So I finally consulted the ever trusty Internet to solve this mystery and learned a new word--demonym. 

What is a demonym?  It's a word used by geographers to describe where a person comes from. The website I consulted via my cell phone listed the demonyms for all fifty states alphabetically.

I learned that a resident of Connecticut is a Connecticuter and a person from Massachusetts is a Massachusettsan. Do the people in those states know this? The next time I talk to someone from either of those states I will ask them.

Here are some other demonyms: if you are from Iowa, you are either an Iowan or an Iowegian; if you call Illinois home, you are an Illinoisan (pronounced, I assume, Ill-leh-noy-an) or an Illinian (pronounced, again I assume, Ill-len-nee-an); a resident of Maine is called a Mainer or a Maineaker

(pronounced either Main-ah-ker or May-nee-ack-er). The last one sounds a little insulting. Maineite or Mainester might be better. And if you are firmly rooted in the state of Wyoming, you are a Wyomingite.

I now know --as well as lexicographers, I hope--what to call persons living in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

A Better Word For Suicide Due To Bullying Is Needed

Whenever I hear or see the word "bullycide," the image that comes to mind is someone killing his or her tormentor, not someone killing themselves because they were bullied. I wish someone would come up with a more precise term for suicides caused by bullying. "Bullycide" is not it.

How I Discovered Wiktionary

Browsing through the Village Voice (March 4-10, 2015 issue), I came upon an article about music journalist Robert Christgau and his memoir Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man (Dey Street Books). I remember proofreading his copy in the early 1980s when he was the music critic at the Village Voice.  (I think it was his sister, Georgia Christgau, who hired me.)

 Not seeing Christgau's age mentioned in the piece, I immediately went to Wikipedia to look up his birth date (It's April 18, 1942) and stumbled upon a link to the word "memoir." That led me to the Wiktionary page, which for me, a language buff, was a fascinating discovery. I learned that Wiktionary, the free dictionary, was "a multilingual, web-based project to create a free-content dictionary of all words in all languages."

 The project is currently available in 158 languages and is, like Wikipedia, its companion site, "written collaboratively by volunteers" called "wiktionarians." The English-language section, at the time that I checked the site, contained 3, 971,737 entries (and counting).

Although I had trouble using the site on my cell phone, I did click on the highlighted word "free" in the phrase "free dictionary." What popped up on the screen was a language lover's delight: there were
word origin and pronunciation guides, a list of synonyms and antonyms, definitions with literary examples, et cetera. For example, here are two definitions of "free" that appeared in a long list of definitions:

"without; not containing (what is specified);exempt;clean, liberated" as in "We had a wholesome, filling meal, free of meat" and "not currently in use; not taken; unoccupied" as in  "You can sit on that chair, it's free."

Once I figure out how to use Wiktionary, it will become a very useful reference tool and I will be consulting it often.

Go to www.wiktionary.org.

Dictionary Browsing

As a leisure time activity, I often browse the dictionary, finding, to my delight, words I've never seen before. Thumbing through my beat up copy of Merriam-Webster's, I discovered this term: "open dating." It sounded at first like there was a romance or "singles's night" connection. When I read the definition, I learned there was a marketing connection instead. The dictionary defined "open dating" (which came into usage in 1971)  as "the marking of perishable food products with a clearly readable date indicating when the food was packaged or the last date on which it should be sold or used."

So now whenever I go grocery shopping and look at the "Sell By" or "Packed On" date on a container of milk or on a deli item, I know those printed dates are called "open dating" and I can make reference to that term when talking to a store manager about an item that's been on the shelf past its expiration date.