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Cool words. Cool phrases.
Simple as that. Post some words or phrases that are not quite well known (or maybe they are) that you find to be fascinating.
| quote: | | A portmanteau is a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning. A folk usage of portmanteau refers to a word formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words (e.g., spork from spoon and fork, animatronics from animation and electronics, ginormous from gigantic and enormous, or blaxploitation from black and exploitation). Typically, portmanteaux are nonce words or neologisms. Portmanteaux are commonly used in scientific literature for a wide variety of technical words, such as cyborg from cybernetic and organism. |
Has anyone here ever used, let alone heard of, the word "blaxploitation"?
Bizarre!
| quote: | A double entendre is a figure of speech similar to the pun, in which a spoken phrase can be understood in either of two ways. This can be as simple as a phrase which has two mutually exclusive meanings, and is thus a clever play on words. An example of this would be the title of the short story, The Most Dangerous Game, by Richard Connell, in which the title can refer both to the "game" that is most dangerous to hunt, and "game" that is most dangerous to play.
But for many, perhaps even most, persons, a risqué, even sexual, element is central to their understanding of double entendre. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as 'A double meaning; a word or phrase having a double sense, especially as used to convey an indelicate meaning' [emphasis added]. In these cases, the first meaning is presumed to be the more innocent one, while the second meaning is risqué, or at least ironic, requiring the hearer to have some additional knowledge. |
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