I have never heard that, Trike - apart from a similar sounding word that my mother used to describe a rough quarter from which ignorant types emerged. And she had little knowledge of the subcontinent save for army picked up words that had crept into English. And whenever i saw gun toting characters in such regions, my first thought would be to wonder what the intent to use it was and not what it may have been called in any language. Not that every male in the north where i went toted a gun. I did see one  chasing another along a deserted road with a  large axe but did not stop to ask what  was going on nor what either called  the weapon. How deplorable for someone interested in History but there it is. Pragamtic selection of the facts to explore is my lot.

Priscilla wrote:

I have never heard that, Trike - apart from a similar sounding word that my mother used to describe a rough quarter from which ignorant types emerged.

possibly BOONDOCKS

another word derived from Army slang, though in this case the US Army. Borrowed during the Philippine War of 1899-1902, from a Filipino word meaning mountain, Boondocks can mean a rural, undeveloped area (another expression being The Sticks) or as your mother used it, "the wrong side of town".

I only know the word from the song Down in the Boondocks - I see it was sung by Billy Joe Royal. I can't think of another song by him. That makes it obvious what boondocks must mean, though it is not used here in NZ either. Here we just refer to the suburb and people who live there know what that means; people who don't probably don't have the faintest idea.

Codswallop

Prompted by Priscilla's post(s) earlier I did some rooting around to find this quaint little word's etymology, imagining (based on the "cod" bit I suppose) that it might be something we can trace back to Master Wobbleweapon and his contemporaries.

However I was surprised that even the venerable OED agrees with its lexiconical peers, rather embarrassedly, that the expression appears to date back only as far as the late 19th century, and in fact cannot be attested to have existed earlier than 1959 in print (where as recently as 1966 it was still being spelled as "Cod's Wallop"). Even more worryingly, the OED notes that a recent urban myth associates the expression with a brewer called Codd whose "wallop" (beer) was rubbish. Unfortunately, upon investigation by the good lexicographers, no such brewer or beer could be found to have ever existed, leaving the Oxford etymologists having to rather uncomfortably admit that the "cod" portion therefore most probably derives from its ancient use among the English to describe their testicles. Having had the poor fortune to sample certain "real ales" in my time while touring the Septic Isle, I am inclined (with apologies to my own senses for what this imaginative concoction inflicts upon them) to admit that this version of the derivation of the word makes all too much sense, unfortunately.

So I was only half right to suspect an association with "cod-piece", but completely right to get this definition posted here before Priscilla could jump in and claim that it comes from a fictional Norwegian law dating to 1979.

P. can only claim to seeing it frequently written after her Latin translations - and pre 1958 too - by which time she had long been parted from Latin lessons. We never asked its meaning - the inference was plain enough..... and it also went along nicely with 'utter bilge.'

TOFF,

colloquialism for an aristocrat. Believed to derive from the gold tassels or "tufts" worn by titled undergraduates at Oxford & Cambridge.
also SNOB, originally a word for a shoemaker, it was used by Cambridge students to describe the town's inhabitants, eventually evolving into a word meaning someone with social pretensions.

GIZMO. WHATZIT, THINGY, DOHICKY, DODAH, THINGMAJIG, WIDGET


There must be many more such words in use to name a small part  - as for the plumbing bit I  now await delivery. However, these are also all known to me as names for very small dogs. One of which, about shoe size six and is much like a caterpillar that bites at one and and leaks at the other and  has a hugely loud, incessant yap. One non-family step across its home threshold sets it off. Only by having it gathered up  dustpan and brush style and  rushed to its heated garden shed brings quiet enough for any sort of conversation.

TOOM

A word that for some strange reason has sprung to mind with a little more regularity lately when visiting this site, this adjective - now restricted in use largely to Scotland and the "umber" regions of northern England - is one of that little group of words from a very old Saxon vocabulary which received something of a boost with the arrival of the Vikings and subsequently refused to die in those areas where the berserkers ran the show for a while.

Modern day Vikings of course know and still use the word a lot in their own languages today - "tom" or "tomt" means "empty" - and it frequently teams up with the preposition "for" so that a degree of specificity can be added to a statement regarding just what might be absent. "Tomt for penger" (empty for money) for example is a fair description of my bank account these days.

However in Scotland, although the word tends to stand alone as an adjective requiring no such clarification, it still retains that subtle little semantic nuance which probably explains why it survived even when a Saxon-English word meaning "unmarried" or "unemployed" ended up meaning "void of anything" in the Middle Ages, leading to "empty" ending up as the word of choice in the rest of England when presented with vacuity (a demand on its use which one can safely presume will only increase in the very near future). But up north "toom" persisted in its own right, especially when communicating that the subject/object of the term was not only "empty" but "empty of content that could or should be present". "Empty" is a simple description of status, the other older term however still carries with it the extra suggestion of sorrow, frustration, disappointment - or even indeed anger - that the status pertains at all.

LALOCHEZIA

Swearing to help relieve stress or pain

Less impressive than Trike's word but the word of the day emailed to me by Dictionary.com was 'mardy' - meaning "grumpy or moody; sulky".  It's a word that has been discussed here before but I was surprised that it was suggested by Dictionary.com (a) as it ('mardy') is a dialect word and (b) Dictionary.com is an American site.

What about 'mardi' as in 'Mardi Gras' - I'm thinking of the party time in the former French area of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans? 
- Thus the American - possible French - site.

Nielsen, I was going to type the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the origin of 'mardy' in full (in quotation marks of course and attributing it to the OED but somehow I lost my commment and exited the site so I'll provide the link https://www.lexico.com/definition/mardy  The origin is in the last paragraph.  From what I can work out Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday in the UK) is literally "Fat Tuesday" in French and is said (according to Wikipedia) to come from the eating of rich and fatty foods on that day before Lent kicks in.

Yes indeed, LiR ... mardi, in French, just means Tuesday - from the Latin, dies Martis - meaning literally the "day of Mars" (that's the Greco-Roman god Mars who later became equated to the god Twi, the Germanic god of war, hence the English, Tuesday). Thus mardi/Tuesday is the third day of the week after the days dedicated to the Sun and Moon: Sun-day and Moon-day. Accordingly mardi gras literally means simply "fat Tuesday", and reflects the traditional feasting and indulgence at the very end of Epiphany. However such riotous partying should strictly end at Shrove Tuesday (when one should be "shriven" ie absolved through penance and prayer) before the religious austerity of Lent starts. Note that the rowdy day of mardi gras is essentially the same day as the Holy day of Shrove Tuesday, and this is largely a consequence of the ancient Roman tradition that a day, whether a calender or festival day or whatever, ended at sunset, as opposed to midnight as is now the usual practice. So one could rowdily celebrate on 'fat Tuesday' until the evening, but then were expected to devoutly go to church to be shriven, on Shrove Tuesday, in preparation for the following religious day, called Ash Wednesday in English, or mercredi des cendres in French - with mercredi deriving from the Latin, dies Mercuri, meaning the day dedicated to the god Mercury, who in turn was equated with Odin/Woden of Germanic mythology, hence the English Wednesday.

MM has given a more complete explanation of "Mardi Gras" than I did.  Back in the day I did some temporary work in Wednesfield (now part of the Black Country) - I can remember walking past a Woden House - which probably was thus called because the name of the district was Wednesfield.  There's a Wednesbury in the Black Country too so maybe those places owe their names to Woden.

Nordmann's "toom" from earlier in the month rang a bell.  Of course the unfortunate John Balliol who was king of the Scots after the death of the Maid of Norway was known as "Toom Tabard" (empty coat).   Edward I's interference in Scots (Scottish?) affairs undermined Balliol's influence as Res Historians probably know.

Edited to remove a superflous 'a'.

QUOCKERWODGER

In the 19th century this was the popular name for a wooden puppet. The word was rapidly applied to politics.

From the Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words 1859 edition:
" a pseudo-politician, one whose strings of action are pulled by someone else, is now often termed a Quockerwodger"

Triceratops wrote:

QUOCKERWODGER

In the 19th century this was the popular name for a wooden puppet. The word was rapidly applied to politics.

From the Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words 1859 edition:
" a pseudo-politician, one whose strings of action are pulled by someone else, is now often termed a Quockerwodger"

 
Yes Triceratops, a politician, whose strings of action are pulled by someone else. Overhere we call it a "marionet"Dutch/ "marionette" French (marionette English)
Kind regards, Paul.

MY GIDDY AUNT

Not a word but a phrase that came into my hear yesterday (or did I read it?) and I wondered how it had come into being. It's not in my little NZ Pocket Oxford Dictionary which is the only one in reach of me. 

And back to Priscilla's list what about WHODACKY? My go-to word for anything I can't think of the name for and even some that I can is MACHINE. Even a wooden spoon can be a machine in my language.

CANDIDATE

With the US Presidential elections in the offing, a quick look at the word candidate.

1.A person who is running in an election.
2.A person who is applying for a job.
3.A participant in an examination.
4.Something or somebody that may be suitable.
5.(genetics) A gene which may play a role in a given disease

The word derives from the Latin candidatus, "white-robed", named after the white togas worn by Senators. The white implying purity. The word CANDID, meaning open or honest also derives from this source.

All stemming from "candere" - to glow very brightly - and so in addition to less than candid presidential candidates this simple root has also added both "candle" and "incandescent" to English.

Caro wrote:

MY GIDDY AUNT

Not a word but a phrase that came into my hear yesterday (or did I read it?) and I wondered how it had come into being. It's not in my little NZ Pocket Oxford Dictionary which is the only one in reach of me. 

And back to Priscilla's list what about WHODACKY? My go-to word for anything I can't think of the name for and even some that I can is MACHINE. Even a wooden spoon can be a machine in my language.

Caro, I don't know if this is of any  https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/what-is-the-origin-of-73/help about the giddy aunt.

(Thinking of the etymology of Trike's word of the day I don't suppose purity isn't the first characteristic I think of about parliamentary/political candidates though there must be some decent ones in the mix I guess).  Edit: nordmann posted around the same time as I did and he had pre-empted me with the observation about purity or not of presidential candidates though his comment hadn't appeared when I typed mine but the point belongs to him as his post was before mine even if only a few seconds.

QUAFFTIDE

The time or season for having a drink.

SCOFFLAW

A person who flouts drinking laws. Dates back to the Prohibition Era in the US, Scofflaw is a made up word, scoff, to eat or drink quickly, and law. It was the winner of a competition for a word to describe people who ignored the Prohibition law. Two people (out of 25,000 entries) independently came up with the word and shared the $200 prize.

THAGOMIZER

The spikes on the tails of Stegosaurid dinosaurs. The word was invented by Gary Larson for a Far Side cartoon in 1982 and has since been adopted as an official term.

4 spike thagomizer:

OOPS, Trike, I hadn't seen this before posting my message some minutes ago. I know I can delete it, but I stick nevertheless to what I said.
Regards, Paul.

COCKWOMBLE 


I only came across this word the other day and already I have forgotten in what context. I haven't been reading any contemporary British books; has it appeared in a Guardian article? It is apparently British slang for an obnoxious person, usually a man. I don't know its derivation, but does it have something to do with the popular children's programme of decades ago, The Wombles. If so, why has it just recently emerged, as I have read?

My understanding of the word is that a cockwomble is an obnoxious person specifically because of their outrageously stupid and ignorant statements while generally having a very high opinion of their own wisdom and importance - ie they spout utter rubbish/bullshit. Since the original Wombles (of Wimbledom) collected and recycled rubblish, I wonder if that's the connection, or am I looking too deeply?

I've seen it suggested that the term originated in Scotland (and it was certainly widely used in Scottish social media in response to Trump when in 2016 he twittered his congratulations for Scotland supposedly having voted to leave the UK ... d'oh!), or alternatively to unspecified football discussion fora at about the same time. But I'm not convinced that it's not just another imaginative version of the "take an innocuous or mildly rude/slang word and add a noun", idiom, to create a culturally-evocative, vaguely-new, somewhat rudely-suggestive insult ... in the way of shit-weasle, jizz-trumpet, arse-bandit, badger-botherer, mouth-breather, etc.

The earliest formally-written usage of the specific term, cockwomble, at least that I can find, is in Chris Brookmyre's novel 'Dead Girl Walking' (published in 2015):
They even made the mistaken assumption, mainly from the title, that the song had some kind of lesbian message. As Heike put it: "You can't expect the subliterate cockwombles on the Daily Heil showbiz and gossip desks to have read Orwell.":

DECALCOMANIA

Sounds like what some of us suffered from around 12 years of age as we obsessively worked our way through the local shop's range of Airfix kits. And in fact it is related, as I discovered while rooting around to see if I could add to Meles meles' Cockwomble findings.

The word originated in the late 19th century to denote a new industrial process whereby patterns and images were transferred to surfaces, especially in glazing techniques for mass produced crockery. It had begun over a century earlier in France as "décalquer" with regard to cut glass ornamentation ("off-" "to press"), namely an innovative combination of waxed paper and mild acid that could be used repeatedly to transfer a drawn image to still maleable glass before it hardened. The technique was refined later and renamed "décalcomanie", though still with the same original paper used multiple times to create repeating effects. In England and the US the process was simplified with much cheaper materials, allowing single use paper-to-product transfer, and the process became known as "decalcomania".

The first "transfers" (or "decals") that could be applied to human skin with which children the world over are now so familiar were produced in New York in the 1920s, and booths in which one could receive these temporary tattoos became a common feature in travelling fairs and, of course, at Coney Island - where the word "Decalcomania" emblazoned in light bulbs above advertised this service in the booth beneath.

Popular designs, especially among children, were typically humorous caricatures and silly - if convoluted - depictions of popular tropes of the day; basketball stars, Hollywood starlets, national heroes and symbols, ranging from Honest Abe to Uncle Sam. Having such a decalcomania on one's forearm was proof worn with pride that one had just returned from Coney Island, and children proudly displayed this recently acquired "cockamamie" to their envious pals.

Long after "decalcomania" was assigned to the semantic dustbin, its childish mispronunciation survived and, after the 1950s, even flourished as a perfectly understandable synonym for anything silly, pointless, probably funny, and - most importantly - mildly provocative BS.

I must have been an  odd child. I had  transfers  on each hand - replaced when faded - of the lion and unicorn. Not for loyalty to the throne but because an interest in the goings on between warring Stephen and Matilda.... or was she also called Maud or Mary, even?

 Even more suprising is that Woolworths sold these transfers as such; up market decals., if ever.

OVER A BARREL

To be in a helpless position: Left without choice.

Dating from the US in the late 19th century, believed to have originated from miscreants being placed over a barrel for flogging; alternatively the practice of placing a drowning victim over a barrel to clear their lungs.

Savannah newspaper of 1890:

The barbarous practice of rolling the person over a barrel, or hanging him head downward, to permit the escape of water from the lungs, has almost ceased, in view of the fact, now generally known, that no water can get into the lungs.

Trike, your related 'Drawing a line at that' message, posted today (04/11/2020):

Triceratops wrote:

... prominently features the word 'curfew' in regards to setting times for children being expected to be back home.

CURFEW is a very old term but has now once again come into regular parlance with covid restrictions. I expect most of us here already knew that the English usage derived from medieval French meaning to "cover the fire", ie that time in the evening - usually announced by the tolling of the parish church bell - when every household and business in the city had to dampen down their open fires, ovens and furnaces, and so generally shut down for the night. Ostensibly it was a fire-safety measure, but I'm sure it was generally used as a social control/policing/enforcement measure too.

Having lived in France for many years now I have never needed to use nor have encountered the expression in everyday French ... that is until very recently, when I had to specifically refer to the current government regulations in an email, and so I did have to check I was using the correct modern term. In modern French a curfew, in its original meaning, as well as more modern usages such as in defining childrens' bedtimes or adolescents' freedoms etc.,  is still 'un couvre-feu', literally a 'fire-cover' .... of time/rule/law/thingy/or whatever. Nevertheless I was still a bit surprised that in over 1000 years the French word has changed hardly at all from the Old French, cuevrefeu.

BAFFLEGAB

Word invented by Milton A Smith in January 1952, baffle+gab,

from, worldwidewords.org
"Milton Smith coined the word in a piece he wrote for the Chamber’s weekly publication, Washington Report, which criticised the OPS for the bureaucratic language it used in one of its price orders. This was picked up by the Bellingham Herald in Washington State, which wrote an editorial about it, saying “Gobbledegook is mouth-filling, but it lacks the punch of bafflegab. The inventor of that one deserves an award.” The newspaper made sure he got one by paying for the plaque to be made and organising its presentation.

The inventor said he had spent a maddening day trying to explain the OPS order to a colleague and decided a special word was needed to describe its special blend of “incomprehensibility, ambiguity, verbosity and complexity”. He tried legalfusion, legalprate, gabalia, and burobabble before settling on bafflegab. There’s nothing mysterious about the make-up of the word, and that’s part of its appeal. But it’s the stress on those plosive consonants that really makes it fly. It might well have succeeded even without the publicity associated with the award.

At the presentation, Milton Smith was asked to briefly define his word. It was, he said succinctly, “multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.” Just so."

I came across the (new to me) word

LAGOM


meaning 'the principle of living a balanced, moderately paced, low-fuss life'.

The explanation of the meaning and the origin of the word come not from me but Dictionary.com

'The uncommon English noun lagom “the principle of living a balanced, moderate life” comes from Swedish lagom, a fossil noun form in the dative plural used as an adverb meaning “just right, just the thing,” literally “according to custom or common sense.” Lagom comes from an unattested Old Norse plural neuter noun lagu “what is laid down,” which in Old Icelandic becomes lǫg “law, laws.” The Old Norse neuter plural noun lagu was taken into late Old English as a feminine singular noun lagu by the year 1000, becoming lawe in Middle English, and law in English. Lagom entered English in the mid-1930s.'

GAMBOL


Not an unusual word in its meaning or etymology, it comes from an obsolete word 'gambade', via French from the Latin 'gambata' connected to 'gamba' meaning leg. But what I wonder is why at least in NZ English it is only used in one context, that of two-three month old lambs playing with each other. We don't talk of children gambolling or calves or even I think baby goats (it's hard to call them kids now when that is the common name for children, another subject in itself). 
I have been rather disappointed this year that although there are plenty of lambs here in the paddocks (fields) we haven't seen any gambolling on our drives. Would that be weather related? or food?

It appears to be one of those many words which, when imported from French into English, ended up as a nuanced expression for something that English hitherto hadn't produced a generally understood term to describe (regional dialects may well have had individual examples which simply didn't manage to escape their local use).

Its ovine context - especially when lambs exert a lot of energy doing nothing of any seeming point or purpose - was probably inescapable and there right from the start within English society given the ease with which examples could be witnessed, and could only have been reaffirmed constantly as England became, under early Norman rule, a country and an economy built on wool. Not seeing sheep on a pretty regular basis must have been something of a challenge for both town and country people alike. Even when used in a context of generally disparaging such useless activity (directed against children and other young animals - or even those engaged in field sports or soldiery) the literary evidence suggests that a direct reference to lambs was very commonly included, meaning the metaphor never really left its ovine context at all. New Zealand, and I assume all English speaking societies, have simply inherited this extremely concise semantic application. Unless a lamb appears in the sentence one may as well use "frolic" anyway, a word that had entered English slightly earlier via Norse and which became the preferred expression therefore for when one didn't really need to draw the comparison with young sheep at all to make the same point.

There are two imponderables with regard to English in the early medieval period - the extent to which the language was fractured on a dialect basis to the extent that intelligibility across the Saxon kingdom was hampered, and the extent to which the Normans imposed their imported tongue as a lingua franca across their newly conquered kingdom.  The former can be logically assumed even if we lack sufficient philological evidence, and the latter seems to have been applied (if even that word can be used) in what we would now call a granular way. As long as the Norman aristocracy were intelligible to each other they were less concerned, it seems, in ensuring the same down along the social ladder (except when it came to accounts, laws and taxes). The result was a language that developed nuance far exceeding its requirement for basic communication, and even nuanced terms for nuanced terms - each with an extremely specific semantic payload - that one simply does not see in other languages to the same extent.

"Gambol" seems to be a good example of this. Without lambs on which to hinge that payload it has practically no purpose whatsoever. Other nuanced terms exist for all extra-ovine activities of that nature.

I've heard Birmingham people call a cartwheel (as in the type children do - not the actual wheel of a cart) a 'gambol' only pronounced gambole.

HIBERNACLE

A place to spend winter. A winter retreat.

Deriving from the Latin hibernus meaning winter.
The Classical name for Ireland, Hibernia is a Latinised version of the Celtic  Iveriu. Hibernia translates as "the Land of Winter".

INOCULATION


I was surprised to find this word in George Eliot's Silas Marner, though spelt without the first 'i' to show the rural speech patterns. "For if this child ever went anyways wrong, and you hadn't done your part by it, Master Marner - 'noculation, and everything to save it from harm  - it 'ud be a thorn i' your bed for ever o' this side of the grave..." 
I looked it up in my Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories and the word goes back to late Middle English an originally meant 'graft a bud or shoot into a plant of a different type'. It has a Latin source and the sense of vaccination dates from the early 18th century. 
I didn't realise vaccination dated so far back.

In Eliot's time "inoculation" referred exclusively to smallpox and to various practices (powdering smallpox scabs and blowing them up a child's nose was one recorded method) that were common among the ordinary people. Similar practices to immunise children also against smallpox, when engaged in by physicians working for more noble employers, were referred to as "variolation", so this was regarded as the "official" term in medical textbooks and journals. Having her character use the former term would have emphasised to her reader that character's lower social status.

Likewise, using cowpox scabs or pustules to immunise against smallpox, the literal meaning of "vaccination" (from "vacca", Latin for "milk cow"), also originated among the lower classes, probably as much through desperation as from astute clinical observation and learnt as much from "old wives' tales" as from trusted medical sources.

Jenner's "discovery" therefore was less a brainwave on his part than it was an attempt to validate in medical circles a proven practice already well established among the lower classes which yielded many more effective results with far less risk to the patient than "variolation" tended to achieve. And the proof of his success, as well as of the actual origin of his method, was the elevation of both terms from their lower class origins so that they effectively supplanted the old "official" term completely among serious clinicians.

Jabberwocky


An invented nonsense word which just about covers most of the Sunday paper content today on jabs assorted.

I am detecting the unmistakable tone of a stopped clock and its propensity to be inevitably correct, despite its limitations, at least twice within the diurnal phase. Your association between the Jabberwock and the diarrheaotic effluent of opinion masquerading as journalism that constitutes "the Sunday newspapers", though prompted by a bad pun, is actually one of which Lewis Carroll himself would have most heartily approved. Brillig, even! (which, meaning a time approximating to 4 o'clock - look it up - is also correct twice a day, interestingly enough)

A very polite group of girls attending a Latin School in Boston, Massachusetts, back in 1870 were very taken by said creature's poetic context and actually wrote to Carroll requesting his permission to name their school magazine "The Jabberwock". However, a little fearful that their grasp of English might be somewhat less than their aspirant grasp of the Lingua Nobilis, they also asked him if perhaps the word itself was maybe not as "nonsensical" as advertised, and in fact might have a very real linguistic provenance in which scandalous antecedents not commensurate with a young lady's comport and image befitting the reputation of their establishment might unfortunately be lurking.

Carroll was moved to reply to the young language students (probably delighted at the prospect of securing new - ahem - "photographic models" should he ever visit the errant colonies at some point in the future), and revealed that the word did indeed have sound etymological roots in English. "Jabber", as any American should of course know through simple experience, simply meant "loud and excited chatter". "Wock", he said, he had borrowed from the ancient Saxon word "wocer" or "wocor", signifying offspring or fruit, be it of the floral or loins variety. His newly coined portmanteau therefore simply meant "the result of much excited and voluble babble with little or no inherent consequence".

All that is missing from this definition of the Mail On Sunday is to surround it with images of body-shaming semi-naked portrayals of the nubile female form (an addition of which Carroll also would no doubt have approved).

By 1870 he'd bought a bigger camera.

Influencer

New use of this word - to me -that is. Since I have seen it used twice today thought it might be an addition here.

An influencer, - or so I can gather- is a social media  networking celebrity with followers. These influencer seem to be young people - somewhat self deluding - who have attitude and opinion and a dash of charisma that often appeals to  sad life  i.phone clamped down people. 

An influencer often directs  style interest, opinion - and sales. An influencer has today been accused of leading many gullible women into faulty  plastic surgery in places in Turkey - ,  and the clinics, it is now revealed, paid her highly to do so. 

Influencers are also the sort of unqualified people who sometimes fan interest in attitudes about no vaccination and aspects of fake news..... sad sacks, in other words. 

I suppose there are influences who move folk towards better things..... I know not.
Using celebrities to advertise products is nothing new.... Denis Compton and Brylcream come to  mind

I was surprised to learn that the word unsuspended exists. Someone had been given the royal order of the boot from a social media platform but had appealed and the account had been re-instated.  I thought it was an example of newspeak like 'unfriended' but I looked in the dictionary and 'unsuspended' does indeed exist.

Priscilla wrote:

Influencer


I suppose there are influences who move folk towards better things..... I know not.
Using celebrities to advertise products is nothing new.... Denis Compton and Brylcream come to  mind

 I hope, Priscilla, that you aren't suggesting that Brylcreem is a 'better thing' I should adopt.
 I can hardly remember it.

 'Influencers' as far as I've noticed has only been around as a word for a few years, but influencers have been around for millennia - often operating within religions, and always within ruling regimes.

Influencers by other names such as 'eminance gris' and advisors - counsel etc etc have, of course,  been around since whenever. here I meant that the media context word applied was new to me because I am not  a social media follower - and therefore  very distanced from such things  - and not sensing any loss for that, either. 
As far as I can gather these influencers have no special knowledge, experience or qualifications but have attitude, opinion and are big on their own hair styles, chat yap and own to bucket loads of self importance. Some people go for them and their screen speak ... I think 'like' is a word often used ... or a heart... and they believe it too. If you can giggle through the pain, life is great.

FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION

What Priscilla applies to "influencers".

At the risk of - but without intent on my side - saying something not nice, then Priscilla's definition reminds me of 'hot air', and Nordmann's word, which I don't know the meaning of, made me think of 'Flatulence' - a different emission of hot air.

I'd better get me coat - and mask.

I strongly doubt that this word is in the Oxford English Dictionary but some people have taken to calling those followers of the last US president trumpanzees though I think that's a bit of an insult to one type of great ape.

Triceratops wrote:

Dinfluencer....someone who posts photos of their lockdown supper on social media.

It's interesting to note that Dinfluencer made the thread before Influencer. Maybe that's a bit like Temp's Throttlebottom (incompetent, bumbling politician) coming before today's word:

GIATROCRACY

(state ruled by doctors of medicine)

KIBOSH


I was doing a crossword today and the answer to one clue was "put the kibosh on" which I got, but it led me to wonder about the origins of the word. I found this site which discussed it but didn't come to any definite conclusion. It is in my pocket Oxford Dictionary but not in my Oxford Word Histories.  Can't seem to put a link to it. 

https://blog.oup.com/2013/08/three-recent-theories-of-kibosh-word-origin-etymology/#:~:text=is%20vanishingly%20small.-,J.,are%20common%20terms%20in%20heraldry.