Undulatory is a great word, isn’t it? It means undulating or wavy, or due to undulation. And undulation means a wavy motion or a gentle rise and fall.
There are days when my hair is as undulatory as this wave lapping gently against the breakwater.
Happy New Year!
Yule-tide is an archaic term for the festival of Christmas. Yule is just a shortened form of that.
A Yule-log is either a real log, or one made from cake and covered in chocolate. Guess which is my favourite! (Coincidentally, the next word in my dictionary is ‘yummy’) Traditionally a yule-log really big piece of wood, which would be set alight on Christmas Eve to signal the start of the festivities, and would hopefully keep burning until twelfth night, when the feasting and frivolity would stop.
I don’t have any kind of yule log this year, but I do have a nice big tree stump, which would probably burn well – although I think it looks better left in the garden. This is it at the end of last winter.
A couloir is a steep, narrow gully on a mountainside. It’s also a marvellous excuse to post yet another picture from my Scotland trips (only 7,346 to go and you’ll have seen them all)
It might not actually be of a couloir, but it’s definitely a mountainside. Or a hill. Anyway, there was steepness involved.
A gaff can be either one of two horrible sounding fishing implements, or a slang term for a person’s home. Gaff can also mean a plan or secret, most often used in the phrase ‘don’t blow the gaff‘ which is similar to not letting the cat out of the bag. (English is fun, isn’t it?)
Don’t make the gaffe of adding an e – that’s a different word.
Threave castle was once the gaff of Archibald the grim. (Upsetting him was way more than a gaffe)
I wonder if he used a gaff to catch fish in his moat?
Quadrifid means to have four divisions or lobes. This akebia quinata has three parts to the flowers and five to the leaves – so that averages out right.
This book is ‘Display of Heraldry’ which was published in 1660.
Back then it was only the very rich who could afford books (the kind of people who had heraldry to display). It wasn’t uncommon for workers, even skilled ones to be illiterate. You can imagine this had to potential to cause problems when some of those skilled workers had the job of binding individual pages into a book.
To ensure the pages were stitched together in the right order a catchword was used. The last word at the end of a page would be repeated at the start of the next. This meant that even those who couldn’t read the text could match up these two words and avoid expensive errors.
A while ago I wanted a one word alternative to ‘only child’ and discovered monogene. The word isn’t in my dictionary and doesn’t seem to have one clear definition, but being the only begotten child is one alternative. It can also mean unique, special and one of a kind.
Much as I love my brother now, there were times whilst growing up when I’d have preferred to be a monogene. (I can’t give examples as he’s got as much on me as I have on him!)
Monogenesis is in my dictionary. It refers to the theory that all living things developed from a single cell. Apparently it was a bacteria like thingamy*. Monogeny is an alternative term as is monogenetics.
*sorry for the technical jargon!
An alpinist is a climber of high mountains (generally, but not necessarily the Alps). I’m not an alpinist.
I don’t know if there’s a word for climbers of not very high mountains, only when it’s sunny, the path doesn’t look too treacherous and regular stops are permitted, but if there is, I’m one of them.
Specious means either misleadingly attractive or superficially plausible, but actually wrong.
Custard made with salt instead of sugar would add speciosity to your trifle. An example of speciousness is the specious claim that as chocolate is dervived from plants, a family sized bar of Aero counts as one of your five a day. That’s only true if you choose the orange flavoured one (she adds speciously*)
*mint’s a plant, so green centred Aeros are healthy too.
A monticule is a small hill. Sounds rather friendly, doesn’t it? The sort of place you’d walk up to enjoy a picnic involving ginger beer and home made cake. A monticule can also be a mini mound caused by a volcano.
Here’s the view from a hill (quite a big one) I climbed up one summer. Recognise it?
Clue … instead of climbing up, you could just swan about down the bottom.