OneGuyFromBarlick

I am not going to dig a hole in the front garden!

A good day with words today.

i've manged, with little effort, to get 'extant' and 'tergiversation' into the same post.

Also a very subtle pun on the word 'stroke' So subtle it's almost unnoticeable, and needs pointing out.

Tripps wrote: ↑17 Jun 2025, 12:44 i've manged, with little effort, to get 'extant' and 'tergiversation' into the same post.

The Cambridge Online dictionary defines tergiversation as: the act of making statements that are different from each other, so that they cannot both be true. That sounds like Trump to me - the world's biggest `tergiversator'. He'd be proud to hear that!

We've mentioned it several times on this board. Usually we use it in the sense of

1. to change sides or loyalties; apostatize

Perhaps the mosty famous tergiversator was the MP for Oldham in 1901 Winston Churchill who was both a Liberal and a Conservative during his career.

And it was a quote from him that alerted me to the fact that the word tergiversation existed.
I went looking for the quote but when I asked Google AI about it it said he never used the word. Next to that response was a quotation from his book 'My Early Life' in which he uses the word but in connection with mathematics. Once again we find an instance where AI is wrong.

Stanley wrote: ↑18 Jun 2025, 01:54 And it was a quote from him that alerted me to the fact that the word tergiversation existed.

I read a quote from Churchill putting down Islam. It all seemed a bit too good to be true, and convenient for the person posting. Since I believe many of the quotes ascribed to him (and Einstein) are apochryphal I bought the book from which it is said to have originated. It is over 300 pages and has no index!

The River War

I haven't found the quote, but it may be in there. It's not an easy read, and I would not recommend it. How on earth did he write such a quantity of text without a word processor?

The (half hearted) quest continues.

I did a similar thing at one time David. I forget what I was looking for but I never found it. Here's the proof Churchill used the word....
“I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor’s Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go! The practical point is that if this aged, weary-souled Civil Service Commissioner had not asked this particular question about these Cosines or Tangents in their squared or even cubed condition, which I happened to have learned scarcely a week before, not one of the subsequent chapters of this book would ever have been written. I might have gone into the Church and preached orthodox sermons in a spirit of audacious contradiction to the age. I might have gone into the City and made a fortune.”
—WSC, My Early Life, 1930
As to his output. As I remember it the key elements were a stand-up desk and an iron routine of a set number of hours per day spent writing.

I think this is the first time (yesterday) that I ever heard this
-
"They couldn't organise a bun fight in a bakery"

I like it more than the usual "booze up in a brewery".

I think I prefer piss up over both of them! (But then I am a nasty old bugger!)

The word 'ragamuffin' came to mind so I looked up the etymology and found this: Middle English: probably based on rag1, with a fanciful suffix.
Not very informative.... However....
My research led me to THIS which was something I had no knowledge of beyond the fact that it is part of the history of Giuseppe Garibaldi. (Well worth looking up, a fascinating man!)

'Lutter' is a word I use frequently. I looked it up in my usual sources but could not find any mention of it in the sense which I know it. I picked it up in my days in Warwickshire and suspect it was local dialect. Down there it referred to anything falling out of a cart, like a load of turnips tumbling over each other. They were said to be luttering.
Has anyone else ever come across it?

I like the word. New to me. This is all I could find.
.

Yes I found all those Cathy but no mention of it as a dialect verb meaning to bounce down a slope.....

I did think ‘wrestling’ as in tumbling over each other, but no it doesn’t really come together.

I think it's just a case of an obscure dialect word passing under the radar of the lexicographers Cathy.

I used the word Scuppered today, it happened out of the blue, not a word I normally use.
Scuppered - British
To defeat or put an end to: to do in.
To cause something such as a plan or an opportunity to fail.
To sink your own ship on purpose.

"To sink your own ship on purpose."
That one is wrong Cathy, they have confused scuppered and scuttled.

'Scuttle' is interesting, particularly its use as a noun as in coal scuttle. So I went for a furtle.....
The word "scuttle" has two distinct etymological origins. One meaning "to run hastily" comes from the Old English scyttan, related to words meaning "to shut" or "to close." The other meaning, "a shallow container or a hole with a lid," derives from the Latin scutella, meaning "tray" or "bowl."
Here's a breakdown:
1. "To run hastily":
This sense of "scuttle" is related to the verb "scud," meaning to run or move quickly, and possibly influenced by the word "shuttle".
It implies a quick, hurried movement, often associated with small animals or people.

2. "A shallow container" or "hole with a lid":
This meaning originates from the Old English scutell, which came from the Latin scutella (a diminutive of scutra, meaning "flat tray").
Examples of this meaning include a coal scuttle (a container for carrying coal) and a scuttle in a ship (a small opening with a lid) like a prthole.
There is also scuttle as in sink a ship, this goes back to the small hole I suppose.
So it's a complicated word.....

One of my mother's sayings was "Teacher's rest, mother's pest." Was this a Dukinfield/Hyde saying or more widely used?