folderol [fol-duh-rol]

noun:
1 a useless ornament or accessory; a trifle
2 mere nonsense; foolish talk or ideas

Examples:

Americans left all that royal folderol about titles behind them in 1776. Yet here we are, nearly 250 years later, agog about princes and dukes, queens and consorts, and the rest of the mystifying rules about royal style ( Read more... )

Jouska - noun.

I hemmed and hawed over creating an entry for this word. I first found it on a list of words circulating around Facebook. As we all know, many non-English languages have words for the intangible, like weltschmerz. Author John Koenig made up his own dictionary of words for intangible feelings. It's The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows ( Read more... )

Etaoin shrdlu

Something of a cousin to lorem ipsum, etaoin_shrdlu is a nonsense phrase appearing in old newspapers and printed material. Generated by the two left-most columns of keys on a linotype machine keyboard.

Here's a 9 minute video explaining etaoin_shrdlu and the printing process in detail and a Wikipedia page that can summarize it ( Read more... )

adjective:
(Scot and North England) disgusting, horrid; loathsome

Examples:

In a sometimes ugsome, plague-filled world of violence and adventure that evokes the swashbuckling nature of The Count of Monte Cristo, you're presented with so many super heroic abilities, you feel like an omniscient kid in a candy store. (Harold Goldberg, 2012 In ( Read more... )

illeism (IL-e-izm) - n., the practice of referring to oneself in the third person ( Read more... )

yo·gi·bo·gey·box [ˌyȯ-gī-ˌˈbu-gē ˈbäks]:
origin: (1918) James Joyce; yogi= spiritual master bogey= imaginary monster + box= container

nounA bag of tricks, the devices used by a spiritualist ( Read more... )