Friday in the wild - May 6, 2005

Here's some of the fun and interesting stuff I've seen around the blogosphere this week.

The Thinklings celebrate the second anniversary of the infamous Gatorade post, which has at the time of writing garnered 730 comments and is still going strong. (What colour is that stuff, anyway?)

Rebecca encourages other readers to add to her list of the words we love. Any list that has "curmudgeon" in it can't be all bad. It's not necessarily a Good Thing to have an expanded vocabulary that leaves your friends scratching their heads on occasion, but on the other hand it does give you a whole lot of options to choose from. Here are my top 5. It shouldn't come as any surprise that my favourite words are largely related to the (mis)use of language and rhetoric:

• Codswallop. Rebecca had this one down too, but I had it first. It's a wonderfully descriptive word for all sorts of abject nonsense. (And when you don't have time to say "codswallop," crap will suffice.)
• Ostensibly. I overuse this word, but there isn't a better one for "by all appearances."
• Ipse dixit. This is my favourite Latinism. When someone presents a load of codswallop without evidence, they expect you to accept it on their ipse dixit.
• Bloviated. If you think this word sounds an awful lot like "bloated," you're half right. When someone compensates for a lack of something meaningful to say with torrents of verbiage, he is bloviating.
• Umlaut. This is an in-joke. Maybe one or two of my friends who have known me long enough to get it happen to be reading this blog.

Over at Semper Reformanda, Julianne has started a weekly habit of posting a difficult word of significance to Christian thought to see if her readers can guess what it means. This week she's going easy on us: the word is hallel. I know what it means; do you? Answer on Saturday.

No interesting searches this week, although it looks like all those papers on Life of Pi aren't due yet.

Till next time.