Weird Word Wednesday!

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt, history, humor, inaugural address, inauguration, politics, President Barack Obama, speeches, squiddle, weird word, William Henry Harrison, Winston Churchill

Welcome to Weird Word Wednesday! Today’s weird word is squiddle, which means “to waste time with idle talk.”

Bear with me here – just a few days ago, President Barack Obama took the oath of office, officially starting his second term as president of the United States. The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution states that “the terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January.”

yahoo.com

I never gave it much thought, but when January 20th falls on a Sunday, as it did this year, the president takes the oath in private, and public festivities are held the following day.

President Obama took his oath of office on Sunday, January 20th, in a brief, two-minute ceremony in the White House Blue Room. No time for squiddling at all!

Generally speaking, two-term presidents’ inaugural addresses are briefer the second time. Contrast that with William Henry Harrison’s 1841 address, which lasted one hour and 45 minutes! He died a short time later of pneumonia, so we’ll never know how long a potential second address of his would have been. Harrison might well reign as our nation’s leading squiddler.

It’s fun (not to mention easy) to pick on politicians for being squiddlers. Many of their speeches, though, contain phrases that stir us to action (think of those given by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during World War II) but some…well, they just send us snoozing. We can be glad we weren’t in the audience in 1960 as Cuban leader Fidel Castro gave a four-hour whopper speech.

The work world is full of squiddlers, people who ramble on and on simply for the sake of hearing themselves talk. I hope you don’t know too many, but if you do, take heart that at least they’re not Lluis Colet. The French government worker rambled on and on for a record five days and four nights. 

Now that was a true Squiddlefest!

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Weird Word Wednesday!

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culture, Duke of Marlborough, editing, grammar, history, humor, inspissate, proper grammar, society, strange word, Vanderbilt, weird word, Winston Churchill, writing

Welcome to 2013! What better way to start the year than with a weird word.

Today’s word is inspissate, pronounced “in-SPIS-ate,” and it means “to thicken, as by evaporation; to make or become dense.”

First thing that popped in my mind was cooking, but it turns out people are affected by inspissation, too.

thefarside.com

Cletus’s refusal to read signs indicated an inspissated mind, no matter how much he protested to the contrary.

Bear with me as we gather a little background – I’m still reading “Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt” by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, and have reached the part where Consuelo marries the Englishman Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, better known as the 9th Duke of Marlborough.

wikipedia.com

After a very brief courtship (six weeks or so) Alva, Consuelo’s overbearing mother, hustled her daughter down the aisle, marrying Consuelo off to the 9th Duke on November 6, 1895. Consuelo was the only daughter of William K. and Alva Vanderbilt, and was one of several American heiresses who married into European aristocracy, Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, among them.

The 9th Duke and Winston Churchill were first cousins; Winston was wordy and full of ideas, while the Duke is a little harder to pin down. He’s described in the book as having “considerable ill humour,” while also being “sensitive and hospitable.”

One historian called the 9th Duke “an inspissated little man with a truly appalling attitude toward the ‘lower orders.'”

In other words, “a dense little man who disses commoners”? Ouch!

It seems that one day, Winston and the 9th Duke were discussing England’s rising unemployment figures, and “the Duke said disagreeably that he hoped they would reach two million,” according to Mackenzie Stuart’s book.

Well, that’s a cringeworthy comment, isn’t it?

welcome2britain.com

Consuelo came with a hefty dowry of $2.5 million, much of it going toward the upkeep of Blenheim, the 9th Duke’s palace; you think that would cheer up the Duke just a bit, but it seems not.

But how can we incorporate inspissated into our daily lives? Let’s see!

Norman’s attempts at becoming the next Iron Chef failed miserably when his sauce inspissated to a thick glop.

Hopefully both your cooking and mental efforts meet with much more success than either Norman’s or the 9th Duke’s.  Bon appetit!