Thirty-seven Words to Tickle the Tongue
I like words. Maybe you’ve noticed. Of the three “37 Things” lists I’ve posted so far, two of them are lists of words. And I’m only just getting started.
I promise the next list won’t be about words. Probably. My longest non-word list is at 28 right now, while my longest (unpublished) word list is only at 15, so I predict the former will see the light of day first.
Anyway, THIS list is about words that are funny because of their pronunciation.* This is by no means a complete list. I started it sometime last week, wrote down the first ten or so right away, then forgot about it until yesterday, so really, these are just the first 37 words off the top of my head that make me giggle when I say them.
Ticklish, apparently: words with many syllables (onomatopoeia), words with long strings of consonants (conflagration, monstrous), words with unexpectedly positioned emphasis (epistemological), words pronounced differently than their more common relatives (circuitous, capacious).
Bonus points for you if you can work one of these words into conversation today.
- tintinnabulation
- jonquil
- onomatopoeia
- obfuscate
- mischievous
- befuddled
- conflagration
- epistemological
- tutelage
- ordnance
- behoove
- suave
- prescient
- confabulate
- monstrous
- corpulent
- litigious
- ingrate
- aghast
- willy-nilly
- albeit
- nuisance
- behemoth
- epiphenomenon
- lugubrious
- rapscallion
- tomfoolery
- fisticuffs
- circuitous
- pusillanimous
- mugwump
- peripatetic
- phlebotomize
- capacious
- polysyllabic
- inanity
- musculature
———
* Another list of words with funny meanings is in the compiling. Approximately half of the items I’ve collected so far involve poop.
** Should the ’s’ in thirty-seven be capitalized (in a title)? I have a feeling that it ought to be, and I’m too lazy to look it up, though in the time it’s taken me to type this, I probably could have found the answer myself and fixed it already.
Tags: 37 Things
October 26th, 2005 at 4:34 pm
tutu? highlight?
October 26th, 2005 at 6:53 pm
jonquils… oh my. why must i remember a particularly bad tableau w/ sound effects… how did pablo get away with doing all the music stuff and we had to be silly?
October 26th, 2005 at 11:26 pm
No no, the jonquils were “performance art.” The Glass Menagerie in the dark with light sabers and a soundtrack by The Verve.
The tableaus were with that story about the lady who was walking to town and saw the scarecrow or whatever, where we had to act out half a scene and then freeze in a position that “symbolized” something.
Man, I hated that class when I was in it, but now I miss it. I wish my college grades were based on whether I could justify a light saber-and-flower fight as “art.”
October 26th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
Oh, and tutu and highlight? Are SO last millennium.
October 28th, 2005 at 3:14 am
If you’re going for words with lots of consonants, I should probably add chthonic (from the underworld) and phthisis (any wasting disease, such as tuberculosis). And who could forget the creator of our favorite single-source-shortest-path graph algorithm, Dijkstra?