I Now Pronounce You: 10 Unusual Wedding Words

I love discovering things -- may it be places, persons, things, and most of all words. I enjoy vocabulary building. 

Today, I discovered new words, 10 unusual wedding words, from Dictionary.com.

1. Bridaller - If the expression "wedding guest" feels too impersonal or generic for your tastes, perhaps you'd like to call your beloved revelers bridallers. The singular of this rare word means "a guest at a wedding." Its root word, bridal, originally meant "a wedding" or "a wedding feast." The origin of the word bride is uncertain, although it might be linked to the Proto-Indo-European root bru- meaning "to cook, brew, make broth."
2. Epithalamion - If witnessing a heartfelt exchange of wedding vows moves you to song, take note: the resulting ditty might be referred to as an epithalamion, defined as "a song or poem in honor of a bride and bridegroom." It is very close in meaning to the word prothalamion; both words are built on the Greek word for “bedroom” or “bridal chamber,” thalamus. The difference lies in their prefixes: epi- means "upon," and pro- means "before." Prothalamion, which refers to a song or poem written in celebration of a forthcoming wedding, was coined by the English poet Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene.
3. Foy - To walk down the aisle is to embark on a lifelong journey, which is perhaps why the Scottish dialectical term foy, which broadly means "a farewell gift, feast, or drink," is sometimes used in Scotland to refer to what people in the US might call a bachelorette party: a party given in honor of a woman on the eve of her marriage. Etymologists link it to the French term voie meaning "way” or “ journey."
4. Paranymph - Wedding terminology is peppered with words that have been historically bound to gender, such as bride and groom. But one lesser-known wedding word with unisex applicability is paranymph, meaning "a groomsman or a bridesmaid." It translates literally from the Greek paránymphos as "the person beside the bride." The oldest sense of the word nymph referred to a class of lesser deities of mythology, though by the late 1500s, the term could refer, less supernaturally, to a maiden.

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Loose v Lose

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My heart breaks as soon as I saw the word "loose" in this image. It ruins a beautiful message. 

Loose and Lose are two words that are often misused. 

According to Dictionary.com:

loose[loos] adjective, loos·er, loos·est, adverb, verb, loosed, loos·ing.
adjective
1. free or released from fastening or attachment: a loose end.
2. free from anything that binds or restrains; unfettered: loose cats prowling around in alleyways at night.
3. uncombined, as a chemical element.
4. not bound together: to wear one's hair loose.
5. not put up in a package or other container: loose mushrooms. 

lose[looz] verb, lost, los·ing.
verb (used with object)
1. to come to be without (something in one's possession or care), through accident, theft, etc., so that there is little or no prospect of recovery: I'm sure I've merely misplaced my hat, not lost it.
2. to fail inadvertently to retain (something) in such a way that it cannot be immediately recovered: I just lost a dime under this sofa.
3. to suffer the deprivation of: to lose one's job; to lose one's life.
4. to be bereaved of by death: to lose a sister.
5. to fail to keep, preserve, or maintain: to lose one's balance; to lose one's figure. 

The word there should be LOSE. 

The message should read:

Stop worrying about 

what you have to

lose and start

focusing on what you

have to gain.

Effective Words to Use In Meetings

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We all know that meetings can be toxic, especially if you don't use Parliamentary procedure. You hold a meeting and nothing gets done or decided upon. Such a waste of time!

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) online edition came out with an article, titled To Master Your Next Meeting, Just Say ‘Yeah.’ Other effective words mentioned in the article are ‘give,’ ‘start,’ and ‘discuss.’ Read more...

These words are more of listening to what the other person has to say. Interesting! 

Word of the Day: Isolato

From Dictionary.com:

isolato \ahy-suh-LEY-toh\ , noun:  
a person who is spiritually isolated from or out of sympathy with his or her times or society.
Also, in the years since the events you are investigating, my life has been that of an isolato, a shepherd on a mountaintop, situated as far from so-called civilization as possible, and it has made me unnaturally brusque and awkward.
-- Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter, 1998
There is, of course, Paul's unremitting aloneness: he is in every sense an isolato, and if this state is elicited by his impertinence and his refusal to conform, it is brought about as well by the inability of all those around him to perceive either his uniqueness or his pain.
-- Philip Stevick, The American Short Story, 1984
The most predictable Justices now on the Court, Antonin Scalia and Thomas, seem brooding isolatoes, openly contemptuous of the doctrinal laxness of their brethren.
-- Louis Menand, "Decisions, Decisions," The New Yorker, July 11, 2005
Isolato was popularized by Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick. The word comes through Italian from the Latin word insulātus meaning "made into an island."

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Check out Emotionary

I stumbled upon this blog, Emotionary through David Kanigan. It says:

The Emotionary is a blog established for the creation of “words that don’t exist for feelings that do.”  The Emotolution began on May 15, 2013.  The Emotionary can be found on Tumblr and on Twitter.

So do you have an emotion that you don't have a word for? Check out Emotionary! :D

Trivia on the Word, "Serendipity"

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28 January 

It was on this day in 1754 that the word "serendipity" was first coined. It's defined by Merriam-Webster as "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for." It was recently listed by a U.K. translation company as one of the English language's 10 most difficult words to translate. Other words to make their list include plenipotentiary, gobbledegook, poppycock, whimsy, spam, and kitsch.

"Serendipity" was first used by parliament member and writer Horace Walpole in a letter that he wrote to an English friend who was spending time in Italy. In the letter to his friend written on this day in 1754, Walpole wrote that he came up with the word after a fairy tale he once read, called "The Three Princes of Serendip," explaining, "as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of." The three princes of Serendip hail from modern-day Sri Lanka. "Serendip" is the Persian word for the island nation off the southern tip of India, Sri Lanka.

The invention of many wonderful things have been attributed to "serendipity," including Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Charles Goodyear's vulcanization of rubber, inkjet printers, Silly Putty, the Slinky, and chocolate chip cookies.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin after he left for vacation without disinfecting some of his petri dishes filled with bacteria cultures; when he got back to his lab, he found that the penicillium mold had killed the bacteria.

Viagra had been developed to treat hypertension and angina pectoris; it didn't do such a good job at these things, researchers found during the first phase of clinical trials, but it was good for something else.

The principles of radioactivity, X-rays, and infrared radiation were all found when researchers were looking for something else.

Julius Comroe said, "Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter."

Wiktionary lists serendipity's antonyms as "Murphy's law" and "perfect storm."

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English Vocabulary: Forenoon

In my Gmail, Word for the Day, I got this new word:

forenoon (noun) The period of time between sunrise and noon.
Synonyms: morn, morning
Usage: The heat of the sun awoke him early in the forenoon.

More about forenoon.

I learned a new word today. :)