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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Effective Words to Use In Meetings

Image Source

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! 

Check out the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus!

I stumbled upon this interesting site: Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus. 

You key in a word and you will be given the synonyms of that word presented like a thinkmap like this:

 

Then the meanings of each synonym is given at the right column. You position your mouse on a word and the definition appears. And the choices expand as you click on every word. This way, you don't need to key in the word every time. It definitely makes your word search easier and more efficient.

Check it out! :)

Fee v. Cost

Fee - an amount of money paid for a particular piece of work or for a particular right or service.

Examples:
How much is the registration fee?
We have added the doctor's fee to the bill.

Cost - the amount of money needed to buy, do or make something; the amount of money needed for a business or to do a particular job

Examples:
I wish I could install this software to my new laptop at no extra cost (that is, for no additional money).
Management told the marketing people to cut advertising costs.

Source

'Austerity' is 2010 Word of the Year

Not many of us pay attention to our vocabulary. What words we often use, what words are newly coined, and what words are added to the dictionary.

Through the years, words get listed on the dictionary while others got removed mainly due to its reach, use, or lack of it. And little did we know that words are also good signs of the times. :D

Take for example the word 'Austerity.' It is declared as the 2010 Word of the Year. Here's why:

Austerity, the 14th century noun defined as "the quality or state of being austere" and "enforced or extreme economy," set off enough searches that Merriam-Webster named it as its Word of the Year for 2010, the dictionary's editors announced Monday.

John Morse, president and publisher of the Springfield, Mass.-based dictionary, said "austerity" saw more than 250,000 searches on the dictionary's free online tool and came with more coverage of the debt crisis.

"What we look for ... what are the words that have had spikes that strike us very much as an anomaly for their regular behavior," Morse said. "The word that really qualifies this year for that is 'austerity'."

Source

The Student Theme

by Ronald Wallace

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.

"The Student Theme" by Ronald Wallace, from The Uses of Adversity. © The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.

Via: The Writer's Almanac

Censorship and Word Choice

I chanced upon this post on Six Sentences and I thought of how censorship can sometimes hinder us from expressing how we feel and see things. :)

Click here to see what I mean.

Word Choice

"Thank you for letting us know of this matter.

We acknowledge your request to put your Smart Bro account on temporary hold due to recent typhoon and we would like to be of help.

We are sudden to hear about what happened to your area and we apologize for the inconvenience it may have caused you."

What is wrong with this letter?

Teem: to rain heavily

I know the phrasal verb "teem with sth," which means "to contain large numbers of animals or people."

The mall was teeming with shoppers last weekend.

Today, as torrential rains batter Metro Manila, I just typed the word "rain heavily" on Google, and I found out this new word, "teem." It means "to rain heavily."

Examples:

• It's been teeming down all day.
• It's teeming with rain.

Interesting! ;)