BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

cold turkey
"without preparation," 1910; narrower sense of "withdrawal from an addictive substance" (originally heroin) first recorded 1921. Cold turkey is a food that requires little preparation, so "to quit like cold turkey" is to do so suddenly and without preparation. 
Online Etymological Dictionary
**
Hanukkah Means “Dedication”
The word “Hanukkah” is a transliteration of the Hebrew word for “dedication.” This is a reference to the historical moment at the heart of the holiday, the rededication of the Second Temple of Jerusalem during the Maccabean Revolt of the second century BCE. At the time, the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire was forcibly oppressing the Jewish population by trying to eradicate their religious practices; as part of this effort, they defiled the temple and placed an idol on its altar. In 164 BCE, the Maccabees (a group of Jewish warriors) recaptured Jerusalem, cleansed the temple, and rededicated it on the 25th day of Kislev, a month in the Hebrew calendar (and the date used today to mark the beginning of Hanukkah). The eight candles on a hanukkiyah commemorate the moment when Jews relit the temple’s ner tamid (Hebrew for “eternal light”), a lamp meant to burn perpetually in a synagogue. Although they had only one day’s worth of oil, the flame miraculously burned for eight days — enough time to get more purified oil to feed the flame."

INTERESTING FACTS website (December 28, 2024)
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXKqrVfwjzJwxBJPmLzQnBKTld
**

WEIRD WORDS DICTIONARY

acadamic-- a college course involving the study of the Grand Coolie Dam
babblegum-- a candy that causes you to become garralous
chumdrum -- Experiencing a humdrum time with a pal
dabblecross-- swiftly changing from one hobby or from quickly perusing  numerous academic  subjects 
GALAxy--  Elaborate party thrown in a corner of our Milk Way
imomiseration--The act of making your mother miserable
majamas-- sleep wear for women
Messimess -- cleaning up a stadium after a soccer game
psittacinema -- any movie that imitates a previous film

robbernecking -- Looking around to see what things
                                are worth stealing

slaverfest -- making peanut butter sandwiches for a large group of children


spurrealism--- a dada cowboy movie where Roy Rogers lassos a burning
                            giraffe

tennisebrous-- Playing tennis in semi-darkness or dark
                              shadows




 MAKING A BEE LINE
In June 1828, the American Quarterly Review published an article that contained an early use of the term “bee-line,” referring to how a bee released from captivity appeared to set a direct course to return to its hive. This was true even if the bee appeared to move in a crooked pattern rather than a straight line, as it was still heading quickly back to its hive. Further scientific studies of the insects showed that bees also followed direct patterns in other situations, such as when they left and returned to the hive as part of their daily quest to harvest nectar.
Almost overnight, people began to use “bee-line” in an idiomatic sense. The term appeared in an October 1829 edition of the New-York Spectator: “I drew a bee line to the next tavern.” The exact phrase “make a bee-line” appeared in print by 1835, as seen in an example in a book called Clinton Bradshaw: “Now there’s the door — make a bee-line out, if you please, gentlemen.” These examples show a rapid shift from “beeline” as a scientific descriptor to the idiomatic usage. 
https://wordsmarts.com/beeline/?lctg=836f5d3d-5790-467f-9432-066ef87ba5ce
**
**

ON GOOGLING -- HAVE YOU GOOGLED YOURSELF?
What is the greatest legacy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Buffy fans might have a lot of answers for you, but the widespread answer is popularizing the use of “google” as a verb. In the 2002 episode “Selfless,” computer geek and sidekick Willow asks Buffy, “Have you googled her yet?” — referring to the idea of using the internet to search for data about someone else. At the time, Google was still relatively new, and it wasn’t yet the de facto search engine for everyone. Founder Larry Page had used “google” as an intransitive verb as early as 1998, but Buffy ushered in a new transitive use about googling something specific, compared to how Page used googling as a general concept. 
This brief line in an episode of Buffy contributed to “google” moving from company name to general term. The verb “google” was named the most useful word of 2002 by the American Dialect Society, and it entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.
https://wordsmarts.com/beeline/?lctg=836f5d3d-5790-467f-9432-066ef87ba5ce
WORD SMARTS (February 7, 2025)
**

Ballyhack
MEANING:
noun: Hell.
ETYMOLOGY:
Of uncertain origin. Perhaps after the Irish village Ballyhack, where a castle was the holding place for confederates caught in a rebellion before they were expelled. Earliest documented use: 1843.
Wordsmith 
**
WORDSMITH -- Anu Garg

"It's tempting to tell such people to get a life, and it's hard to believe a guy can get e-mail like this for basically learning English. But India-born Garg, 35, who now lives near Seattle, has done a lot more. For the past nine years, while trying to improve his own command of the language, Garg has e-mailed a word a day (wordsmith.org/awad), plus its definition, pronunciation and roots, to an increasingly large group of recipients. His free e-mail list, which started with about 200 subscribers, has ballooned to more than 500,000."

USA TODAY (January2, 2003
**

Anu Garg, the wonderful Wordsmith man, quoted
the following in his website for August 12, 2024:

The poet Samuel Butler (1612-1680) once wrote:

For he cou’d coin, and counterfeit
New words, with little or no wit;
Words so debas’d and hard, no stone
Was hard enough to touch them on;*
And when with hasty noise he spoke ‘em,
The ignorant for current took ‘em.

**
THE DANCE OF LANGUAGE

In a good poem, 
Every word dances.
Listen up "do-si-do":
We are not doing 
A square dance at this time...

Louis Phillips