Word of the Day
textlationship
noun
Slang.
a relationship or association between people who text each other frequently, but rarely if ever interact with each other in person: I thought he was interested in me, but we never even went out—it was just a textlationship.
More about textlationship
In English, the consonant cluster –xtl– in textlationship is awkward and rare. Textlationship is a neologism composed of text (message) and (re)lationship. The electronic medium is new, but a relationship, especially a romantic one, carried on at a distance through letters, has a long history. The word textlationship entered English in the early 21st century.
how is textlationship used?
Harry’s cottoning onto a textlationship might add meaning to one of his other recent stunts—dashing across the finish line of a Brazilian charity run … wearing a paper mask of his brother’s face. Let the soap opera begin!
Friendships can dwindle to textlationships, but it’s especially frustrating when a former or potential lover keeps you at arm’s length.
snoot
verb (used with object)
to behave disdainfully toward; condescend to: New arrivals in the town were snooted by older residents.
More about snoot
The English noun snoot is a Scottish variant of snout “the nose, muzzle.” Snout and snoot are akin to Middle Low German and Middle Dutch snute, German Schnauze, and more remotely to Old English gesnot “nasal mucus” (English snot), Middle Low German and Middle Dutch snotte, and German schneuzen “to blow one’s nose.” The verb snoot “to behave disdainfully toward; condescend to,” a derivative of the noun snoot, is an Americanism dating only to the late 1920s. The noun snoot entered English in the early 1860s.
how is snoot used?
“I happen to be one of those people who knows what they’re talking about,” he snoots. The ghastly oil paintings in Rae Smith’s design suggest otherwise.
His retention of old tropes is no more inherently sentimental than the myth of progress that led some modernists to snoot him.
More about hyperbolic
The adjective hyerbolic has two distinct senses, both of them from the same Greek word hyperbolḗ “superiority, excess (in geometry), extravagance (in rhetoric),” literally “a throwing beyond.” In rhetoric hyperbolḗ means “an overstrained word or expression, a strong statement,” as in “I could eat a horse!” The geometric sense of hyperbolḗ (via New Latin hyperbola) is the curve formed by the intersection of a plane with a right circular cone when the plane makes a greater angle (that is, the plane makes a hyperbolḗ) with the base than does the generator of the cone. Hyperbolic in the rhetorical sense entered English about 1646; the geometry sense entered English about 1676.
how is hyperbolic used?
… his hyperbolic rhetoric and his lack of attention to the concrete realities of reform will make it harder for even his sensible ideas to work.
“Ignore the sound of people retching and sobbing and remember to keep your pace constant and very slow,” is the slightly hyperbolic description from Henry Stedman’s guide to climbing the mountain.