New English Words Quiz - Spring 2017: Answers
Created | Updated Apr 16, 2017
New English Words Quiz - Spring 2017: Answers
If you happened upon this page by accident, it won’t make a lot of sense. Take the quiz first!
If you arrived here from the quiz, then here are the answers, with some superfluous commentary.
- d) marijuana
A 420 or 4/20 is American slang for marijuana, coined by a group of high-school students in the 1974 after the time in the afternoon they arranged to meet up.
- b) Mexican kebab
If you’re into American street food, you may recognise al pastor as marinated pork roasted on a vertical spit, which is sliced and served in tacos. It literally means ‘shepherd-style’, but I’m struggling to imagine vertical spits featuring large in the Mexican rural idyll.
- b) Japanese dance
The OED describes bugaku as ‘A classical dance style of Japan, characterized by highly stylized, restrained movements made by performers wearing elaborate costumes and sometimes using masks and hand-held props’. A troupe performed this entertainment at the 2012 Edinburgh festival.
- c) Dorset scarecrow
William Barnes’ 1886 A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect, describes buggerlugs or rather its original spelling ‘bug-a-lug’ as ’an effigy, a bugbear. A scarecrow or gally-bagger. It means a bug or bugbear on a pole; a-lug meaning on a lug or pole’.
As to what a gally-bagger is, that’s anyone’s guess.
- d) tropical tree
It may sound like a room in a Roman villa for washing dogs, but a canarium is a tree native to Africa, southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. It exudes a pungent resin and bears almond-like nuts.
- a) baseball pitch
Truett ‘Rip’ Sewell, pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was noted for his eephus, a slow pitch having a high arcing trajectory. As the Zanesville Signal once wrote, ’When Rip Sewell throws an ephus (sic) the ball goes up 20 feet in the air as it lazily approaches the batter’.
- d) unconventional trait
In the sleeve notes to his album Axis: Bold as Love Jimi Hendrix notes ’I’m gonna wave my freak flag high’. The phrase has since been variously used to describe those who proudly display their unconventionality.
- b) edge of the solar system
On 25 August, 2012, the Voyager space probe crossed the heliopause and headed out into the void of interstellar space, the first man-made object to do so. Technically, it’s the boundary beyond which the solar wind is undetectable.
- a) Australian fish
Abbreviated from kingfish, the kingie is any of a number of game fish against which Australian anglers pit their wits. It was first recorded in 1900 in the Sydney Sportsman, which offered the advice: ’Tie a piece of white calico to the hook of a schnapper line, and the kingie will snap at sight of it’.
- c) shimmering (like a rainbow)
Labradorescent, a term coined by geologist Ove Balthasar Bøggild, simply means iridescent in the manner of labradorite, a pretty type of feldspar rock first discovered in Labrador, Canada, but also occurring in other locations worldwide, including Norway.
As Wikipedia will tell you, ‘The cause of this optical phenomenon is phase exsolution lamellar structure, occurring in the Bøggild miscibility gap’. Here, we’ll just say it’s a popular choice for decorative items such as paperweights and necklaces.
- a) fish
A labrid is a generic name for a fish from the family Labridae. These include a number of colourful reef fishes, including the wrasses. The group was named not after Labrador, but after the Latin word for ‘lip’.
- a) elastic
First recorded in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill in 1906, laccy is colloquialism for ‘elastic’. It’s most commonly used today in ‘lacky band’, an item of stationery which has brought endless amusement to generations of bored schoolchildren.
For the record, the colloquialism for electricity is ‘leccy’, and that for tobacco is ‘baccy’.
- b) kale
Also known as ‘black cabbage’ or ’cavalo nero’, lacinato is a dark green variety of kale used in Tuscan cuisine.
- c) lump of phlegm
Another quaint American saying, to hawk up a loogie means to cough up phlegm and propel it in someone’s direction. As the Galveston Daily News reported in 1995: ’There were … a number of fans who resented the fact he hawked a loogie toward the stands’.
The three distractors were definitions of the words ‘fugie’, ‘noogie’ and ‘boogie’.
- c) flawless character
The OED defines Mary Sue as ‘Originally in fan fiction: a type of idealized female character, typically a young woman, unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses’. The term derived from the protagonist of the early Star Trek fan-fiction story A Trekkie’s Tale by Paula Smith: With lines like ’Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky,’ thought Mary Sue as she stepped on the bridge of the Enterprise. ‘Here I am, the youngest lieutenant in the fleet—only fifteen and a half years old.’ you can understand why the character and the genre have been widely reviled.
- d) Zetlandic whisky
Deriving from the Scots word ‘skreigh’, screecham is slang for whisky in the Shetland Isles. As someone wrote in New Shetlander in 1963, ’Dey wir aal menner o screechim, fae Johnnie Walker ta kinds we gret lang foreign names.’
- b) hitch a skateboard ride from a moving vehicle
In his 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow writes, ’I remember you … skitching rides on the ice wagons’. It’s the first recorded use of the word skitch, and the originally meaning was ‘ski-hitch’. Modern skitching involves skateboards and bikes, and is a menace to urban traffic.
- c) hymn
A sticheron is a hymn sung during the morning and evening services in the Orthodox Church, typically in alternation with verses from the psalms.
- b) fat
In RO Heslop’s Northumberland Words (1894) he lists: ’Throdden’, to make grow, to thrive. Hence ‘throdden’ and ‘throddy’, plump, fat, well thriven.
- d) plum tree
The ume is a variety of Japanese plum tree. Its dried and pickled fruit, umeboshi are eaten as a light snack, served with rice. The fruit also yields a red dye for silk.
