Obscure trivia about a pointless word.

Did you know that ‘orrery’ which has featured on my pointless words category was named after Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery (1676-1731), for whom one was made ?

 

Pointless words 4

Here are a few more:

acapnotic: person who doesn’t smoke

accouchement: the time or act of giving birth

 

A reluctant response

I wasn’t planning on doing this but Avnish has put pressure on me to respond to Abhishek’s attack on our attack on pointless words. Avnish has made some pretty good points . Abhishek  particularly has taken to heart the posts and JR too has expressed his less pissed off  views on the subject.
I couldn’t really make out how I had offended Computational Linguists because I don’t have the slightest idea what they are. The rest of this post is written asuming its some hi-funda tech joke that I, a ‘technophobic mech guy’ , have no hope of getting.

Getting back to words. I do not hate words nor do I feel that new words shouldn’t be made. I hate being made to learn these words , especially those I will probably never use in my life , for I feel that it is a waste of (my very limited) memory. I would much rather know that a dog ran onto the pitch and urinated on Jimmy Greaves’s shirt in the Quarter final of the 1962 World Cup than know what ‘amanuensis’ means.

So maybe its my hatred of mugging or maybe I’m just not that attached to language in general as you are. For me Language is just a mode of communication. As long as the chap I’m talking to gets what I’m saying , I’m happy. It doesn’t hurt me if people don’t compliment my vocab or command over the language.

Sheesh ! Chelsea is playing Everton and here I am talking about words! How lame is that?

 

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Avnish has now outdone himself and come up a word that is so pointless that it makes  ‘orrery’  look very very useful.

boustrophedon: written from right-to-left and left-to-right on alternate lines.

 

Pointless words 2

Avnish gave me this word in the comments for the earlier post.

I feel it is pointless enough to have it’s own entry.

orrery  : clockwork model of solar system

 

New Category – Pointless words

Now that I’m so confused with what I want to do in life , I’ve decided to give everything a shot. That means that I’ve recently started looking through material (my mom would have preferred the term ’studying’ here) for both CAT and the GRE. This means that I come across many words of whose existence I had no clue previously(because my vocabulary sucks ). During the course of going through this material I often come across words which really piss me off for their total pointless-ness.  When I see these words and realise I have to mug them up I feel ‘ Why the <insert four letter word starting with ‘f’ ending with ‘k’ with a ‘u’ and a ‘c’ thrown in here> would anyone coin this word??’

So I’ve decide to share my frustration with you and have created this new category entirely dedicated to pointless words.

Here is the first one in the list :

 sternutation : the act of sneezing

I challenge you . Use that in a everyday conversation.