Gyre

   A gyre is a circular or spiral motion or form; especially : a giant circular oceanic surface feature made up of currents and winds that spiral around a central point and push water and marine debris to its centre.

The word is also used metaphorically as in the following sentence ffom 'The Professor and the Madman' by Simon Winchester  -  "A hundred years ago it was positively vile.  It was still then low,marshy, and undrained, a swampy gyre of pathways where one sad little stream called the Neckinger seeped into the Thames."

Ploddledygook

A word coined in May 2013 by Steve Jenner of the Plain English Campaign.  The word is used to describe a series of offences against the English language by the police force.  


Ploddledygook is based on the word gobbledygook  (language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms) combined with the plod.   

P.C.Plod is a British slang term used to refer to a police officer, particularly one slow-witted or dull.  A more recent variant is the plod, meaning the police force in general.  The term originates from the character Mr. Plod, a police officer in the Noddy stories written by Enid Blyton.

Advice e-mailed by senior officers included “Articulate your aim as SMART and understood the impact you intended.”  One officer replied “Could you translate this pretentious male bovine dropping for me please?”

Jarble

While I was washing the dishes yesterday I dropped one of the dishes into the washing up water; it didn’t break but I jarbled myself.  At least, at one time I might have claimed I had done so.  Sadly the word is archaic and no longer in use.   

It meant to splatter with something wet or muddy; to besmirch.

Sweating like a Pig

The term "Sweating like a Pig" denotes perspiring profusely. 

I can't recall the source of this and therefore my apologies to the author but this was what I recently found out about the saying.  

"This sounds illogical, as pigs have ineffective sweat glands, but the term is allegedly derived from the iron smelting process. After pouring into runners in sand, it is allowed to cool and is seen as resembling a sow and piglets, hence "pig iron". As the pigs cool, the surrounding air reaches its dew point, and beads of moisture form on the surface of the pigs. "Sweating like a pig" indicates that the pig has cooled enough to be moved in safety. "

   

Wingnut

 Someone, mentioning no names, Heather, described herself as a wingnut recently.  Now this is the only sort of wingnut I know –

  - a nut with a pair of wings to enable it to be turned without tools, used where frequent adjustments are needed or part removal can be made quickly at some later stage.

Obviously she wasn’t talking about that sort of wingnut and being an oldie I had to look it’s modern usage up in Urban Dictionary - "(noun) A person appearing to be moderately to severely crazy, disoriented, majobling, jumbled and more often than not, a total mess. A wingnut is a constant source of entertainment to those surrounding it and can easily be found in any type of setting or venue. Example: grocery stores, sporting events, cross-walks, public transportation, school, work…you may even have one in your house."

Majobling????!!!!  I thought wingnut was weird enough....

Grubble

   To grubble was a term meaning to eat in the dark.  Perhaps few of us grubble any more and that is why it has fallen out of favour.

Play hooky

 "There is no widely accepted explanation for the word 'hookey' or 'hooky.' An Americanism that arose in the late 19th century, when compulsory attendance laws became the rule in public schools, 'hooky' may be a compression of the older expression 'hook it,' 'to escape or make off,' formed by dropping the 't' in the phrase. Or it could be related to the old slang word 'hook,' meaning 'to steal,': kids stealing a day off from school. 'Hooky' has so often been associated with going fishing that it may even owe its life to 'getting off the hook' the way a fish can; anyway, school is often insufferable as a hook to schoolchildren and many kids squirming in their seats all day look like they are on a hook." From "Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997).

Pure

   The word pure has obvious and well-known meanings such as - unmixed with any other matter (pure gold); free from dust, dirt, or taint (pure springwater); spotless; being thus and no other (pure nonsense);
free from what vitiates, weakens, or pollutes (pure mathematics); or containing nothing that does not properly belong (pure blood).

But what would you be doing if you were carting pure about the streets of Liverpool in the nineteenth century? 
 

The answer is picking up dog turds for use in darkening skins in the tanning industry.  Pure was a Victorian term for dog turds.





I'm only including this as an excuse to tell you the following story -

A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum on the night of July 31st 2008, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday.

The art work, titled "Complex S(expletive..)", was the size of a house. The wind carried it 200 yards from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children's home, breaking a window.
I wonder if Museum Director, Juri Steiner, said "Oh S(expletive..)"' when he saw the damage?  (Sorry couldn't resist that!)

Xylography or woodcut

Woodcut — occasionally known as xylography — is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges. The areas to show 'white' are cut away with a knife or chisel, leaving the characters or image to show in 'black' at the original surface level. The block is cut along the grain of the wood (unlike wood engraving where the block is cut in the end-grain). The surface is covered with ink by rolling over the surface with an ink-covered roller (brayer), leaving ink upon the flat surface but not in the non-printing areas.

 

Multiple colors can be printed by keying the paper to a frame around the woodblocks (where a different block is used for each color). The art of carving the woodcut can be called "xylography", but this is rarely used in English for images alone, although "xylography" and "xylographic" are used in connection with blockbooks, which are small books containing text and images in the same block. Single-leaf woodcut is a term for a woodcut presented as a single image or print, as opposed to a book illustration.

Enneagon

In geometry, an enneagon, also spelled eneagon,  is a polygon or plane figure with nine angles and nine sides; a nonagon.

Because nonagon and eneagon (with one initial n) have the same number of letters this word is sometimes used to trip up those doing crosswords!