Poncif

Poncif (plural poncifs) is a French word sometimes used in literary English.  It means stereotype, banality or derivative.

  

Gastrocnemius

Noun: the gastrocnemius muscle in the back part of the leg that forms the greater part of the calf, responsible for the plantar flexion of the foot; the largest muscle in the calf of the leg, the action of which extends the foot, raises the heel, and assists in bending the knee.

"Her legs are telling that she's a dancer: gastrocnemiuses look strong, perfect shape of shank, back is not slouching." 

 Origin: First recorded 1670–80;  < Neo-Latin  < Greek gastroknēm ( ía ) calf of the leg + Latin -ius  noun suffix

Related forms  - gastrocnemial, gastrocnemian - adjectives

Since it's a Latuin suffix I would think the plural should really be gastrocnemii.  But then does one refer to hippopotamuses or hippopotami??

Enervated

I was reasonably sure I knew what enervate meant .  I thought it was a synonym for energise and meant give somnething energy.  Wrong!

To enervate is to cause something to weaken or to cause someone to feel drained of energy.  As an adjective, enervated means lacking in energy or vitality.

Synonyms for enervated include torpid, listless, lethargic and drained.

Previse

    I came across a word that was new to me the other day - prevised. So I did what I usually do and looked it up.

 

To previse means to know in advance; foresee; notify in advance; or forewarn.

 

Prevised therefore means known in advance, imagined beforehnad, or forewarned. 

Prelapsarian

 

Prelapsarian is an adjective. Strictly speaking it means of or relating to the period before the fall of Adam and Eve; characteristic of the time before the Fall of Man.  It is, however, also used in a broader context to mean innocent and unspoiled; or simply ancient.

In a Ruth Rendell novel, for example, a young girl who drives an automatic car describes her mother's car with gears as prelapsarian.

It appears to be pronounced prlps-ARE-ian but don't quote me on that - I'm no good at working with the phoentic alphabet.

Tracklements

   Tracklements are savoury jellies, served with meat or savoury condiments (for example mustards, relishes or chutneys), especially ones served with meat.

 The word first appeared in the 1950s and is of unknown origion.

Pothooks

A pothook is an S-shaped hook for hanging pots and kettles over an open fire.  But in a meaning almost fallen out of use nowdays it came to mean a written character resembling a pothook and, later, simply a scrawled written  character or a fancy one with extra squiggles on it. 

I have my own theory as to why the word came to be related to writing. Pothooks would have been made by the local blacksmith - each of whom would have had his own design.  So much as one person's writing varied from another so did pothooks.

"The pothooks straggled a little wildly across the page, as if written too hurriedly, on a pad balanced on someone’s knee." (Mary Stewart - "Touch not the Cat" 1976)

Hanged or hung?

   Did you know that in British English inanimate or dead objects are hung but people are hanged. In other words the past tense of hang is 'hung' if referring to things like hanging game to enrich the flavour but 'hanged' if referring to capital punishment for people.

(I don't think I'll bother illustrating this post!)

Smithereens

I love the word smithereens . Smithereens means small fragments or tiny bits, and is usually found in the phrases  the alliterative phrase "smashed to smithereens."   I thinbk it is so evocative of small pieces - a fine example of onomatopoeia.

A typical use of the word can be found in a Time magazine story about cosmology from 1976: "The result is another kind of supernova, a fantastic explosion that blows the star to smithereens, dispersing into space most of the remaining elements that it had manufactured during its lifetime." 

Smithereens first appeared in English in 1829 in the form "smiddereens," and most likely was borrowed from the Irish Gaelic smidirîn, a diminutive of smiodar, small fragment.

Demonym

   A demonym (a word not used until coined by Paul Dickson, an editor at Merriam-Webster, in his 1997 book 'Labels for Locals'), also referred to as a gentilic, is a name for a resident of a locality.

A demonym is usually – though not always – derived from the name of the locality;  thus, the demonym for the people of Britain is British, and the demonym for the people of Italy is Italian, yet the one used in the English language for the people of the Netherlands is Dutch (in Dutch Nederland/Nederlander).  In some cases the demonym is said to have preceded the place being named - hence Germany was the place from which Germans came rather then the other way round.