Midnight Blather and Flammulation

Or, How Much Better the World Would Be if Everyone Read the Dictionary Regularly. At least, it would be more fun...

Okay, so it's not quite midnight yet, but I'm sure I've got the blathering part down solid. Transitions are tough. I love that I have a new job, and I love the new job itself, but I'm not used to the schedule yet. I'm also still in a little bit of limbo as far as my duties go—during most of the week I'm the media department go-to, but for the next several Saturdays I'm back to being 100% Tour Guide Chick. I can handle switching back and forth; in truth, I like variety and change. It's exciting. But the sad fact is that I really function better with routine.
Blah blah blah blah blah...

How dreadfully boring. Not only am I seriously blathering, but it's not even in the slightest bit an interesting kind of blather.


And now for something completely different!

So let me tell you about the new word I discovered yesterday in the midst of a wildly successful game of Scrabble:

feculent

Lovely little word! The root derives from feces...have you figured it out yet? It means filthy, nasty, or just plain covered in poop. Wonderful! Please do not pretend that you do not find poop funny. Of course you do, or you would not be human.

And I just now discovered another positively perky and precise little word: flammulated. FLAMMULATED!! Get flammulated, will you? Actually, you could if you were blushing—it means "of a reddish color; ruddy." Like flame, you see? The funny thing is that this word is used mostly just to describe one particular tiny owl native to North and Central America. The flammulated owl: Otus flammeolus.

By the way, flammulation really is a word, too. Use it in conversation tomorrow! Amaze your friends! It means a small flamelike marking. I needed a word to describe that, didn't you? How I love English. So many words; so many words to describe one small detail of one small thing that only 0.4% of the population even knows about. It truly is an extravagant and ridiculous language. And absolutely wonderful.

Running right along with that train of thought, did you know that deer poop is so special it gets its own name? Yep. Fewmets. Deer poop and deer poop only. Other types of poo need not apply. And there's actually a word fecundify. It just gets better and better, doesn't it? I'm going to make you look that last one up yourself if you don't know it. I can't do all the work around here—I need to get to bed!

footnotes:
1. All definitions were taken from the OED shorter edition
2. Above Scrabble catfight brought to you by a French advertisement for a Scrabble tournament
3. If you google scrabble images you will get some interesting results...