03/26/25 Grif.Net - Scrumptious Words (+ Answers to 'Who Said It' Quiz)
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[Among the million words that the English language supposedly includes, some of them sound very strange. Other words are written in an unexpected way. Most of these words were never taught in your English language class unless you had ME for a professor.]
**Scrumptious - this word is practically an onomatopoeia and refers to a delicious dish.
**Serendipity - This word appears in numerous lists of untranslatable words and is a mystery mostly for non-native speakers of English. It refers to a happy and unexpected discovery or event.
**Quire - You surely must have, at one time or another, wanted to order in English 24 or 25 sheets of paper without having to say, “I would like 24 or 25 sheets of paper, please”. Right? Problem solved: Ask for a quire.
**Tittynope - To be precise: the scattering of crumbs left on one side of the plate, the few grains of rice sitting at the bottom of the bowl, the few drops remaining in the glass, are NOT mere leftovers and dregs. Now you know.
**Yarborough - A useful term for daily life, especially if you play bridge. You probably know that unpleasant feeling of having a hand where no card is higher than 9. That’s a yarborough hand.
**Winklepicker – You may not use mollusk skewers often (or ever), but if your boots or shoes have such a sharp point that they evoke the utensils used to pry winkles from their shells, you’re wearing winklepickers.
**Gobbledygook – In 1944, Politician Maury Maverick described a bill riddled with official jargon and extremely complex sentence structures.
**Halfpace - It is a landing, certainly, but not just any landing. It is that small landing at the top of a flight of stairs where you have to turn and take another flight of stairs whether going up or down.
~~ANSWERS TO ‘WHO SAID IT’ QUIZ 2~~
1. “If you are going through hell, keep going.” – Prime Minister Winston Churchill
2. “Wise men learn by other's harms; fools by their own.” - Benjamin Franklin
3. "The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates
4. "Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future." - Oscar Wilde
5. “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” - Confucius
6. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” - Henry David Thoreau
7. "The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave." – President Ronald Reagan
8. “It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.” – Rev. William Watkinson (on Chinese wisdom, NOT Confucius)
9. “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” - Thomas Edison
10. “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” - Mark Twain
11. “To err is human; to forgive, divine." - Alexander Pope
12. “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” - Oscar Wilde
13. "Never interrupt your enemies when they are making a mistake." – Emperor Napoleon Bonapart
14. “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.” - Robert Louis Stevenson
15. “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” - John Wooden (UCLA basketball coach)
Bonus: “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.” – Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
~~
Dr Bob Griffin
“From all harm safe in His sheltering arms
I'm living by faith and feel no alarm.”
