Year: 2014

Appropriately (for Writing Bar) this week’s wacky word describes a commonly used literary device. It’s one most readers would immediately recognise on seeing it used, but may never have realised just how common, and clever, it is. It’s zeugma, a rhetorical device where a single word is linked to two words in a sentence but is really only appropriate to one of them.

So, that makes a zeugma sound more like a grammatical error than a writing technique. But used well, the zeugma can add drama, humour and beauty to writing. The Macquarie Dictionary describes zeugma as “a figure of speech in which a verb is associated with two subjects or objects, or an adjective with two nouns, in a way that is unexpected”.

There’s mystery surrounding this week’s wacky word. Despite a listing in Peter Watts’s 1977 reference book A Dictionary of the Old West – and an almost plausible explanation for its etymology – the word hornswoggle remains unexplained.

This word should be immediately recognisable as an American colloquialism, though it is listed in the Macquarie Dictionary also. It means “to deceive or con”, and the phrase “I’ll be hornswoggled” can also be an exclamation of amazement. It first appeared in print around 1829 and has remained popular in the US. (Even the World Wrestling Entertainment has its own Hornswoggle, a diminutive and popular wrestling champion.)

In 1920 hornswoggle popped up in PG Wodehouse’s Little Warrior.

You probably come across this week’s wacky word more than you know. Described in the Macquarie Dictionary as ‘bragging; bravado or bluster’ it’s the kind of behaviour we’re not unused to seeing, probably more so among the rich and famous. If you were paying attention you probably saw some of it at this week’s Oscars ceremony. Well, now when you come across a boastful, blustering braggart’s crowing you have one perfect word to describe it – fanfaronade.

Fanfaronade, or arrogant or boastful talk, has its origins in French. Around the mid-17th century it comes up in English in Sir Thomas Urquhart’s Logopandecteision (or An Introduction to the Universal Language – actually, I’m sensing some fanfaronade in that title…). Sir Thomas was a Scottish writer and translator who is most famous for his translations of Rabelais. In Logopandecteision he wrote: