Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Defenestration - my favorite word

defenestration (noun) - the act of throwing someone or something out of a window.
defenestrate \dee-FEN-uh-strayt\, transitive verb: To throw out of a window.

I thought that I was unique in having defenestrate as my favorite word but while investigating it to write this blog post I discovered that according to Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster's dictionary users named it as one of their favorite words of the year in 2004. This means that I have to share.

I have learned to keep my favorite words to my close circle of friends. I was once working on a software project and thought that it would be educational for the users to be presented with dialog boxes that gave them alternatives to the ubiquitous OK and Cancel, which led me to substituting common words for more happening words for the older users (Groovy) and more unusual words for the younger users (Abrogate). Management did not share my views.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

fenestrate - from the afrikaans word for window, venster.

Guy Ellis said...

I forgot that Afrikaans was the mother of all other languages.