Word of the Day
jollier
noun
a person who talks or acts agreeably to someone, in order to keep that person in good humor, especially in the hope of gaining something.
More about jollier
The noun jollier, a derivative of the informal verb jolly “to talk or act agreeably in order to keep someone in good humor, especially in the hope of gaining something,” is an Americanism dating back to the end of the 19th century. If only there were fewer jolliers and “jollyees.”
how is jollier used?
Certainly he would never dream that a “jollier” could become the leader of a great English political party.
The Jollier jollied Mr. Thompson up and down the sweet nerve of flattery in a manner truly artistic, then came away with a double half column ad.
cosplay
noun
the art or practice of wearing costumes to portray characters from fiction, especially from manga, animation, and science fiction.
More about cosplay
Cosplay is a blend of costume and play, but the combination is masking a much more complex performance. Japanese borrowed the English compound noun costume play (as in theater) and rendered it into its sound system as kosuchūmu-purē, which was shortened by the 1980s to kosupure and narrowed to the more specific sense “the art or practice of wearing costumes to portray characters from fiction, especially from manga, animation, and science fiction” (as well as characters from video games). English borrowed back kosupure and refashioned it as cosplay by the 1990s. Japanese words like kosupure are considered pseudo-English Japanese coinages known as wasei-eigo. Other familiar examples adopted into English from Japanese include salaryman, anime, and Pokémon, the latter itself a popular subject of cosplay.
how is cosplay used?
Although cosplay isn’t a requirement at Comic-Con, many people participate, and they take it extremely seriously.
The goal, many cosplayers interviewed said, is to disrupt popular ideas of what cosplay can and should look like and to help create a more racially tolerant environment through cosplay, both in Black Panther costumes and outside of them.
ideogram
noun
a written symbol that represents an idea or object directly rather than a particular word or speech sound, as a Chinese character.
More about ideogram
An ideogram or ideograph is “a written symbol that represents an idea or object directly rather than a word or speech sound, as a Chinese character.” Ideogram and ideograph literally mean “a written idea,” from Greek idéa “idea” and the noun grámma or the Greek combining form –graphos, both meaning “something written,” which are derivatives of the verb gráphein “to write.” Because ideograms convey meaning, not words or sounds, 5 can be pronounced five, fünf, pięć, pĕt, pénte, pémpe, or in several thousand other ways. Ideogram and ideograph both entered English in the first half of the 19th century.
how is ideogram used?
Ideograms are symbols that represent ideas or concepts rather than objects themselves—a circle with a line through it (🚫) to indicate prohibition, for example. Many emoji are hybrids of ideograms and pictograms.
Chinese characters are based on the simplified outlines of concrete elements in the visible world. Reduced to abstract lines and combined together, these yield the thousands of characters called ideograms, i.e.: idea transcribers.