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Scare quotes. Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes, [1] [2] sneer quotes, [3] and quibble marks[citation needed]) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense. [4] Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's ...
An inherently funny word is a word that is humorous without context, often more for its phonetic structure than for its meaning. Vaudeville tradition holds that words with the / k / sound are funny. A 2015 study at the University of Alberta suggested that the humor of certain nonsense words can be explained by whether they seem rude, and by the ...
The English suffixes -phobia, -phobic, -phobe (from Greek φόβος phobos, "fear") occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, abnormal, unwarranted, persistent, or disabling fear as a mental disorder (e.g. agoraphobia), in chemistry to describe chemical aversions (e.g. hydrophobic), in biology to describe organisms that dislike certain conditions (e.g ...
Of course, the way people put words together can be pretty funny, too—just take the funniest quotes of all time. And brush up on your grammar knowledge with these acronym examples and funny ...
The death of Aeschylus, killed by a turtle dropped onto his head by a falcon, illustrated in the 15th-century Florentine Picture-Chronicle by Baccio Baldini [1]. This list of unusual deaths includes unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history, noted as being unusual by multiple sources.
In the Zork series of games, the Great Underground Empire has its own system of measurements, the most frequently referenced of which is the bloit. Defined as the distance the king's favorite pet can run in one hour (spoofing a popular legend about the history of the foot), the length of the bloit varies dramatically, but the one canonical conversion to real-world units puts it at ...
In honor of Black Twitter's contribution, Stacker compiled a list of 20 slang words it brought to popularity, using the AAVE Glossary, Urban Dictionary, Know Your Meme, and other internet ...
The word nikoli, when stressed on the second syllable, means "never", when stressed on the first it is the locative case of Nikola, i.e. Nicholas; Spanish – cuando las vacas vuelen ("when cows fly") or cuando los chanchos vuelen ("when pigs fly"). Its most common use is in response to an affirmative statement, for example "I saw Mrs. Smith ...