a plump of fatuous Nimrods

today i will start a new life. a new life where i improve my vocabulary daily by writing about words that computers email to me. everything will change!

naw, that belief would be fatuous, which is dictionary.com's word of the day. it's not the best word of the day, but i'd previously thought it meant something along the lines of "maudlin" just because of it reminds me of "infatuated". but actually, the shared root of the two words is fatuus meaning stupid. so fatuous refers to anything that is inane or stupid, especially when it's illusory or misguided. hint: use the derivative fatuity in a sentence in order to impress people!

mysteriously, merriam-webster's word of the day is Nimrod, who is a king of Shinar when he's capitalized, and either a hunter or a stupid jerk when it's lowercase. the definition actually uses the word jerk, which gets it points. it's not the best word, but i do wish people would call each other nimrods more often. underused putdown!

oed fails to disappoint today! i think they've wised up to the fact that nobody wants to learn the history of the word "frown" and they've started telling us about interesting archaic phraseology. today their word is the noun plump, which is a group of people or animals or trees or things. it was used for a while just in the phrase "a plump of spears" which referred to a bunch of spear-carriers. but you can also use it to refer to waterfowl or shrubs or pressmen.

i'm a huge advocate of bringing plump into the mainstream as a collective noun, and using collective nouns more often. it's sorta nuts, too, that the english language has all these terms of venery that we learned from pretentious gentleman hunters in the fifteenth century. and furthermore, that there's a word game built into the language where anyone who fathoms themself a wordsmith is allowed to introduce new collective nouns for things in order to change the way we think about a group of a thing. let's not waste this opportunity!