After looking at circumbendibus last week, I decided it would be fun to do a series on Mock Latin words ~ words deliberately made up to sound like Latin even though they’re not. Since they’re completely fake, LOL, the etymology on these isn’t very long, so I’m going to just feature a couple in each post for a few weeks. =) Not much history to learn about them, but fun words to work into a conversation!

So here’s our first installment.

Boxiana – created in 1819, this word has to do with fighting/boxing and is meant to mean “the lore and annals of prize-fighting.” I can just imagine Regency gents talking about boxiana, can’t you?

Crinkum-crankum – this one almost sounds like a Harry Potter-esque magic word, doesn’t it? LOL. But in fact, it’s mock-Latin for “anything full of twists and turns; a winding or crooked line.” This word was created in the 1760s and is just so much fun to say that I’m going to have to make it a point to start using it. 😉 Or if it’s too much of a mouthful, you can shorten it to…

Crankum – This shorter form means “a twist” as per the word it’s shortened from, but it can also mean “an eccentricity.” Crankum dates from the 1820s.

Come back next week for the second installment!

Circumbendibus. How fun is that word? You can almost guess the meaning just by listening to it, can’t you? This is another selection from that Colonial-era word list I saw, and I absolutely LOVE this one.

Circumbendibus simply means “a roundabout way or process.” Like circumlocution or circuitous. But I love this one because it’s a deliberate joke–it’s mock-Latin, something people put together knowing well it wasn’t the real word, but that it sounded like it.

This word was popular in the late 1600s, and I’m going to make an effort to use it in conversation this week, LOL.

(Then I’m going to start a mock-Latin series on here, because how fun is that?)

It’s my birthday week, so I thought it would a fun time to look at this old-fashioned word, popular in the Colonial American era. =)

Jollification is literally “making merry,” from jolly + -ication (“to make”) and dates from the 1760s. Though the adjective “jolly” had been around since the 1300s, jollification actually eventually led to the 20th century slang of jolly (or more often jollies) as a noun, which was just a shortening of jollification. (Think, “she gets her jollies from stamp collecting.”)

This year for my birthday, I decided that some authentic French macarons would make for excellent jollification, so I ordered some from ma-ka-rohn. Because seriously, is there a cookie that looks more celebratory?? I’ve long wanted to try them. If you’ve had them, what did you think? Love them? Hate them?

A couple weeks ago a friend sent me a list of “18 English Words That Are Actually Hindi,” and while quite a few of them I knew that about, others really surprised me.

One of those was cushy. I knew that cushy meant “soft” and so I think I always imagined it came from cushion. Cuz, you know…logical, right?

Wrong. Cushy comes directly from the Hindi khush, meaning “pleasant, happy, healthy.” That morphed into “easy” or “soft” by the early 1900s.

Cushion, on the other hand, comes from the Latin via French and has been around since the 1300s. So the fact that these two words sound very similar is largely a coincidence, but also probably has something to do with why the “soft, easy” meaning of cushy really caught on.