#1: Quixotic
Definition:
: idealistic and utterly impractical; especially : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or chivalrous action doomed to fail
About the Word:
The novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (published in 1605 and 1615), is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of literature ever. It also has given us a small, but useful, batch of words and phrases for describing that special kind of person who is unencumbered by common sense and the notion that grand gestures are often impractical.
Definition:
: an uncouth or rowdy person
: idealistic and utterly impractical; especially : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or chivalrous action doomed to fail
About the Word:
The novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (published in 1605 and 1615), is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of literature ever. It also has given us a small, but useful, batch of words and phrases for describing that special kind of person who is unencumbered by common sense and the notion that grand gestures are often impractical.
#2: Yahoo
Definition:: an uncouth or rowdy person
About the Word:
Yahoo comes to the English language from the fertile imagination of Jonathan Swift, author of the famed Gulliver's Travels (as well as the somewhat less-remembered Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue).
In Gulliver's Travels the Yahoos were an imaginary humanoid race, brutish and uncouth. This book was also responsible for introducing the words Lilliputian and brobdingnagian.
#3: Pooh-bah
Definition:1 : one holding many public or private offices
2 a : one in high position
b : one who gives the impression of being a person of importance
About the Word:
Readers of a certain age might be excused for thinking that the pooh-bah comes from the cartoon series The Flintstones. That show occasionally featured a 'grand poobah', who was a high-ranking member of a secret society. However, the roots of pooh-bah extend far beyond Saturday morning cartoons.
It originated in the Gilbert and Sullivan 1885 comic opera, The Mikado. The character of that name finds himself in possession of a wide variety of positions and offices, and is dubbed Lord-High-Everything-Else.
#4: Pander
Definition:: someone who caters to and often exploits the weaknesses of others
About the Word:
Pander has undergone a bit of what linguists and other wordy types like to call "pejoration," the process by which a word's meaning and connotation goes downhill.
The initial meaning in English was in reference to someone who acted as a go-between for a pair of lovers, a facilitator of romance. The word entered our language in this sense as an alteration for the name of a character (Pandare) in Chaucer's classic poem Troilus and Criseyde; Pandare assisted the lovers in this poem in their romance. However, soon after the word began to take on slightly...less noble shades.
Pander began to be used as a term for a pimp, or a person who procured the services of a prostitute. After this it broadened to include any person who helped satisfy any one of a number of questionable urges.
#5: Gargantuan
Definition:
: of tremendous size or volume
About the Word:
Gargantuan comes from the title character of the 1535 satire by Rabelais, Gargantua.
In this work, Gargantua is a giant with a ravening appetite (eating, for instance, six pilgrims in a salad). The name appears to have been first converted into an adjective in 1596, by Thomas Nash
#6: Serendipity
Definition:
: an assumed gift for finding valuable or agreeable things not sought forAbout the Word:
Serendipity was the creation of Horace Walpole, the famed 18th-century English writer, who is known both for authorship of the first Gothic novel in English (The Castle of Otranto) and for having a lifelong obsession with writing letters (more than a thousand of which were to Horace Mann).
#7: Malapropism
Definition:: a blundering use of a word that sounds somewhat like the one intended but is ludicrously wrong in the context
About the Word:
Richard Sheridan, the Irish dramatist, is responsible for the word malapropism, as it is based on the name of a character, Mrs. Malaprop, who appears in his 1775 play,The Rivals.
#8: Milquetoast
Definition:: a timid, meek, or apologetic person
About the Word:
Comic strips may not seem like the most likely source to have provided English with new words, but they have actually been quite fertile in this regard.
Milquetoast is one such word: it comes from the name of Caspar Milquetoast, a character invented by cartoonist H. T. Webster in 1924 for his strip Timid Soul (it was based on milk toast, a dish of toast softened in milk). Comic strips have also given us the word dagwood (a comically large sandwich, named after Dagwood Bumstead, from the comic Blondie), and it is likely that goon (a thuggish man) was largely taken from the character Alice the Goon in the comic strip Thimble Theatre in the early 20th century.
#9: Micawber
Definition:: an improvident person who lives in expectation of an upturn in his fortunes
About the Word:
Wilkins Micawber was an eternally optimistic and frequently impoverished character from Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, published as a serial novel in 1849 and 1850.
#10: Panglossian
Definition:: marked by the view that all is for the best in this best of possible worlds
About the Word:
Master Pangloss, the tutor for the titular character of Voltaire's novelCandide, was prone to making such pronouncements as "they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best."
The novel, a satire on the subject of philosophical optimism, is Voltaire's best-known work. In large part due to this popularity the fictional tutor has seen his name forever associated with unfettered and irrational optimism.
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