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Spambot (and word) of the day — 10 Comments

  1. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that “flibbertigibbet” happened to be one of the featured new words on http://dictionary.reference.com/
    Each day they have some word game feature under the look-up box and yesterday it was unusual words.

    I happened to look something up yesterday and perhaps it’s just a fluke-y coincidence, but flibbertygibbet was one of the words.

    For some reason, Julie Andrews popped into my head & I realized I associated the word with her. So I proceded to go though her movie songs. At first I thought “Mary Poppins” but then realized it’s from the song “What Do You Do With A Problem Like Maria?” Maria being the novice nun which she played int the musical. Lyrics include calling her a “a flibbertiggibet….a clown.)

  2. Oops! Didn’t get to your last paragraph before making my comment. You beat me to the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”….

    So, sorry for repetition. But it was featured on Dictionary.com yesterday, as well.

  3. It’s straight from Shakespeare…

    And from Captain Kidd: a gibbet is his final ‘resting’ place. The gibbet being commonly used with dummies / effigies as cautionary totem.

    One can infer that the term refers to an un-cautious speaker.

    Flibberty seems to be a neologism between flippant and liberty.

    Hence, their total fusion being a stew of noise and vapidness.

    A flibbertiggibet: a totally untrustworthy windbag — aka attention *h*re.

  4. That’s what my grandmother used to call me. There’s a world of expressions and words that used to be and are so much a part of my childhood that when I hear them, I have a flood of memories

    I remember first reading the Canadian writer Alice Munroe and I could hear my grandmother, my aunt and mother in the rhythms and the words and the retorts – Part Canadian, part Scot, part Midwest. Turns out she lives just 20 miles from the farm where my mother would go every summer when she was a child.

  5. @bob – wonderful.

    I hadn’t thought about it like that, but I so agree: Emma my favourite, too.

  6. “flibbertigibbet” is still in use here in the South, though now that you mention it not as common as it once was.

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