Nearly through our Mock Latin series! I just have one more week of them after this one. 😉

Today we begin with a word I have used all the time, never realizing it was one of these “fake” constructions!

Discombobulate – So obviously this is a fun word, which is why I use it all the time. But I didn’t realize it was made up to sound Latin! This word dates from 1834 and means “to upset or embarrass. The original form was actual discombobricate, which I didn’t know.

Confusticate – this one is not only mock-Latin, it’s also meant to mock the people saying it, which could open a whole other can of worms. Meant to imitate confound or confuse, this word first appeared in 1852 in a passage of a book as “Negro dialect.” I do find it interesting that this one was meant to make fun by implying that the speaker thought it was a real, intelligent word, while it’s in the pattern of so many other mock-Latin words that were funny because everyone knew they were fanciful and fabricated. Just goes to show how intent matters…

Come back next week for the final installment!

Time for the third installment of the Mock Latin series!

Omnium gatherum ~ So technically, this one is only partly “mock.” 😉 Omnium is indeed a Latin word for “of all things.” Kind of like miscellaneous. In the 1520s (this one is OLD!), people came up with the humorous addition of gatherum to put with it, just from the English “gather.” So of course if you gather all things, you end up with a motley collection, which is exactly what this phrase means. =)

Harum-scarum ~ This phrase actually originated in the 1670s as harum-starum. The harum part is taken from the verb “to harry or harrass,” and then the scarum was added mostly just to rhyme. The -um endings are abbreviations of “them,” the whole phrase meant to be a humurous mock-Latin that would quite literally mean “to harrass and scare them.”

Two installments left in my Mock series!

Today we’re continuing our Mock Latin series with a few more totally fabricated, totally joke words that make me smile. =)

Cruciverbalist – Our first word is actually quite new, dating from 1977. If you look at the parts of the word, we have the roots crux which means “cross” and verbum which means “word.” So…yep. Crossword. A cruciverbalist is someone who creates crossword puzzles! How fun is that?!

Olde – Okay, this isn’t mock Latin per se, but it is mock-archaic. Did you know that this form of “old” was totally made up in the 1880s?? I had no idea! But yep, olde was never actually a spelling of old. People came up with it solely to be cute while imitating archaic spellings.

Installment three will come next week!

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?