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Nov 13, 2017

This week’s theme
Toponyms from fiction

This week’s words
grimgribber
ecotopia
ruritanian
edenic
stepford

Cover of the first edition of the play

Image: Brick Row Book Shop

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

Luggage? Check. Passport? Check. Travel guide? Check!
Looks like you’re ready for the trip. But we can leave all this behind, because we are traveling to the land of imagination. The land where places such as El Dorado and Xanadu exist.

We’ll visit places that started out in fiction, and live on in the English language.

This week we’ll see five fictional toponyms (from Greek topos: place), words derived after names of fictional places.

grimgribber

PRONUNCIATION:

(GRIM-gri-buhr)

MEANING:

noun: Jargon of a trade.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Grimgribber, an imaginary estate, discussed in the play Conscious Lovers (1722) by Richard Steele (1672-1729). Earliest documented use: 1722.

USAGE:

“Cracking speech, William: it was a fine specimen of grimgribber.”
Philip Howard; The Lost Words; Robson Press; 2012.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign. -Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (13 Nov 1850-1894)

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