A.Word.A.Day -- jimjams

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A.Word.A.Day--jimjams

This week's theme: reduplicatives.

jimjams (JIM-jams) noun

1. Extreme nervousness; jitters

2. Delirium tremens: tremors and hallucinations caused by withdrawal from alcohol.

[Perhaps a reduplicative of jam.]

See more usage examples of jimjams in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

-Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org)

"I didn't feel attached in any way to my brothers and sisters. The very word siblings gives me the jimjams: it suggests something small and helpless, almost pathetic." Stephen Zanichkowsky; Fourteen; The Atlantic (Boston); Sep 2000.

X-Bonus

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics". All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. -George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)

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