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Posted on 08/08/2025 12:04:37 AM PDT by kawhill
The strangest words in the English language Cattywampus Originating in the Colonial United states and still used in the deep South, cattywampus means something that is in disarray, that is askew, or something that isn’t directly across from something.
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From the first time I heard it and on the rare occasions since, “cattywampus” has always struck me as a weird word. But come to think of it, its synonym “askew” is kind of strange, too.
Correction to what I said at first:
Brits said schedule as ‘SHedule’ and asked where he learned to say it as SKedule
He said he learned it at ‘SKool’
I guess, the ‘correct’ way is the way you were taught and the way you understand it
We better not catch you engaging in fisticuffs, laddybuck.
Catty-corner and catty-whompus are two completely different things! These guys are stupid.
If I remember correctly: It was indeed pronounced in medieval English, but between 1400 and 1600, the lateral sound (the „l“), if it was following a dark vowel, underwent a gradual lenization - until it disappeared in spoken Standard English around Shakespeare‘s lifetime.
The orthography, however, remained unchanged.
Yet, there are some English dialects in which you can still (lightly) hear the l after a dark vowel 🙂 It’s just amazing how similar Middle English sounded to German - medieval or modern 😄
Say what? People threw their crap out onto the street???
= = =
They weren’t homeless. They had a window to toss from.
Why do you think we went to war with the Brits. We moved to the next hemisphere and they still wanted to be the grammar police. And we just were not going to let that stand.
Calypgin ..........
My good Freeper friend and major force in the establishment of the Free Republic Media Chapter is named Calypgin. I lost touch with her some years back
Monosyllabic. I’ve just always thought it was funny it has 5 syllables.
At one of my Air Force assignments back in 1980 or so, we had a supply sergeant from Georgia that used “cattywampus” all the time—so much so that it became his nickname.
Yclept is actually a Middle English word that means "named", as in "He was named Albert." The word "yclept" appears numerous times in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English.
I've seen it spelled catawompus. And I've heard both catty- and kitty-corner in my northern part of the South, but mostly catty.
They were mostly dirt or stone lanes with vegetation on either side, and already piled with horse, goat and sheep crap. The more civilized folks who lived in rowhouses piled the poop all together at the corner, high. But day to day, out the window:
The wealthy had servants to clean out their castle toilets:
antidisestablishmentarianism
Those usages are not vowels, they are nouns.
The other use of "one" in English is as a pronoun, when speaking of oneself as an everyman, as in: "One never tires of such winning."
I always wonder how people do learn English as opposed to other languages, English has so many quirks to it like that.
LOL!!!
Pecksniffian.
As I remember a late night tv guy got in trouble for using “water Closet” on the air sometime in the early 60”s
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