Nurdles
I came across the word nurdle in a book I read last week. Which of the following definitions do you think is the correct one?
- Nurdle, noun: A small furry creature that lives in burrows in the hills of Yorkshire
- Nurdle, verb: To score runs (in cricket) by gently nudging the ball into vacant areas of the field.
- Nurdle, noun: Something small and cute
- Nurdle, verb: To waffle or muse on a subject about which you know little.
- Nurdle, noun: A plastic pellet
- Nurdle, verb: To faff about doing nothing constructive.
- Nurdle, noun: A blob of toothpaste shaped like a wave.
- Nurdle, verb: To play a (tiddly)wink so close to the pot that it’s almost impossible for your opponent to pot it.
Can you suggest any other definitions for this word?
First one, reminds me of Gizmo the Gremlin :D
I’ll only say that I went and looked it up, because I prefer to do that rather than make a wild guess when I see a totally unfamiliar word. :-)
I had read part of the book, so I could guess which term the writer would want to use.
But I think it would work better as verb meaning “to mix the egg yolks into eggnog”.
I’ve read the book so I recognised the word but it wouldn’t surprise me if all of the multiple choice option definitions were nurdles?
I’m not English native speaker, I don’t know. But there are lot of similar words in my native language, for example oko can mean eye, hole, middle, centre, card game and lot more….
but this is in all languages :)
Have a nice day
Jurčík
[jonathan: But I think it would work better as verb meaning “to mix the egg yolks into eggnog”.]
I’d add a twist to this and say “to mix eggs with flour to make noodle dough” ;)
It’s definitely a verb.
nur-dle (verb): to throw a fellow nerd in the path of a bully, forcing the bully to hurdle over the nerd’s body, thus obstructing the progress of his assault.
Example sentence:
As captain of the Pokemon Card Club in high school, Glen was proficient in defensive nurdling, an unsavory but necessary measure to stave off the violent advances of the football team after school.
All of the definitions are correct (that is, they appear online somewhere), apart from the first one, which I made up.
You can find discussion of nurdles and nurdling on World Wide Words, the Urban Dictionary, and the Double-Tongued Dictionary.
The word isn’t in my dictionaries and the only sense I know it is the plastic pellet definition which really I’ve only read in the book you’ve mention and never actually heard anywhere else. My work vaguely involves ‘nurdles’ but they’re always listed as consignments of ‘plastic pellets’ despite some of the strange industry and business words and terms invented for specific usage (such as ‘dewatering’?) they haven’t adopted ‘nurdle’ yet – it sounds a bit of a silly, nonce anyway!?
This is an off-topic post:
Concerning the “Nawat” page recently added, I’ve noticed that the text sample contains the letter “X” within words, but the main consonants chart had no “X”. I wonder how is it read.
TJ – According to the Nawat Bible website (Ne Bibliaj Tik Nawak):
(X) as in Spanish, extranjeroj
‘Those letters in parenthese mostly only occur in words borrowed from Spanish or other languages’.
Thanks for the info Yenlit!