Purfle is a very handy word that means “to decorate the surface of a violin”.

I came across it today in an article about the completion and publication after 45 years of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary – the first historical thesaurus in the world in any language. The Thesaurus sorts words by date and meaning into more than 236,000 categories and subcategories, and the oldest words date back to about 700 AD.

Interesting discoveries include 265 ways to say ‘immediately’, multiple Anglo-Saxon words for diseases of the feet, as well as all sorts of words for stupid people, including medwis, modigleas, samwis, ungerad and stuntlic from the time of King Alfred (849-899); dumpish, dorbellical and grout-headed from Shakespeare’s time; and numskulled, born-muzzy, ram-headed and chuckleheaded from the late 18th / early 19th century.

I came across the word highpointing the other day in a list of a blogger’s hobbies. It’s not a word I’m familiar with so I looked it up.

According to Wikipedia highpointing is “is the sport of visiting (and finding) the point with the highest elevation within some area (the “highpoint”), for example the highest points in each county within a state. It can be considered a form of peak bagging.”

Peak bagging (a.k.a. hill bagging, mountain bagging, Munro bagging, or just bagging) involves climbing a collection of mountains or hills – often those above a certain height or with a particular feature. Munro bagging, for example, involves climbing as many Scottish hills over 3000 ft (914.4m) as possible. Such peaks are known as Munros and named after Sir Hugh Munro (1856–1919), who was the first to catalogue them.

Another example of peak bagging is the Three Peaks Challenge, which involves climbing the three highest peaks in England (Scafell Pike), Wales (Snowdon / Yr Wyddfa) and Scotland (Ben Nevis / Beinn Nibheis) within 24 hours.

Are you a highpointer or peak bagger? Is this sport practised in your country? If so, what’s it called?

The word ectomorph is used to describe one of the characters in a novel I read last week. It’s not a word I’ve come across before so it caught my attention.

According to The Free Dictionary, an ectomorph is “an individual having a lean, slightly muscular body build in which tissues derived from the embryonic ectoderm predominate.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the word ectomorph as “a human physical type (somatotype) tending toward linearity, as determined by the physique classification system developed by the American psychologist W.H. Sheldon.”

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines an ectomorph as “a person with a lean and delicate build of body”, and related words include endomorph, “a person with a soft round build of body and a high proportion of fat tissue”, and mesomorph, “a person with a compact and muscular body”.

According to these definitions, I think I am an ectomorph. What about you?

The phrase “loaded for bear” appears in the novel I’m reading at the moment and is used in the following context: “I know next to nothing about computers but clearly Dommie is loaded for bear.” I take this to mean that Dommie is a computer wizard who’s ready for any challange, and if he were to go hunting, he would have appropriate ammunition for bears.

According to the Free Dictionary, loaded for bear means, “ready and eager to deal with something that is going to be difficult”.

What does this mean? defines this expression as, “To be full of energy. To be prepared for any eventuallity; to be over-prepared.”

The Urban Dictionary defines it as, “Carrying more equipment than necessary. Overloaded.”

I haven’t heard this phrase before and suspect it might be used mainly in American English. Is it familiar to you?

On the radio the other day they were discussing the possibility of staging televised debates for British politicians similar to the ones that happen during presidential elections in the USA. One commentator thought it was unlikely that the British Prime Minister would be willing to take part in such debates and that if he didn’t, the BBC might “empty chair” him.

According to The Guardian, empty chairing is “the practice of drawing attention to politicians’ refusal to show up. The aim is clear: to embarrass ministers for ducking tough questions.” While according to The Economist, empty chairing involves using an empty studio chair to symbolically represent someone who has refused to appear on a TV programme.

This seems to be similar to the practice of mentioning that somebody was “unavailable for comment” or “refused to comment” on a big news story.

Have you heard the term empty chairing used? Are there equivalents in other languages?

While travelling by train the other day I heard an announcement which explained that passengers in the back two or three coaches of the train would have move forward if they wanted to get off at the next stop as their coaches would not be ‘platformed’. I think this was the first time I’d heard this word.

Have you heard this usage before?

Can you think of an any other ways to express the same thing?

Recently while reading Douglas Coupland novel Gum Thief I came across a used of bus(ing) that I hadn’t heard before – one of the characters talks about “busing” tables, which sounded a bit strange to me. I’m familiar with the word busboy, but haven’t been quite sure what a busboy did. Now I’ve discovered that a busboy, busgirl or busser is someone who works in a restaurant clearing and laying (busing) tables and helping the waiting staff – a kind of assistant waiter. I’ve never heard this expression being used in the UK though and, as far as I know, no equivalent position exists here – waiters and waiteresses are normally responsible for clearing and laying tables.

The use of busing to refer to clearing tables was apparently first attested to 1913 and probably comes from the four-wheeled cart used to carry dishes.

In the UK the word busing might be used in the context of transporting people by bus, especially school children. According to Wikipedia busing is “The transportation of schoolchildren, by bus, to schools in other neighbourhoods in order to alleviate social inequalities or to achieve racial integration.”

Are busing or to bus used in other English-speaking countries? If so, what does in mean?