Sunday, September 2, 2012

Frasmotic

Meaning: Invented for a Blackadder episode, ("Ink and Incapability") it's not yet in any official dictionaries, although this guy suggests 'so frazzled that one goes into a spasm.' There's a suggestion of frantic about it, as well.

Usefulness: 2 (rates very high in work applicability)

Logofascination: 2 (it's in Blackadder, and an episode about dictionaries at that)

In the wild: Urban Dictionary. And Blackadder fans everywhere.

Degrees: 2

Connections: frasmotic - sausage (I can't use the OED on this one, so I'm inventing invoking the Contrafibularity Clause)

Which is used in: G&P, 22 times, first off in the First Book, III: How Gargantua was carried eleven months in his mother's belly. Could equally have been titled: How Gargantua's parents ate a lot of pork products.
"To this intent he was ordinarily well furnished with gammons of bacon, both of Westphalia, Mayence and Bayonne, with store of dried neat's tongues, plenty of links, chitterlings and puddings in their season; together with salt beef and mustard, a good deal of hard roes of powdered mullet called botargos, great provision of sausages, not of Bolonia (for he feared the Lombard Boccone), but of Bigorre, Longaulnay, Brene, and Rouargue."


N.B. if we accept frazzled as part of the definition, we could have frasmotic - frazzled - fray - rub - frott, which turns up just after the line above in G&P.  

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