I don't want to hear any writer say, nah, not so much. Plain talk suits me swell. There's no ball game can't use a curveball once in a while.

.

I have thirty years of notes on wonderfully weird words and phrases. Let's put up our favorites. I'll start:

.

Foofaraw: 1) a fuss or disturbance about very little    2) an excessive amount of ornamentation

.

I got this off Thomas Pynchon just the other day. He spells it foofooaw; the dictionary says foofaraw. Either way, great fun.

.

I'll review my files and be back with more. 

Kerfuffle.  Similar to a brouhaha, but not exactly a hugger-mugger.  Of Scottish origin, essentially meaning disorder, confusion, tangle.  

Another favorite is larrup.  No one is quite sure where larrup, comes from, perhaps from the Dutch word larpen meaning to thresh with flails (those are fine words as well.)  Sportswriters at a loss for alliterative nicknames for Lou Gehrig sometimes called him Larrupin' Lou, an awful nickname, really.  So many excellent synonyms for larrup:  clout, clobber, biff, cudgel, cold cock, soak, wallop, thump, belt.  

Speaking of soak and baseball, soak used to be a common enough word for getting a runner out by hitting them with the ball, Not tagging him with the ball, mind you, but beaning them on the base paths. Once, that was a legitimate means of putting a runner out. Those were different times, Jim. Soak. "Evers soaked Lajoie, leading to a kerfuffle of considerable protraction."

Good old Atthys! 

.

I'm currently distracted by a plethora of issues, but I'll up your ante over the weekend.

Excellent words, all!

 I always like 'fisticuffs':  a wonderfully descriptive old-timey term for a fistfight.

'Jenkins, you garrulous old goat; this foofaraw has gone too far!  I shall be forced to larrup you soundly at the fisticuffs!'

oneiric: of or related to dreams and dreaming.

sample usage: H. P. Lovecraft's novella of startling imagery and incident, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, forms part of his celebrated "Dream Cycle"--as oneiric and surreal a weirdling road trip as has ever been chronicled by a "Gentleman Sage of Providence, Rhode Island". 

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 9/29/2014, 12:23 AM--

Jibber jabber. I know that. My mother used to say it. I'd forgotten all about it.

.

I'll have to google it, see how long in use. I covet that one for Sly. (Sixteenth century). A piece of nonsense like that, he could have made it up. Thanks, Robert.

I, too, used to collect interesting words, Mimi.   I remember reading an interview of Sting probably about thirty years ago now, when I was in middle school, and he talked about "gelignite,"  I looked it up in an unabridged dictionary and found out it's a gel explosive (I cannot remember the context in which he mentioned it in the interview).  At any rate, in looking up the word, I encountered gelid in one of the entries just prior to it, which means "icy."

One of my favorite onomatopoeic words is susurrus, which is a whispering or sibilant sort of rustling or pattering sound.