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Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Oniomania

Oniomania


Are you crazy about onions?  Are you an onion enthusiast?  Do you vedge on Vidalias, live for leeks, or yearn for yellow onions?  Well . . . do ya?!

Whether you wish for Walla Wallas or surrender to sweet onions, guess what. . . you don't have "oniomania."

(What?!?!?!?!  I don't?)


Nope.

(but . . .)

Nope.

Every once in a while, a word comes along in the English language that should mean one thing, but instead means something completely different.  This is one that is most certainly worth pointing out.  Any wild guesses as to what you "suffer" from if you have oniomania?  As much as I want to tell you that it is an unhealty obsession with a bulbous vegetable, oniomania is actually the excessive desire to shop.

So why do we say "shopaholic" instead of "oniomaniac?"  It's easier to remember, of course.  And I agree.  But if practically no one uses a word for what it really is, why don't they just change it to what it should be?

Know of any other pointless or obscure words?  Please share!  :)

6 comments:

Casey said...

oniomaniac- excellent find! wish i had another one to add...

xo,
Casey

Jon said...

Not really pointless or obscure, but ruthless always confused me. Without ruth??

AmberLaShell said...

That's a good one Cole, i actually did LOL... :)

amberlashell.com

Leigh said...

The one word that always confused me is one you've mentioned before - lisp. Why in the world would you put an "s" in the word describing the inability to correctly say the letter "s"? Ridiculous.

Girly said...

I was actually filling out a survey for a couple friends who are linguistic majors the other day, and it was really interesting because they would give you a word (such as "husbian" "forizzle" "texting" etc) that is not currently in the English language (officially) and you would say a) if you have heard the word before b) if you think it should be in the dictionary and c) on a scale of 1-5 how likely you are to use that word. It really made me start thinking of what qualifies as words to me, and what makes one slang term any more worthy than another.

Cole Garrett said...

@ Girly Cool. I would have liked to have heard some of the words they were asking about in that survey. I'm a nerd, so that kind of stuff fascinates me.

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