Baggage-SmasherĪs well as being a name for a thief who specializes in stealing luggage from trains, in 19th-century slang a baggage-smasher was a porter at a railway station. Jargon-filled talk that sets out to clarify something but ends up only confusing things? That’s bafflegab. It’s used in relation to someone going back on their word, after a deal has been struck. Backspangĭerived from spang, an old Scots word for a sudden jolt or kick, a backspang is essentially a sting in the tail-a bad turn of events or a sudden detrimental change of mind at the very last minute. Back-Doubleīecause it’s usually a less direct route, any side road or backstreet can also be called a back-double. Likewise, babblement or babblery is gossiping, prattling conversation, while a babble-merchant is an unstoppably talkative person. If you’re babblative, then you’re prone to babble or chatter. The novel inspired a handful of words that have since entered the language including Babbittism or Babbittry, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “materialistic complacency and unthinking conformity.” 2. Babbitt, who achieves the perfect American middle-class life but soon finds total conformity and social expectation oddly discomforting.
Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis’s controversial 1922 satire Babbitt tells the story of fictional Midwest businessman George F. So why not give B a boost with these brilliantly bizarre words? 1. But when B isn’t the first letter of a word, it’s actually quite rare: Take an average page of written English text, and you can expect it to account for less than 1.5 percent of it, making B the seventh least-used English letter overall. And on the one hand, you’d be right-nearly 5 percent of all the words in a dictionary are listed under the second letter of the alphabet. If you had to take a guess at the 10 least-used letters of the English alphabet, chances are you wouldn’t rank B down among the Zs, Qs, Xs, and Js.
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