🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the 1st of June (ushering in the summer months — and Pride Month, for which even the rabbits go gay: 🏳️🌈 🏳️🌈 🏳️🌈)
Today’s amuse-gueule for the month is a Zippy strip (which has been hanging around on my desktop since it appeared in 10/14/19) in which the notoriously onomastomanic Zippy savors the word bibulous for the delights of its meaning a well as its pronunciation:
From NOAD: adj, bibulous: formal excessively fond of drinking alcohol. ORIGIN late 17th century (in the sense ‘absorbent’): from Latin bibulus ‘freely or readily drinking’ (from bibere ‘to drink’) + –ous.
So we’ve got a specialization of drinking up to drinking alcohol; plus a metaphorical view of drinking up to refer to absorbency (paper towels drink up spills) — but the (older) ‘absorbent’ sense of bibulous is now obsolete. Never mind: Zippy loves it.
Oh yes, also from NOAD (with Zippy, but not with Griffy’s further specialization in the strip, which is not in anybody’s dictionary):
adj. verklempt: North American informal [AZ: in Yinglish] overcome with emotion: I found myself getting a little verklempt just thinking about it | he was standing at the top of the steps looking verklempt.
You can certainly be verklempt over the meanings of words, but it doesn’t follow that verklemt, the Yiddish English adjective, means ‘overcome with emotion about the meanings of words’; verklemt, the Yiddish English adjective, is (off the shelf) neutral, unspecified, uncommitted as to the cause of this extreme emotion, which could be any of an endless number of things. Once off the shelf, you can do all sorts of things with it.
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