Ridiculously precise words that amuse you.

Let's avoid jargon or trade-specific cant. That stuff is specific for a good reason, and there's mountains of it.

I'll start:

1) Triskadekaphobia - fear of the number 13

2) To welch - to skip out on the results of a lost bet.
(Thinking of Bob Cherub's failure to produce an essay in QT3's P&R section is what remnded me of this word)

3) Nimbar - to encircle with a halo
(This one's Spanish, obviously. When I discovered it during my time in Spain, I thought it was the funiest thing. The Spanish people, most of whom were familiar with the word, did not share my amusement. This only made it funnier.)

Defenestrate: To throw something or someone out a window.

Gegenschein: a faint brightening of the night sky in the region of the antisolar point.

Possibly my favorite word.

This article. And this one.

Favorites include "pochemuchka," definitely something I've been called, and "backpfeigenbesicht."

It's "backpfeifengesicht". Also:





(just kidding <3)

Also, "backpfeigenbesicht" seems to be, to my shitty shitty german skills, "baked figs inspection", which is awesome.

This site has you covered.

Somewhat like the way that the Eskimos have many words for snow, the Javanese have many words for rice, both for different growing stages, and different processing/ cooked states.

To welch has racist origins - the more modern equivalent would be to "jew" someone out of a payment. But the sheep-shagging lot across the Severn shouldn't have broken their promises all the time, if they didn't want to be stereotyped as deadbeats

Wow, thanks for that little correction, then. "Baked figs inspection?" Sounds tasty. :D

...and, unfortunately, you are not the first person to draw that conclusion upon hearing that word. Love you, Aaron!

Jumentous. Having the frothiness, warmth and cloudiness associated with horse urine.

German is the clear language winner in this competition due to their habit of just compounding little words into longer more precise ones. I just gathered a few up from around the internet but you could do this all day:

• Handschuhschneeballwerfer - A person who wears gloves to throw snowballs, used as a metaphor for a person who throws abuse from a safe distance.
• Sitzpinkler - A man who pees sitting down
• Umweltverschmutzung - The dirtying up of the world via pollution
• Drachenfutter - A gift bought to placate one's wife when you've managed to upset her. (literally dragon food)
• Kummerspeck - The fat that accumulates after too much comfort eating (literally sorrow bacon)
• Fremdschämen - The shame you feel for someone else.

I think this is a wooden floor polishing shop:

I don't have enough likes to give. Whenever these things show up, I regret I'm not better at speaking German.

Weltschmerz - literally "World-pain": mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.

It's a rental shop for wooden floor polishing machines.

My favourite extremely specific German word is one that we were given in a list of words to block in the profanity filter for our game. Sony supplied the list and we imported it. The word is Diplomverkehrinselbeflanzer which means someone who has a qualification in planting flowers on traffic islands. Quite why that particular word needed to be filtered I'm not sure.

And yet they don't have an equivalent word for "Do-it-yourself-System."

This is what happens when you give your cat a laptop and ask him to name your business for you.

It's a phrase, not a word, but I've always been a big fan of "l'esprit d'escalier" - when you think of a great comeback way too late to use it.

Don't worry the German's have got you amply covered with 'Treppenwitz'. Which covers exactly the same concept but niftily encapsulates it in a single word.

Finally, a word for everyone on BF. Pilkunnussija.

Surely; you's mean 'Finally? a word, for, everyone's on: BF"

I meant

FINALLY GUYS A WORD THAT DESCRIBES EVERYONE ^_^ IN MY HEADCANNON WE ARE ALL PIKUNNUSSIJA-KUNS AND PIKUNNUSSIJA-CHANS! YA TAH! ;_o,O@@``````P

Sharing some of these on Facebook taught me these three words for wuz (from a German friend):
In -der Sauna- Untensitzer, (he who sits on the lower bench in the sauna), Warmduscher (someone who takes warm showers) and Schattenparker (someone who parks his car in the shadow).

Warmduscher ahahahahh lololol

Of course they don't. That would put all of these very specifically-named professionals out of work.

It's actually "Diplomverkehrsinselbepflanzer". This is very important because somebody who would actually use that insult is obviously also the kind of person who would make sure he's spelling it correctly.

"Warmduscher" is one of those wonderful words that basically mean "wimp". Synonyms include "Turnbeutelvergesser" (someone who forgets his gym bag, likely intentionally in order to be excused from gym class), "Pizzarandliegenlasser" (one who leaves the pizza's crust behind) and the devastating "Teletubbyzurückwinker" (one who waves back at the Teletubbies).

German is ridiculously fun for insulting people.

I think Afrikaans wins for my favorite insulting word, "stoepkakker" - which means, basically, a fat little dog that sits on your front stoop and will not move, even to take a dump. Literally "stoop shitter".

cnahr's link helped me with an adjective I can use on my girlfriend: Callipygous

It fits well!

I am going to spend the rest of my day and perhaps week integrating this word into my mind as a new insult for someone. If I am lashing out in anger like with road rage it will still be FUCK YOU! DAY BY DAAAAAAAAAAY! But if I'm just grumbling about something at the office, I will call him a sitzpinkler; with a lower-case S because FUCK YOU DAY BY DAAAAAAAAAY!

All right, Horrible Oscar, I cave. IainC gave us the literal meaning, but what's the actual insult?

Which reminds me of one of my all-time favorite bits from The Straight Dope:

Handy-am-Gürtel-Träger loses points for hyphens in a German burn but gains points for incorporating the word handy.

Mayhaps my favorite word of all time: Cromulent

It implies that you're dumb because you have an academic degree in something ridiculously trivial and specific, meaning you had to study for it and aren't good at anything else. Also it's a really long word. I never said it was a particularly good insult.


If you google a bit you can find joke lists of long insult words that include Diplomverkehrsinselbepflanzer along with the ones I've described above, though like everything else on the internet 90% of the list will be kinda dumb and unfunny. What probably happened in IainC's case is that somebody at Sony found one of these lists, assumed that these were all deadly weapons that internet trolls would actually use to hurt people's feelings instead of just calling them "Arschloch" and copy/pasted it into the swear filter wholesale.

Actually looking at the list we were sent, I'd bet money that every time they got a complaint about a name, they added it to their filter list. For example Japkiller is filtered which seems a bit specific. And then, instead of filtering with wildcards (*Japkiller*) the list then goes on to ban Japkillera, Japkillerb and so on all the way through to Japkillerdd. I suspect that long block of entries in the filter list harks back to a drawn out battle between customer service and a particularly stubborn player who really didn't like the Japanese for some reason.

I'm imagining a stubborn 14 year old boy with his jaw sticking out, furiously swearing to himself "I *will* tell the world about those dirty Japs" as he types in his latest entry: Japkillerac.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_foer?currentPage=all

I was telling my partner, an English professor and all-around geniusperson, about this thread and about how most of the words in this thread were German.

"Well, the Germans are ridiculously precise people," she says. I can't argue with that.