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In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax. In other words, it is a long story that is intended to be amusing and that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending. [1]
So out with long-winded presentations of foreign policy minutiae and in with ideas that either contribute to his 'America First' agenda, while securing wins for the UK too, or help the President ...
The word also appears in John Marston's 1605 play The Dutch Courtesan, Act V, Scene II: For grief's sake keep him out; his discourse is like the long word Honorificabilitudinitatibus, a great deal of sound and no sense. [49] In John Fletcher's tragicomedy The Mad Lover of c. 1617 the word is used by the palace fool: The Iron age return'd to Erebus,
Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs and "servicing the target" for bombing), [1] in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable.
Oxymorons are words that communicate contradictions. An oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction. As a rhetorical device, an oxymoron illustrates a point to communicate and reveal a paradox.
While literal and long-winded word content is often the most identifiable feature of stilted speech, such speech often displays irregular prosody, especially in resonance. [8] Often, the loudness, pitch, rate, and nasality of pedantic speech vary from normal speech, resulting in the perception of pedantic or stilted speaking.
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym , with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.
So, if this is the sort of distinction you care about, we’ve got some more brain food for you: With 645 meanings, the most complicated word in English is only three letters long. Sources: