FW: flibbertigibbet: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

[John Walton]

No: HPFGUIDX 9017

This seemed like such a JKR-type word that I just HAD to send it to the list
:) Can you not see a character (owl, perhaps?) named Flibbertigibbet?

--John

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John Walton     john at walton.to

Don't lose your right to vote -- let Jeb Bush take it away from you!
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   Word of the Day for Thursday January 11, 2001:

   flibbertigibbet \FLIB-ur-tee-jib-it\, noun:
   A silly, flighty, or excessively talkative person.

     We discover here not the flibbertigibbet Connolly describes
     but a serious reader (Goethe, Tolstoy, Proust) who found
     her cultural ideal in 18th-century France.
     --Martin Stannard, "Enter Shrieking," review of Love From
     Nancy, edited by Charlotte Mosley, [1]New York Times,
     November 28, 1993

     He argues persuasively that Millay's reputation has been
     harmed not only by academics who dread and fear her
     heartfelt "simplicity," but by the very admirers who wished
     to promote her as a kind of whimsical flibbertigibbet, a
     poetical Anne of Green Gables.
     --Liz Rosenberg, "So Young, So Good, So Popular," review of
     Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems, edited by Colin
     Falck, [2]New York Times, March 15, 1992
     _________________________________________________________

   Flibbertigibbet is from Middle English flipergebet, which is
   probably an imitation of the sound of meaningless chatter.

   Trivia: Flibbertigibbet originally meant a gossip or
   chatterbox, but it soon took on the idea of a light-minded or
   frivolous person, especially a pert young woman with such
   qualities. Flibbertigibbet was also the name of an imp or
   demon; it appears in a list of 40 fiends in a book by Samuel
   Harsnet, and also in Shakespeare:

     This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at
     curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and
     the pin, squints the eye, and makes the hare-lip; mildews
     the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth.
     --King Lear, iii. 4.

     Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once: of lust, as
     Obidicut; Hobbididance, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of
     stealing; Modo, of murder; Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and
     mowing.
     --Ibid., iv. 1.

References

   1. http://www.nytimes.com/
   2. http://www.nytimes.com/

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