littoral \LIH-tuh-rul\, adjective:

1. Of, relating to, or on a coastal or shore region, especially a seashore.
2. A coastal region, especially the zone between the limits of high and low tides.

Professor Henslow tells me, he believes that nearly all the plants which I brought from these islands, are common littoral species in the East Indian archipelago.
— Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle

A country that is landlocked or has few neighbors will be more vulnerable than one that is littoral or extensive.
— Franklin L. Lavin,, “Asphyxiation or Oxygen? The Sanctions Dilemma”, Foreign Policy, September-October 1996

Like 49ers staking claims in California, the five littoral nations have asserted overlapping territorial claims in the Caspian itself.
— Richard Stone, “Caspian Ecology Teeters On the Brink”, Science, January 18, 2002

As the Portuguese moved south along the Upper Guinea Coast along the littoral of Sierra Leone, a region known as the Windward Coast, they entered another major area of rice cultivation.
— Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas

Littoral derives from Latin littoralis, litoralis, from litor-, litus, “the seashore.”

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for littoral

I know, I know, more than one whole week between posts. Shameful. I’ll be honest, when I hit one of these incredibly difficult and odd words with very slim matches, I find it hard to work up the verve to make a post. Most of these have something to do with a boat near a shore line or lava flows hitting the ocean. I wanted something a little interesting. I did find this fun little tidbit with some (I’m guessing) sports fans rowing their car down the road … without water, and right past a couple of police officers!

Row, row, row your link gently down the road …

I also found this arty little student film with a cute little very determined girl.

Don’t forget to soak your links.

donnybrook \DON-ee-brook\, noun:

1. A brawl; a free-for-all.
2. A heated quarrel or dispute.

But this was the beginning of Tommy’s years of fighting back, a period that ended in a donnybrook conducted all over the O’Connor house.
— Tracy Kidder, Home Town

Wine and talk flow freely, so much so that the meal ends with a Rooney family donnybrook over, typically enough, religion and politics.
— Howard Frank Mosher, “24 Hours in Due East, S.C.”, New York Times, April 7, 1991

The author finds few villains in “West Virginia’s Battle of the Books,” which describes a donnybrook over the content of public school textbooks during the mid-70’s in the “seemingly placid community” of Charleston, W.Va.
— Kaye Northcott, “Round Up the Usual Enigmas”, New York Times, February 23, 1992

A donnybrook is so called after Donnybrook, Ireland, a suburb of Dublin that once held an annual fair known for its brawls.

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for donnybrook

Definitely a better word than slugabed!

So there were quite a few options today, but I wasn’t really enthused by the Donnybrook Scouts or the band “Donnybrook“.

Microsoft is apparently working on a new way for FPS’s to reach true MMO status despite the slow upstream bandwidth called, wait for it … Donnybrook.

Attention campers: video spawns at the link.

This one falls into sense 2 … a heated quarrel. You could call this a fight, but I’m not quite sure it qualifies.

Toe the link!

I really expected to see some real mob fights and such, but none were in the first couple pages of hits. Weird.

slugabed \SLUHG-uh-bed\, noun:

One who stays in bed until a late hour; a sluggard.

Nemecek’s business is not for slugabeds. He opens for business every weekday at 4 a.m.
— Drew Fetherston, “He Can Really Make Pigs Fly”, Newsday, December 12, 1994

I found Oriana, as usual, up before me, for I always was a sad slugabed.
— W. Hurton, Doomed Ship

All save Whit elected to sleep in that morning. Whit came back to report that he had spotted the tracks of a doe and a fawn made in the new snow directly beneath my unoccupied stand, and I regretted being a slugabed.
— “Paying Tribute to Deer in Minnesota Woods”, New York Times, December 6, 1998

Slugabed is from slug, “sluggard” + abed, “in bed.”

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for slugabed

Interesting word for a return to Tube of the Day. I thought for sure I would find nothing with such an archaic word, but sure enough, we have two youtube videos.
The first is a video demonstration (done in AfterEffect) showcasing a fancy-schmancy new typeface. The music for the video is by a band called Slugabed (hence the hit).

The link is an inspiration … or something.

The second video appears to be a test video of someone playing around with texture and a graphics renderer set in time to music by … you guessed it … slugabed.

It’s, well, quirky.

Allow me to render a link.

And since they have a, well, fortuitous name, here’s their myspace page. Hope you like electronica … at least, I think it’s electronica. I’m not good with such things.

Hopefully tomorrow’s word will be more interesting, and produce some humor. I much prefer the funny on my blogs.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!

So I’ve fallen too far behind to keep pushing off more until I can catch up, so I’ll start from today and backfill when possible.

Wan \WAHN\, adjective:
1. Having a pale or sickly hue; pale; pallid.
2. Lacking vitality, as from weariness, illness, or unhappiness; feeble.
3. Lacking in intensity or brightness; dim or feeble.

She was concerned about her grandson’s wan appearance. “So skinny,” she would say in Yiddish, “such a plucked little owl.”
— Herbert G. Goldman, Banjo Eyes

Her pale, pinched lips, sunken eyes and wan, haggard cheeks presented a mournful contrast to her former self.
— Wilkie Collins, Iolani

. . .some wan heroine in a Gothic romance, keening over a faithless lover, trembling before a murderous stalker, falling into the arms of her rescuers.
— Marilyn Stasio, review of Final Jeopardy by Linda Fairstein, New York Times, July 28, 1996

Through the frayed curtain at my window, a wan glow announces the break of day.
— Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Wan is from Old English wann, “gloomy, dark.”

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for wan

Wan should come up with a lot (although I keep thinking of Wide Area Network).

God I love geeks with a camera!

Use the link, young Padawan

Does this mean I have to change the name of the blog to GooTube of the Day? Maybe, they’ll call it Toobgle?

And now, your creepy ‘Hoff Moment of the Day:

Link in my Car!

It’s been nearly two weeks since my last post. I’m sorry for that. It’s not like anyone but Mrs. Bixby (Not Her Real Name) reads this, but others may later. I’m still sorry.

It’s been a very difficult last few weeks. I could go over the litany of excuses (work, family, moving to a new place and throwing a three-year-old’s birthday party one week later – today – and a non-recoverable computer crash) but who wants to hear that?

Instead, how about a funny youtube movie until I can catch up on TubeoftheDay?

This one is for the boys. Ladies, if you don’t get this, you’re not supposed to. Gentlemen, now that you know them, follow the rules.

Always wash your hands after you link

Monomania \mon-uh-MAY-nee-uh; -nyuh\, noun:
1. Pathological obsession with a single subject or idea.
2. Excessive concentration of interest upon one particular subject or idea.

One of the themes in the book was the necessity for a leader to be passionate about the work. And sometimes in a corporate setting, passion becomes monomania.
— “Balancing the Personal and the Professional”, New York Times, October 10, 1999

It is a monomania that approaches a frenzy in which girlfriends or wife, family and sleep, mean nothing.
— Newgate Callendar, “Crime”, New York Times, January 4, 1987

He was . . . a rather impossible person — self-absorbed to the point of monomania (when lesser beings presumed to take part in his monologues, he would say “Quite” and then continue along his solitary path).
— Thomas M. Disch, “Later Auden”, Washington Post, July 4, 1999

After visiting American prisons Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, wrote that social reformers in the United States had been swept up in “the monomania of the penitentiary system,” convinced that prisons were “a remedy for all the evils of society.”
— Eric Schlosser, “The Prison-Industrial Complex”, The Atlantic, December 1998

Monomania is derived from the Greek elements mono-, “one, single, alone” + mania, “madness, frenzy, enthusiasm.”

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for monomania

No hits on YouTube or Google Video.

Aesthete \ES-theet\, noun:
One having or affecting great sensitivity to beauty, as in art or nature.

Beijing, with its stolid, square buildings and wide, straight roads, feels like the plan of a first-year engineering student, while Shanghai’s decorative architecture and snaking, narrow roads feel like the plan of an aesthete.
— “Sky’s the Limit in Shanghai”, Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1999

But he was also an aesthete with a connoisseur’s eye for the wild modernist innovations with letterforms and layout of the 1920s.
— Rick Poynor, “Herbert Spencer”, The Guardian, March 15, 2002

Where the standard Oxford aesthete of the 1920s had been showily dissipated, full of wild talk about decadence and beauty, Auden was preaching a new gospel of icy austerity and self-control.
— Ian Hamilton, Against Oblivion

Aesthete is from Greek aisthetes, “one who perceives,” from aisthanesthai, “to perceive.”

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for aesthete

Nothing deserves an arty youTube video more than the word Aesthete.

The beauty is in the link.

Fulsome \FUL-sum\, adjective:
1. Offensive to the taste or sensibilities.
2. Insincere or excessively lavish; especially, offensive from excess of praise.

He recorded the event in his journal: “Long evening visit from Mr. Langtree–a fulsome flatterer.”
— Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City

Concealed disgust under the appearance of fulsome endearment.
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World

Fulsome is from Middle English fulsom, from full + -som, “-some.”

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for fulsome

He shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die – and because the man took his candy.

Because you’re mine, he walks the link!

Ostensible \ah-STEN-suh-bul\, adjective:
Represented or appearing to be true, but not necessarily so.

The credibility of the energy-trading sector has been severely damaged by disclosures of sham transactions in energy trading, designed to build up ostensible sales and profits and therefore share prices of the trading companies.
— James Flanigan, “Dynegy CEO Quits as Probe of Sham Trades Intensifies”, Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2002

Aspects of environmentalism have long been criticized as using ostensible concerns about nature to serve private purposes such as property values.
— Gregg Easterbrook, “The case for sprawl”, The New Republic, March 15, 1999

After an epidemic of yellow fever in 1798, in which coffins had been sold by itinerant vendors on street corners, Burr established the Manhattan Company, with the ostensible aim of bringing clean water to the city from the Bronx River but in fact designed as a front for the creation of New York’s second bank, rivalling Hamilton’s Bank of New York.
— “Soaking the poor”, The Economist, March 16, 2000

We might define play as pleasurable activity in which the means is more important than the ostensible end.
— Karl Meninger, Love Against Hate

Ostensible comes from Medieval Latin ostensibilis, from the Latin verb ostendere, “to show,” and is related to ostentatious, “showy.”

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for ostensible

Beware Dairy Madness!!!

This Link could happen to you too!