Let's Stump Ben! A shirt.woot contest/game! Ends Thursday, 10/8 [ENDED]

defenestration

my favorite word

edit: may have lost to Ben already

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Exonerate

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Guernsey

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amphibology

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Onomatopoeia

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Superfice

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Spanghew

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Pilule

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hydrocarbon

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Asphyxiation

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murmuration

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Miter

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I see what you did there. :wink:

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Great word, @mylionmaker! One of my favorites, actually. It’s one of the few words where I remember my “first time” experience with it. It was a Thursday afternoon, I was eating an after-school snack of grapes and Cheese Nips on my couch, and watching this episode of my favorite after-school program: Mathnet.

As an aside, another one of my “first time” vocab memories is about the word “the.”

I was in Kindergarten, sitting at the kidney-bean table for reading time, waiting for my turn to read aloud. I was scanning ahead to make sure I could pronounce all the words that would come up in my allotted sentence, and was pleased to see that most were easy. All but one. I was stymied by an odd-looking three letter word with back-to-back consonants and the vowel stuck on the end.

“Tuh-huh-eh.” “Tuh-huh-eh,” I silently pronounced in my head over and over, as my turn grew closer and the panic began to rise.

I knew I was saying the word wrong, but couldn’t think of how else to pronounce it. In a last-ditch effort to save face, I scanned up a sentence or two and saw with palpable relief that Kenzie [last name redacted], the student right before me, was also going to have to read the tricky word out loud.

Well, her turn came, and she casually breezed past the word like it was old news. And it WAS! I was flabbergasted! That word was “the?” THE?! HOW DID I NOT RECOGNIZE “THE?!

The feeling of chagrin (and probably bruised ego) at having been stumped by such a simple word was SO intense that the memory of the moment has been seared into my brain.

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Going for the obscure, I see. Hmm… could be a tricky one.

emo

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Borborygmus

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A fun choice, @daveinwarshington. And speaking of Warshington, I’ve found that most people who stick an “r” in Washington also pronounce my name as “Benjerman,” which is a bit confusing because I’ve never been German. Mostly Italian, with a little British and Finnish thrown in for good measure.

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This one is giving me indigestion already…

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Yup.

My personality makes girls and old people want to call me Benny.

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