Monday, August 26, 2013

Fwd: doggerel: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dictionary.com <doctor@dictionary.com>
Date: 2013/8/25
Subject: doggerel: Dictionary.com Word of the Day
To: "Hector William G." <hectorpinillos@gmail.com>

Word of the Day for Sunday, August 25, 2013

doggerel \DAW-ger-uhl, DOG-er-\, adjective:

1. (of verse) a. comic or burlesque, and usually loose or irregular in measure. b. rude; crude; poor.

noun:
1. doggerel verse.

Whoever wrote that doggerel had picked up the Virginia gossip about Jefferson having a black "wife," but Callender assumed the dialect poet had only a suspicion.
-- William Safire, Scandalmonger, 2000

I found myself in a house of kindly people, who had found me on the third day wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets of St. John's Wood. They have told me since that I was singing some insane doggerel about "The Last Man Left Alive! Hurrah! The Last Man Left Alive!"
-- H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds, 1898

Doggerel is likely a blend of dog and the pejorative suffix -rel. It came to English in the 1400s as a way to insult bad poetry by implying that it could have been created by dogs, or could have only been enjoyed by dogs.

Read the full entry | See synonyms | Comment on today's word | Suggest tomorrow's word

Yesterday's word | Previous words | Help

Words of the Day? How about words of timeless wisdom?

Introducing our Quotes channel! "Life itself is a quotation." - Jorge Luis Borges
Check out the Quote of the Day ››

Why do people end sentences with "so"? What effect does it have on conversation?

Welcome to Part II of our discussion on the word so. Last week we explored the sentence-initial so, and today we'll be looking at ending sentences with so-a phenomenon called "the dangling so." Despite its widespread usage, this construct seems to irk people even more than the sentence-initial so; there's even a Facebook group called "I...
Read more ››

Dictionary.com Word of the Day	You are subscribed to the Word of the Day as: hectorpinillos@gmail.com
Subscriber since: June 03, 2013 Unsubscribe from the Word of the Day	To subscribe to the Word of the Day by email, please send a blank message to: join-wordoftheday@lists.lexico.com
©2013 by Dictionary.com, LLC. 555 12th Street Suite 500 Oakland CA 94607	Subscriptions to the Word of the Day can also be managed online
	Tell a friend about the Word of the Day!