What's the latest English word you learned thanks to WK

I’m not sure ‘overgrowth’ is a great synonym for that :thinking: overgrowth implies a negative connotation, whereas luxuriant is a very positive word.

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If you google image search for しげる, you’ll see plenty of things that look more “overgrown” than “luxuriant”. And vice versa. I think both are fine.

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Oh, I see. I guess I was answering purely from the point of view of synonyms for ‘luxuriant’ rather than synonyms for the actual Japanese word in question. Oops.

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nailbat… is it an animal? do I hit people with it?

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Don’t forget de geoduck.

Nailbat

I feel like it started out as a kind of joke weapon in games? I associate it with zombie apocalypse-type scenarios… But I’m not sure what the origin of the idea is, honestly. Anyone know?

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I might be wrong, but as far as I remember, it’s Yonder.
Btw, later I found out that there’s also a game called Yonder and it’s great :sweat_smile:

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is a type of Morning star (the cheap one :slight_smile: ) Morning star (weapon) - Wikipedia

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Eddy. I still don’t get what it means to dig out an eddy.

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But do we know when nailbats specifically became a thing? Was there a particular game or show that introduced them, or were they a real-life thing before that? I’m genuinely intrigued by them :sweat_smile:

The OED says the earliest recorded morning star (which is what a nail bat is a variant of) dates back to 1684.

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… and just right now I learned “outhouse”. Not exactly what I would have guessed without a google image search :wink:

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The one i remember the most was from the Radical 广 - Mullet.
I’d like to share the german word for that as well: “Vokuhila”- a short word for “VOrne KUrz HInten LAng” (short in the front, long in the back).

There’ve been a some of others hidden in the explanations - but i don’t find them or remember them at the moment.

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Yonder. It means to look or glance at something distant, apparantly. :stuck_out_tongue:

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It’s more like… used to indicate something distant, ‘over there’. You might say “look at yonder tree”, for example, kind of meaning “look at that tree way over there”.

It can also indicate “the far distance” as a noun itself. It’s not a verb though.

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Stilts (zancos) never really needed that word before
sickle (hoz) of course
clique (pandilla)
and i have one better

plutocrat… which is the same in spanish but for some reason i didn’t even know what it meant… actually the japanese vocab helped me to understand

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That’s the earliest recorded use of the English word “morning star” in print, not the earliest known existence of an actual object. They’re from the medieval period and appear in art from at least as early as the 14th century. Here’s an example in art dated to the first quarter of the 15th century:

There’s also the related Japanese weapon the 金棒

What @Radish8 was asking about though is specifically a baseball bat modified by driving nails through the striking end to create an improvised weapon. If we’re going to expand that to “a wooden club with spikes in the end” then that’s a weapon of prehistoric origin, which isn’t a very interesting answer. I think @Radish8’s original question is a lot more interesting so I’ll look into it. I know improvised wooden clubs with nails driven through the end were used in trench raids in World War I, but I’m not sure any of them were actual baseball bats. If I were to guess at their origin I would say they were used in 19th century New England gang warfare but I’ll have to look for actual sources to confirm that. It’s possible they’re a fantasy weapon invented in the 20th century for pulp novels and comics.

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This is everything I wanted, thank you.

If you do manage to work out their ‘proper’ origin please tag me!

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Could you ford on a Ford?

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Now we know you’re not a druid, nor a communist! :wink:

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