Furiously Eclectic People

Vitriolic

adjective

[vick-tree-ol-ik]

Bitterly, scathing, caustic....

"It was vitriolic criticism"

slake

verb

[slāk]

1. quench or satisfy (one's thirst).
"we longed for a mountain spring to slake our thirst"

2. satisfy (desires).
"restaurants worked to slake the Italian obsession with food"

3. combine (quicklime) with water to produce calcium hydroxide.

I wanted to post this one because I came home to my wife, my 12yo and 10yo girls (the 3yo wasn't involved ) sitting about chuckling because they swore my 7yo had made up a word. The 7yo and I laughed even harder when we proved slake is a word... good times!

zoonosis noun \ˌzō-ə-ˈnō-səs, zō-ˈän-ə-səs\
plural zoonoses
a disease communicable from animals to humans under natural conditions

A good Scrabble word

Spot

Three-headed guardian of Hades' dominion.

Cerberus is Latin for the Greek kerberos, which means "spotted", thus Hades named his dog Spot.

Nice!

Retard

To slow down or hinder. Anyone who thinks it's a derogatory word is a retard.

A healthy lifestyle will help retard the aging process.

Well "retarded" can be used as slur. Then that's not cool.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinio....html?_r=0
http://www.r-word.org/r-word-not-acceptable-psa.aspx

Funny though I used the word probably into my 20's. I grew up with a cousin who had Down's Syndrome (literally, my aunt and cousins lived with us for a long while) and have been working in the field serving folks with developmental disabilities for over 20 years. But my sister and I would say "that's retarded" or the like when we were younger. I didn't stop using it until, after being promoted to Assistant Manager in the Group Home I'd been working in after a couple months, one of the folks who lived there responded to me (and I don't even remember what I said), a nice guy with some cognitive limitations, he said: "You're right Ron, that is retarded." Now I don't really use the word, even though I wasn't really ever using it as a derogatory term.

But yeah, it is a real word meaning "slow down or hinder" so it's all good!

"1984. Sometime in the spring. I went from retard to mentally handicapped. And then in 1987-88, I went from handicapped to challenged. I changed again. I'm probably changing right now. Who knows what I'll be next?"
~House of D

I also worked in a mentally challenged institution. It was quite rewarding but the political mumbo jumbo of changing terms could be a pain. Ultimately, internally, they were almost always referred to as "tards" but there was often a loving tone to it. Admittedly, some workers also weren't respectful.

I grew up with "mentally retarded" (formal) or simply "retarded" (informal and/or insult). I didn't encounter "retard" and "'tard" as derogatory words until (relatively) recently.

Anyway,

Pussy noun \ˈpu̇-sē\

The small billet of wood used in Tip-Cat. (colloquial)

No one is a better striker than Billy. He can hit the pussy fifty feet easily.

Heh, until the 1960's (I think) "idiot" "moron" and "imbecile" were diagnoses for levels of cognitive functioning.
Fun stuff.