A.Word.A.Day --sprattle

A.Word.A.Day

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Oct 21, 2014

This week's theme
Words formed by metathesis (a transposition of sounds)

This week's words
mullion
sprattle
brummagem
pernancy
girn

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A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

sprattle

PRONUNCIATION:

(SPRAT-l)

MEANING:

noun: A scramble or struggle.
verb intr.: To scramble or struggle.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Scottish sprattle, from switching of sounds in spartle (to scatter). Earliest documented use: 1500.

USAGE:

"I watched him sprattle
as bugs do sprattle
with their legs like so, like bugs's legs, stretched out and sprattling."
Walter Nash; The Language of Humour; Routledge; 1985.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals, the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great creative scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned if at all. -Martin Gardner, mathematician and writer (1914-2010)

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