

Nov 13, 2017 This week’s theme

Toponyms from fiction



This week’s words

grimgribber

ecotopia

ruritanian

edenic

stepford



Cover of the first edition of the play Image: Brick Row Book Shop Toponyms from fiction A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg



Luggage? Check. Passport? Check. Travel guide? Check!

Looks like you’re ready for the trip. But we can leave all this behind, because we are traveling to the land of imagination. The land where places such as El Dorado and Xanadu exist.



We’ll visit places that started out in fiction, and live on in the English language.



This week we’ll see five fictional toponyms (from Greek topos: place), words derived after names of fictional places. grimgribber PRONUNCIATION: (GRIM-gri-buhr)

MEANING: noun: Jargon of a trade.

ETYMOLOGY: From Grimgribber, an imaginary estate, discussed in the play Conscious Lovers (1722) by Richard Steele (1672-1729). Earliest documented use: 1722.

USAGE: “Cracking speech, William: it was a fine specimen of grimgribber.”

Philip Howard; The Lost Words; Robson Press; 2012.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign. -Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (13 Nov 1850-1894)





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