Monday, March 19, 2012

Word of the Day: mooreeffoc

mooreeffoc (n or adj)

Something that appears strange when seen from an unusual angle.

"In addition to making humorous puns on cliches, Anthony was here allowing us to perceive a natural phenomenon from a new direction; he was fabricating in essence a mooreeffoc vision."
--Robert A. Collins, in The Scope of the Fantastic

The word comes originally from Charles Dickens, who used it in his abandoned autobiography. He was sitting in a London cafe one day and noticed that "Moor-eeffoc" is "coffee room" spelled backwards; Dickens was looking at the establishment's name from the "wrong" side of the window. G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien later used "mooreeffoc" in print to mean something suddenly seen in a strangely new way. (You might say that David Lynch films are full of mooreeffoc places, objects, and people.)

It's one of those words that is more commented on than actually used, but I feel up to the challenge: "Her face transformed into a frightening mooreeffoc as he looked up from the floor, with her spiked heel pressed firmly against his chest."

I'm no Dickens.

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