Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Word of the Day: mooreeffoc

What's the word I'm thinking of? Today, it's...

mooreeffoc [MOOR-ee-fok] (noun or adjective) TWITO, page 91

Something that appears strange when seen from an unusual angle

"That wild word, 'Moor Eeffoc,' is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle--the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact."
--G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)

This word comes 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 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." Sadly, I'm no Dickens.

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