Saturday, April 07, 2012

Bloomy Bricks and Butter Tooth

I'm teaching a ghost class in the fall so yesterday I was reading an old ghost story by Oliver Onions, who has the best name for an old ghost story writer of old ghost stories. Mr. Onions used the adjective "bloomy" and I wanted to look it up. And I thought, "I know which dictionary will have bloomy in it: WEBSTER'S NEW TWENTIETH CENTURY DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, UNABRIDGED, SECOND EDITION from 1974." So I opened it up and looked up bloomy and yes bloomy means exactly what you think bloomy means and I was only confused because Mr. Onions applied it to bricks and I had to sit and think a minute about what kind of bricks "bloomy bricks" might be but sitting and thinking a minute never hurt anybody. While looking up "bloomy" I accidentally ran across "butter tooth," which WEBSTER'S NEW TWENTIETH CENTURY DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, UNABRIDGED, SECOND EDITION from 1974 defines as "a broad front tooth."