Post details: Words We've Heard - Shambolic

Tuesday February 7, 2006

Permalink 08:48 pm, Categories: Words, 155 words   English (UK)

Words We've Heard - Shambolic

Today’s word is shambolic. According to Answers.com it is an adjective, used chiefly as British slang, meaning disorderly or chaotic.

An example from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Now, nearly four months and three chief judges later, the court has actually sat for just 10 days, and those sittings have often descended into shambolic shouting matches between the defence and the bench, peppered with walk-outs. Last week, the defendants boycotted the court, which continued hearing the case without them before adjourning for 10 days. Such scenes have led some observers to label the trial a sham, warning that it may help make a martyr out of Saddam Hussein.

What a great word. Say it a few times and feel how it rolls around in your mouth.

It seems like it might also be used appropriately in discussing the US State of the Union but I could not find an references in US newspapers ;)

Comments, Pingbacks:

Comment from: Desmond Harte [Visitor]
From the Oxford University Dictionary (the bible of the lingo - all 500,000 words. That's words. It excludes terms like "pig in a poke" or "cul de sac", which mean something other or more than the literal interpretation of their component parts).

Shambolic

[f. SHAMBLE n.1 5b, perh. after SYMBOLIC a.]

colloq

Chaotic, disorderly, undisciplined.
Reported to be ‘in common use’ in 1958.

1970 Times 18 June 9 His office in Printing House Square is so impeccably tidy that it is..a standing reproach to the standard image of shambolic newspaper offices. 1975 Times 14 June 8/5 The average listener is in the position of anybody who encounters an organization at work for the first time. It may appear shambolic but how much is that because he hasn't yet made sense of it. 1978 R. JANSSON News Caper xiii. 110 We may have a shambolic landing, Jean. I want you to go right through the aircraft reminding people about the emergency drill. 1980 Jrnl. R. Soc. Arts July 509/1 It will continue in a much more shambolic manner than the urbanization that has occurred in the Western World.

BTW, you do know we are missing two letters in the English alphabet; "ng" (which looks like a cross between a 3 and a Z accounting for the peculiar proper pronunciation of Menzies as Mengies) and "ss" (as in "missing", which looks like an italicised f, which you can see in texts pre c1700). No wonder people find English a hard language to master when you add things like where were and wear or there, there and they're.
Permalink Friday February 10, 2006 @ 21:05

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