Word of the day

[hellymedic]

Dehiscent

[T42]

I could have told you what that meant if I hadn't read it first.

[Jakob W]

thixotropic

e.g. ketchup, something I always remember my father mentioning.

[thread awakening alert]

Thixotropic is one of the (few!) things I recall from my fluid dynamics lectures, but Google tells me there's an opposite term 'rheopectic' (i.e. time-dependent shear-thickening) I didn't know. Custard and Oobleck are shear-thickening but apparently not time-dependent, and so are 'dilatant'.

[Giraffe]

Polyfilla is (was?) dilatant - it can be too stiff when mixing then too soft when in use. Damned nuisance as it's the opposite of what's needed.

[ian]

Deliquescent is a word I quite like, suitably onomatopoetic.

[Wowbagger]

Heather honey is an excellent example of a thixotropic gel. It presents practical problems for the beekeeper in that the honey cannot be extracted from the comb by means of a centrifugal extractor. It's usually sold in chunks of cut comb, which accounts in part for the high price: bees have to consume about 4lb of sugar for every 1lb of beeswax they produce.

[Giraffe]

Deliquescent is a word I quite like, suitably onomatopoetic.

As in juvenile deliquescent?

[Canardly]

Verisimilitude

[spesh]

Deliquescent is a word I quite like, suitably onomatopoetic.

As in juvenile deliquescent?

That's one way to describe a child having a tearful meltdown in a supermarket... 

[T42]

My school dictionary used to fall open with porbeagle at the top of the left-hand page and probang opposite.  The one's a fish; the other isn't. The usage they gave only mentioned the oesophagus, though.  The Inlaw Paw, having served on the medical side of the RN during WW2, spoke of other channels.

[hatler]

Palimpsest.

[spesh]

Thagomizer - the spiky business end of a stegosaurid dinosaur's tail.

(Coined in 1982 by Gary Larson in his comic The Far Side)

[citoyen]

Palimpsest.

adj. Superlative form of palimps. "He was the palimpsest dude in the whole of our year at school."

Also the name of Gore Vidal's autobiography, which I think is probably where I first came across the word.

[T42]

Palimpsest.

adj. Superlative form of palimps. "He was the palimpsest dude in the whole of our year at school."

Also the name of Gore Vidal's autobiography, which I think is probably where I first came across the word.

Someone once told me that he had thrown up in a piano, but it turned out to have been Eddie Grundy. 

[hatler]

Twatspertise, c/o Mr Larrington in the Super Twat thread.