"Nyctalope", "ejaculatory", "Eburnean"... Better to do it twice before pronouncing these words as their resonance is confusing.
As long as your interlocutor has a licentious soul, he will consider that you are not talking about a clouding of vision, a short prayer or what is ivory in color, but about something else entirely.
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As the
Dictionary of the French Academy
indicates , a "homophone", taken from the Greek "homophônos" ("which makes the same sound"), is said of one or more words having the same pronunciation as a another term with a different meaning.
Some are well known.
Also it is a question of not making a counterpoint by saying that one is going to "poculate", that is to say to participate in a wedding, a debauchery, for example.
Unorthodox if any, some terms also border on double meaning because of a common etymology.
Do you know the true meaning of these words?
Nychthemeron
Not to be confused with a very uncourteous insult, this word finds its place more in the vocabulary of a scientist than in that of a clumsy.
Born in the 19th century, “nychtémère” (from the Greek “nukhthêmeron”, composed of “nuktos”, “night”, and “hêmera”, “day”) is a term qualifying a period of 24 hours.
As the
Treasury of the French language
specifies , the latter includes a day, a night, and corresponds to a biological cycle.
Also we speak, in zootechnics, of the inversion of the day-night cycle on the moment of foaling during the nychthemeron in horses.
In 1920, in
Question calendar
, the Abbé Chauve-Bertrand wrote:
“The day started from evening to twilight;
the diurnal part and the night part united bore the name of nychthemeron.
Cenobite
Borrowed from the Christian Latin “coenobita”, itself derived from “coenobium” (“community, monastery”), a “cenobite” is a monk living in community.
Attested from the 13th century in the French language, this term, which should not be chanted, designates, by extension, a person living in an austere way, withdrawn from life in society.
In the
History of French Literature from 1789 to Our Days
(1936), the essayist Albert Thibaudet said of Flaubert:
"To this collector of documents and this cenobite of style, the fabric, the will, the health , the temperament of Balzac had failed.”
ground squirrel
Chances are you'll never see rodents in the sciuridae family, commonly known as squirrels, the same way again.
The latter are, in effect, “gophers”.
In other words, animals that like seeds.
Because just like the word that qualifies the male seed, the origin of “squirphile” is found in the Greek “sperma”, “seed”, and “philein”, “to love”.
"In the United States, ground squirrels are even more abundant than in Eastern Europe and Asia"
, could we read in 1879, in the
Encyclopedic Dictionary of Medical Sciences
by Amédée Dechambre.
Read alsoSix language errors that penalize us
Chatmite
"Mrs. Lebien's voice had a false, chattemite inflection
," wrote Léon Daudet in
Le Coeur et l'absence
(1917).
When it appeared in 1295, probably in reference to the cat keeping watch, the term "chattemite" was the nickname for a turret.
It was not until the 15th century that it began to designate behavior.
That of a person who affects a sweet, humble and flattering countenance to deceive others.
To say that someone likes to do the chattemite therefore comes down to saying that he is a flirt.
This also gave rise to the adjective “mitting pussy”.
The same Daudet, in
L'Astre noir
(1893), spoke of a "smoky and twisted pussy letter".
