Sesquipedalius' F Words Trivia Quiz

Answer: pretend, dissemble

To feign is to create a false impression, to give a false appearance, or to disguise. The modern English verb "feign" derives from a Middle English word ("feynen") meaning to disguise. It descended, via the Old French ("feindre"), from the Latin "fingere" meaning to touch, fabricate, or change. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino said, "Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I'm not interested in, I can't even feign interest."

Answer: athletic training of varying intensity

"Gösta" Holmér competed in the 1912 and 1920 Olympic Games in track and field events. He coached the Swedish cross-country team in the 1930s and developed an interval training technique called "fartlek." "Fart" is the Swedish word for speed and "lek" is the Swedish word for play.

The neologism was understood to mean speed-play. His method was to increase both speed and endurance by alternating anaerobic sprints with aerobic walking or jogging. While developed particularly for runners, the method has found use in general conditioning, weight loss, and off-season training.

Answer: a ghost, a poltergeist, an incorporeal vision

The Modern English noun "fantast" traveled from the Ancient Greek "phantastes" (boaster) via the Medieval Latin "phantasta" (an ostentatious braggart) through the German "Fantast" (visionary, dreamer) to English in about 1580-1590. The term is more common in British English than in North American.

It may describe a person who has fantasies or a person who confuses fantasies with reality. Fantasy, in this sense, is a dreamy pleasant state with few practical implications. A "fantast" could be an author like Neil Gaiman who has written novels, comic books, short stories, screenplays, and audio theater. Similarly, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling could properly be called fantasts because of their writing. For his work in the visual arts, Salvador Dalí has earned the epithet. More practical were the intense imaginations of Nikola Tesla and René Descartes. People who engage in woolgathering and daydream may be called fantasts, as may futurists who predict utopian or dystopian times ahead.

Answer: iron deposits inside a blood vessel

In Aldous Huxley's first novel, "Crome Yellow" (1921), he observes the young poet Denis Stone: "With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar's long bristly back." A ferrule is any collar, strap, or band enclosing a shaft, pole, or pipe.

This metal part reinforces whatever it encircles and prevents it from splitting. The ferrule on a pool cue may be made of plastic or carbon fibre but one occasionally sees higher-end (usually older) cues with ferrules of brass, gold plate, or ivory.

The Medieval Latin noun "viriola" meant a bracelet, which entered French in the 12th century as "virole" meaning collar, which arrived in English in the 1610s with its present meaning.

Answer: olive oil

In one sense, fissile materials are those which can undergo nuclear fission. In another wider sense, fissile describes a material which can be cleft or divided in the direction of its grain. From the perspective of nuclear engineering, a fissile material is one capable of sustaining a chain reaction of nuclear fission.

This has been referred to colloquially as "splitting the atom" since Ernest Rutherford's 1919 experiments bombarding nitrogen atoms and John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton's 1932 experiments reducing lithium atoms to helium nuclei using a particle accelerator.

The physical properties of substances like a stalk of celery, a block of wood, and a crystal allow them to be cleft smoothly into parts. Likewise slate, well-made buttermilk (American) biscuits, and the keratin in finger- and toenails.

The word "fissile" derives from the Latin "fissilis" meaning easy to split, cleave, separate, or divide.

Answer: to gibe, barrack, mock, scoff

The verb "flout" means to treat someone or something with contemptuous disregard. American poet Edwin Markham (1852-1940) wrote, "He drew a circle that shut me out - / Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. / But love and I had the wit to win: / We drew a circle and took him In!" A parallel meaning is to demonstrate contempt for the law, rules, or norms. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle (3 July 2010) about black American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson said, "He flouted many of that era's social conventions." There is no consensus concerning the origin of the verb "to flout." It might relate to the Middle English "flowten" and the Middle Dutch "fluyten" both meaning to play the flute.

Answer: frivolous, inconsequential, excessive

The American word "foofaraw" (also spelt variously as "fofaraw," "fofarow," "fofarraw," "foofaraw," "foofoorah," "forfarraw," "froufraw") appears to be a pioneer coinage arising during the Western Movement. It is sometimes used as a noun and others as an adjective. When attached to things, it means frivolous, excessive, flashy, gaudy, and/or tawdry, often with reference to decoration, ornamentation, architecture, or apparel. When attached to the reaction to a thing, person, or event, it means a very big fuss, brouhaha, dust-up, upset, or outcry over a matter of little or no importance or consequence.

There is no etymological certainty about the origin of this word. It might derive from the Spanish "fanfarrón" meaning a braggart, boaster, show-off, loud mouth, or blowhard. The Spanish word may derive from the medieval Arabic "farfar" meaning talkative, frivolous. The Modern English might derive from the French "frou frou" meaning the rustling sound of a woman's skirts or from "fou faraud" meaning a silly dandy. When William Shakespeare wrote his play "Much Ado About Nothing", he might as well have named it "The Foofaraw", had only the word been invented in 1599.

Answer: a gold ingot

Samuel Johnson included "friable" in his 1755 dictionary. He said it meant something which was easily crumbled or turned into a powder. He found it, inter alia, in the "Historia Naturalis" of Francis Bacon. It has been used as an adjective to mean crumbly, fragmentable, or easy to turn into mush. English lexicologist Susan Dent wrote, "Friable isn't often used of food, yet its meaning lends itself perfectly to pastry and crumbly biscuits." The Latin transitive verb "frio" means to crumble or break into bits.

A related adjective "friabilis" means crumbly or prone to be broken into small pieces. A Middle French term "friable," meaning to crumble, led to the English adjective in the 1500s.

Answer: shining brightly, radiant, dazzling

The Modern English adjective "fulgent" was derived directly from the Latin "fulgentum" meaning shining, bright, dazzling. "Fulgentum" participates in the family of words containing the Proto-Indo-European root "*bhel (1)" which begat many words in many languages, e.g. beluga (white whales), Beltane (spring festival with bonfires), blancmange (sweet white dessert), blaze, bleach, and such.

"Fulgent" is less common now than it has been in prior years. In "The Poetical Works of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton", in "King Arthur" (Book XII, Stanza 142), he wrote, "The fulgent splendour from the arms divine / Paled the hell-fires 'round God's elected Man, / And burst like Truth ..." Bulwer-Lytton is the author responsible for the opening line of the 1830 novel "Paul Clifford": "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents -- except at occasional intervals ..."

Answer: puffed up, self-important, sententious

In addition to its original meaning of a sort of strong, coarse fabric made of cotton and linen, fustian refers (by some kind of analogy) to speech or writing which is pompous, bombastic, pretentious, and/or inflated. The word history of "fustian" is all about the cloth from around 1200 on.

Its use to mean pompous, bombastic, and inflated appears to be figurative from the 1590s. In World War II, Allied forces mounted a British paratrooper and glider assault on German positions in Sicily. Their intent was to seize the Primosole Bridge across the Simeto River.

The code name for this daring (and largely unsuccessful) attack was Operation Fustian. The Royal Army's naming convention for operational code names was to use references to ordinary, common, everyday items, in this case, a type of cloth used extensively in the military for its durability and practicality.