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The ordinary-sized words are for everyone, but the big ones are especially for children.



Friday 17 May 2019

Word To Use Today: maccaboy.

I accept that using this word is going to be a challenge, but it's such a lovely word, maccaboy, so full of energy and bounce, that it will add exotic grace any vocabulary.

Maccaboy is a dark rose-scented sort of snuff. (Snuff is powdered tobacco. You sniff it. It makes you sneeze. Yes, very odd.)

I can just remember people taking snuff. Well, I can remember one person taking snuff. There was an old man who was sometimes on the bus to town when I was a very little girl (this was in the 1960s). He was smelly, filthy and fat, poor man, and his handkerchief, when he dragged it out of one of his many pockets after he'd sneezed, was a thing of dreadful, horrid fascination.

I doubt this man's snuff was anything as refined as maccaboy, but I note the essences used in vaping also involve exotic scents.

So, it seems, the folly of man is constant, if not the fashions.

Word To Use Today: maccaboy. This word comes from the French macouba, from the name of the district of Martinique where it was made. 


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