Jazz Up Your Lesson
ALL KINDS OF PEOPLE
Want to know more and more precise names for people around you?
Then lets play a guessing game!
Here you will find lots of different names for various categories of people.
Try to guess who these people might possibly be by amusing storylets.
Then check your guess with the help of the glossary.
| “That gammer is a gork, and I don’t know how to help her,” Dr. Blaster admitted.
“Perhaps we should send her back to the assisted-living facility,” suggested the nurse. | Derek was proud of being a monomath. His brother, Julian, was a polymath and had more friends, but Derek could always show him up whenever there was any discussion about turbine engines. |
| Would you rather be an infracaninophile or a makebate? | Would you rather be a crawk or a criticaster? |
| Bernard’s colleagues had been calling his wife, Deanna, “Xanthippe” behind her back, ever since she lost her temper with him at the company picnic. She felt bad about her behaviour, but it was no picnic being married to Bernard, that supreme aeolist. She simply could not listen to another one of his uninspired “insights” and had told him right then and there to shut up. | William refused to let Steve touch him. He had seen the visagiste turn other actors into stiff-faced China dolls, and was not going to be his next victim. Plus Steve was clearly an autotonsorialist, and looked awful. There was no way Will was going to let him get his hands on his own hair! |
| Mimi knew that Bernard was an oneirocritic when she married him. But she stopped telling him her dreams after a while, since she tended to be a pantomancer as well as she tried of his admonitions. | Would you rather be a bellibone or an objurgatrix? |
GLOSSARY:
aeolist a pompous windy bore who pretends to have inspiration.
autotonsorialist a person who cuts his own hair, or looks as if he cuts his own hair.
bellibone an old word that comes through French “belle et bonne”, from the Latin “bellum” which is beautiful, and “bonus” which is good. So the word means literally “a woman who is both beautiful and good”.
crawk a radio announcer who imitates animals.
criticaster a third-rate, mean-spirited, contemptible critic.
gammer an old woman.
gork in medical slang, a person with an unknown sickness; in fact it is an acronymic word formed from “God only really knows”.
infracaninophile is someone who defends or champions the underdog.
makebate is someone who stirs up trouble or strife between others.
monomath a person who knows everything about one thing and nothing about anything else.
objurgatrix to chide or rebuke harshly, and means a scolding, sharp-tongued, shrewish woman.
oneirocritic an interpreter of dreams.
pantomancer a person who sees omens in all events or a lurking lesson in every experience.
polymath a person of superior, wide-ranging knowledge.
visagiste a makeup artist.
Xanthippe an ill-tempered, browbeating woman.
Xanthippe was the wife of Socrates, a brilliant philosopher and teacher and also a repugnant runt who was hardly God’s gift to a woman. Xanthippe may have been a henpecking shrew, but then who would not be when faced with a man of such hellacious ugliness and arrogance?