Thread for words you never bothered to look up & one day you realized "I still don't know what that means"

fellacity

is that like dudetown

Here's one:

I can't seem to find the correct definition of the term "cosmic joke", which I understand relates to something specific, as opposed to well, gags about space aliens.

Ayn Rand used this (very minor part of the plot) of The Fountainhead to explain a "cosmic joke":

Keating reads a book by Lois Cook, and reasons that it must be very deep indeed, since he doesn't understand it. Keating meets with Lois Cook. She makes him uncomfortable; he tries to compliment her on her book, but she replies that it's tiresome to be understood by everyone. For her house she wants something ugly, simply for the sake of going against what is thought to be beautiful. Keating (an architect) tries to object, but takes the commission. When it is built, (a syndicated critic named ) Toohey refers to it as "a cosmic joke."
http://www.bookrags.com/notes/fou/PART19…

It was a joke on Keating because Keating didn't understand what had happened, but Toohey did.

hilarious imo

yeah, that was the only definition I could find, but it seemed rather contrived and WTF to be honest.

what makes you think it is a thing? did you read the rest of that yahoo answers page?

late on this but: always assumed excelsior was the stan lee ref which in turn I think ref'd the longfellow poem

I thought a cosmic joke was something in the vein of a Kafkaesque mockery at the hands of the universe at large.

choate/inchoate

x-post
Yeah, kind of a Depeche Mode "Blasphemous Rumours" thing.

"...But I think that God's got a sick sense of humor
And when I die I expect to find Him laughing."

choate/inchoate

otm

here's Scalia's take on choate

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E3D91339F930A35752C0A9669D8B63

assay!

scalia needs a slap if that's where his attention is during arguments

slap!-

'don't interrupt me when my sentence is inchaote, beyotch'

wile e chaote