This week’s theme
Words made with animal parts

This week’s words
dogleg
stickybeak
moth-wing
griffonage


Wordsmith Games

🧩	Jigsaw Riddle Three Girls
🌍	Langitude Trace gotham home

A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(grif-uh-NAHZH)

MEANING:

noun: Careless or illegible handwriting; scrawl.

ETYMOLOGY:

From French griffonner (to scribble or scrawl), from griffe (claw). Earliest documented use: 1832.

NOTES:

English calls an indecipherable scrawl chicken scratch, and French clearly agrees: griffonage comes from griffe (claw). Medical schools probably require doctors to take a solemn oath to maintain a prescribed level of griffonage on every prescription.

My dad was not a doctor, but he practiced griffonage par excellence. The post office sometimes returned his letters because no one could decipher the address. We joked that he should add extra stamps to cover the decoding fee. I would sometimes set one of his letters aside and ask him to decipher it the next time we met. At times, even he couldn’t.

Thank God Sholes et al. for the typewriter, which my dad used for all his nonpersonal correspondence and, mercifully, some personal letters too.

USAGE:

“Had I the right rag paper, and minerals to mix a passable Elizabethan ink, I could reproduce a couple of lines of Shakespeare’s griffonage.”
Bradford Morrow; The Forgers; Mysterious Press; 2014.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: