Funniest Word?

[Psy-Fi]

Flotsam & Jetsam

[Lexi Darling]

Persnickety

[Psy-Fi]

Gadzooks

[Lisnaholic]

Flotsam & Jetsam

Good one! ...and an example of words that I used for years, until I one day made the effort to discover how they are not the same:-

Flotsam is defined as debris in the water that was not deliberately thrown overboard, often as a result from a shipwreck or accident. Jetsam describes debris that was deliberately thrown overboard by a crew of a ship in distress, most often to lighten the ship's load. Under maritime law the distinction is important.

[Psy-Fi]

Good one! ...and an example of words that I used for years, until I one day made the effort to discover how they are not the same:-

Same here. Until I looked up the definition, I always assumed that those two words referred to any debris, man-made or natural, that would be seen floating in a large body of water or washed up on shore.

[Lexi Darling]

Brouhaha

[Psy-Fi]

Ballyhoo

[Lisnaholic]

Flipperty-gibbet is a word that has lost the popular vote: nobody uses it anymore, though I remember hearing it as a child. It's a noun for a distracted, silly person and here are two possible origins for it:-

What is the origin of the term "flibberty gibbet"?

Derek Barnicoat, Chilliwack, BC, Canada:
Flibbertigibbet means "fly by the gibbet" - the scaffold where the bodies of executed criminals were left to rot. No doubt these attracted crows and other carrion feeders. Presumably the inferred meaning is "flighty" and possibly in a more sinister sense than its current meaning.

Dorothy Macedo, London:
I understood flibberty gibbett to be a sailing reference relating to a torn mainsail which flapped loudly with little effect on anything, since the yardarm on sailing a vessel was also the gibbett (used for hangings) it made sense to me.

Another word that has also lost the popular vote is Refrigerator. Yes, it's still around, but in the UK people almost always talk about "the fridge". In Spanish Refrigerador is reduced to "refri". So the full word is my candidate for one of the least popular words in the world: avoided, rejected, reduced in at least two European languages.