You wouldn’t have thought what you can learn …
J’ai appris un mot anglo-anglais pour faire des grimaçes.
… from reading an article on computer security:
The choice of a gurning picture may indicate that the worm’s writer is British. Gurning is an ancient Cumbrian practice of pulling a funny face and is famously practised in the village of Egremont at its annual crab apple fair.
I had never heard of gurning before, and neither have most of the dictionaries I checked. AMHD4 knows the word as girning (vb.: girn), and, wow, World Wide Words has an entry on it in the, er, Cumbrian spelling.
The activity it denotes is exemplified here and here — certainly topical in the context of crab apples.
Billets connexes : BBC "Word 4 Word", Amuse-bouche to zaibatsu, Thy "thee"s, Ed Felten..., Nouns and verbs on #wordpress, "Stateside marketability", For the danglers..., Euphemism of the day: concertina wire
Technorati (tags): anglais, English, gurning, language, words