Word of the Day: Ballyhoo

I found a cool site called Vintage Vocabulary (http://www.vintage-vocabulary.com/index.html). Here's the description from the site:

"Vintage Vocabulary features over 150 American words and expressions with intriguing histories. These include some that are now obsolete, but encapsulate colorful slices of America's past. Others are recent word inventions that seem like good candidates for future "vintage" status."

I love this! When I was a junior in high school we had to write this crazy mega paper that was a joint History/English assignment. We were given 5 pivotal time periods in American history and had to choose one to set our story in. Additionally, we were given certain aspects of the time period that we had to research and include in the paper. It was a pretty cool assignment and even though I did my typical procrastination, I had a great time doing the research. Naturally I chose to set my story during the Civil War...one of the things I chose to include was some dialect of the time. Ever since then I've been fascinated by "forgotten" words and expressions. So until I get tired of it, my Friday word of the day (and the definition because it may not necessarily match the modern definition) is going to come from this or a similar website.

Today's word? Ballyhoo!

ballyhoo: boisterous publicity; commotion; noisy, extravagant talk

If you'd like to read more about the history of the word, here's a link. It's interesting, but it's a fairly long description, so I don't want to paste it in... http://www.vintage-vocabulary.com/ballyhoo.html

Happy Friday!!