Flummox

flummox (flmks)

verb
1. To baffle or otherwise confuse.
Speaking in acronyms flummoxed the conversation. GFY can stand for Good For You, but can also mean Go Fuck Yourself; OM can refer to your Old Man or a very peaceful state of mind, the two of which often having little in common; and TTTT can look like your cat is leaning on your keyboard, when you really mean to say These Things Take Time. Acronyms make it difficult to understand what you're trying to say.

Synonyms: addle, baffle, becloud, befuddle, cloud, clutter, confound, daze, discomfit, faze, fluster, fog, frustrate, fuddle, mislead, muddle, nonplus, obscure, perplex, puzzle, rattle.

Funambulist

fun-am-bu-list (fy-nmby-lst)

noun
1. A tightrope* walker or practitioner of funambulism.**
After being told all his life that he was walking a fine line, Garfield became a funabulist.

Synonyms: tightrope walker.

* It's not really fair to specify, since it can mean slack rope too, but that's just not as fun!
**Funambulism is the art of rope walking.

Flub

flub (flŭb)

verb
1. To undeniably screw something up.
The intern at Fox News, who flubbed the banner line on this news report, is going to be looking for a new job soon.

Synonyms: addle, blunder, botch, bungle, confound, err, fail, goof, jumble, lapse, mistake, misconstrue, misinterpret, misjudge, mistake, miss, slip.



noun
1. The act or instance of such a colossal error.
The most embarrassing flub of the US media this year has been a Fox News banner line that read: "Obama bin Laden Dead."

Synonyms: aberration, befuddled, blooper, blunder, boo-boo, bungle, damn you auto correct, erratum, error, faux pas, gaffe, inaccuracy, lapse, miscalculation, misinterpretation, misjudgment, misstep, misprint, muddle, oops!, oversight, slip, slip up, snafu, solecism, trip, typo, typographical error, woopsy daisy.

* See Jenny Owen Youngs for more on relationships and flubbing up.

Fauxtography

faux-to-graph-y (f-tgr-f)

noun
1. The art of creating deceptive images, especially through the use of digital cameras and Photoshop. This is often practiced in advertising, government propaganda, and on dating sites.
He listed his body type as "athletic" and that he smoked "occasionally"; from his photos, I now think he must have been an expert in fauxtography!

Synonyms: big fakers!

* While all may be fair in love and vanity, fauxtography has some serious implications, especially in the media. For more, check this out.

Fractious

frac-tious (frkshs)

adjective
1. Peevishly resistant to authority and control.
People, who act out their identities as anarchists by putting forth a fractious contrarian attitude toward everything from cheese crackers to St. Patrick's Day, give anarchy a bad name and ruin it for the rest of us.
2. Easily irritated or annoyed.
I don't know if talking to him put me in a fractious way or if I'm just PMSing.

Synonyms: belligerent, bitchy, captious, crabby, fretful, huffy, indomitable, intractable, irritable mean, ornery, peevish, petulant, recalcitrant, restive, scrappy, snappish, testy, touchy.

Ignis Fatuus

ig-nis fat-u-us* (ĭgˈnĭs făchˈo͞o-əs)

noun
1. A flitting light over marshy ground, possibly caused by the spontaneous combustion of gases from decomposing matter. It is seen and it advances always out of reach.
When the sun completely set, ignus fatuus confused and distracted and befuddled them from their intended path.

Synonyms: Charlie Sheen, Friar's Lantern, jack-o-lantern, will-o'-the-wisp, wisp.

2. Something that deludes or misleads.
Her novel became the ignis fatuus that prevented her from making concrete plans for the future or even finding a real job.

Synonyms: delusion, distraction, illusion.

*This term comes from medieval Latin: the word ignis meaning fire and the word fatuus meaning foolish.