RIH-buhld
(adjective) Referring to sexual matters in a coarse or humorous way.
The comedian’s ribald jokes made half the audience laugh—and the other half blush.
Fun Fact
“Ribald” has medieval roots where it referred to a lewd or vulgar person, often tied to jesters or bawdy entertainers. Today, it usually describes humor that’s raunchy but not malicious—think late-night standup or locker-room banter. It walks the line between clever and crude.
LANG-ger
(noun) A state of pleasant tiredness or dreamy inactivity; a soft, luxurious lack of energy or motivation.
The long afternoon, the slow ceiling fan, and the smell of rain left her in a state of deep, contented languor.
From Old French langueur, from Latin languor, derived from languere (“to be faint, to be listless, to droop”). Related to lax, languid, and slack — all sharing the Indo-European root (s)lēg- meaning “to be loose or slack.” Languor has always described a state of pleasant looseness — the body gone soft, the mind unmoored.
Fun Fact
Languor was a prized condition in Romantic poetry — Keats in particular made a kind of art of it. His “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on Indolence” are essentially sustained meditations on the beauty of surrendering to a beautiful, purposeless drift. In the Victorian era, languor was also embraced by the Aesthetic Movement — figures like Oscar Wilde celebrated it as a mark of refined sensibility. To be languorous was to be too elevated for the crude busyness of ordinary life. Today, we might just call it a Sunday afternoon.
Today's Word Recidivism rih-SID-ih-viz-um Definition (noun) The tendency to relapse...
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