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.
kun-TRYVD
(adjective) Obviously planned or forced rather than arising naturally; lacking authenticity or spontaneity.
The film’s ending felt contrived — a sudden reconciliation between characters who had spent two hours proving they could never forgive each other.
Contrived comes from the verb contrive, rooted in the Old French controver, meaning “to imagine” or “to find out,” itself from the Latin contropare — “to compare” or “to devise.” It entered English in the 14th century originally meaning simply to plan or devise something cleverly. Over time the word acquired its current negative undertone, shifting from neutral ingenuity toward the suggestion of something manipulated or artificially engineered to produce a desired effect.
Fun Fact
The tension between “contrived” and “authentic” sits at the heart of one of cinema’s longest-running debates — the difference between classical Hollywood storytelling, where every plot point is engineered to produce a specific emotional response, and the naturalistic tradition championed by filmmakers like the French New Wave directors, who deliberately introduced improvisation and ambiguity to avoid exactly that engineered feeling. François Truffaut famously argued that a perfectly constructed plot was itself a form of dishonesty — that real life never resolves so neatly, and that contrivance in storytelling is a kind of lie told to comfort the audience.
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