Also Applicable To Most Bus Rides....

Word of the Day Wednesday, January 06, 2010

flibbertigibbet

\FLIB-ur-tee-jib-it\ , noun;

1. A silly, flighty, or scatterbrained person, especially a pert young woman with such qualities.


He glanced at her crossly from across the cab of the pick-up truck.

She noticed the slight movement on his part and interpreted it as an invitation to continue the monologue brimming behind her lips.

"What makes your truck so loud grandpa? Because our car at home never makes this much noise. It sort of sounds like our neighbor's car. The ones down the street with the dog that barks when you walk by. My dad says the....mutter....or something like that on their car must be broken and the city should be notified that they are a noise nuisance."

He clutched the steering wheel tighter as she continued to chitter on about noise nuisances, the irony completely lost on her.

"I don't know, if a car is a noise nuisance, why isn't a hair dryer a nuisance? It seems pretty loud to me…"

"Stop talking!" he finally bellowed drowning out the noise of the motor. "Why must you be such a flibbertigibbet?!?"

His granddaughter, her eyes wide with surprise, stopped talking in mid-sentence, her lips still frozen in position to form the next word on the tip of her tongue.

He immediately felt remorseful, snapping at her that way. She was only seven after all, and being the youngest of five children he imagined she had been trained as a squeaky wheel.

"Grandpa?" she asked timidly after a moment.

"Yes?" he replied trying to mold his tone from gruff to kind.

"Is that even a real word?" she asked.

"Of course it is a real word!" he declared indignantly, the gruffness appearing briefly in his voice. "It happens to be dictionary.com's Word of the Day today. I always try to learn the word of the day and use it in a sentence. I was skeptical this morning if I would even be able to find a use for flibbertigibbet today. However, I had anticipated that your Grandmother would be picking you up this afternoon, not me," he mused almost to himself.

The girl was quiet for a moment, the coughing motor filling the silence.

"That is really lucky that you could use your word," she said earnestly, turning to face him with those large brown innocent eyes, genuinely pleased for him, "I hope the next time I come to visit the word of the day is crotchety so I can use it in a sentence. I just learned that one from my dad this morning."