Word of the Day!

exculpate [ek-skuhl-peyt, ik-skuhl-peyt]

verb:
to clear from a charge of guilt or fault; free from blame; vindicate

Examples:

He devises a daring, sometimes distracting but ultimately inspired format by saving his commentary for footnotes that contextualize, teasingly contradict and occasionally exculpate Rodgers from her unsparing self-assessments. (Charles McNulty, Stephen Sondheim and Mary Rodgers, late Broadway greats, have brilliant last words, Los Angeles Times, November 2022)

An amnesty could exculpate as many as 1,400 activists and politicians involved in the attempt to separate Catalonia from Spain. (Spanish Socialists and Catalan Junts reach deal for government support, amnesty, Reuters, November 2023)

In a perverse circular logic, the crime itself can come to seem like the clearest evidence of the condition that is held up to exculpate the mother - and also like its own form of punishment. (Eren Orbey, A Husband in the Aftermath of His Wife's Unfathomable Act, Reuters, October 2024)

Cato attacked him for this, and Lucilius ran the risk of losing his tribunate, and many of the friends of Pompeius came forward to exculpate him and said that he did not seek that office or wish for it. (Plutarch, Lives)

Origin:

'to clear from suspicion of wrong or guilt,' 1650s, from Medieval Latin exculpatus, past participle of exculpare, from Latin ex culpa, from ex 'out of' + culpa ablative of culpa 'blame, fault.' (Online Etymology Dictionary)

There's no need to say 'my bad' if you're unfamiliar with exculpate; while the word is far from rare, it is most often encountered in formal writing in reference to the clearing of someone of alleged fault or guilt, as in 'they were exculpated of any wrongdoing.' You may be more familiar with a pair of terms that, like exculpate, come from the Latin noun culpa, meaning 'blame' or 'guilt.' One is the adjective culpable, used to describe someone deserving of condemnation or blame. The other is the Latin phrase mea culpa, which translates directly as 'through my fault' and refers to an acknowledgement of personal fault or error that is more formal than, well, 'my bad.' (Merriam-Webster)

sploot [sploot]

verb:
(slang, of an animal) to lie flat on the stomach with the legs stretched out
noun:
the act or an instance of splooting

            
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There’s the classic sploot (one leg remains beneath the body while the other leg is kicked back), the side sploot (one leg is tucked under the body while the other is kicked out to the side) and a full sploot (the animal has kicked both legs behind the body, exhibiting a full body stretch). (Hannah Docter-Loeb, Who Sploots?, Slate, August 2022)

But even in the chillier climes like Laramie, squirrels will sploot on warmer days. The upside to what Koprowski called heat islands is that cement sidewalks, while also retaining heat, will retain cooler temperatures while in the shade. (Joshua Wood, U W Professor, Who Is World’s Foremost Authority On Squirrels, Says Splooting Is OK, Cowboy State Daily, August 2022)

Snellby Kay said her household refers to the position as "road kill pose," and Brianna Portillo called it the "sploot." (Sophie Lloyd, Cat's Bizarre Sleeping Position Confuses Internet: 'Airplane Mode', Newsweek, July 2023)

I think a senior cat who still gets the zoomies would love her own bean bag chair to sploot in! (Eve Vawter, Scottish Fold Cat’s Beanbag Sploot Is the AMSR Therapy Session We Didn’t Know We Needed, Parade Pets, April 2025)

Origin:

Sploot is part of a growing lexicon of 'DoggoLingo', which uses cute, deliberate misspellings and onomatopoeias like mlem, blep, smol, borf, and heckin to fawn over man’s best friend online - and the many, many pictures and videos we post of them. While the exact origins of sploot are unclear, lexicographer Grant Barrett of the A Way with Words radio show has suggested that the term sploot may riff on the word splat to characterize the splat-like (flat, spread-out) appearance of a sploot pose. This wordplay mirrors other changes made to existing words in DoggoLingo, like the substitution of chonky for chunky. Sploot is especially associated with corgis, a squat breed of dogs with very short legs. The use of sploot, as associated with pets, is evidenced by at least 2012. (Dictionary.com)

mudlark [muhd-lahrk]

noun:
1a Chiefly British. a person who gains a livelihood by searching for iron, coal, old ropes, etc., in mud or low tide
1b someone who scavenges the banks and shores of rivers for items of value

2 Chiefly British Informal. a street urchin

3 either of two black and white birds, Grallina cyanoleuca, of Australia, or G. bruijni, of New Guinea, that builds a large, mud nest

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Mudlarking's popularity has grown steadily in recent years, driven in part by social media communities where enthusiasts share their finds, and tour groups that offer a trudge through the shards of history's castoffs (Megan Specia, Mudlarks Scour the Thames to Uncover 2,000 Years of Secrets, The New York Times, February 2020)

On a freezing January day during the recent cold snap, those walking along The Weirs might have been surprised to see Jane Eastman - Winchester's premier mudlark - waist-deep in the Itchen, bent double as she scoured the riverbed not so much for treasure, as trash. (Sebastian Haw, Hampshire mudlark looks for treasure and trash in Itchen, Hampshire Chronicle, January 2025)

Thames mud - damp and oxygen-free - is a 'magical preserver', Maiklem writes, and extracting an object from its embrace takes care, skill and an extraordinary level of patience, from both the mudlark and those who share her household. (Joanna Scutts, Unearthing London's history from a muddy riverbank, The Washington Post, December 2019)

"It always makes me smile, how emphatically people say, 'the piping shrike — that's the mudlark, we call it the mudlark' … and just how powerfully this myth has stuck," he said. (Daniel Keane, Magpies, magpie-larks and the striking mystery of South Australia's piping shrike, ABC News, March 2024)

Origin:

The first published use of the word was in 1785 as a slang term meaning 'a hog'. Its origin may have been a humorous variation on 'skylark'. By 1796, the word was also being used to describe "Men and boys ... who prowl about, and watch under the ships when the tide will permit." Mudlarks made a living in London in the 18th and 19th centuries by scouring the muddy shores of the River Thames for anything and everything that could be sold to eke out a living. This could include pilfering from river traffic. Modern mudlarks have sometimes recovered objects of archaeological value from the river's shores. These are either recorded as treasure under the Treasure Act of 1996 or submitted for analysis and review under the Portable Antiquities Scheme. (Word Genius)

boondoggle [boon-dog-uhl, -daw-guhl]

noun:
1 a wasteful and worthless project undertaken for political, corporate, or personal gain, typically a government project funded by taxpayers
2 work of little or no value done merely to keep or look busy
3 a product of simple manual skill, as a plaited leather cord for the neck or a knife sheath, made typically by a camper or a scout
verb:
to deceive or attempt to deceive

Examples:

These subsidies are a boondoggle for taxpayers, who have spent nearly $30 billion on stadiums over the past 34 years, not counting property-tax exemptions or federal revenues lost to tax-exempt municipal bonds. (Dan Moore, Taxpayers Are About to Subsidize a Lot More Sports Stadiums, The Atlantic, October 2022)

Admittedly, he explains, "many of these boondoggles were hare-brained ideas to begin with, others were solid ideas that went wrong operationally or were short of financing," a not unusual problem in the Atlantic provinces. (Burton K Janes, The boondoggles of Newfoundland and Labrador, Saltwire, September 2017)

Some commentators have called for the Olympics - or, to be more blunt, the IOC's financial boondoggle - to be scrapped altogether. (Ishaan Tharoor, Japan's Olympics kick off amid a cascade of disasters, Washington Post, July 2021)

No matter how well you plan, something will boondoggle in unexpected ways. But having a plan means that you can improvise a solution. (Renee Bates, Favorite Finds - In Nashville, Hersavvy, June 2014)

The United States has not embarked upon its formidable program of space exploration in order to make or perpetuate a gigantic astronautic boondoggle. There are good reasons, hard reasons for this program. (George Saintsbury, 'The Practical Values of Space Exploration: Report of the Committee on Science and Astronautics, US House of Representatives, Eighty-Sixth Congress, Second Session')

Origin:

When boondoggle popped up in the early 1900s, lots of people tried to explain where the word came from. One theory traced it to an Ozarkian word for 'gadget', while another related it to the Tagalog word that gave us boondocks. Another hypothesis suggested that boondoggle came from the name of leather toys Daniel Boone supposedly made for his dog. But the only theory that is supported by evidence is much simpler. In the 1920s, Robert Link, a scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts of America, apparently coined the word to name the braided leather cords made and worn by scouts. The word came to prominence when such a boondoggle was presented to the Prince of Wales at the 1929 World Jamboree, and it's been with us ever since. Over time, it developed the additional sense describing a wasteful or impractical project. (Merriam-Webster)