#blatteroon

The #bane of office life - the quiddler and the blatteroon #lostwords #obscurewords #logophilia

It is a long time since I worked in an office but one of the most irksome features of office life was the presence of a quiddler, someone who hung around wasting time and striking up conversations with those who were trying to get their heads down. Another word to describe such a person is blatteroon, defined by Thomas Blount in his Glossographia of 1656 as a “babbler, an idle-headed fellow”. In…