The last word of your mother tongue you have learnt ?

[vijayjohn]

to wax to grow, increase

Isn't that the meaning in the phrase to wax and wane, basically to increase and decrease, to grow and lessen?

Yes.

[Olinguito]

gig economy

[Michael]

[flag=]en[/flag] an adder a snake, a serpent (←"a nadder", from earlier sēo nǣd[d]r/e, pl.: þā -an)

[linguoboy]

[flag=]en[/flag] an adder a snake, a serpent (←"a nadder", from earlier sēo nǣd[d]r/e, pl.: þā -an)

Adder for a snake in general is archaic. In modern usage, this term is applied to certain small vipers (esp. the common adder) and other species resembling them.

[dEhiN]

[flag=]en[/flag] shibboleth
1. A word, especially seen as a test, to distinguish someone as belonging to a particular nation, class, profession etc.
2. A common or longstanding belief, custom, or catchphrase associated with a particular group, especially one with little current meaning or truth.

(Taken from Wikipedia).

I've seen this word a few times in the past, but never knew what it meant. Dormouse recently used it here when responding to me and that forced me to look it up.

[Olinguito]

[flag=]en[/flag] shibboleth
1. A word, especially seen as a test, to distinguish someone as belonging to a particular nation, class, profession etc.
2. A common or longstanding belief, custom, or catchphrase associated with a particular group, especially one with little current meaning or truth.

(Taken from Wikipedia).

You mean Wiktionary. I first came across it in the King James Version of the Bible (Judges 12:6). The people of Gilead were at war with the people of Ephraim. The latter spoke a language that did not contain the phoneme /ʃ/; hence they could not pronounce the word shibboleth correctly. This was the method by which the Gileadites recognized their enemies.

[linguoboy]

I think I first learned about "shibboleths" in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict. Militants would make you recite the alphabet and listen closely to how you pronounced the eighth letter.

[vijayjohn]

I'm not sure when I first learned what a shibboleth was. I think it might even have been as late as my first year of grad school, when I had to know what it was because I was a teaching assistant for Intro to Linguistics.

[linguoboy]

[flag=]en-us[/flag] zerk a grease nipple

[Dormouse559]

I figured I'd learn some new vocabulary following the Obamacare repeal bill, but I wasn't expecting this:

[flag=]en-us[/flag] to snatch a knot in someone's ass - to hit someone as punishment

(context)

As far as dialect distribution, I'll say Southern U.S., being the representative who used the phrase is from Georgia. I can't get more specific than that, though.

[linguoboy]

[flag=]en[/flag] wherry a type of small boat

[razlem]

[flag=]eng-us[/flag] riparian - relating to or situated on the banks of a river

[mōdgethanc]

tulle a kind of mesh-like fabric

critter derogatory name for "gender-critical" feminists, a euphemism for TERFs

I think I first learned about "shibboleths" in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict. Militants would make you recite the alphabet and listen closely to how you pronounced the eighth letter.

Since my grandmother was Irish, my father always pronounced it with /h/ and when I asked him about this as a kid, he told me it was used in his youth to tell apart Catholics and Protestants among Irish-Canadians. (He grew up in an era where it was frowned upon to even date or have friends outside of your denomination.) So that was also how I learned about the concept of a shibboleth, long before I found out what the name for it was.

[vijayjohn]

Since my grandmother was Irish, my father always pronounced it with /h/ and when I asked him about this as a kid, he told me it was used in his youth to tell apart Catholics and Protestants among Irish-Canadians.

So Protestant Irish Canadians didn't pronounce it with an /h/ and Catholic ones did?

[mōdgethanc]

So Protestant Irish Canadians didn't pronounce it with an /h/ and Catholic ones did?

[h]I think so. You would have to [h]ask the [h]Irish though.

[OldBoring]

Well, maybe they thought it was more logical to pronounce the letter h with actually the [h] sound in it.
But Latin letter names come from Latin, and IIRC the Latin name for H doesn't have the [h] sound.

In Pinyin, officially the name of the letter h is [ha]. But in practice nobody ever uses those "letter names", but instead they use the English names of the letters.

[linguoboy]

Well, maybe they thought it was more logical to pronounce the letter h with actually the [h] sound in it.

Next thing I know you'll be expecting us to say the name of 'q' with a [q]!

[flag=]en-us[/flag] cafone a boorish Italian-American
[flag=]en[/flag] anankastic compulsory; compulsive

[Olinguito]

scurf
(n)
1. another word for dandruff
2. flaky or scaly matter adhering to or peeling off a surface

Nevertheless I have no idea what is meant by the following sentence.

A scurf of books and china ornaments awaited him.

—E. M. Forster, Howards End, Chapter 30

[Dormouse559]

Maybe a "crust" or "layer" of books and china ornaments?

[flag=]en[/flag] to serpentine - to move like a snake

I already knew the adjective and noun senses, but I didn't know it could be a verb. I learned this from, of all things, a pop song, Selena Gomez's "Bad Liar".

[mōdgethanc]

[flag=]en[/flag] anankastic compulsory; compulsive

Is this a Britishism? I've never encountered it except in "anankastic personality disorder", a rarely used synonym for "obsessive-compulsive personality disorder" (a confusingly named condition which is not the same as OCD).