giggles

It's giggle-inducing pleasure that my job - at times - allows me to indulge in a penchant for chasing down the obscure.
For instance, today (Friday - this is late in being posted) a hunt to fully understand the off-hand use of "proustian moment." Several colleagues, with many an MA in English lit therein, kindly offered up "long-winded navel-gazing" as suggestion. Independent research has led me to assume "proustian moment" - as it was used - referenced the notion of "involuntary memory." A term Proust coined, as it happens.
Further fun new discoveries:
• Bildungsroman
• Neurasthenia: Victorian chronic fatigue?
• various and sundry causes for eczema
• agonistes: (ægnst) 1. 'A contender for prizes.' J. rare ; Happiest of mothers am I, who have borne so noble an agonist. 1626 COCKERAM, Agonist, a Champion. 1859 I. TAYLOR Nilus in Ess. etc. 1859, 161
2. A person engaged in a contest or struggle; a protagonist. (For the spec. sense in quot. 1914 cf. AGON 2.)
3. One who advertises in an 'agony column'
• tohu bohu: (tohubohu) a. Heb. 1. 'emptiness and desolation', in Gen. i.
2. rendered in Bible of 1611 'without form and void'. So F. thohu et bohu (Rabelais 1548), tohu-bohu (Voltaire 1776).] That which is empty and formless; chaos; utter confusion. That Prophecie ... that the world should be two thousand yeares Tohu emptie and without Law. [1626 COCKERAM, Agonist, a Champion. 1859 I. TAYLOR Nilus in Ess. etc. 1859, 161] It is .. not any figure, but a Chaos, a Tohu and Bohu, a meere confusion. [1619 Microcosm. xxviii. 275] I. 8/2 Man's heart is a mere emptiness, a very Tohu vabohu. [1643 TRAPP Comm., Gen. i. 24-5 (1867)]

Last two from my fave, Oxford English Dictionary, online.