One Word: Twangled

Twangled – seriously?

Yes, “twangled” is a real word. An odd, quirky, playful word, with a self-mocking tone that makes it fun to use (sparingly).

No, I hadn’t heard it before either. Here’s how it came to my attention:

Recently I posted a list of various ways my full name (“Gary Leland Matthews”) could be rearranged into colorful phrases. (“Colorful” is a polite way of saying the examples I posted all were most unflattering.)

At the start, there weren’t enough; I wanted an even dozen. So I cobbled together a few more anagrams (as such reshufflings are called).

One letter-combination I came up with was “lame, trashy, tangled” – except that that doesn’t work. There’s a left-over “w” (the one in “Matthews”). So that isn’t a valid anagram.

I therefore looked for a way to work in the missing letter. How about “led lame, trashy twang”? Hmm. Too awkward. I found myself wishing that “twangled” was a word. Then I thought, “What if it is, and I just don’t know about it?”

When I Googled it, danged if it didn’t pop up in various dictionaries!

A “twangle”, says UrbanDictionary.com, is “the weird feeling you get when you are expecting to experience a certain thing, but experience something else instead.

“For example.. when you take a drink, and you expect it to be milk but it turns out to be apple juice.”

Or when you make anagrams of your own name, expecting praise and flattery, only to have them all embody caustic satire.

Now here is where it gets confusing: Not all dictionaries agree as to the meaning of twangle. TheFreeDictionary.com defines it as “to make a twanging sound, esp on a musical instrument”.

It gets even worse (more twangling?) because some dictionaries give a quite unrelated definition for the past-tense verb “twangled”.

The same Urban Dictionary quoted above defines “twangled” as “the combination of the two terms ‘tweaked and mangled’”, giving a usage example: “Dude I crashed. I am tweaked, my bike is mangled… It is all Twangled.”

I’m suspicious: The latter definition was posted by a user who is self-identified as “The Twangled”. Readers of the Urban Dictionary get to vote on definitions. This one, at this writing, has seven votes for, six against.

Worse yet: The online Merriam-Webster dictionary concedes that “twangle” is a real word, but refuses to define it in its free version. For just $30 a year they’ll give me their full definition. I bailed.

Given these uncertainties, I’d suggest that in the unlikely event you ever decide to use twangle, twangled, or twangling in your own discourse – use it to mean whatever the heck you want! It’s too new a word for anyone to be making dogmatic pronouncements.

Be that as it may, I did note that several websites mention the word is useful in Scrabble and in making (tada!) anagrams.

(This article is part of my series on words that are #worth1000pictures.)