humbum
n.— «Is there anybody left who knows about humbums from the Depression days?…Maybe it was two words: hum bums?…They were kind of like fritters, made of selvage bread-dough pieces and plopped into hot oil. There they sizzled, expanded, turned reddish-brown.…You could slaver them with butter or powdered sugar or jam.…Humbums were yumptious.…My lineage is part French, so maybe it’s a French thing? I have fancied an etymology from hommes bonnes. They often ended up looking like little fat men.» —“Anyone got the dope on humbums?” St. Paul Pioneer Press (Minn.) Feb. 15, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Ahmed, a native speaker of Arabic who also speaks French, wonders how he should pronounce words from those languages when speaking English. For example, should he model the pronunciation for the name of the writer Kahlil Ghibran the country of Qatar...