Omnishambles has only been around since 2009 when it was introduced on the BBC show The Thick of It. It is a neologism combining the Latin word “Omni,” meaning all, and “Shambles,” referring to waste in a meat market.
From its humble origins as a fictional colloquialism, “Omnishambles” made a remarkable journey. In 2012, it was catapulted into the lexicon of the English language when the prestigious Oxford Dictionary crowned it the Word of the Year. The term is now widely used to describe a string of blunders or miscalculations of epic proportions.
Some describe the word as particularly applicable to political blunders. In some cases, omnishambles has been used to describe a person.
“Senator Bluster introduces legislation so strange that he can only be described as an omnishambles.”
“I sure hope no one is turning into an omnishambles today when we present the budget.”
“The company’s president’s speech was so strange that we can only call it an omnishambles.”
“Congress became little more than an omnishambles in the months before the Civil War.”
Impignorate is a verb and an old term that was used to describe what today we might call mortgage, pawn, or pledge something. When thinking about a mortgage, it describes a willingness to swap a lien on a piece of property for money. When using the term to describe pawning an object, the pawn shop might hold the item, but with other items, like a building, physically holding the building is impractical, so a legal document is used to record the lien.
The word is often seen in its noun form, impignoration, which is most often used to describe mortgaging a property. But this is an old word, and outside of legal documents, it is unlikely to be encountered.
“Lenders who engage in the title pawn business must impignorate the vehicle to lay claim to it if the loan is not repaid.”
“Many contracts include an agreement to impignorate some asset and often include a witnessed signature.”
“John was willing to accept the impignoration of his office building to obtain money for repairs.”
