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prettygoodwordlemony (LEH-muh-nee) - adj., (Aus/NZ) (outdated) angry, irritated.
After the sharpness of the fruit. I'm not clear on how common that first sense is these days (ETA: not at all, see comments), but it does still show up in American dictionaries as a slang sense. (British dictionaries too, and they firmly mark it as Australian usage.) See also the phrase go lemony at, to lose one's temper with. The word for lemon, btw, has one of those fascinating long chains of inheritance: it arrived in English in the Middle English form lymon, from Old French lymon, meaning citrus in general, from either directly from Persian limon or via intermediary Arabic laymūn, both from older Persian līmū, still any of various citrus, from Sanskrit nimbū, lime, from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *limaw, lime.
Bonus word: lamster
---L.
After the sharpness of the fruit. I'm not clear on how common that first sense is these days (ETA: not at all, see comments), but it does still show up in American dictionaries as a slang sense. (British dictionaries too, and they firmly mark it as Australian usage.) See also the phrase go lemony at, to lose one's temper with. The word for lemon, btw, has one of those fascinating long chains of inheritance: it arrived in English in the Middle English form lymon, from Old French lymon, meaning citrus in general, from either directly from Persian limon or via intermediary Arabic laymūn, both from older Persian līmū, still any of various citrus, from Sanskrit nimbū, lime, from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *limaw, lime.
Bonus word: lamster
---L.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 03:15 pm (UTC)My associations with lemons are
a) the actual food/flavour
b) the whole "turn lemons into lemonade" saying
c) lemon/citrus is something to do with F/F romances in Japanese manga
no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 03:18 pm (UTC)Ha! Good to know. I'll update the post to indicate it's outdated -- which I almost did, as Green's last usage example was from the 1960s.
ETA: BTW, the terms lemon/citrus and vanilla (to indicate how spicy or not a story is) started in F/F anime fanfic, but are used in general in fandoms well beyond that.