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« on: February 05, 2015, 12:04:29 PM »
Every day we encounter with some familiar words. Thousands words remain unused as we hardly know their meanings. So let's try to learn a word a everyday.
Whippersnapper:
A whippersnapper is someone who is younger than you are but also irritatingly overconfident and impertinent, like your little smart aleck cousin.
The word whippersnapper describes a specific kind of bratty, know-it-all kid, and it's only used by an older person who is talking about a younger person. It's a fairly old-fashioned word, having been around since the late-1600s, when it apparently arose out of "whip-snapper," which implied a general sense of lots of noise and very little importance. Around the same time, the word "whipperginnie" was a derogatory term for a woman.
Synonyms: a)Jacknapes: It means a colorful but very old fashioned way to describe a rascal or a whippersnapper. Your great-grandfather might shake his cane and yell, "Get off my lawn, you jackanapes!" when the neighbor kids lose their basketball in his yard, but they're unlikely to know what the word means. Jackanapes is from the fifteenth century, and it's thought to come from the phrase "Jack of Naples," or to have some connection to the word apes, but experts are uncertain.
b) Lightweight: Break lightweight apart — light + weight — and you see its definition right there in its root words. Someone who is called a lightweight is either a professional boxer who weighs under 135 pounds or he's someone with little importance or ability. When a company is looking to make layoffs, it's the lightweight employees, or those who just aren't important to the business that often get axed first.
Source:www.vocabulary.com
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