pushmi-pullyu
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
24
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
4
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A person who behaves in a conflicting or contradictory manner.
adj
adj
in teleosemantics, being a representation with both indicative and imperative content.
Example Sentences
- "This is the age of the Cry-Bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper. They are everywhere, these duplicit Pushmi-Pullyus of the personal and the political"
- "It's one of the most characteristic behavior patterns of human beings, this pushmepullyou approach to life. We say one thing and do another […]"
- "They don't want some sort of hopeless compromise, some perpetual pushme-pullyou arrangement in which we stay half-in and half-out in a political no man's land - with no more ministers round the table in Brussels and yet forced to obey EU laws."
- "What […] are the steps from […] the sort of inarticulate pushmi-pullyu comprehensions the bee has and the dim sort of pushmi-pullyu comprehension that mediates responses to behavior releasers, to articulate, well-differentiated, and uncommitted human beliefs and desires […]?"