Today's Word "Confabulate"
Published in Vocabulary
confabulate \kehn-FAEB-yu-leyt\ (verb) - To chat, converse; (psychology) to fill lapses of memory with fabrications that one believes are facts.
"The old folks had a tendency to spend their evenings confabulating their childhoods as though they remembered every detail."
The process is "confabulation," the person confabulating is a confabulator and the adjective is "confabulatory." The word is often clipped to "confab" and used as a noun or verb, but such usage is slang and sounds very hokey. Latin confabulatio "conversation" based on con "with" + fabulare "to talk" from fabula "talk" whence English "fable" and "fabulous." "Fabula" comes from fari "to speak," distant cousin to Greek pheme "saying, speech" (as in euphemism "good saying") and phone "voice, sound" from phonein "to speak" which we find in "phonology," "phonetic," "telephone," "symphony," among others. In English it turns up as "ban," from Old English bannan "to summon, proclaim."
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