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| Not that kind of rum... |
m)adj. rum·mer, rum·mest Chiefly British
1. Odd; strange.
2. Presenting danger or difficulty.
'I must say it's a rum time of year to come up 'ere. Lovely autumn we've 'ad, but the weather's going to worsen...' A Dream Came True
And then a blizzard hits.
What most interested me about this word was the comparison and superlative adjectives that came with. Rum, rummer, rummest. (Let's see if I can use them: 'My ex-boyfriend was a rum fellow. That woman in the nursing mother's lounge at Nordstrom was rummer. The vegan baker was the rummest of them all...')
In high school and college I got through five years of German (which, sadly, only qualifies me to find the nearest bathroom and tell people that the room is old-fashioned (Das Zimmer ist alt-modish!) which I would never be rude enough to do in the first place.) and, while I appreciated that they have a similar comparative structure (gut, besser, am besten) to English, I struggled mightily with their version of high, higher, highest--hoch/höher/am höchsten. It requires me on the second word to say a sound I translate as tongue swallowing. It makes me sound a bit rum.
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