Amphibologies

Meaning: Those self-contradictory words listed in emails about the craziness of English; 'to dust', for example, can mean removing something or adding something.  As Cotgrave says:

A doubtfull, or double, meaning in one, or many, words.

Usefulness: 1 ("We like to call this the amphibologies building; our sales team and legal team share the space.")

Logofascination: 1 (Partly because it seems to be the theme this week - see below - and partly because it means I can use one of my favourite Much Ado About Nothing quotes: "There's a double meaning in that!"  Also because since I learnt that the Greeks had this problem, I wonder if they had the equivalent lists of the wackiness of the Greek language.)

In the wild: So, this week Stan Carey discussed fulsome, and linked to his previous post on chuffed (which is where I ran into amphibolous) and the ever-awesome Dinosaur Comics take on these things. LTA then mentioned auto-antonyms and a plethora of posts on the classical variety, and then (no, really) Ed Latham wrote an excellent-but-annoying* post about literally becoming (already being?) one of these words, not that he used any of the fancy technical terms.

Culbut

Meaning: Cotgrave says that in French it is "a tumbling, a turning, or tossing upside down", and the OED adds a sense to these in English: "to drive back in disorder."

Usefulness: 1 (it has any number of meanings, although Sir Thomas, as we shall see, mainly associated it with the feat of the loose-coat skirmish.)

Logofascination: 2 (Rabelais used a similar word once, but not in the contexts in which Sir Thomas uses it; Sir Thomas seems to have picked up a slang usage - in France, perhaps, or from Cotgrave - and added it to his list of of synonyms.)

Jectigation

Meaning: Cotgrave tells us this means "wagging or shrugging".

Usefulness: 2 (technically, we should speak of Gallic jectigation rather than the Gallic shrug; shrugging is English, whereas jectigation came to us via French.)

Logofascination: 2 (Etymologically, it's related to pretty much anything that has ject in it, and a number of other words besides.  Although he didn't invent it, Sir Thomas has the first two citations for this in the OED.)

Chironomatic

Meaning: relating to chironomy, which is the art or science of what to do with your hands; John Bulwer also applied it to the Art of Manual Rhetoricke, which we much more boringly call sign language.

Usefulness: 1 (Can be applied to all those people who are happy to tell you what to do with your hands while presenting or, Google suggests, kissing. Also conductors - though it seems to have some kind of technical application to choirs - and Italians, which is how Rabelais uses it. Is a stereotype any more true because it is 400 years old?)

Logofascination: 2 (ah, humanity: concerns of chironomy bind actors, presenters, politicians, rhetoricians and, apparently, lovers, across time, space and YouTube.)