Les Jones

Nifty > Word of the Day: Funambulism

From Merriam-Webster:

funambulism \fyoo-NAM-byuh-liz-um\ noun

1 : tightrope walking
*2 : a show especially of mental agility

Example sentence:
As a game-show contestant Brian amazed us all with his funambulism, answering every question correctly to win the $10,000 first prize.

Did you know?
Back in ancient Rome, tightrope walking was a popular spectacle at public gatherings. The Latin word for "tightrope walker" is "funambulus," from the Latin "funis," meaning "rope," plus "ambulare," meaning "to walk." It doesn't take any funambulism on our part to see how the word for an impressive act of physical skill and agility came to mean an impressive act of mental skill or agility. That extended sense of the word has been around since at least 1886, when British academic and writer Augustus Jessopp described the act of diagramming sentences as "horrible lessons of ghastly grammar and dreary funambulism."