Project Punway

Posted - July 15, 2008, 2:21 p.m.

Fashion aside, one of the best things about watching "Project Runway" is mentor Tim Gunn and his expansive vocabulary.

Time magazine recently asked Gunn about how he got such a big vocabulary. He responded:

" ... And I have to say as a teacher, I always wanted to raise the bar for my students. I wanted them to wonder and then research, 'what is he talking about? What does he mean?' And I will tell you, when I wrote my book "A Guide to Quality, Taste, and Style," my editors came back to me and said, "You know, we need you to change a lot of these words because people won't know what these mean." And I said, "You know something? Let the readers who need to sit with Merriam-webster.com and Google! I'm not going to dumb this down."

A clip of Tim spitting out his fancy vocabulary was played during the Season 3 reunion show. A few of his favorite words and phrases:

>> make it work: Tim's common criticism to a contestant when he sees that the design is moving in the wrong direction or the contestant is running short on time.

>> mitigate: to make less severe

>> caucus: meet with your team members

>> consternation: dismay

>> Sturm und Drang: turmoil

Take the Tim Gunn vocabulary quiz here

Season 4 winner Christian Siriano also had a few favorite phrases including fierce (though that's more of a Tyra Banks word) and hot tranny mess (denoting a model who looks like a transvestite because of poor design choices by a fellow contestant, though Christian later said he was trying to work that phrase out of his vocabulary).

I wonder what Season 5 will deliver on the punway.