Posts tagged with "new word" - Faerye Net

New word: the love affair

2008-11-06T22:45:03+00:00

Truly, English is beautiful for its rich and varied scope, from the profane to the obscure, the lyrical to the particular.

Today, exploring the online Oxford English Dictionary because, thanks to Multnomah County Libraries, I can, I came across this utter gem: liripoop.

Let me say that again: liripoop. Better still, I own one and have been in discussions about what to call it. This sadly incomplete entry on Wikipedia should give you an idea (the OED lists liripipe and liripoop as the most prevalent spellings.) I wore one of these around my neck (and a mortarboard on my head) at my MFA Commencement. We were all unsure what to call it. People seemed to tell us it was a ‘hood’ despite its evolution towards the vestigial. “Why is it that bizarre shape?” people asked. No one could say. But now, thanks to the OED, I know.

And I also know that by being “furnished with a liripipe” I have become…liripipionated.

New word: the rereading!

2008-10-09T16:41:06+00:00

Another one from the Aubrey-Maturin files. Did I let this one slide by me the first three times I read that Bonden brought Maturin that coffee? It’s too obscure for Merriam-Webster, but as we’ve established, the Wiktionary loves Patrick O’Brian.

roborative: “giving strength; invigorating.”

I love you, Maturin, but I’m saving this word for next time I want to win a pompous-off.

New word: the footnote!

2008-10-06T10:54:25+00:00

From the convoluted pages of House of Leaves comes a word I felt like I had heard, but had to look up anyway:

amaurotic: Total or partial blindness, especially blindness that occurs without external signs on the eye. (From the Greek for ‘dim’.)

Now that is a super-ornate way of saying something fairly simple. I approve.

New word: the partial disclosure!

2008-07-22T13:33:56+00:00

This one comes courtesy of my graduate program. I scrawled it in a flyleaf during a lecture, and I’ve been trying to figure out whose lecture – hence the month’s delay in posting. Here is the word, robed in its glory and naked of context:

adumbration: partial revelation or hinting; or, contrariwise, obscurement.

These sneaky long Latinate words with their multiple, often contradictory meanings. No wonder writing teachers are always suggesting students use Anglo-Saxon words. They’re just trying to make it easy on themselves.

Wordwatching II

2008-07-15T17:44:24+00:00

Here’s another fine word just lying on a page waiting to be picked up: cuneal.

Found this one in a long sentence by my professor Claire Davis:

Clouds rankled in the east, a high wide billowing like the thunderheads of summer, but overhead was blue sky, and Ike flipped his sunglasses on, the snow and the world turning deeper, more vibrant, the light polarized and somehow more true so that the distant cuneal hills were compressed, and the plains became dimples and swales, gullies and hollows, brushed blue and bluer, cobalt and indigo.

This one evolved from Latin cuneis, which is unilluminating until we remember cuneiform. ‘Cuneal’ means wedge-shaped.

That leaves me with just one question — are long sentences the natural habitats of cool words?

New word: the frenzy!

2008-05-25T13:44:36+00:00

From the comments at Pam’s House Blend comes a fabulously evocative new piece of vocabulary:

corybantic: frenzied, ecstatic, unrestrained; a reference to Phrygian devotees of Cybele, the Korybantes.

That is high-quality sesquipedalianism.

New word: the excess!

2007-12-24T00:38:06+00:00

Trust Angela Carter to use a long, interesting word, opulent in its syllables and sounds, which I had never heard:

deliquescent: “1: tending to melt or dissolve; especially : tending to undergo gradual dissolution and liquefaction by the attraction and absorption of moisture from the air
“2: having repeated division into branches” – Merriam-Webster

New word: the amazement!

2007-06-15T14:03:30+00:00

Sadly, I so enjoy sweeping along in Patrick O’Brian books that I often fail to note and look up the words I do not know (another good use for BookDarts!) Today, however, I decided I had to look up ataraxy, if only out of shame for having forgotten to mark, look up or even correctly recall something like ‘vaticination’ a chapter or so earlier.

Merriam-Webster hides the word behind its pay-wall, so I had recourse to the Wiktionary. The first example in the definition is, hilariously, the sentence that lies over my knee in HMS Surprise: “There was no longer any need for fortitude: he felt nothing at present and there was no point in artificial ataraxy.”

Without further ado then:
ataraxy: sullen indifference, or imperturbable calm.

Given the laudanum-related context, the latter seems more likely.

New word: the renewal!

2007-02-13T12:09:07+00:00

Man, that Twisty Faster sure is expanding my vocabulary.

purulent: Made of or containing pus.

That’s a doozy.

New word: the revenge!

2006-11-16T14:50:26+00:00

The last thing I was expecting from a radical feminist blog post/philippic on lapdancing was a beautiful new word.

caliginous: “misty, dark”

Where has this word been all my life? The existence of ‘tenebrous’ was gift enough, but now this! I love you, English language! Et aussi le français, bien sûr—‘caligineux’ et ‘tenebreux’, vous voyez.