I love weird words, and I especially love it when I can use highfalutin diction to both amuse and please. Share yours! Please include a short definition from a reputable source, and stories and anecdotes are optional but encouraged.
pulchritudinous: Characterized by physical comeliness. [MW]
eleemosynary: Of, relating to, or supported by charity. [MW] I actually learned this one from the Dope, in a thread about a religious woman refusing help from one of our resident atheists.
I’m partial to avuncular, which means having the properties of an uncle, generous, and magnanimous. I’m not sure that all uncles are avuncular, but the definition certainly fits fine. I also like gonfalonier, which means a person who carries a gonfalon. (For those who don’t know, a gonfalon is a medieval flag that hung downward from a cross piece at the end of a long pole, like this.
I was happy to be able to use jejune today on a post in another board.
There’s also roorback – a slander created for political purposes.
I like to use snickersnee when I need a large knife:
“Hand me that snickersnee, will you? I’m about to carve the turkey.”
I first heard it in the Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), where it is the execution weapon favoured by Ko-Ko, Lord High Executioner of the town of Titipu.
I have two:
defenestration: the act of throwing a person out of a window
morganatic: describing a form of marriage in which a person of high rank marries a person of lower rank but the lower ranking person and any children resulting from the marriage will not inherit the titles or property from the high ranking person.
I’m a big fan of onomatopoeia. The word, and the phenomenon (and my ability to spell it – I believe my crowing achievement of parenthood will be the day that I teach my daughter to correctly spell this word).
minion: 1) a servile follower or subordinate of a person in power
2) a favored or highly regarded person
isogloss: the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature
If you are a vocabulary junkie, I recommend the movie Spellbound. I have a good vocabulary, but about 1/4 way through I was floored by the obscurity of most of the words they were using. And there is a scene involving the spelling of the word “Darjeeling” that is completely priceless.
Are you referring to the Hitchcock movie starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, with the surrealistic dream sequence? I don’t remember any mention of Darjeeling.
slugabed - a lazy person; a layabout
antepenultimate - third from last
gorbellied - describing someone or something with a protruding belly
No. I was referring to the movie released in 2002, about a spelling bee.
Reference: Spellbound (2002) - IMDb
I’m fond of amanuensis. As in have your amanuensis call my amanuensis and we’ll set up a meeting.
Subitize (and subitizing), coined in 1949 by E.L. Kaufman et al. refers to the rapid, accurate, and confident judgments of number performed for small numbers of items.
In other words, determining how many items there are by inspection only (no counting). Most folks can’t do more than 5 items.
It wasn’t my favorite until recently, but after I told my golf buddies that “it’s 190 yards to where the cart path bifurcates” and they started giving me a hard time about that word, well…
Any time I’m in a meeting and someone is logging into RDC from the demo machine, and is typing their ridiculously too-long password, I like to ask if their password is “Sesquipedalian”
Thrice–three times
Aliments–food
Comestibles–food
Communiqué–that little slip that comes in your fortune cookie
Well, this is entirely TOO weird.
It was eleemosynary which I came here to type!
Odder still, to me, is the fact that it was my favorite word when I was about four years old. Although at that time I doubt very much that I had ever heard anyone say it and thought that it was my special made-up word.
It was gratifying later in life to find that, not only had I followed an eleemosynary path in my life, but that I seem to have chosen it at an early age.
Ooooo-EEEEE-oooooooo. :eek:
Sesquicentennial. For example, this year marks the sesquicentennial of the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the U.S.
Lately I have taken a liking to crepuscular, vespertine, and matutinal. They mean relating to dusk and dawn, dusk, and dawn respectively.
Hey! That was MY word!
