I was gonna say exsanguinate but Qagdop usurped me.
onus is a good word. I get a giggle out of words that look nasty or rude. You gotta say them with a straight face, a snooty look is even better.
I have others, but my brain seems to be napping.
~VOW
The word “prepone” is very useful. To make the time of a meeting or event sooner, not later. Common in India. Not Canada.
I like the word ‘palaver’, which I don’t think I ever heard until I read The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Now I use it when I have the opportunity (and can think of it at that time, which doesn’t always happen.)
Time for a quick stealth brag. This story will make me seem much better at reading French than I actually am, but what the hell. To maintain vocabulary, I occasionally read French newspapers online. Google Translate has a handy little add-on that allows you to highlight a single word - a box then pops open with the English translation. It keeps you moving nicely.
So: a French adjective, autochtone - I had no clue. Help me Google Translate! English translation: autochthonous. Great - now I have a French word that I’ve never seen before translated as an English word I’ve never seen before. But in a way, neat huh? So damn obscure I didn’t know the English either! And so the word has stuck with me - it means Indigenous.
Autochthonous - my contribution.
j
ETA: Elsewhere I just saw a @DesertDog post using an American phrase I love: Mendoza line. Being British, whenever I use it I get asked what it means - so I explain its meaning and its origin, and the invariable response is, “What an incredibly useful concept, I’m going to use that myself.” [Note: it’s the line that separates the mediocre from the unacceptable]
So, over here I’m doing my best…
In this weather I’ve been using aestivation a lot. I learned it a couple of months ago.
“Make a note of that word. Give it to Susan!”
Thank you for giving the definition. Some of these words sound neat but I’m not going to look every one of them up. Having the definition in-thread, it’s a lot easier to digest.
I neglected to include the definition. There are other definitions as well, but this is the one that I use.
palaver: A negotiation or discussion concerning matters in dispute
Awesome! Thanks. I just found a Firefox extension that will find the definition when you double click on a word. That makes it a lot easier.
I lilke Brobdingnagian. I picked it up as a kid reading a Philip Jose Farmer novel, one of the later Riverworld books I think. I believe Swift used it in Gulliver’s Travels too, which I just learned.
I use it when I want to say something is larger than humongous.
This word in turn reminds me of asafetida, which smells just as its name implies.
Unfortunately it also reminds me of fetus. A foetid fetus. Gack.
A word I would run across in my younger days that I found perplexing was poleaxed. I wasn’t sure at all how to pronounce it as I’d never heard anyone say it out loud. Not something one would use on a daily basis, but perhaps useful to keep in one’s back pocket (provided it fits).
Poleaxes are better carried in two hands, not a back pocket. Big, heavy and long.
Since somebody mentioned callipygian, I thought I’d remind the gang of the word steatopygous. (Big-assed.) Prognathous (jut-jawed) is another nice anatomical description.
Woulda said defenstration, but that seems to have become more common lately.
There is the word Coprophagia. I always thought there was a word for a person or other organism who had a habit of that. I guessed it would be coprophagite. That seemed like a fancy way to insult someone, especially someone who believed any woo or gossip that came along.
Unfortunately I can’t find any such word.
Susurrus.
(whispering, murmuring, or rustling)
Earlier this week a character on a TV show used “irksome”. I realized that I may never used that word in a normal conversation, so I am making up for it. I’m finding a lot of things that could be described as irksome.
Perhaps you’re not pushing the opportunity envelope hard enough: Glenn Yarbrough of The Limeliters delighted in the use of “calliphygian cleft:” in a song, maybe “Hard Aint It Hard”, which I got to see and hear live in the early '60s.
Dan
I’m just trying to figure out how to pronounce it.
When I first saw it, I instinctively wanted it to be uh-NECK-do-TARD. But then I thought maybe you could keep the stress in both words, and come up with AN-eck-DOH-turd. But that sounds less like an actual word to me.
I tried looking it up on Google, but the word is only listed in a few places and none show the pronunciation.
I don’t know how you define “opportunity”, but going back into time to the 1960s might also be the best way to avoid lines at Disneyworld…
Heck, Harley Quinn used that in the first Suicide Squad movie.
This morning, I started a memo with “Remember the halcyon days…”