I’ve been banging lots of these against the online dictionary sites and finding that – along with sounding ridiculously cool – so many of them have ridiculously interesting meanings.
So … thanks !
And while some medical terms clearly have meanings that are pretty awful … the words themselves are ridiculously cool.
F’rinstance …
A few years back, I got sick. On the table (among the differential diagnoses) was:
Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis
And while I’m glad it wasn’t what I had … it really is a cool sounding term … once you get your head around saying it … er … mellifluously.
I was watching some TV show, I can’t remember what, and one character named a litany of ways to kill another character, and they were all these short, Anglo-Saxony words: shoot, beat, choke, stab! and at the end, she says “or defenestrate!” It struck me as very, very funny for some reason.