Fuck me, is this the sort of help we conservatives get these days?
There are so many wanky words to poke fun at the left* with. “Embolden” is waaaay down the queue.
*Actually the right too - all that corporate shit.
Not to worry. Hang in there. The left and right swapping places even as we speak.
Here’s the thing. It’s not about hanging out with people. It’s about literacy. I see now where your thinking has gone awry. Read more books. Read some poetry. Maybe a literary magazine or two. Some history. Natural history. John Fowles. Mark Twain. Cormac McArthy. Munro. Chesterton. Conrad. Don’t rely on your miscreant contemporaries to bolster your vocabulary. You’ll be gibbering like an ape inside of two years.
I’m pretty sure that **Miller **has laid to rest your misconception about the rareness of “embolden.” At this point, I’m just making fun of you.
My superiornessosity over you, sadly, is even more common than field mice in a Georgia meadow. No sense in trumpeting that.
Think you misspelled blackguard there, sparky. After you eviscerate all those orphans, you won’t be able to swap out your paladin levels if you can’t find the thing in the DMG…
No. Because you think “embolden” is a Bushism.
You know, for the rest of us outside the US who speak English, embolden is a rather common word. So please don’t usurp it and give it to Bush. That’s just insulting.
You know, I wonder if born too late’s underlying problem is that he is simply shocked that your fearless leader actually knows some big words that aren’t made up?
Dibs on the window seat.
According to WordCount, “emboldened” (Yes, I know. Past tense. Work with me here.) is the 37,434th most common word, right between “dictators” and “solidified.” “Codpiece” weighs in at 81,201, between “pyrites” and “birdlip.” “Maiden” is at 10,140, between “syllabus” and “micro.”
“Giraffe,” sadly, is at 34,887, and “ignoramus” is way out at 66,591.
That site is way neat, but I just don’t think it’s right. Most common for whom? For example, look up “cat” and you’ll find that “bird” is one place more common. One place more common than “bird” is “candidate.”
The least common word in the list is “conquistador.”
I agree about using it as a cite. But just for information:
I think we should see what we can do about “conquistador.” Perhaps we can start using it interchangably with “barista.”
The 792nd word is “gon.”
I don’t know that word at all, my conquistador friend. 
Here:
Bedizen, noumenal, coacervate, condign, concupiscent, and uxorious don’t even make the list; nor does asshat.
I bet floccinaucinihilipilification is used less often than conquistador.
It’s British, try arsehole (32927).
Oh, sure. The list is clearly British, for one thing. It’s ranking words based on a small sample size, for another. Different word forms (plurals, past tense, etc) are listed seperately, for a third. And it includes proper nouns, for a fourth.
Also, you start getting into questions of how to define “commonness” of a word. In writing? In speech? Popular press? Academic papers? Some weighted combination? I don’t think it’s really anything more than a very rough measure of a word’s commonness.
Still and all, it’s rather fun, and the only thing I know of that even attempts to quantify word frequency beyond, say, the first thousand or so. And at least it’s got some pretense of objectivity.
(Bolding mine)
See, now that’s funny.
And the words zoom. I am always in support of that.
Gene Simmons was quite the conquistador in his aluminum codpiece. It probably emboldened him to approach all the emsheepened females. There are those who say he floccinaucinihilipilificationed sex.
“Embolden” is correct English. “Alright” is substandard usage.
Depending on your linguistic philosophy, it is either an outright error that is distressingly widespread, or a perfectly standard usage that is unnecessarily condemned.