Name your favorite useless words! Show off your mad skillz in jargon, obscure old words, and bizarre half-forgotten pieces of vocabulary. They don’t even have to be English. Short, long, it don’t matter. Just make them useless – either their definitions are so specific that the word is nearly meaningless or they are far harder to pronounce or remember than what they describe.
I’ll get it started with some of my favorites from science and medicine. Mine roll off the tongue with all of the elegance of Rodney Dangerfield’s Triple Lindy.
hyperborborygmi – loud stomach groaning
microsynteny – the property of two genomes having the same ultrastructure over a range of a few dozen kilobases
triphodont – a person who grows a third set of teeth
macrognathia – a person with an abnormally large chin
If you want a useless word, there’s ambuscade. It means ambush. There’s no shade of different meaning, no odd connotations. It just means ambush. Why say you’re going to ambuscade someone?
Isotropic reactions manifest equally in all orientations and directions. Dip something in acid and it etches in all directions at once.
Anisotropic reactions are directional. Reactive Ion Etching, Ion Milling and Ion Plating are all orientation dependent and perform their work according to sample position and exposure.
Stoichiometry = A term used to represent ideal reaction and deposition factors according to projected electrochemical values and rates.
Extispicy = Divining from the exta of sacrificed animals.
Sortilege = The casting of lots.
Not exactly the sort of thing you’re looking for, but here’s a useless word I’ve been noticing a lot lately: supernumerary. The word you’re groping for is “extra.”
All those ridiculous collective nouns for different kinds of birds, like a murder of crows or an exaltation of larks. Everybody in the real world just calls them “flocks.”
Why do you consider anisotropy (and, by implicayion, its derivatives) a useless word, Zenster? I encounter it often, and I’m not sure what word I would use to more efficiently replace it.
Oh really? So tell me exactly when you would use the word “utilize” where the word “use” just wouldn’t do. There are plenty of words, which may not be entirely useless, per se, but are easily replaced with much simpler ones.
Why say “ambuscade”? What if there were some Ayrabs around? You couldn’t merely ambush them, you’d have to step things up a notch. Or so Twain thinks.
The indentation in the bottom of a wine bottle is called a “kick” or a “punt.” I reccommend not trying to dispense that trivia after emptying the bottle. Words may be slurred, first letters may be swapped, bad things may occur. The Book of Lists has a list of “ten things you don’t know the names of,” and if I weren’t so lazy, I’d go find it. I do remember that a “hemidemisemiquaver” is a 1/64 note.
