There are only a handful of words where I can remember exactly when & where I learned the word. (Perhaps I’m in the minority here by only remembering a handful.)
For example, I learned the word “caprice” while reading, “The Count of Monte Cristo”.
“Bailiwick” I learned while reading Cliff Stoll’s, “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, and I learned the word “haver” from the Proclaimers’ song, “500 Miles”.
So, which words do you specifically remember learning? It can be from a book, song, movie, or elsewhere as long as it’s a specific event. “High School English Class” doesn’t cut it.
I specifically remember my mother teaching what “disobeyed” meant. This was one day before I had started school and was in trouble with her for some reason.
Me: “Why am I being punished?”
Mom: “Because you disobeyed me, didn’t you?”
Me: “I don’t know.”
Mom: “You don’t know whether or not you disobeyed me?”
Me: “No. I don’t know what disobeyed means.”
Like the OP – and, I suspect, nearly every American who knows the word – I learned “haver” from The Proclaimers.
I remember my grandfather, on a long car trip in his green Mercedes, explaining the meaning of “merge.”
And I somehow made it all the way to 4th grade without ever hearing or reading “fuck.” I still remember the bathroom wall it was written on. Took me a little longer to work out the precise meaning, though.
My grade 8 teacher made a big deal about his favourite word. The way he said that word was so compelling - it seemed something magical. We had to look it up. After the build up, it was a bit of a disappointment to learn the meaning of the word “gossamer” But I never forgot it!
I was working late one night (about midnight) and my wife called me to ask how to spell “egregious.” She was a court reporter, and an attorney had used it. She was looking it up under “A” in the dictionary. Another engineer knew the word, and now everyone in my family uses it regularly.
I looked up the word “latigo” after hearing it in a Garth Brooks song. I’ve been riding horses since I was a kid and owned them for years, and never heard that word.
When I was an adult, “epicene” and “inchoate” in two of Isaac Asimov’s stories. Actually, I don’t remember EXACTLY which stories, but I do remember my surprise that I couldn’t infer what they meant from the context and I HAD to look them up. At the time and even now, I don’t remember the previous time that had happened. Since then, of course, I’ve had to look up many words.
I always think of the phrase “non sequitur” at times like this. I learned it from Star Trek: TOS, on the episode about Nomad. :dubious: (aka Spock eyebrow smilie).
I also always remember two words I learned from Simon and Garfunkle: desultory, and philippic, from the song.
I remember looking up “epicene” while reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy, in 1988.
In another thread I was reminded of “ineluctable,” which I first stumbled upon along Sandymount strand, erm - in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
“Anamnesis.” Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion.
“Lordosis.” I learned this word from an ex-girlfriend who was an enthusiastic runner. She cited a study that showed that mice that ran in a wheel for extended periods of time tended towards lordosis, which she explained meant increased libido. I found it was an interesting word, and looked it up immediately.
It actually means “curvature of the spine.” I could never persuade her of that, and she kept bragging about her “total lordosis.” :smack:
I learned the word “shibboleth” early on here at the Dope in some thread on vocabulary. Any legitimate word that sounds like it came out an H.P. Lovecraft story is awesome by me
Not a word, but a phrase: When I was in the fifth grade (ca. 1978), our teacher was reading Banner in the Sky, a book about a kid climbing the Citadel in the Alps, aloud to the class. At one point the kids stops “to relieve himself.” Mr. D stopped to point out that that was a subtle way to say that he stopped to take a piss. (OK, so Mr. D didn’t actually say “take a piss,” but you gather my meaning.)
I learned “crackpot” from Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War, still a favorite of Mr. S’s and mine for personal reasons.
Vaginal. My younger sister musta had a yeast infection or something. But I remember picking up her prescription bottle and trying to pronounce the word by sounding it out. I might have been 14 or so. Hey! This was 1958. We didn’t know much back then.
I was a sheltered child and remember very, very clearly reading “shit” on a bathroom wall in third grade. It was written in purple crayon. We all got a big lecture on writing dirty words, but I didn’t even know what it was!
I learned “sodomized” and “orgasm” from The Stand when I was maybe eleven or twelve. Do you have any idea how hard it is to figure out what those words mean from the dictionary?
Like everybody else in the world, I got words like “carious”, “telic”, “crepitation”, and “etoliated” from Stephen R. Donaldson. Man does love his funny little words.
I learned some of the more ‘technical’ terms for various sexual acts by looking up dirty words in the dictionary and reading their definitions. ‘Coitus’, ‘fellatio’ and ‘cunnilingus’ fall squarely in this category.
