I can get fired for even looking at my phone at work “for security reasons,” so I have it on tickle and steal a glance at who’s calling or texting. I may have a job interview coming up so Goody zone kept texting me about my wardrobe and its quality. Her last was an injunction to check my clothes “for incipient crappiness.” She has a basic flip phone but too much time on her hands, so this might have been the first time “incipient,” used and spelled correctly, has ever been sent from a dumb phone.
<hangs head> I had to expand it. I’ve never gotten or sent a text. Once my cell phone told me I had gotten one but by all that’s Holy, I could not figure out how to retrieve it.
A friend of mine casually used “thrice” the other day. He caught himself and said with surprise, “I don’t think I’ve ever used that word in conversation before.” The context in which he used it was completely appropriate, and I probably wouldn’t have batted an eye if he hadn’t said anything.
I used “assuage” in a text to my wife the other night. She told me it was really hot when I use words like that. Pretty sure she was only saying that because she was safely in another state.
One day while mowing the lawn, I noticed that my toddler son was dropping his blocks out the front window of the house, into the space behind the hedge. I shut down the mower, walked over to the front door, stuck my head in and called out to my wife that our son was defenestrating his toys.
A short time later she came outside and said that when she married the son of an English teacher, she knew I’d eventually use a word she’d never heard before, but she didn’t think it’d take that long.
Ms. Cups was commenting on my last girlfriend and used the word “lugubrious” which I’m pretty sure is the first time I’ve ever heard THAT word in casual conversation
Doesn’t exactly qualify, but here’s my story. When I first got my smart phone, I tried to type the word “nope.” One of the autotcorrect suggestions was “neophyte.” I didn’t use it, but now I sort of wish I had.
“night” or “tonight” rather than “nite” and “tonite”. At least, if sent from a phone where ‘g’, ‘h’ and ‘i’ share the same key, compelling an annoying delay in typing the word out.
Got my first smartphone ten months ago. Early on, I was (laboriously) posting to the SDMB on it…some topic involving World War II. I don’t know how the auto-suggest is coded, but it seems to have some sort of learning algorithm based on usage, because for weeks afterward it constantly guessed my next word might be “Nazi.”
“Honey, I’ll be home by Nazi.” "“Let’s invite the Nazi.”
I managed to use “polyorchidistic” in a text fairly recently, but this is with a friend where using such vocabulary is not unusual in the least. He’s pretty much the only one I go crazy with the vocab with. (As for “albeit,” I didn’t think that was that unusual a word. I hear it often enough in casual conversation that it doesn’t ping my radar as a “word power” sort of word.)
