I come across these quite often , and those of you who know me well, know that English is actually my second language and I find it very fascinating.
(You will often see me referencing a book called Foxen In The Hen Hice by Richard Lederer, for instance)
So that led me to start this thread. Think of it as words you’d like to use, but you’re afraid to because you don’t know WITF they mean, okay?
I once gave a speech and at the end of it, I had to introduce the next speaker, so I used the word “erstwhile”.
Being German, and knowing that the prefix “erst” means “first”, I thought I was paying the next speaker a compliment when I introduced her as “The erstwhile Ms. Teresa Williams, Ladies and Gentlemen!”
Well, shit! This woman had never been married and that was her exact name, not her former one!
crickets
And then “laughter”, thank Og. Because I was known as a bit of a joker in those days!
So I dug up a couple (or three) to get y’all started. Now keep in mind, these are words you might not use in every day conversation, even though you may think you know what they mean.
Banal
Nonsequitur
Sophomoric
I looked these up before posting, so I now know what they mean, but I didn’t before.
Bemused. I look it up all the time, and I still can’t wrap my mind around that word. I don’t know why. I can’t think of any more off the top of my head, but I know that as a big reader I often learn words that I’m not totally sure of, and am a bit afraid to use in real conversation.
Funny story though, that sort of matches this thread. A couple of years ago my niece moved in with us (aged 15), and I needed to go back to work because of it. Just her luck, I got hired at her high school teaching her math class! She told me after a couple of weeks that most of the kids don’t understand me when I talk – I use too many big words and nobody talks like that in real life. (Yup, and from where she comes from, it’s probably true. As she’s gotten to meet more and more of my friends, she realizes that real people do talk like that, and she’s trying to do it too now, with mostly positive results.) Anyway, as the school year went by and they got comfortable with me, the kids would start asking me what words meant, and trying to work them into their own conversations. It’s neat watching them learn (and also very “across the curriculum”, since I’m math). One of my former students even stopped by the other day to visit me, and asked the kids if I teach them lots of good “big words”.
I like hearing or reading new words and not really knowing what they mean, but if they pop up enough I sort of unintentionally decide what definition it should have (even if that’s wrong). The best examples come from music reviews, where I would find words like ‘angular’ and ‘obtuse’ applied to stuff I liked (I knew math and music are supposed to be related, but come on!)-- instead of trying to find out what they meant, I just remembered what they referred to and came up with my own definitions based on seeing it in reviews for different albums/bands.
Not quite on topic but I used to read the word “alcove” all the time but never heard it said and in my head consistently switched the l and the c so when I used it in spoken language myself I would say “aclove” and got bemused looks even more often than if I had pronounced it correctly.
I was at my girlfriends while her daughter was getting reading for a date. the daughter boyfriend is the son of one of my golf buddies. I naturally told him that the duaghter was upstairs farding in the bathroom and she will be down in a few minutes.
That’s another one for me! I can’t ever use it because I’m never quite sure what it means. So it’s a place named after a person? So Washington state is eponymous? I know I’ve heard it used before to represent a titular character (that sure is a great word too!), but knew that it wasn’t quite right.
According to this site an eponym is either something named after a person, or a person for whom something is named. Eponymous just means relating to an eponym.
So I think “eponymous” can legitimately be used to refer to a character who gives his name to a book, but also in great variety of other cases. E.g., “You may have heard of the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, whose eponymous cat is simultaneously alive and dead.”
“Apologist” is an easy word to misunderstand. It sounds like it means someone who’s apologizing for something, but it actually just means someone who is offering a defense of or justification of something.
For instance, I’ve heard people say “C.S. Lewis is an apologist for Christianity,” only to be met with the angry response “Who says Christianity has anything to apologize for?!”
Another example: English speakers learning Spanish sometimes think the word “embarazar” means “embarrassed”, when in fact it means “pregnant”. Ironically, such a mistake can lead to embarrassment.
I think nonplussed’s definition needs to be changed legitimately to “unsurprised”. I find myself constantly re-looking up this word’s definition as it just won’t stick in my head.
