Here’s a collection of absolute crackers I came across. It was literally a run-out sale of words - the Macquarie Dictionary was trying to decide whether or not these words were in fact extinct or so moribund as not to be worth putting in the dictionary anymore, so they organised a bit of a news story to see if anyone came to their rescue. I’ve been dying to use them. But I doubt I ever will. How do I Mrs Prosequi that she is “full of muliebrity”?. But I am tempted by “Me fail maths and English? That’s compossible!”
Abstergent: Cleansing
Agrestic: Rural
Apodeictic: Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration
Caducity: Perishableness
Caliginosity: Dimness
Compossible: Possible in coexistence with something else
Embrangle: To confuse
Exuviate: To shed
Fatidical: Prophetic
Fubsy: Squat
Griseous: Somewhat grey
Malison: A curse
Mansuetude: Gentleness
Muliebrity: The condition of being a woman
Niddering: Cowardly
Nitid: Bright
Olid: Foul-smelling
Oppugnant: Combative
Periapt: An amulet
Recrement: Refuse
Roborant: Tending to fortify
Skirr: A whirring sound, as of the wings of birds in flight
Vaticinate: Prophesy
Vilipend: To treat with contempt
Quintessential- For some time I thought this word meant “very essential”, as in five times as essential as everything else. Turns out it just means “typical” or “a good example of”.
Diffident. I think it means not caring much, but I’m not sure. I’ve been diffident about looking it up. If it doesn’t mean that, boy, will I be embarazar.
Edit: Nope. It means:
lacking confidence in one’s own ability, worth, or fitness; timid; shy.
I was just getting ready to put this word down–yet still only had a fuzzy explanation of why I can’t grasp it…you just described it perfectly. I just cannot accept the definition–it’s just–wrong!
Maybe a year or so ago, my mother and I discovered during a game of Fictionary (like Balderdash, but there’s no board and you use a dictionary instead of a stack of cards) that we both had the same (wrong) meaning of “akimbo”–we were always picturing limbs willy-nilly all over the place.
In sixth grade, I walked up to my teacher after she’d finished writing that spelling unit’s words on the board and informed her that she’d misspelled “derbis.” Because in my head, there was the word “debris,” which I’d only heard spoken, and the word “derbis,” which I’d only seen written. This happened for a number of other words, too. :smack:
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!
An easy way to think of an eponym is that it’s the reverse of a namesake–an eponym gives its name to something else, whereas a namesake takes its name from something else. So, if something is eponymous, it means it’s the thing for which something else is named. So you can speak, for example, of the eponymous character in *Hamlet *(which would be Hamlet).
I only know this because eponymous is the name I use on 90% of the webbernets. (Which is why it’s weirding me out to see it bolded so much in the posts in this thread–I keep thinking people are speaking to or about me!
These, at a minimum, I’m quite sure I knew… not that I’d use them in conversation, but.
Well, it really means something more like “the ultimate example of”. Like “7-11 is the quintessential convenience store.”
I’ve never let not being sure of a word’s meaning keep me from using it. I once wrote an essay about a story where one group won by way of burning something, and I called it a Pyrrhic victory.
When I was a kid, I read a comics digest which included a story called Mr. Malison’s Mansion. Since I knew that the “mal-” prefix meant "bad"or “badly” in such words as “malady” and “malnourished”, I figured out from the title that Malison would be a bad guy. However, I didn’t check a dictionary to see if “malison” was an actual word. Years later, I came across the word benison and remembered that Captain Nemo yarn.
I subsequently realized that malison must be the antonym of benison. Although the former term is marked as “archaic” in this entry, the fact that its antonym is still in relatively common use argues for the dictionary’s retention of malison as “the other side of the coin”, so to speak.
I think the word “anachronism” is just great and I frequently use it on people at work who would never pick up on the fact that I have no idea what it means. Something to do with time.
I think I’ve looked up the definition of “hermeneutic” a million times, but when I encounter the word, I can never remember the definition. “Solipsism” also falls into that category.
I really want “touchstone” to mean something like talisman – a thing or place or person or idea that can focus or ground you when you “touch” it. Too bad it doesn’t mean that.
I have two cats. “Exuviate” is so becoming part of my vocabulary!
Ubiquitous. Which I probably just misspelled too. Someone used it in another post I just read and I remembered that I cannot recall this word’s meaning any time!
I’m so glad to know I’m not the only person who has words they just can’t wrap their mind around.
Even after I’ve looked up words like these, as I just now did, I won’t use them. They are obscure enough that people won’t know what I’m saying. If I use a mysterious word, I haven’t communicated anything. I might as well have mooed. :smack:
I use the word droll to mean “a joke so unfunny as to be funny.” You know, sort of like the opening of this post. I suppose it’s not far from the given meaning, considering I use it to point out things that are humorous in an odd way.
I once wrote an essay about a story where one group won by way of burning something, and I called it a