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For a while now, whenever I’ve seen a word I liked and not known the meaning of, I’ve looked it up and stuck it on the end of a list in Google Keep. I was looking at the list the other day – I could not really remember (a) what any of them meant, or (b), where I read them. So, what I have done it stuck them all in a Google Sheets spreadsheet and bit-by-bit I’ll go through, look them up and note down the meaning.
The table is linked directly to the Sheets spreadsheet here, I am using the Inline Google Spreadsheet Viewer WordPress plugin to make it all WordPress friendly and such.
Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Myopia | Short-sighted. I know what this was in physiological sense, but I think I came across as more a lack-of-foresight type critical sense. Not sure where. |
| Flaneur | A man (or woman?) who saunters around observing society |
| Bildungsphilister | (a neologism: Bildung + philistine) A philistine with cosmetic, nongenuine culture...whatever that means. Probably using the word qualifies. http://tj-place.blogspot.co.nz/2009/02/bildungsphilister.html |
| Jante (, law of) | A condescending attitude towards individuality and success. A nordic thing. |
| Diatribe | |
| Diaspora | People who have spread or been dispersed from their homeland. "the Ukrainian diaspora flocked back to Kiev" |
| Boustrophedon | Written word where consecutive lines read forwards-backwards-forwards-backwards...kind of makes sense. if you ask me. Some ancient languages did it - did not catch on, but nor did Betamax. WIsh I knew waht the context was where I found this word. |
| Kaizen | A Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices, personal efficiency, etc. Thing I came across the word reading about 'The Toyota Way' in the book: The Machine that Changed the World |
| Vocal fry | |
| Torschlusspanik | The fear that time is running out to act, often regarding a life goal or opportunity. |
| Weltschmerz vs stoicism | |
| satisfice | |
| Milieu | A person's social environment. From the French 'mid-place' |
| autotelic | (of an activity or a creative work) having an end or purpose in itself. |
| Faustian bargain | |
| Imbroglio | An extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation. A confused heap. |
| apotheosis | |
| vainglorious | |
| starch gelatinization and proteins agglutination | |
| Potentate | |
| Orotundity | |
| Refusenik | |
| prelapsarian | |
| vexatious | |
| enantiomorphous | |
| aspersions | |
| Schadenfreude | |
| Merle | |
| akrasia | |
| Wu wei | |
| Legerdemain | Skilful use of one's hands when performing conjuring tricks. Also, more generally, deception & trickery. From the French, Leger de Main ('Slight/ lightness of hand") |
| Myoclonus,Myokymia & fasciculation | |
| denouement | |
| trencherman | |
| Sanchean phrase | From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: “Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise.” No idea what it means though. Read somewhere its alluding to Sancho Pancho, Don Quixote's squire and side-kick. Closest english term for 'Sanchismos' maybe? |
| Encomiums | a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly |
| apophthegm | |
| ignominy | |
| apotheosis | |
| Sartorial | |
| komorebi (木漏れ日) | |
| Flake of hay, blown calf (and cow blowing...) cast sheep | |
| staid | |
| Flimflam | Nonsensical or insincere talk, or a confidence trick. Came across when I was looking up 'Legerdemain' elsewhere in this list. |
| Mote | A tiny piece of a substance; a speck. "A mote of moon dust". |
| Atonal | Not written in any (musical) key.k. "There is no celestial harmony, but atonal panic"...in descring the sound of storm waves on a tropical island |
| Sibilant | Making or characterized by a hissing sound |
| Peregrinations | A journey, especially a long or meandering one. |
| tête à baffe | French for 'a pain in the neck'; but literal translation is 'the kind if face that makes you want to slap it' |
| unctuous | Excessively flattering or ingratiating, but in toady, slimy & insincere sort of way. |
| hormesis | phenomenon where a low dose of a stressor causes some small beneficial response whereas larger dose would not. An observed effect in toxicology... Different from homeopathy in which 'low' are orders of magnitude smaller (to the point of being, most studies would indicate) ineffective. |
| techne and episteme | crafts and know how & book knowledge, know what |
| fissiparous | inclined to cause or undergo division into separate parts or groups. 'the fissiparous tendencies innate in tribalism" |
| iatrogenics | relating to illness caused by medical examination or treatment. |
| spurious | I know, a relatively common word; but I like it and wasn't 100% what it meant:not being what it purports to be; false or fake. |
| teleological | |
| asinine | extremely stupid or foolish."Leo ignored Jon's asinine remark" |
| cynosure | a person or thing that is the centre of attention or admiration |
| promulgate | promote or make widely known (an idea or cause). "these objectives have to be promulgated within the organization" |
| "these objectives have to be promulgated within the organization" | |
| petrichor | earthy smell of rain, mostly due to geosmin. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44904298 |
| tabula rasa | blank slate, esp human mind at birth |
| bodacious | |
| autodidact | a self taught person |
| adduce | to cite/present as evidence |
| myoclonic/ hypnic jerk | when you jolt awake when you are drifting of to sleep |
| frisson | tingles/eurphoria when you hear certain music, see certain art |
| misophonia | A strong reaction to specific sounds. |
| palimpsest | |
| querulous | |
| reductive | |
| inveterate | having a particular habit, activity, or interest that is long-established and unlikely to change"""an inveterate gambler""". |
| codicil | appendum to a will |
| progenitor | |
| abyssopelagic | ...and Jack Nicholson deploying full Nicholson Eyebrows to portray the Joker’s abyssopelagic depths of insanity. |
| esoteric | intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest. |
| brown study | The condition of being so lost in solitary thought as to be unaware of one's surroundings |
| hirsute | hairy |
| Bresenham's | |
| penumbral | |
| Pyrrhic | (of a victory) won at too great a cost to have been worthwhile for the victor. |
| peduncle | a stalk like thing with a nodule on the end |
| Consecotaleophobia | fear of chopsticks |
| jejune | naive and simplistic, or uninteresting |
| sinophobia | fear/racism towards China ('mask-o-phobia') |
| Apophenia | incorrectly applying cause and effect between wholly unrelated things |
| hither and yon | |
| fallacious | based on fallacy |
| demotic | denoting or relating to the kind of language used by ordinary people; colloquial. "a demotic idiom" |
| vitiate | spoil |
| mast (year) | bumper crops of acorns etc (hard mast) or berries etc (soft) |
| pannage | (right to allow) pigs in woods eating acorns mostly |
| effete | |
| myrmidon | |
| psithurism | Sound of rustling leaves. Pronounced sit-your-ism |
| whippletree | type of load spreading mechanism |
| prosody | Prosody is the study of the tune and rhythm of speech and how these features contribute to meaning. |
| immolate | 1 : to kill or destroy especially by fire. 2 : to offer in sacrifice especially : to kill as a sacrificial victim |
| representativeness heuristic | |
| martinet | a person who demands complete obedience; a strict disciplinarian. |
| pettifogging | placing undue emphasis on petty details; petty or trivial. |
| factitious | artificial. A sham. |
| infundibular | funnel shaped |
| paramnesia | paramnesia |
| beatific | |
| lugubrious | dad |
| sad or dismal looking | |
| rachitic | look if having rickets |
| anodyne | not likely to cause offence or disagreement and somewhat dull |
| perfunctory | (of an action) carried out without real interest, feeling, or effort."he gave a perfunctory nod" |
| avaricious | |
| morose | |
| cuidado | be careful, in Spanish (kewy dado) |
| furtive | |
| sententious | |
| polluation | |
| parenthetic |
Are Obscure Words ‘Bad’?
Every once in a while I come across something that says using obscure words is ‘bad’. Bad because obscure (actually more typically ‘long’ in the articles) words are pretentious, or actually make you sound stupid, not erudite…or just make you an arsehole. An example of such an article is here on LifeHacker; that article quotes a study titled Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilised Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly
I just like words. The whole idea of them. I am not smart enough to use them in normal conversation so kind of a mute point.
An Aside
For the sake of it, I did some Googling and came across testyourvocab.com. My result was an estimated vocab of 32500 words, which was around the 70 percentile for a 37-year-old English speaker, which is okay I suppose.
The page’s blog does point out that the results are based on surveys of 2 million people as of 2013, but this population is representative of the 98% percentile of the American population as a whole: A certain type of person would take such a test. I was also pleased to see a couple of words in my list in the test words I was presented with!