Needful Words

Searching (per Dr. Spanks's suggestion) for websites collecting obscure words, I found a bunch, including The Gradiloquent Dictionary and the Luciferous Logolepsy. ("Luciferous" there meaning, as it does in the Fallen Angel's old name, "Bearing light" or "illuminating").

From the first I found this useful word:

eleutherophobia -- fear of freedom

I also found this essay by Will Self on "fast culture," a term he uses for fast-food style culture or education.

Oh, and here's something I found last week: "nonce word," a word invented "for the nonce" and not expected to be used again. A nonce word is an invented non-word where you can still tell what it means, because it's combining real words and suffixes and prefixes and such. For example I just insulted Jake Tapper's cat as "fat, entitled, and dandrous," dandrous being a made-up word for "full of dander."

Now that I know this is A Thing and not just a mistake I make, I'm going to be doing it more. I feel liberated, knowing this is A Thing I'm allowed to do.

(It's possible dandrous really is a word, if you look it up in the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary, but who has one of those? Not me.)

posted by Ace at 05:08 PM

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