demagogue on 2/2/2009 at 20:42

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I hope you all can do your part in preserving the English language by adopting a rare word and pledging to use it periodically, lest it disappear into obscurity (and more to the point, from the dictionary for lack of use).

(http://www.savethewords.org/)

You can choose a word or click "adopt-a-word" to randomly select one. I'd already adopted "apophthegm" on my own because it's so perfectly clumsy. This time, it randomly selected "radicarian"* for me:

"The radicarian nature of kanji was very helpful to my Japanese study. I would have been lost in a sea of strokes and dashes without it."

Oh, I can write a better sentence than that:

"Japanese characters are essentially radicarian, which comes in very handy when learning them. I would have been lost in an indistinguishable sea of strokes and dashes without it."


* Radicarian - Pertaining to the roots of words.

Kolya on 2/2/2009 at 22:22

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I hereby adopt venustation which is the

act of causing to become beautiful or handsome.

Basically what Claire does to the Basket Case who, let's face it, looked way better with the black shit on her eyes.
I could also imagine this to describe a certain train station.

jtr7 on 2/2/2009 at 23:17

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Last year saw a brief resurgence of the lesser-known word defenestrate, to throw out a window, though I've seen it misspelled as "defenstrate" in most instances I've come across.



I had to purchase a Dictionary of Difficult Words because many of the books I had been reading had words not found in my 40,000 word collegiate dictionary, nor, at the time, would they turn up in an online search! Although grateful for the words it did define for me, I was quite miffed to discover a large portion of the dictionary was elementary filler. I don't need to find "a", "the", "for", et cetera, in a dictionary of DIFFICULT words, thank you very much. Before I had the internet, and before I had access to dictionaries of difficult words, I created a document to list out all these words I'd never seen before, and many I still have not found elsewhere beyond the pages of those books. Someday I hope to fill it out with definitions, to have my own dictionary of difficult words. :p

Toxicfluff on 2/2/2009 at 23:42

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That was my immediate thought. Some are OK, a lot of them are just clanking antiquities bereft of the subtle inflections that words still in currency acquire. Their only, uh, charm is that almost always irritating 'I know a weird old word' sort that almost invariably leads to some smiling blister of a human being staring into your face with a stabworthy expression of self satisfaction, waiting for you to ask what it means.

Yup, great site. A bit too good, I fear, as I often don't check etymology on a second source any more and there's an awful lot of it that ain't certain.


jtr7: Yeah, it's interesting how unusual words will bubble up into the common consciousness from time to time. I was introduced to defenestrate by some piss-poor english nu-metal band monikered the very same about 6 years ago. Recently, I've noticed byzantine coming up a lot. There was another one too that I can't recall.

jtr7 on 3/2/2009 at 01:21

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Indeed, 'tis horrocious.