New to Me

The word kakistocracy popped up in Johnson, the Economist's language blog. Normally I don't include words unless I have to look them up for some reason other than idle curiosity or seeing them on a word of the day site or the like. In the specific case of word of the day sites, it would feel a little like plagiarism to every day post the word I'd «looked up» by seeing it as the word of the day.

Found in a quoted section of a New Jersey child abuse case in a recent post on The Volokh Conspiracy. The post uses the case to raise questions of balancing religious freedom and parental rights in legal cases.

Found in Chambers Thesaurus as related to glibness while looking for words to describe P J O'Rourke's writing tone. Flibbertigibbet has led to a cascade of discoveries in the dictionary today.

Also persifleur, one who engages in persiflage.

Kudos to P J O'Rourke. I can't recall the last time I had to look up a word I found in a newspaper because the word was new to me. I've looked up words from a newspaper because I wanted a better understanding of some aspect of usage or nuance of definition. More often I've headed to the dictionary because the journalist misused or misspelled a word.

I wrote this down a while back but I'm pretty sure that I found it in de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

My goal this year is to have a post to Monochromatic Outlook every day, which might sound good but you also might end up with a bunch of vocab items. I have a backlog of words that I've had to look up but which have not yet made it to the database. I'll try not to rely too heavily on these as daily filler, but I'm making no guarantees.

About soporific, I'm embarrassed to say I wrote down the word but I did not write down the source. So I have no backstory except that I read it and looked it up. I have a vague recollection that I encountered it in another context very soon after I looked it up, but it's all hazy.

Found in deToqueville's Democracy in America. The word obviously comes from the name of the Roman god of sexual love, but in usage it does not apply so much to healthy desires. Instead it is associated with a dissatisfaction with what one already has and a need for possession.

Another word from Democracy in America.

Found in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I was surprised to find such a short word I was unacquanted with, and at first I thought I might have discovered a typo in my edition. However, it didn't make sense in the context of the sentence, so I turned to the dictionary and learned a new four-letter word.