Reification

Found in Jaron Lanier’s [*You Are Not A Gadget*]([canonical-url:2013/05/26/finding-internets-inner-human]). I haven’t read enough of the book to tell much about it, but it should be…

Footmanism

I stum­bled across [a pas­sage from *Moby-Dick*]([canonical-url:node/1564]) which tick­led my fan­cy today. In there was a word I can gen­er­al­ly dis­cern from con­text, but of…

poseuse

I don’t nor­mal­ly include words here that come from Word of the Day sites as it seems a bit like pla­gia­rism, but today’s OED Word…

Gift

This hol­i­day sea­son Sears’s slo­gan is «how to gift.» I know more than a cou­ple peo­ple who share a pet peeve: the use of the word…

Greed

Note the word «exces­sive» in the def­i­n­i­tion above. This word has been com­ing up fre­quent­ly these days with the Occu­py Wall Street protests hap­pen­ing. It comes…

Kakistocracy

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…

Paradoxically

I can’t fault the New York Times too much. After all, they were quot­ing what oth­ers said in yes­ter­day’s arti­cle Can a Play­ground Be Too…

Heterotrophic

She: I’ve got to get up and get lunch. I’m like an amoe­ba today. Me: Het­erotroph­ic? In the age of text mes­sag­ing, one can use Wikipedia…

Gravamen

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…

Hoary

My father is fond of a kind of cough­­drop-like can­dy called hore­hounds. I knew from his descrip­tion that the can­dy got its dis­tinct fla­vor from…