Lexical geekeries - Page 4 - Monochromatic Outlook

Solecism

I wrote this down a couple days ago with a note to myself to add it to the list. I can’t recall where I encountered…

Prosody

Prosody, or more properly Prosody IM is the name of an open source Jabber/XMPP server which was recommended to me as a replacement for the…

Chitin

Came across this while I was looking up the definition of Carapace. I’d always assumed it was pronounced with a soft ch sound and a…

Carapace

Yet another word gleaned from Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space.

Iatrogenesis

Rebecca mentioned it being her new favorite word in her comment about my last vocabulary entry. Darned if I knew what it meant, so I looked…

Hove

I guess I’d always assumed that would be heaved. I came across this in Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space.

Moribund

I came across moribund in Thomas Cleary’s introduction to the Shambhala edition of The Art Of War. I’ve picked up the meaning by context and…

refulgent

Yeah, «bright and shining» for a pretentious nincompoop in love with his thesaurus. In this case, Alan Dean Foster, who wrote the [novelization of the…

Just Happens

I cringe almost every time I see this phrase, and especially hate «just so happens». It almost always indicates the writer attempting to congratulate her…

Vertiginous

Heck, I know what vertigo is, but I didn’t make the connection when I saw the word vertiginous applied equally to Kandinsky’s early painting and…