There she goes, my beautiful world
Indicates that I was previously unaware of the existence of this word.
A friend on Facebook recently asked why anyone would use bespoke when custom is a perfectly good word. The post sparked a flurry of responses about the faddish use of bespoke and its use to put on airs. I was reminded me that I looked up bespoke in the dictionary less than a year ago. My too-infrequently followed rule here is to write an entry when I look a word up in the dictionary, so I am responding here.
I looked
Another word found in Go Set a Watchman. It usually says good things about a novel when I have to look up multiple words in one sitting. Not always; sometimes it seems like the obscure words don’t add value. I have mixed feelings about the use of gulosity here. If I were asked to edit this I might not insist it get replaced but I’d want to have a conversation about why it was important. Perhaps it’s archaic, but
Found in Harper Lee’s *Go Set a Watchman*. I don’t want to go in to the context here, but I was almost sorry I looked this one up.… Read the rest
Found in the 25 January 2014 edition of *The Economist*. The former military dictator of Pakistan, Perez Musharraf, was described by doctors as being in «pretty good fettle» despite claims of a heart attack for which there was no evidence, and upon which his lawyers claimed he was not healthy enough to be tried for high treason.
Thanks go to *The Economist* for expanding my vocabulary, a task other publications seem reluctant to take on. … Read the rest
Mr Lanier strikes again.
When I came across the sentence, «The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process» in *You Are Not A Gadget* I thought at first that I’d stumbled across a typo that had escaped the editor’s eye. I expected that he meant *leeched* as in, sucked away as though by a parasite. While this would have made enough sense, Lanier’s choice indeed seems more appropriate.
Fortunately, I thought for a moment about who was more … Read the rest
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 clear from the title that *reification* is the kind of word one would likely find in its pages. … Read the rest
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 which I was unfamiliar. *Footmanism* itself isn’t found in my Shorter Oxford or Chambers Dictionaries, but *footman* refers generally to one who goes on foot but more specifically to one whose occupation it is to run next to a coach or horse in order to attend to the needs of the passenger or … Read the rest
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 of the Day is *[poseuse](http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/265105)*, which tickled my fancy. It had not occurred to me that there might be a feminine counterpart to poseur. Though gender-specific names for roles and professions are increasingly seen as distasteful, somehow, doing so in French doesn’t seem so bad. Not that there is any real difference between … Read the rest
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.
But Kakistocracy … Read the rest
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 and a dictionary for one’s snappy responses.… Read the rest