Vocabulary Attribute: Personal Favorites

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

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.… Read the rest

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.… Read the rest

Sleep-induc­ing.

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 … Read the rest