21st Century Literature discussion

A thread to celebrate the simple joy of words. It's not that any one thing makes us enjoy or remember words. Sometimes it's the discovery of a word for an action you never knew had its own word (defenestration). Or maybe a word describing a certain type of book (grimoire). Maybe it's just the physical enjoyment of their sound or how it feels to say them aloud (mulch, shank, and cabochon always appealed to me for these reasons).

Tell us some of your favorites, share a recent discovery, or let us know about long-held confusions/mispronunciations/misunderstandings (e.g., for about 30 years I thought the appropriate phrase for someone quite taken with fashion was a "clothes whore" until I finally saw the phrase in writing and realized it was "clotheshorse").

Defenestration was familiar because I remember my parents talking about the Defenestration of Prague, but grimoire is a good one. I like macaronic, but it is not easy to use in conversation...

Marc wrote: "Or maybe a word describing a certain type of book (grimoire)...."

Is grimoire used in the Henry Potter series?

I'm glad you titled this "The Joy of Words." I was thinking last night of the sometimes power, for better or worse, of single words, like "despicable" for a recent political example.

Macaronic seems great, Hugh (and certainly, challenging to use)! One of my co-workers actually used defenestrate yesterday in reference to Amazon's Alexa: "You ask her more than two questions and you just want to defenestrate her!"

Not sure, Lily. I think I first came across grimoire via HP Lovecraft, but I'm not positive. Feels like Gaiman or Borges might be potential sources for me, as well.

They needn't be esoteric words. I had a classmate who added the letter "Y" to the end of words and it suddenly made them cute, especially curse words (she would curse by saying "fucky!").

The Kindle has a useful feature where you can press on a word and add it to a vocabulary builder. Recently, I have added “fungible” and “velleity”.

On a related note, the book Lost In Translation by Ella Frances Sanders is great fun. It takes words from other languages that cannot be translated directly into English and explains what they mean. There’s one for “the peculiar itchiness that settles on the upper lip before taking a sip of whisky”, for example.

Neil wrote: "The Kindle has a useful feature where you can press on a word and add it to a vocabulary builder. Recently, I have added “fungible” and “velleity”."

Fungible is a word I would use on a weekly, if not daily, basis in my day job. But velleity is new to me and actually, to your 2nd post, one of the concepts for which I wasn't even aware a word existed in English.

Which book did that come from?

Now that I know what fungible means, I can understand that, but I hadn’t come across it before.

Velleity is used in Gravity’s Rainbow.

Hugh wrote: "Defenestration was familiar because I remember my parents talking about the Defenestration of Prague, but grimoire is a good one. I like macaronic, but it is not easy to use in conversation..."

Last week at trivia, I was the only one who knew what defenestration meant. I was quite proud since everyone on my team has at least a master's degree and one person has a PhD in English. We take our little victories wherever we can find them!

I second Sanders's book--it's a fun one. I posted some of my favorites in my review.

Velleity is new to me, as well.

Sounds like you're more than pulling your trivia weight, Drew!

I like “gallimaufry”

Yesterday I while reading an essay in the New York Review of Books written by Marilynne Robinson I found myself resorting to the dictionary more than once. A couple of the words that I must find a place to use were "kerfuffle" and "panopticon."

I've come across a couple stories that made use of a panopticon, most recently the podcast "The Magnus Archives", where there's a labyrinth beneath the original panopticon at Milbank. I'm trying to remember what the other story was, I think it was a horror / SF story with an actual panopticon space prison or something. But the word and concept certainly grabbed my imagination as well.

Neil wrote: "The Kindle has a useful feature where you can press on a word and add it to a vocabulary builder. Recently, I have added “fungible” and “velleity”."

Thanks for pointing out this feature - unknown to me, Kindle has been storing the words I've looked up. You've can even select a book to see what you looked up when reading it:

Here are a few of my favs:
Malapert, scrumbled, pourboire, convolvulus, obsequies.

One thing I like is discovering short words with very precise meanings - gelid is one. I get a lot of my knowledge from crosswords - there are favourites dictated by grid-filling problems that you rarely see elsewhere - apercu, etagere, etui, moiety (etc. etc.)

As for convolvulus, I know all about that because my parents are constantly fighting it...

On Convolvulus, there’s a Flanders and Swann song that starts:

The fragrant honeysuckle spirals clockwise to the sun,
And many other creepers do the same.
But some climb anti-clockwise, the bindweed does, for one,
Or Convolvulus, to give her proper name.
Rooted on either side a door, one of each species grew,
And raced towards the window-ledge above.
Each corkscrewed to the lintel in the only way it knew,
Where they stopped, touched tendrils, smiled, and fell in love.

That’s me showing my age!

PS The song is a plant version of Romeo and Juliet

David Foster Wallace's novels are a treasure trove of newfound words. The one which I like is simple and direct AND found in the first page of Infinite Jest:

Wen

ah, the Great Wen!

Neil wrote: "On Convolvulus, there’s a Flanders and Swann song that starts:

The fragrant honeysuckle spirals clockwise to the sun,
And many other creepers do the same.
But some climb anti-clockwise, the bindwe..."

Excellent!

Last night, soon after posting, I came across convolvulus in a different book. One more time and it's a conspiracy.

https://youtu.be/AYr0eNtpDHs

Great thread, Marc, I'm enjoying everyone's examples.
Along the lines of your clotheshorse, for years I thought a lady of the night was a hoar and was puzzled by expressions like 'a hoary old cliche'.
I also mispronounced the word misled as myzuld for longer than I care to remember and it seemed to fit the sense just fine.
My personal favourite - I'd love to see the word coolth back in use.

Marc wrote: "A thread to celebrate the simple joy of words. It's not that any one thing makes us enjoy or remember words. Sometimes it's the discovery of a word for an action you never knew had its own word (de..."

Er... so you were not incorrect. Yes, there's a term, clotheshorse, but it is dated and rarely used by anyone discussing fashion or apparel love. Clothes whore has been commonly used for a couple of decades, at least since the '80s when I was in high-end retail. Urban Dictionary will verify its use, if you deem them worthy as a source of verification. In any event , I thought I'd reassure you that you haven't been misusing a term.

My learnings from last week, from -- I believe -- Out Stealing Horses -- were minging and jollification. Perhaps well-known to my Brit friends, but I encountered each for the first time and was amused to learn of them.

Seems like clothes whore must be derived from clotheshorse given they both have a pejorative tint, no? I still see it now and again in fashion mags and it turns up if you do a Google news search, but I can easily see the older term being supplanted by the newer one. Jollification sounds like some sort of made up business word ("Please follow the dress code when attending the year-end company jollification.")...

Sue, your post is like the opposite of those quotes I've seen going around (the ones about not making fun of a person for mispronouncing a word since it means they probably learned it from reading)--your reading has distorted your hearing!

Not a new word to me, but one I never grow tired of:
homunculus (grow'em early in time to use'em for stocking stuffers!)

Marc wrote: "Seems like clothes whore must be derived from clotheshorse given they both have a pejorative tint, no? I still see it now and again in fashion mags and it turns up if you do a Google news search, b..."

I agree.

Jollification now joins shenanigans and tomfoolery for favorite terms.

I love homunculus.

I learned defenestration back in the day when one of my clients was a window manufacturer. I didn't learn of the Prague events until last summer, I'm embarrassed to admit. It's such a fabulous word, notwithstanding the horror it describes.

How can you not like shenanigans?!! It's irresistible.

I learnt about the word jollification through liverpudlian group The Lightning Seeds as it is the title of one of their albums

I like circumlocution because it is almost self-referential

I like accumulate because, to me, it sounds like exactly what it means.

had to look up veridical yesterday

Nice one! Once you’ve looked it up you can reverse engineer it to see why it means that (if you did Latin at school 40+ years ago).

If I'd done Latin properly, I probably wouldn't have had to look it up! (we only did a few months at a very basic level)
I should have been able to work it out anyway because the component parts are both in plenty of other words, but I wanted to be sure...

This week in the UK Parliament the Transport Minister used the word "sermocination" - only the 3rd time it has been used in Parliament since 1803 (from when records of all words spoken have been kept).

The joy of dictionaries - you look up sermocination and get a word like prosopopoeia in the definition and have to look that one up too!

I like the words 'Translucent' 'luminous' and "Glissando'. More for the way the sounds of the words reflect the actual thing they are describing.

One of my favorite words is “umbrage.” I save it for very special occasions.

Hugh wrote: "The joy of dictionaries - you look up sermocination and get a word like prosopopoeia in the definition and have to look that one up too!"

Hugh, you brought a giggle to my morning, another word with a nice bit of onomatopoeia to it. I could have written "laugh," it might have been more accurate. But "giggle" was more fun and fit the mood created.

Here is one that caught my ear from another Goodreads thread that collects words we have chosen to note/look-up as we read: Alan: "ecdysiast: This was a word coined by H.L. Mencken in 1940, but I was surprised to see it used in a novel (and without even italics or quotation marks to distinguish it). The novel is Next by James Hynes..."

Note the etymology from ecdysis. Alan's entry led me down the path of realizing Mencken's interests in the use (joy?) of words, including American versus English. (E.g., his The American Language, which I have not read.)

Paul wrote: "This week in the UK Parliament the Transport Minister used the word "sermocination" - only the 3rd time it has been used in Parliament since 1803 (from when records of all words spoken have been ke..."

Wait. Your politicians use complex and rare words? How heartening. Sermocination is one I'm adding to my internal list.

Carol wrote:.... "Sermocination is one I'm adding to my internal list. ..."

What about Hugh's suggestion while you are at it, Carol? I hope I can remember it to use it... Sounds to me as if could be used for some of our American politics.

Hugh wrote: "The joy of dictionaries - you look up sermocination and get a word like prosopopoeia in the definition and have to look that one up too!"

214 years is a lot of Parliamentary speech so 3 occurrences is not many. Who knows it might even have been used in Congress in the 19th century...

Lily wrote: "Carol wrote:.... "Sermocination is one I'm adding to my internal list. ..."

What about Hugh's suggestion while you are at it, Carol? I hope I can remember it to use it... Sounds to me as if could ..."

Prosopopoeia is delightful. I would gave to practice saying it in front of a mirror several times privately before uttering it in a public setting. Perhaps it's one to use in a job interview when one has determined she doesn't want the job?

Hugh wrote: "214 years is a lot of Parliamentary speech so 3 occurrences is not many. Who knows it might even have been used in Congress in the 19th century..."

We can only hope. No money should be placed on that bet. :)

"Hugh wrote: "214 years is a lot of Parliamentary speech so 3 occurrences is not many. Who knows it might even have been used in Congress in the 19th century..."

Sermocination accurately describes many contemporary debates in Congress. But its use in a Congressional speech would be regarded as unAmerican and likely subversive.

Indeed.

I learned a new word from a friend's GR review a moment ago.

interdigitate

I'll be looking for somewhere to use it ....

One of my favorite words I heard first on The X-Files:

obfuscate

Kirsten wrote: "One of my favorite words I heard first on The X-Files:

obfuscate"

That was a favorite of NPR's Car Guys.

Was just introduced to a new word this morning: psithurism--The sound of wind in the trees and rustling of leaves.
Not something I can easily drop into a conversation, but I'm always happy to make the acquaintance of a new word.

You can always use it when you've already used "susurration" in your paragraph :-)

Whitney wrote: "You can always use it when you've already used "susurration" in your paragraph :-)"

Susurrus is a great word! Onomonopoetic enough that most people can guess the meaning from context, but unusual enough to show off! ;-)