Archive for the 'Brand New Words' category

Vocabulary Goals

Jul 22 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words

Y’all, while I was suffering from depression, ennui, adult onset ADD (lazyness, easy distractability), greater and lesser degrees of drunkeness, and some truly stupendous degrees of drunkeness, and as such, not blogging, I spent a lot of time reading books.

Which is to say, when I wasn’t funneling prozac down my gullet with jeroboams of wine, I read. I am thinking of making a list of books here, but mostly you could go to my Goodreads page and friend me there, because I do tend to keep it updated.

Point is! Books! I read them. But! I didn’t take notes on new words. Occasionally I learned a new word and thought, “Oh, I should blog that.” Then I came over all sweaty and shaky and had to go get another drink.

Blogging anxiety or the DTs– they’re so similar.

Anyway, two words, or one word and a suffix, I am trying to use lately:

  1. “rad” as in, “This sobriety thing is rad.”*
  2. “-balls” as a replacement for -ly, as in “Last night we got amazeballs drunk and played mariokart and I came in third!”**

Do you all have vocabulary goals? Is it strange to have vocabulary goals?

* Or so I hear.
** That’s totes a lie. I came in 12th.

2 responses so far

The Beauty Blogroll

Dec 10 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words, Confession, Gaming

Last week, during what I started thinking of as The Week of Loveliness I was going to talk about all the reading I do lately to get the scoop on beautifying my mug. I started a post, got distracted, and wandered off. Just like I do all the time! So now I’m getting back to things. I haven’t updated my blogroll in quite a while and there’s quite a bit of stuff over there I don’t read and need to purge in favor of other things. But there are two beauty blogs there and not my at-home bookmarks, so we’ll start with those.

  • I forget how I found Temptalia, but it’s one I definitely read every day. Christine is a prolific, fun blogger. And though for a while there her site was exceptionally cluttered and hard to navigate, she’s written her ass off the last few months with a series of posts called The Scarlet Season, describing and swatching all her red lipsticks. It’s glorious!
  • And then there’s The Next Best Thing to Going Shopping Yourself, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Karlasugar swatches like she was born to do it! I have a great time looking at her new posts every day, comparing colors and reading about textures and finishes. She even posts great, complex look tutorials from time to time.

And then there are the blogs not in the sidebar blogroll, because I’m lazy and also there was a strange feeling of not wanting everybody to necessarily know how much time I spend contemplating eyeshadow. Which is silly, don’t you think? I do. So here goes.

  • Karen’s Makeup and Beauty Blog is awesome and hilarious. She might be my favorite beauty blogger. I’d love to take her out for lunch, because she reads like she’d be totally cool if you just said, “Hey, let’s go to lunch and talk about Benefit and cats.” Her cat blogs, and she’s constantly editing pictures of fantastically attractive men with hilarious speech bubbles while swatching, describing, tutoring, and dishing like she’s your best friend who just happens to be massively stylish and awesome and normal all at the same time.
  • Beauty Blogging Junkie is kind of the opposite of that. Everything is rarefied and sophisticated and so very New York. But what do I know about how to look glamorous in New York? Not a thing. But she writes a lot, so I’m learning.
  • Scrangie is, in my opinion, pretty much the best nail polish blog there is. I’m pretty sure she has more than two hands. Or maybe just a preternatural ability to organize editorial lead times. Whichever. Point is: gorgeous swatches, honest commentary, near-daily updates. Excellent!
  • Beauty and the Blog is Sephora‘s corporate blog, so what you lose in honesty is made up in frequency. It’s great reading for finding new products and new incarnations of existing products.
  • The Beauty Look Book seems to concentrate on rarer brands, and also pick a brand and exhaust all exploration possibilities before moving on to a new one. But I’m still getting to know it and how the author works, so I could be wrong there. She also posts fantastic product sets– pictures of all the products she used to create any given look. It’s very inspirational.
  • I’m also new to Chic Profile, but I give her mad props for the first two posts as of today. The first one is on a hot pink Essie nail polish that, worn without base or topcoat, is not long for this world, and saying that it’s not worth the money you’d spend on it. And then, in the next entry, talking about how great La Mer face cream is. For $110 or so per ounce, it best soothe your skin, clean your house and give you an orgasm.
  • All Lacquered Up is another nail polish blog. There are fewer swatches, but more information on upcoming trends and releases.
  • Just getting to know Spoiled Pretty, but I really like her voice. She seems very genuine and very down to earth and honest about the products she’s using and recommending. She’s also got a great Ask a Makeup Artist feature.

I spend a whole lot of time contemplating eyeshadow. And even more on lipstick. And lately, a ton on nailpolish. I’m very serious about my silly!

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On the Discord Arising from the Excessive Love of a Hat Words II

Dec 07 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words, Recovering English Major

We haven’t gotten up to much lexpionage around here lately, have we? As usual, there’s no particular reason for it. I’m just very lazy and easily distracted. So back at Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon? Yes.

Where we learn words like fleam:

It had been forged to order by the same maker of instruments who supplied the rabbi-physicians of Zelikman’s family with their scalpels and bloodletting fleams, in sly defiance of Frankish law, which forbade Jews to bear arms even in self-defense, even when an armed gang of ruffians dragged your mother and sister screaming from the kitchen and did rank violence to them in the street while you, a boy, were obliged to stand bladeless by.

A fleam is exactly what context says it is– a lancet for opening veins. Although this gives you the idea that you could shiv someone with one if they were raping your sister, and you probably could, it looks more like a little hammer than anything we’d think of as a slicing device. The word itself goes back to the Greek root phlebo- meaning “vein.”

Or contumelious, which is an awful lot like contumacious, but different enough to catch the eye:

He was nearly as gifted at languages as the contumelious myna.

Contumely is absue, scorn, or disdain. To be contumelious is to act in a way that shames and humiliates with insults. Quite a bit more powerful there than contumacious and good to know. And from the Latin contumax, meaning insolent.

And also, affiant:

All that remained of the temple, reared by Alexander during his failed conquest of Caucasia and affiant now to that failure and to the ruin of his gods, was a wind-worn pedestal and the candle stub of a fluted column, against which a would-be ruffian named Hanukkah sat propped with his right hand over the wound in his sizable belly, as he had sat for two long days and nights, waiting with mounting impatience for the angel of death.

This is a tricky one. Affiant essentially means witness. Or I guess it’s tricky, to me, because of Chabon’s way of packing about 18 different ideas into one sentence. An affiant is a person who makes an affadavit. It’s from Middle French afier, meaning “to confide,” “to trust,” or “to promise,” which is the same root that gives us “fiance.” Prior to that it’s straight Latin ad fidere, “to trust.”

And that’s where we’ll stop, because staring at fidere brings to mind “fid” which makes me think of Anathem, which is what I was sure I’d be writing for the Yuletide rare fandoms ficathon this year, but it turns out not. And I spent all weekend watching a certain set of DVDs for the fandom I am writing for and I’m finding it really hard to get going with a story in that fandom which also involves a love of Latin as in In Hoc Signo Vinces except I’m not writing about that part of it and the part I should be writing about really makes me wish I knew Russian. Anybody know Russian? I’ll be your best friend! Okay!

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On the Discord Arising from the Excessive Love of a Hat Words

Oct 19 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words, Lexpionage

Alright. I took a bit of a break from the literary vocabulary out of respect for Mervyn Peake and also because I was bored and worn-out of it. But now! I am still kind of bored and worn out. Nevertheless, there is lexpionage. Because that is what we do around here. Words for the next few weeks will be from Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. Y’all know I’m a huge Chabon fan. I hope you are, too, or are considering becoming one. Last year I did the Yiddish Policeman’s lexpionage, from his novel of similar title. Remember that? Zugzwang! This novel, though, doesn’t lend itself so easily to titling, punny or otherwise. So the title is the title of the first chapter of the book, from which we get the first three words. Which I should probably throw out there already. Ahem.

Ever heard of shatranj? Me neither, until now:

Engrossed in the study of a small ivory shatranj board with pieces of ebony and horn, and in the stew of chickpeas, carrots, dried lemons and mutton for which the carvansary was renowned, the African held the place nearest the fire, his broad back to the bird, with a view of the doors and the windows with its shutters thrown open to the blue dusk.

Shatranj is a the board game from which Chess developed.* The word itself is Arabic (from which English derives the word “Chess” via French) but can be traced back to the Sanskrit word chaturanga, and from there to Old Persian chatrang. The missing “u” is the result of syncope, the same phonetic process usually inflicted on unstressed vowels that has us say “gonna” when we mean “going to.” Interestingly enough, “chaturanga” survives intact in yoga. It breaks down into two words “four” and “arms,” as in Chaturanga Dandasana, the Four Limbed Staff Pose.

Nor had I heard of bambakion, which goes like so:

The precise origin of the African remained a mystery. In his quilted gray bambakion with its frayed hood, worn over a ragged white tunic, there was a hint of former service in the armies of Byzantium, while the brass eyelets on the straps of his buskins suggested a sojourn in the West.

Clothing word! Exciting! I never get tired of learning these. This one is a little difficult for me to picture. It’s definitely worn on the top half of the body. Wikipedia says that it’s a protective garmet for the Cataphract warrior (mounted cavalry), and is distinguished from infantry gear by composition (leather) and color (red). Leather to protect your sensitive rib cage and guts. Except The African’s is quilted, so maybe not so much leather.

So we’ll leave that to marinate and move on to mahout:

Neither the beardless stripling who was sitting just to the right of its victim, nor the one-eyed majout who was the stripling’s companion, would ever forget the dagger’s keening as it stung the air.

A mahout is the keeper or driver of an elephant. This is a major plot point. And one I should have seen just from the cover of the book, but didn’t, because I like to ignore all signs and symbols on the covers of books and just let literature flow over me. No, just kidding. I can be completely seduced or sickened by covers. The cover of this particular book did neither, though. The word is from the mid-17th century, which makes it a bit out of place for a story set in A.D. 950. Nevertheless, it’s forerunner, the Sanskrit mahamatta, would have been just that much harder to figure out.

So! Wow! No Latin in sight! How do you feel?

*“Not much is known of early days of chess beyond a fairly vague recourse / that fifteen hundred years ago two Princes fought / though brothers for a Hindu throne….”

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The Neglected Vocabulary of the Recent Past

Oct 12 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words, Lexpionage

Way back when, I used to do weekly lexpionage. I had a big blotter calendar kitted out by month and would write down a new word on the day I first learnt it; then every Friday I’d round up the words and part. That blotter got used up and the one that replaced it has no calendar. So I started making columns of different types of words: new words, rediscovered words, fanfic words, and several others. And I found that, by making all these big lists, and being constantly on the lookout, and also making the same notes in books, I was actually getting less lexpionage done. I wasn’t being as discriminating. And I’d fill up a blotter page with other stuff– phone numbers and doodles and stuff, but the words would still be there, unposted. So I’d tear one sheet off and write the columns down again, copying what I already had. I’ve done this several times now. Maybe for the better part of a year.

So today I’m starting to clear out the New Words I Learned on the Internets column. I didn’t save URLs, only sources, so I can’t give context or remember it. But once upon a time these words were interesting. Or they still are. I think they still are.

I found enthymeme at The Evangelical Outpost way back when it was just a Joe Carter joint. Not that it’s not still good reading, but it is different. And enthymeme is a syllogism in which one part of the conclusion is not stated explicity, usually because it is assumed, either because it is obvious or because it is dubious.

Doxastic comes from Vox Populi and I think tripped me up to the point where I thought I’d just set it aside and mull it over until it made sense. Because frankly it cooks the nugget. Doxastic logic is logic concerned with belief. Go check out the wikipedia entry for doxastic logic. Shoot buddy. Y’all want to take some symbolic logic classes? I do.

Conurbation should have been self-evident, but it wasn’t. Those guys at Counting Cats in Zanzibar are always dazzling me with their wit and badinage. I should remember they’ve got a woman on staff lately, but somehow Nick hovers frontmost in the mind. Conurbation is the technical term for suburban sprawl, where several developed areas come together to form one large urban area that nevertheless maintains the idea of the small towns or cities that came together to make it. I like this word because it’s easily and obviously understood, yet still manages to give the idea that it means something entirely else, like maybe it’s a fancy, secret word for being very annoyed.

These words actually aren’t copied anymore. I stopped copying. I just clipped the corner out of one blotter sheet and taped it down on the new one. Enthymeme and Conurbation are bent and manged from my keyboard. Three words down, six to go.

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Gormenghastocabulary XII

Sep 08 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words, Lexpionage, Recovering English Major

I was going to start out by talking about how this is the penultimate edition of the Gormenghastocabulary, but then I realized it’s not. There are two more books in the Gormenghast series, and I own both and I plan on reading them both. So this is the penultimate set of words from Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. And some exciting words they are.

First, there’s madder:

Her big head was coloured to a dim and dreadful madder.

“Her” is Countess Groan and dreadful is right. Poor Flay! This is one of those situations where Peake manages to just stuff a sentence full of meaning. Countess Groan has strangely colored red hair, yes, so that gets the first, truest definition of madder: red dye attained from the roots of Rubia tinctorum. It’s where Stephen King got his title Rose Madder and part of the chorus of the song, “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” (Alizarin crimson).* But then you’ve got secondary and tertiary meanings of “mad” going on: crazy and enraged, and the Countess is both.

Peake, as a writer, can craft a sentence, right? Sometimes he spools them out, drowning you in words. Sometimes, like here, he just seizes you around the throat and asks, “Got all that?!”

Then, dace:

Swelter is shifting the soft, dace-like areas of his feet backwards and forwards, a deliberate and stroking motion, as of something succulent wiping itself on a mat.

A dace is an oogy little fish. This is twice now Peake’s gotten me with animal words. Swelter is awful to begin with (he hates Flay so I hate him) but this really amps up the grody.

Finally, arras:

‘Good-bye,’ said the voice. ‘It is all one. Why break the heart that never beat from love? We do not know, sweet girl; the arras hangs: it is so far; so far away, dark daughter. Ah no – not that long shelf – not that long shelf: it is his lifework that the fires are eating. All’s one. Good-bye…good-bye.’

An arras is a tapestry and the word comes from a town in France, where tapestries are made. Contextually, that’s Lord Groan. He’s in a bad, bad way. He’s got all kinds of colons and semi-colons and the fires are eating his life’s work. Which is extra sad, considering the best of his life’s works, Fuchsia and Titus, are not being consumed by fire. Oh dear.

Last of the Titus Groan words next week, y’all. After that? Well, Michael Chabon and Neal Stephenson, of course!

*My favorite version is Sarah McLachlan’s. Solace was a really good album.

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Gormenghastocabulary X

Aug 17 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words, Lexpionage, Recovering English Major

I wanted this morning’s missive to be about food. There was very-low-sugar Blueberry Boy Bait (I have not noticed more than the usual number of boys around– just two and that’s counting Ford-o– since making it) and homemade pizza*. But my camera is acting up. So back to Gormenghast, where Steerpike is also acting up, and I can’t talk too much about context anymore for fear of spoiling the whole thing for you. What do you say?

You say, “Sarah, gill is not a new word. You know what gill means.” As a unit of measurement? Gill?

He followed the two purple ninepins through the door, and after passing down a short passage, Cora opened a massive door at the far end whose hinges could have done with a gill of oil apiece, and followed by her sister entered the Room of Roots.

As a unit of measure, it’s equal to one-quarter of a pint or half a cup. That’s a lot of oil right? It’s an old word, from the early thirteenth centry Middle English from the Old French word for “tub.” Prior to that, Late Latin gello or gillo meaning “water pot.”

Then you might say, “Ah. Well, give us a new one then, preferrably one of those indefinable Peake-only words Maybe something like querail.”

Mrs Slagg smiled pityingly. ‘Poor, poor, wicked thing! what a querail!’

Ask and you shall receive. Receive everything except the definition, that is. Whatever a querail it, it is wicked. Where’s that Peake scholar when we need him?

So you conclude, “I am unsatisfied. What can you leave me with that I might spend the day chewing on a pretty, juicy word?”

And I will tell you, “Palliasse.”

Covering his feet and heaped about his slender body on all sides was a cold, dark, undulating palliasse of pine needles, broken here and there with heavy, weary-headed ferns and grey fungi, their ashen surfaces exuding a winter sweat.

A chiefly British variant of “paillasse,” a palliasse is a thin mattress filled with straw. The Random House dictionary gives its history as early sixteenth century, from the Italian word “pagliaccio” which breaks down into pagli(a) meaning “straw” and -accio, a perjorative suffix. Palliasse is not good times. And, without giving too much away, Lord Groan up there, under the undulating palliasse of pine needles, is seriously bad off.

Will that do? It’s a nice mouthful, although I don’t know how you’ll work it into conversation. Maybe try “gill” instead. And if you see Peter Winnington out and about, let him know I’d like for him to check in and lay some learning on us.

*Take that, fear of working with yeast! Made it with whole wheat flour and it rose and everything. I pressed it down and it sighed, y’all. Seriously! And then I topped it with smashed roasted garlic and olive oil, shredded chicken, prosciutto, and goat cheese. It could’ve used more oil, but the crust was crisp and tender and the everything else was delicious and woohoo! Pizza!

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Gormenghastocabulary IX

Jul 28 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words, Lexpionage, Recovering English Major, Rediscovered Words

You know, in the course of putting my mind back to the task of completing the first round of Gormenghastocabulary, I’ve realized that I’ve marked off words as “new” that I technically knew. Which is weird. Like this morning I was preparing to do this and saw that one of the next in the list was “malkin.” I know what that means. Further, its meaning was contextually evident. It was Countess Groan, and she was talking to her cats, and malkin is a synonym for cat.

So I got to wondering if maybe the procrastination I’ve put into this isn’t in some ways a good thing. I think that I was a bit too giddy with discovery reading the novel. I think that I was so high on a already large number of new words that everything that seemed vaguely non-standard transmogrified into something exotic and worthy of research. The passage of time has allowed me to be more discriminating. I’m glad of it.

Nevertheless, there are still plenty of exciting new words!

First, there’s prolix, which sounds both Victorian and space age*:

“Who?” cried the hard, awkward voice. Mr Flay’s idiom, if at times unintelligible, was anything but prolix.

Prolix is not new. I encountered it before, but apparently got so caught up in other, more Urdu-based words, that I didn’t look too hard at it. Prolix is given to great and tedious length, excessive wordiness. I like its adverb form, “prolixity” meaning verbose. That is fun to say!

Mr Flay is, indeed, anything but prolix. He’s tight-lipped to the point of being, as Marcie once said and I have adored the phrase ever since, “communication-negative.” Prolix comes from the Latin prolixus, meaning “extended,” which is a combination of pro-, as in “for,” and lixus, meaning “flow,” also the root of the word “liquor.”

It’s a fairly romantic set of inverted images for Flay, don’t you think? Words flowing like wine? And he is neither wordy, nor lush.

Then contextually evident, but still new and different, apparisoned:

“Who, blood of my blood,” cried Prunesquallor. “Who is to be apparisoned in the hue of doves.”

The line prior to this talks about dressing someone up in gray. And Prunesquallor pretty much says everything twice, so you know what he’s talking about. An aside, don’t you hate that? Don’t you hate it when you say something and then the person you’re talking to just repeats it back. You’re trying to make conversation and they’re being myna birds. Drives me up the wall, regardless of creative synonymery. Anyway! Apparisoned obvious means dressed. But from there it’s real weird. If you search for it, my Wordie list tops the results and it’s otherwise undefined. There are plenty of other instances of use but no clear definition.

I screwed around for a while with roots and prefixes and the closest I can get, is that it’s a variant of “apparel,” meaning clothing and garments. Take it back through Middle English into Old French apareil and from there back through to Latin apparare meaning “apparatus.” It works well there, since many of the other instances of word use involve horses, rather than people. Apparisoned, we might then say, is to cloth someone in something utilitarian that just happens to be noteworthy beyond its use.

Prunesquallor is, in a word, extremely prolix.

Then there’s fugness. Seriously:

“But I wouldn’t stop bringing home my leaves and shining pebbles and fugnesses from the woods, whatever they thought.”

Another word with either no real definition or one that’s been rendered extinct by modern usage of the word “fug” as a contraction of “fucking ugly.” Fug itself means stale, oppressive air, stench. Chiefly British slang, it is otherwise of obscure origin. We need that Peake scholar who shows up here every once in a while to school us on this one!

So let’s round it off with chloral:

Philosophers and the poetry of Death – the meaning of the stars and the nature of these dreams that haunted him when in those chloral hours before the dawn the laudanum built for him within his skull a tallow-coloured world of ghastly beauty.

Chloral is the adjective form of, or abbreviation of trichloroacetaldehyde, part of the chemicals used to create DDT and, concurrent with the widespread use of laudanum, used as a sedative and hypnotic drug.

This is some really beautiful usage. Those sedative, hypnotic hours before dawn. I am very much a morning person, but there’s nothing I hate worse than not being able to sleep between 2:00 and 4:30 a.m. If I have to be awake, or am awake during that time, those pre-dawn hours, I get angry and melancholy and irrational. I never see ghastly beauty; I just become hypnotized by the dark and quiet, given to ugly thoughts.

And on that bit of down note, we end The Great Peake Word Hunt for another week. What do you think? Anybody want to take on fug? Or should I go back to words like malkin?

* I’m reading The Diamond Age by Mr. Neal Stephenson and everything is looking better when it’s more Victorian and space-agey.

2 responses so far

Track and Field and Word Day

Jun 04 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words, Lexpionage

It’s Thursday and I’ve got no deadlines, so let’s play a game. We can all play different games, too, if we want. We may have to, unable to prevent versioning ourselves over this.

There’s this site, Wordoid. Wordoid is a little scripty thing that takes your choice of language or languages, and starts jamming parts of it together to make “words.” Here are the first 10 I got this morning:

qualiticalls, prescians, plummeters, jospite, califying, semittee, musomozambition, tream, mercent, neces

INORITE INTERROBANG

“Plummeters” looks like a real word. “Semittee” well, I think you know where I’m taking that. “Musomozambition”? What is that? Can I get some? Maybe I already have it? Wow!

Then I clicked the next button and got these:

purvey, internoon, resposed, swartitional, apole, sympation, accouncilitary, troyed, dividual

SWOON

Again, several that look “real” and several that slap me with their wonder. I get stuck on “internoon” and it makes me feel a little zingy inside. Last year’s effort at NaNoWriMo was entitled “The Interfuture.” “The Internoon” could be its awesome sequel! If 60 pages of plotless action could grow on, that is.

What do you want to do with these? Make up definitions? Keep clicking next to find the weirdest possible wordoid? Pick a word and write a 100 word story about it? Something else? Play with me!

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10^6 Units of Language

Apr 14 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words

Couple weeks ago I was reading the Nerdist entry on Hogwarts snaps. They’re funny, sort of, and gross. But what caught my eye even more than Dobby’s tongue stud was Hardwick saying “megaword”:

Needlesstosay (a fun mega-word), it took me a while to put everything together and for that, I apologize.

I went all zingy. Mega-words! Was this an actual linguistic concept I had just never encountered? Turns out not. Googling “megaword” or “mega-word” pulls up some interesting info. There’s

None of these reflect the Nerdist use and they’re also unsatisfying on a lexiphile level. So let’s make up our own definition. What does it take to be a megaword? Hardwick smashed three words together. That immediately brings to mind another adverb: “nevertheless.” Three more words smashed together. Also “nonetheless” and “notwithstanding” and “howsoever.” Then there’s “permayhaps,” which I only ever see used in Firefly fanfiction, but is still a good and useful (mega)word of the three-smashed variety.

What other megawords can you think of? What about joining up four words? Or more? Would you still call them megawords? Maybe different prefixes could be used to indicate just how many words were conjoined to achieve any given mega plus word. You could even do it up #firefly style with “octoword” if you mananged to get eight.

What’s the largest possible word we might achieve without using prefixes or suffixes? And, should we achieve an ultramegaword, do you think it’d shoot lasers out its eyes?

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